by Liz Carlyle
“No, bald and pocked,” said Anisha. “And prosy.”
Welham laughed richly. “Well, no accounting for taste, is there? Good luck to ’em. Now, have you something I might carry up? This small trunk, perhaps?”
The trunk in question was not small, and in fact took up the entire rear corner of the cabin. “Thank you, but are there not porters here?”
The smile deepened. “I believe, ma’am, that I can manage a trifling piece of baggage.”
“You must suit yourself, then.” Anisha had already turned to shove the last of her things into the portmanteau. “Just let me finish—”
“Ah!” His gaze having dropped to the floor, Welham bent down to grab something, his head so near it brushed the fringe of her shawl. Then he came back up at once, his lean, hard-boned cheeks faintly pink. “I fear, ma’am, that you have dropped an . . . er, a garment of a personal nature. I shall restrain the temptation to retrieve it.”
Anisha looked down to see her zari peignoir in a puddle of green silk beneath the berth. Faintly mortified, she snatched it up and stuffed it into the portmanteau. Welham swallowed a little oddly, as if his mouth had just gone dry.
“Thank you,” she managed and latched the portmanteau shut. “Well, then, let us make haste. Though I should first look in on—”
But somehow, they had managed to leap into action at once; she toward the door, and Welham toward the trunk, awkwardly wedging themselves between the berth and one of the massive wooden spars that ran down the wall.
For an instant, they froze, so close the swell of her belly was pressed to his groin. So close, Anisha could see the stubble of blue-black beard beneath his skin and the tiny white scar just below his left eye.
“Oh.” Anisha let the portmanteau fall from her grip. “How frightfully—”
“—awkward?” he supplied. But Welham was no longer grinning, and his gaze had shifted to something far more than mere warmth.
“I believe, sir—” Anisha tried to slip to her right and heard a stitch rip. “Drat! Please, if you would just turn—”
But again, they twisted in unison. And suddenly, as was apparently his habit, Welham smiled down into her eyes; smiled in a way that warmed straight through to the pit of Anisha’s belly. She cut her gaze away.
“Well, look at it this way,” he managed. “Someday we’ll be old friends and have a good laugh about this.”
But Anisha, her breasts pressed nearly flat to the solid wall of his chest, was not feeling especially amused. She felt as if she was melting; as if her good sense had been drowned in the rich, masculine scent of him. Inside her head, her pulse was so loud that she was certain he must surely hear it.
Sensing her discomfort, Sergeant Welham grasped her shoulders and, with a little grunt, somehow managed to maneuver his way through. The sharp oaken edge of the berth slipped past her spine. But his hands did not release her, and she could feel the heat of his gaze burning into her.
Left with little choice, Anisha lifted her eyes to his and was shocked at the sudden tenderness she saw there.
“I beg your pardon,” he said softly. “I forget that you are unaccustomed to our wicked Town ways. I am an incorrigible flirt, I know, but I ought not flirt with you. Indeed, Ruthveyn will have my head for it.”
But Anisha’s mouth had gone dry. “Were you flirting?” she managed.
He winked. “Oh, a little, perhaps.”
When her gaze dropped in embarrassment, Anisha could read the very inscription upon his solid gold cravat pin.
F.A.C.
He was a member of the Fraternitas Aureae Crucis. The Brotherhood of the Golden Cross. Even in childhood, she had been taught to turn to them in time of trouble. And Welham had come—in keeping with his vows—to help her, even in this small way. Incorrigible he might have been, but the man meant only kindness.
The knowledge comforted her and brought her somehow back to herself. Pulling away from his grip, Anisha threw on her heavy cloak, then snatched up her portmanteau in one hand and her dressing case in the other. The moment of unease had passed.
“Now I have these two, my lord,” she said, smiling. “If you can indeed fetch the trunk?”
A few moments later, they were emerging topside to a bitter-cold sunrise, the heavy, brass-banded box balanced effortlessly upon Welham’s shoulder, to a land surrounded by towering brick walls and the unmistakable sweep of the river, which was not remotely straight, as she had somehow assumed it would be.
Had she imagined it would run stick-straight, like the Hooghly as it drifted past her house? Assumptions—about anything—were clearly misplaced here.
Anisha glanced anxiously around to see the boys half-hanging over the gunwale and pointing downriver as Lucan looked on. His cage sitting on the deck beside the three of them, their parakeet, Milo, swung from his perch, bobbing back and forth as he watched the hubbub unfold.
“Pawwwk!” he complained, eyeing her approach. “British prisoner! Let me out! Let me out!”
Dropping her bags, Anisha hugged the boys in turn, then knelt by the cage. “Teddy, where is Milo’s blanket?” she chided. “The poor dear cannot bear this frightful cold.”
“He wanted to look around,” said Teddy defensively.
“Mamma! Mamma!” said six-year-old Tom. “We saw a dead man!”
Anisha took the bell-shaped blanket from him and knelt to swaddle Milo’s cage. “A dead man?” she said, flicking a quick, anxious glance up at her younger brother.
Lord Lucan Forsythe came languidly away from the rail. “There did indeed appear to be a corpse,” he said breezily. “Come portside if you like, and I’ll show you.”
“Heavens, no.” Anisha secured the last frog on Milo’s blanket as Welham reached down to help her to her feet. “But really, a dead man? In the water?”
“No, he’s been hung,” Tom piped, rather too cheerfully.
“Hanged, you dolt,” his brother corrected, pointing downriver. “He’s swinging from a jib back there. And he’s in a cage.”
“Teddy, that is quite enough.” Mildly horrified, Anisha made the introductions in haste. Lord Lucan shook Welham’s hand warmly, but the boys could not get past the grisly excitement of the dead body.
“And he hadn’t any eyes, Mamma!” said Tom, his face twisting grotesquely.
“ ’Cause the birds pecked ’em out, you boka chele,” said his brother.
“Boys, that will do!” Anisha lifted one eyebrow warningly. “Teddy, we will discuss later where you learnt that phrase.”
“It’s what Chatterjee calls the punkah wallah,” said Teddy. “It just means—”
“I know what it means,” she interjected. “And gentlemen do not insult one another in a lady’s presence. Nor do they speak of dead bodies. I am delicate. I might faint.”
“Oh, Mamma!” Teddy rolled his eyes. “You never faint.”
Welham bent to ruffle Teddy’s hair. “She looks pretty hardy to me, too, lad,” he murmured. “But it isn’t really a dead body, just an old prank.”
“A prank, sir?” Teddy looked up at him, puzzled.
“Aye, they call him Dashing Davie the Pirate Prince.” Welham grinned at the boys. “Occasionally some of the stevedores drink too deep and run him up just for fun. But old Davie’s naught but cotton wool and canvas. Something to frighten the tourists.”
“Oh,” said Tom, obviously crestfallen.
Welham seemed to relent and knelt to look the lad in the eyes. “But the gibbet and cage are real,” he said almost consolingly. “Look, do you see that marshy spot across the river’s crook? That’s Blackwall Point. That’s where they hang the real pirates and leave their bodies to rot as a warning.”
Tom’s eyes widened. “Do they?”
“Well, it’s been awhile.” Welham winked. “But one never knows.”
At this hopeful news, both boys brightened considerably. Really, did the man turn his winking, sparkly charm on everyone he met?
Just then, however, their only remainin
g manservant strode across the deck, Janet on his heels. “All the baggage has been offloaded, ma’am,” said Chatterjee with an elegant bow.
“Excellent. Thank you.” She turned back to the boys. “Now let’s have no more talk of gibbets, please,” she added, including Welham in her sweeping glower. “From any of you.”
Welham laughed. “Sounds like fair warning, lads!” he said. “Off we go, then. London and all her fine adventures await.”
But the boys allowed as how it was more likely a new tutor awaited, sounding as if they were going to the gallows along with Dashing Davie. Soon they had taken up the related subjects of beheadings and Traitor’s Gate, speculating about whether or not they would be able to see the Tower along the way.
“I will ask the coachman to drive by it,” Welham assured them as they stepped onto terra firma.
“I am not certain, Sergeant,” she muttered beneath her breath, “that you are being helpful here.”
Nonetheless, Welham’s promise seemed to appease the boys, so Anisha spent the next several minutes looking about her new home, or what she could see of it. Though the twinkling lights of the docks and shoreline had melted with the dawn, the vastness of London—or at least her warehouses—was still apparent.
Never in her life had Anisha seen so much activity as at the East India Docks at daybreak. Already lighters and barges were skimming to and fro in the water, and a dozen ships appeared ready to offload, while many more bobbed, bare-masted, up and down the Thames. Workers swarmed like ants about crates and barrels, dark warehouses looming up behind them in every direction.
At first the port smelled much like that of Calcutta’s; heavy with the scent of rot and effluent. However, when at last she moved beyond the shadow of the Blackwall frigate and nearer the warehouses, Anisha was struck by the more pleasant scents of pepper and ginger and a hundred other things she could not identify—the smell of money, her late father would have termed it.
With a gait that was long and lean-hipped, Welham cut a smooth swath through the morass, the throng falling respectfully from his path as he escorted Anisha and her company safely out into a wide lane that ran behind a row of warehouses. In short order, they were being bundled into the carriages, with Chatterjee and Lucan taking the first, the former having been pressed into her brother’s valet service. Janet shooed the boys into another, and after surveying that all was in order, Welham threw open the door of the third—a fine, fully enclosed landau with a gold coat of arms painted on the door.
“After you, ma’am.”
She was oddly a little wary of being alone again in close quarters with Welham, but pride stiffening her spine, she swept her skirts up perhaps a little more regally than she might otherwise have done and climbed inside.
He followed her in gracefully, shutting the door himself and tossing his tall hat onto the seat beside him. Almost at once, Anisha heard the lead carriage begin to rumble forward, harnesses jingling. She and Welham were utterly alone again, the gloom and close confines of the carriage surrounding them with that same sense of intimacy she’d felt inside her cabin.
Drawing her cloak a little tighter against the cold and damp, Anisha broke the heavy silence. “Sergeant Welham, perhaps I ought to apologize.”
“Should you?” he murmured. “For what, pray?”
“Tom and Teddy,” she answered. “All that talk. About . . . well, hanging. To you, of all people. They meant nothing by it, and you were sporting enough. But still . . .”
The merry twinkle returned to his eyes. “I’m afraid I lost my delicate sensibilities on the battlefields of the Maghreb, ma’am,” he said. “Those boys look a handful, by the way. How old are they?”
“Tom just turned six,” she said, “and Teddy eight. And Luc, at all of eighteen, fancies himself quite the man grown.”
Something in Welham’s gaze suddenly sobered. “Then let us pray Lord Lucan soon learns better—for London has a tendency to teach young men harsh lessons in a hard school.”
He spoke, Anisha knew, from experience.
Just then, they made a sharp turn. Through the wavy glass window, her gaze followed the sweeping vista of masts and warehouses. In an instant they were rolling beneath the arched entrance of a clock-towered gatehouse set into the brick wall that surrounded the dockyard, the carriage lurching a little sideways as it turned right. A few yards further along, and the carriage slowed again, this time to enter a main thoroughfare.
Barking Road, the signpost read.
What strange names this place had. The carriage swung away from it, toward the west. And then, just as they swept out of the turn, Anisha saw him. A somber young man in a long coat standing by a lamppost, his gaze following hers as if locked to it.
Unable to stop herself, Anisha twisted around to look out the rear. Just before vanishing from sight, the man lifted his hat as if in silent salute, revealing a shock of rich, red hair and a quizzical, almost insolent smile.
She turned back, her gaze going at once to Welham, who cursed softly beneath his breath. He, too, was watching, looking past her shoulder with eyes that no longer laughed but instead now glittered with menace.
“That young man,” she murmured, “do you know him?”
A dark look sketched over his once-amiable countenance, and Anisha was struck with a chilling certainty that Welham would make for a brutal enemy.
“I do not,” he gritted. “But it now appears I shall have to.”
“I don’t understand.”
Welham’s every muscle seemed suddenly taut, like those of a great cat ready to pounce. “I’m told the man works for a newspaper,” he answered. “Until this moment, however, I imagined his name did not much matter.”
“But my brother wrote that the Lord Chancellor overturned your conviction.” Anisha glanced uneasily over her shoulder, but the man, of course, had long vanished. “What could the papers want of you now?”
“In my experience, most of the world’s evils have to do with money.” Welham’s jaw twitched. “Specifically, the gaining of it. And usually at someone else’s expense.”
“True,” she acknowledged, “but . . . ?”
He shrugged. “A great many people believe my father bought my justice for me,” he said. “More than a few would be pleased to see me fall from grace. And that, I daresay, would sell a vast number of newspapers.”
For a moment, Anisha considered it. “It’s an ugly thought,” she said softly. “How horrible for you.”
“Horrible?” he echoed, his voice dangerously soft. “No, ma’am. Horrible is being left to rot in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. Horrible is having a noose drawn round your neck and not knowing for certain you’ll breathe your next. Horrible is watching good soldiers left to die in the blood and mud of Africa because they have no better way to earn a living. And if you can survive that, then you generally don’t give a bloody damn what people think. But that fellow has begun to ask questions about my father. And your brother. Twice he’s been seen skulking round the St. James Society, trying to worm his way inside.”
“The St. James Society?” Anisha’s eyes flared with alarm. “That is your new name for the Fraternitas here in England, is it not?”
“More of a camouflage.” Welham’s jaw was set tight, his eyes still hard. “A safe house of sorts, and a way to explain away the scientific research Dr. von Althausen is conducting. Your brother’s former diplomatic standing helps justify some of the odd traffic in and out.”
Anisha hesitated, unsure how to ask her next question. “And so this reporter,” she said. “Have you met him? Touched him?”
His smile was strained. “I am afraid, Lady Anisha, that I am rather ordinary,” he said. “I have nothing like your brother’s strange talents.”
“So I understand,” she said. “And I am happy for you.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps, were I to spend some time in the reporter’s company, I might glean something of his true nature,” he acknowledged. “Or perhaps not. Some days
I’m not persuaded I have any special skill in that regard.”
“And I’m not persuaded I believe that.”
“Believe what you wish, ma’am, but many people are inscrutable to me.” His hard gaze was fixed watchfully out the window now. “Yourself, for example, I should wager. But I believe, too, that there are a rare few to whom evil is so natural and so connate, so much a part of what they are, there is nothing more to perceive. And that reporter—he’s watching the Fraternitas’s every move, our every breath.”
“Good Lord.”
“And now, it would appear, he means to watch you. Your children and young Lucan, too, perhaps. And there are a few things, by God, which even I will not tolerate—as he is perilously close to discovering. So it’s time I settled this business.” His voice fell, as if he spoke only to himself. “It is time—past time—for me to do what I swore I would.”
Every trace of humor had vanished from the man’s countenance. And however much charm he might feign, Anisha was no longer fooled. Incorrigible was not the word for this man. Even had she known nothing of his dark past, she could see that Rance Welham carried himself with the barely leashed strength of a soldier.
His gaze was quick—unnervingly so—and she was now convinced he could turn lethal in an instant. There was a veiled anger in him, Anisha sensed, that had burned through to his very core; a bitterness eating like a cancer behind that amiable façade and those laughing eyes. It unnerved her, yet she found it oddly humanizing.
Anisha knew from her brother’s letters that in his youth, Welham had been convicted of murder and twice put in prison. The first time he had cleverly cheated the gallows. The second time, a witness’s deathbed recantation had saved him. In between, he’d fled England, landed in Paris, then shipped off to Africa in the French Foreign Legion—an organization made up of criminals, thugs, and mercenaries, and only a little less deadly than the gallows.
They continued on in silence for a time, but the mood inside the carriage had oddly shifted. There was an unsettled emotion in the air that even she, in her limited abilities, could discern.