An Unseen Attraction

by KJ Charles

  Oh Jesus.

  “Feel that?” A harsh rasp of a voice.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “In your kidneys if you mess me about. Walk.”

  The arm came from round his neck, but its hand landed on his shoulder before he could think of flight. He stumbled forward into the fog at his captor’s shove.

  “Stop. Right, now. Don’t even think about looking round or I’ll break your neck and leave you for the carrion crows, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The knife went away. Rowley stared forward, into the murk. He had the pocketknife in his coat, could he—

  There was a hand at his face, and his spectacles were twitched off. He let out a cry, couldn’t stop himself, and his captor gave a deep chuckle as he tossed the spectacles away into the fog.

  Fucker Jesus Christ oh God. There was no way he could run now, let alone fight, even if he could twist free of the merciless grip. The thought of playing hide-and-seek with a madman was terrifying enough, but to make it blindman’s buff was too much. He stood, breath coming short, dizzy with fear.

  “Right,” his captor said. “I want that page.”

  Rowley’s back and shoulder blades clenched so hard it hurt. Was it Spim, the torturer, the arsonist, standing behind him with a knife? The rasping voice didn’t sound like Golden Lane, in accent or cadence, or anything much like he’d expected the man to sound. It wasn’t quite natural, in fact. Maybe Spim was disguising it. Surely to God, if he was troubling to hide his identity that must mean Rowley had a chance.

  Breath came hot on his neck. “The page,” Spim rasped again.

  Rowley licked his numb lips. “I’ll do whatever you want, but I don’t have the page. I swear.”

  “You can get it. Talleyfer trusts you, and he’s an imbecile. You can go and get it off him now. If you know what’s good for you, that is.”

  “I can’t. I mean, it’s not possible.”

  The knife pricked harder in his back. “Are you pissing me about? Shall we go back to your shop and try out a few of those sharp little hooks of yours, see if that changes your mind? Want your fingers trimmed like I did that whimpering drunkard’s?”

  “We sent it to the earl,” Rowley blurted, words tripping over one another. “Posted it. I don’t know if it’s arrived yet, the fog—”

  “You sent it to him,” Spim repeated.

  “I swear.” Rowley had no idea if Clem had or not, but he wasn’t bringing this murdering bastard to his lover, not if he got his own throat cut. Edmund Taillefer could take the consequences. “To the Earl of Moreton. We found it and he asked for it and Clem sent it. It’ll be in the post—”

  “Liar.” Spim’s hand was suddenly, terrifyingly, on Rowley’s face, fingers over his mouth, thumb pushing hard into his eye socket. Rowley couldn’t hold in a scream, muffled by fingers and fog; he twisted back, arching over in sickening dread at the twin threats of the knife in his spine and the thumb at his eye. After an agonising second the pressure receded a little. “Think again. Last chance.”

  “I swear. Christ, I’d give it to you if I could, I don’t care about the earl, he can go to prison and be damned. Clem decided to send it, it’s in the post, I can’t do anything. Even if you kill me, Clem doesn’t have it.”

  “Then why did he tell his brother he was going to hold on to it?”

  Shit, shit, shit. “He changed his mind,” Rowley blurted. “He wanted his brother to deal with you first, but he decided he’d rather be rid of it.”

  There was silence, and the rasp of breathing, and the thunder of Rowley’s blood in his ears.

  “Really,” Spim said. “And why would he, or you, decide such a useful thing as that page wasn’t worth keeping?”

  “I don’t give a toss if the earl lives or dies,” Rowley said with deep sincerity. “And Clem’s just trying to do the right thing.”

  There was a pause.

  “If you’re lying to me, I’m going to come back and carve your fucking face off.” The hand on his shoulder moved, pulling roughly across his face, dragging at the flesh. “Piece by piece.”

  Rowley tried to form an assurance, but his lips didn’t seem to be working any more. He managed a shake of the head.

  “Right,” Spim said. “I’m going to take your word for it, for now. If it turns out I shouldn’t have, you and I are going to have a few hours trying out your preserving tools, understand, and I’m going to enjoy that more than you will. Don’t even think about going to the police, and don’t cross me, Mr. Green. Don’t ever cross me.”

  Rowley felt a violent shove between his shoulders, utterly unexpected, sending him crashing to his knees on the sodden muddy mess that was grass in summer. He knew a moment of disorientation and pain, then the terrifying anticipation of a blow, and he cringed away from it, unable to move, until it dawned on him that nothing was happening. It took another long moment before he could make himself look round.

  There was nobody there.

  Chapter 11

  Clem was tidying up his study, an act of order in defiance of fog, when he heard the commotion in the hall. Polly’s voice raised in shock and horror, Elsie as high-pitched counterpoint, and a light tenor voice, coming in gasping sobs, that was almost, but not quite, unrecognisable.

  “Rowley!” Clem bolted out of the room and stopped in horror as he saw his lover, spectacles askew, with one lens cracked, sodden, face patched red and white. “What— Are you all right? Did you fall?”

  “Attacked,” Rowley said hoarsely, and his knees buckled. Clem leapt forward to catch him.

  “Are you hurt? Injured? You’re freezing. Polly, we need a footbath in my study. Er, to save you the stairs. And Mr. Green. The stairs, I mean.”

  “I’ll do a footbath if you sit him down with a blanket,” Polly said briskly. “I’ll put the kettle on. You’ll feel better for a cup of tea, won’t you, Mr. Green? Dear me, if it’s not one thing in this house, it’s another.”

  That was inarguable. Clem left her to it and steered Rowley into the study, where he got the wet greatcoat off him, pushed him into his usual chair by the fire, threw on a plentiful heaping of coals, then went to fetch a blanket. Rowley was shivering violently by the time he came back.

  “Dear God, you’re frozen stiff. What happened?”

  “Spim.”

  “What? How?”

  “He, uh, he sent a message to meet in the gardens, from you. He had a knife. He took my, my, my spectacles.” Rowley put a trembling hand to his eyes. “He took them off my face and threw them away and I couldn’t see. He was right behind me and I couldn’t see.”

  “Oh Rowley.” Clem dropped to his haunches, pulling Rowley into a hug. “Oh sweetheart, sweetheart.”

  “I had to look for them on the ground, in the fog. I couldn’t find them. It took—I don’t know. It felt like hours, but I had to find them, I wouldn’t have seen him, waiting—”

  His shoulders were heaving. Clem bit his lip. “Do you have another pair?”

  “Upstairs. But I couldn’t get back, not without them.”

  “I understand.” He did, all too well. Rowley’s nightmares, come to life. “Will you be all right if I go and fetch them?”

  Rowley nodded. “Top drawer of the dresser.”

  Clem took the stairs three at a time, ignoring Mr. Rillington’s querulous mumbles, and came back down like a sedate dowager, because he could all too easily imagine tripping, falling, and landing on Rowley’s only spare pair. He held them out, and was sure he saw a tiny relaxation when Rowley took off the broken pair and put them on.

  “Thank you,” Rowley said. “That, uh, that’s better. God, I hate when I can’t see. He s-said he was going to cut my fingers off. Wanted the page. I told him we’d sent it to your brother. What did you do with it?”

  “Kept it.” Clem gave him another squeeze and released him with reluctance, knowing Polly was all too likely to come in. “After what Mark said, and what you said…I kept thinking that you were right, he’d
burn it and take a trip abroad and leave us with Spim. What a thing to think of my own brother, but I did. So I told him that I’d keep the page very safe until he’d met his obligations, and you were right because he hasn’t done anything yet, has he, and now this. Oh, Rowley.”

  “We have to get rid of it. Now.” Rowley’s filthy hands were twisted together so hard it looked painful, but that wasn’t enough to stop the shaking. “He said, if I lied to him—if he finds out—”

  “I’ll send it now if it’ll make you feel better,” Clem said as reassuringly as he could.

  “No, wait. You can’t go to the pillar box.” Rowley sat up. “What if he’s out there? Spim?”

  “You don’t think—”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, he had a knife in my back not so long ago. What if he’s waiting for you?”

  “Why would he be?” Still, it was dark outside now, or darker, and the night seemed very full of shadows. Not to mention fog, and Clem had no desire to go groping for a postbox in the murk. He’d got lost on his own street before now. “Look, surely even if he was there, he wouldn’t be interested in everyone from the house, would he? I’ll ask someone to post it, and then it’ll be out of the house. Will that help?”

  Rowley nodded, so Clem scrawled a note for Edmund, addressed the envelope in careful print so it couldn’t go astray, found a stamp, and went to the lodgers’ parlour. Mr. Power had come in early and was sitting with last Saturday’s Illustrated London News. “Good evening,” Clem said. “I wondered if you’d do something for me.”

  Mr. Power winked. “Long as it’s no trouble to me.”

  “I need this posted. I can’t leave Mr. Green after this afternoon—you heard he was attacked?—and I can’t send Elsie out alone on a night like this. Would you mind?”

  Mr. Power put the paper down. “You’re asking me to run errands? Go out in this fog to save the skivvy trouble? Now look here, Mr. Talleyfer—”

  “You don’t have to,” Clem said. “Just as I don’t have to stay up at night to let you in late, or overlook it when you have a nip of rum in your bedroom, or make sure I don’t mention to Millie Blanchard in Clerkenwell that you flirt with Emma Howes at the butcher’s. I do those things because I like this to be a friendly house where we help each other, and now I need help. So would you drop this into the pillar box at the end of the street for me, Mr. Power?”

  Mr. Power gave him a very narrow look. “Mr. Talleyfer, it’d be a pleasure.”

  By then Polly had the footbath ready. The next half hour was all about Rowley: getting his wet things off and hung up for the mud to dry; swathing him in Clem’s dressing gown and getting his feet into the footbath; pouring tea with sugar into him whether he liked it or not. He gave Polly an account of assault in the fog by an unknown rampsman, and she marched into the kitchen, whence the smells of baking soon rose.

  “She’s making preserved-ginger biscuits,” Clem said, with awe. “Goodness, Rowley, she’s only made those for me half a dozen times. She must like you.”

  Rowley offered an effort at a smile. His colour was improving, at least.

  The ginger biscuits were not long in coming, and Clem was pleased to see their restorative effect. He wasn’t sure what Polly put into them, and nor was anyone else; there were women up and down Wilderness Row formally Not Speaking to her because she refused to give out the recipe. Clem didn’t have a sweet tooth in general but could happily have eaten a plateful at a sitting, and they had much the effect on the system that a stiff drink had on people in books. Rowley nibbled an edge listlessly, sat up, took a second one, and let his hunched shoulders relax a little for the first time since he’d come back.

  Clem smiled at him. “They are good, aren’t they? But you do have to have something terrible happen to you first, because she doesn’t like to waste the ginger.”

  “God forfend,” Rowley said. “What are we going to do?”

  Clem scratched his beard. “The police?”

  “He said not to.” Rowley grimaced. “Well, he would. Clem, I should have thought, should we warn your brother?”

  “I did, in the note. I don’t know when he’ll get it but we’ll never find a messenger boy willing to go to Haymarket tonight, so it’s the best I can do short of setting off on foot.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not going to. I’m staying with you. I’m going to secure the house, and stay up all night with the poker to hand if I have to, and tomorrow I’m going to tell Edmund to deal with Spim or I’ll tell the police everything, and Uncle Desmond too, and none of it will be a secret any more. And I’m going to ask Mark and Nathaniel for advice, because they’re the most capable people I know, and after that…I don’t know what else we can do.”

  “I’ve got money,” Rowley said. “The insurance will pay, they said, and I’ve put a bit aside. I don’t have to keep the lease next door. If we wanted to go somewhere else, we could. Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere, where you could keep lodgings and I could set up again.”

  “Do we have to?” Clem asked. “If we don’t have the page any more, surely Spim will leave us alone?”

  “I don’t know,” Rowley said. “Maybe. When people once got in my father’s way, they found it very hard to get out of it again, and Spim’s that kind of man, it seems.”

  “I see. Ugh. I don’t want to. I’ve been here eight years.” It had taken so much work to be settled, to have everything running smoothly, to have his friends and connections and people who understood. Friends at the Jack who shared his likings; friends at the Royal Sovereign who shared the half of his origins unknown to him; the people at the Working Man’s Institute who came to lectures on poetry; the rug seller and his family who were teaching him a few words of Hindi; his lodgers, even, ill-tempered or unreliable as some of them were. The idea of leaving it all behind was sickening. “If we have to, if you’re in danger…”

  “I don’t like it either. I like things as they are, or were, too. But if you’re going to force trouble on your brother, even if it’s his own damn trouble, he might not take it well.”

  Clem hadn’t thought of that. Of course Edmund would be deeply displeased, and with Lugtrout dead, he had no need for a lodging house any more. Change yawned ahead, dark and inevitable and frightening. “Yes, of course. Ugh.”

  “But we can do as we please,” Rowley said. “We’ve enough money, we’ve occupations. If we bring Polly with us she could sell the recipe for these biscuits to Huntley and Palmers, and we’ll all live like kings off the proceeds.”

  “She’d murder you in your bed if you even mention it,” Clem said, and at Rowley’s look wished he hadn’t. “Sorry. It was a joke.”

  “I know. I, uh…God, Clem. I thought he was going to kill me. I couldn’t see, and I thought he was going to kill me, and I was so glad I’d met you first. I kept thinking how much I didn’t want it to be over, and how you’d feel if I didn’t come back or when they found me—it wouldn’t be till the fog lifted—”

  “Oh, love.” Clem leaned forward to take his hand, gripping it hard. “Stop. You’re safe.”

  “Just don’t send me any urgent messages any time soon,” Rowley said, voice a little tremulous. “God, I should have known. I’m a fool. The message was for Mr. Green the stuffer, and you’ve never called me that. He knew so much else, though. That you’re Edmund’s brother, about the page. How much could Lugtrout have told him? How much can he possibly know?”

  “Sssh.” Clem squeezed his hand. “Stop. As long as he knows we don’t have anything he wants. And we’ll talk to Mark tomorrow, we’ll go away if we have to, we’ll be fine. You’re safe. Have the last biscuit.”

  “That’s yours. I’ve had two already.”

  “And you can have the third one,” Clem said. “That’s how much I love you, Rowley Green.”

  “Greater love hath no man than he share the last ginger biscuit.” Rowley took it, broke it in half, and offered one part to Clem. “I love you too, but I’m only human.”

>   —

  Rowley started yawning not long after. He looked drained, and Clem told him firmly to lie down in the bedroom.

  “That’s your bed.”

  “You’re staying with me,” Clem said. “I’m not having you lying awake listening for footsteps in the dark on your own. Go and lie down. I’ll tell anyone who asks that I’m sleeping on the settee, with the poker.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Rowley said, but let himself be moved bedward. Clem didn’t join him. It was only half past eight and he had the usual evening tasks that wouldn’t wait for any amount of criminals. Polly had gone home early, groping in the fog, and all the other lodgers were safely in, so he went to lock the doors and windows. Goodness knew if it was necessary, or if it would do any good against the shadow that brooded over the house, but there was no point leaving more to chance than he had to.

  So he bolted the front door, and was both startled and alarmed to hear a peremptory knock just after the chime of nine.

  “Who can that be?” he demanded of Cat, who was winding around his ankles because of course he hadn’t put the blasted animal out. “Oh, curse it. You can go out the front—”

  Unless it was Spim. The thought stopped him in his tracks.

  Surely not. Murderers didn’t knock, did they? Or perhaps they did; perhaps you opened the door unaware and that was how they came. He had no chain, no peephole—

  A second knock, urgent.

  Either it was a murderer who shouldn’t come in, or it was someone who needed to. Hell’s teeth. Clem undid the bolts, opened the door a crack so he could squint through, and gaped at what he saw. “Edmund?”

  “For God’s sake, let me in!” The Earl of Moreton shoved at the door as Clem stepped back. He was fog-damp, face pinched with cold.

  “But are you all right? How did you get here?” Clem asked blankly.

  “What? My carriage, of course.”

  “But you’re all wet.”

  “I had to walk from…” Edmund flapped his hand to indicate the street. “Do you intend to keep me standing in this hallway all evening? No, I want a private conversation with you,” he added as Clem indicated the general parlour. “Your study.”