by Zoë Archer
“An excellent idea,” Marco said, and the sentiment was echoed by everyone in the room. This, Eva felt, was Nemesis’s true purpose—that no one person or organization should be responsible for addressing wrongdoing, but that everyone labored together for justice. Eva’s own parents could not fault her for wanting this.
Miss Jones suddenly looked abashed, and glanced shyly at Jack. “Mr. Dalton, if you wouldn’t mind … I’d like to name the school after your sister. But … I’m sorry, I can’t remember her name.”
“Edith,” he said. “Edith Dalton.”
“The Edith Dalton Home for Girls,” Miss Jones said, trying out the name. “Would that be all right?”
Eva’s chest tightened at the look of pure, humble wonderment on Jack’s face.
“I’d…” He cleared his throat, but his voice was still hoarse when he spoke. “That’d be an honor. A right honor. Thank you.”
“Thank you.” Miss Jones gazed around the room, looking at each of the Nemesis agents in turn. The youthful fear had left her face, replaced by confidence and purpose. “All of you.”
“What of payment?” Mrs. Jones asked. “Surely you’ll want compensation.”
“We’ve taken a share from Rockley’s money,” Simon answered. “For operating expenses. But we won’t accept any from you.”
The members of the Jones family made sounds of protest, but no one would be swayed. At last, seeing that this was an argument he couldn’t win, Miss Jones’s father said to her, “Come, my dear. It’s time for us to take our first steps in our new lives.” Trepidation edged his voice, and Miss Jones looked daunted by the prospect of the unknown that lay ahead of her, but she attempted a brave smile.
Before the Joneses left, there were handshakes all around, and Mrs. Jones wept delicately into a handkerchief, murmuring over and over her gratitude. And then they were gone. But a minute hadn’t passed before Ockham himself came into the back room, bearing a little muslin-wrapped parcel.
“I was to give you this,” he said, handing it to Eva.
She opened the parcel, revealing a few one-pound notes. Judging by their crumpled appearance, they’d come from Miss Jones’s own pocketbook. A scrap of paper read, For additional operating expenses.
After a moment, Simon handed each member of Nemesis a banknote. Including one to Jack.
“The hell is this for?” Jack demanded.
“Everyone on the team is paid equally.” Simon met his gaze levelly. “That includes you.”
Briefly, Jack appeared as if he’d argue, but then, with a shrug, he tucked the money into the back pocket of his trousers. “Nobility ain’t for the likes of me. Besides, I’ll need this for when I start over, too.”
Eva smiled, but fractures spread through her heart. The clock had already begun to tick. Toward the hour when Jack would have to leave, and she would discover what it truly meant to be alone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jack stared at the envelope. It seemed like an ordinary piece of paper, but he knew that inside, it held an entire life. His new life. Sitting on a table in the Nemesis headquarters parlor.
“It’s all there,” Simon explained. “Fifty pounds. Train ticket to Liverpool, and a ticket for one berth on the steamship Catalonia, which docks in Boston. The train leaves from Euston Station tomorrow at twelve-thirty. Oh, and Marco’s provided you with a passport.”
“You’re now Mr. John Dutton,” Marco added, “born May 18, 1854.”
Jack opened the envelope and studied the passport, including the made-up birthday. “Never knew the actual day I was born.”
“Now you’ve got something to celebrate,” said Lazarus, puffing on his pipe.
Jack stared at Eva, standing on the other side of the room with her arms wrapped around herself. Her face had a far-off look, as if she was walking complicated paths in her mind. She hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left the public house, not even the entire way back to headquarters, when she’d sat opposite him in the growler. As if she was already getting used to him being gone.
“Guess I do,” he said, distracted.
“Vengeance, for one thing,” Harriet noted. “Rockley’s not only dead, but disgraced. That’s got to give you satisfaction.”
At one point, Jack would’ve wanted that more than anything. Now …
“America, eh?” Lazarus said. “Never been there, myself. They say it’s nothing but Puritans and rowdies.”
“Got the rowdy part down,” Jack said. “So maybe I’ll fit in.”
“You could become one of those cowboys I’ve read about.” Harriet’s eyes lit up with excitement. “A Stetson on your head and a six-shooter on your hip.”
Jack snorted. “Had enough of guns, and I ain’t wearing that stupid hat.”
“What are your plans?” Eva broke from her reverie to stare at him intently.
Jack stood quickly, his chair tipping back and falling to the ground with a loud clatter. “I don’t bloody know.” He threw the money, passport, and tickets onto the table.
Silence. Everyone looked back and forth between him and Eva. Her face was a tight mask, clear of any expression.
Finally, she pushed away from the wall, walked past him, then up the stairs leading to the next floor.
Jack left the parlor, aware of all the Nemesis folk watching him. For all that he was bone weary, he took the steps two at a time.
Eva waited beside the window in his room. As he entered, he shut the door behind him. The walls in this damn building were made of paper and excuses, so anyone would be able to hear whatever he and Eva said, but he didn’t want to help out the eavesdroppers.
“We knew this was coming,” she said.
“Doesn’t make it easier.”
“No,” she said quietly, “it doesn’t.”
He’d taken more than his share of hits. Hell, he couldn’t even remember the first time he’d felt a punch. They were just part of his life. He’d even lived with the agony of Edith’s death.
So he knew what pain was. But thinking of not having her beside him, not hearing her voice, not feeling her hands on him or knowing all her sharp, clever thoughts … it was like someone had come along and torn him open and everything inside was shredded and bleeding. The way she looked at him now, she felt the same pain.
No—they couldn’t suffer like this.
“We can make it easy, though,” he said.
She looked baffled. “How?”
He gripped her shoulders. “We stay together, you and me.”
“What?”
“Come with me. To America. Or wherever you want to go.” The more he talked, the more sense it made, the more excited he got. “Canada. Australia. Hell, I’d go to Nigeria if that’s what you want.”
She said, so quietly he barely heard, “I don’t want to go to Nigeria.”
“Anyplace. Just name it.” He spoke quickly, urgently. God, why didn’t I think of this sooner? “We make a good team, you and me. In every way. It don’t matter that you’re an educated lady and I’m just Bethnal Green trash—”
“You’re not,” she insisted, angry on his behalf. “You’re one of the finest men I know, and if you or anyone else calls you trash again, I’ll punch them right in the face.”
He grinned. “There, see? Brandishing your fists like a born fighter. We’re meant to be together.” His mind churned. “I can start a boxing school. You can tutor, and…” It came to him then, and the moment he thought of if, he felt a rightness he’d never known. “We’ll be married.”
Her face went white, and she twisted out of his grip. One hand pressed to her stomach, she said, “Stop. God, stop. No talk of leaving England, or marriage.”
“So I ain’t good enough for you.” He spat the words like acid.
Her cheeks turned an angry red. “Damn it, that’s not what I meant!”
“Tell me what you do mean.”
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and drew a shaky breath. Collecting herself. “What you’re offer
ing me—it’s so tempting.”
“Then give in to it.”
Taking her hands from her eyes, she spread them open at her sides. “Nothing’s that simple, Jack.”
“Never said it would be simple.”
“And my work here, with Nemesis?” she demanded. “I’m supposed to just walk away from it?”
“I … don’t know.” He hated saying these words, but he had no answer, no solution.
“But you want me to choose. Nemesis or you.”
He swallowed hard. “Maybe I do.”
She shut her eyes, said nothing for a long while, and in those moments, fresh and unfamiliar hope broke apart into nothing.
The raw pain in her face cut him deep. She held everything inside, kept herself shielded, but not now. In this room, with him alone, she was exposed. Suffering. Her pain rang through him, metal against bone.
When she opened her eyes, they gleamed wetly. “It’s got to be Nemesis, Jack. It always has to be Nemesis. I’ve dedicated everything to our work. That’s my choice. I’m staying here.”
There was a strange rushing sound in his ears. Someone had wrapped metal bands around his ribs, because he couldn’t breathe. He turned away from her and stared out the window, but all he saw was emptiness.
“And now you hate me,” she said, sounding far away.
“Can’t do that.” He looked back at her, but the sunlight had bleached his eyes, and she was a ghost in the middle of the room. “But you need to do something for me now.”
“Anything,” she answered at once.
“Tomorrow, when I leave, I bet you’re going to go somewhere, someplace that’s your favorite, the place that always cheers you up.”
She thought about it, then gave a small smile. “The British Museum.”
“Take me there now.”
“Been quite tight-lipped about your interest in museums.”
“Never gone to one. But when I think of you tomorrow, and the days after that, I want to be able to see you. Want to picture you where you’re happiest.”
Her smile faded away.
Then she took his hand, and together they left his room. No one in the parlor said anything as Jack and Eva came downstairs. They kept quiet, too, when he and Eva left headquarters.
Instead of taking a cab, Jack and Eva walked to Bloomsbury. He’d passed the huge building on Great Russell Street before, but hadn’t ever had an interest in going inside. Now, with Eva beside him, he climbed the stairs and walked between the big columns out front. It was an odd place, full of people but surprisingly quiet. Eva seemed to know exactly where to go.
She led him through a maze of rooms, each one stuffed full of old things, chipped statues, and big slabs of carved stone. Part of him wanted to linger. He didn’t have much experience with things that were old but also valuable. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to dig all this out of the dirt, drag it across mountains and over the water so that people like Jack could get the smallest look at what it meant to be alive thousands of years ago.
But he barely looked at the objects and stones in the different rooms. It was her that interested him, the way her gaze moved over everything, how he could see her thoughts forming.
“It’s always so peaceful here,” she said softly as they walked. “So orderly.”
“Not like it is outside.”
She smiled at that. “When I see these Assyrian friezes,” she murmured, “or Egyptian sarcophagi or Roman statues, it makes me think that, for all the transience of our lives, there’s something of us that’s eternal. Something remains, even when we are turned to dust.”
He stared up at a very tall statue of a man wearing a strange wrap on his head, with a long, pointy beard, and stone eyes that saw nothing. “The bloke who carved that,” he said quietly, “nobody made a statue of him. But a thousand years later, here we are, looking at something he made. So he ain’t really gone.”
“So long as we have this,” she said, looking at him, “we can remember.”
* * *
They spent several hours at the museum, going slowly from gallery to gallery. Neither spoke much. But she didn’t want words, and he didn’t, either. It was enough to be in the museum with him. He’d be with her, even when she came back alone.
When they left the museum, a cold evening drizzle blurred the streets. They took a cab back to headquarters, and found it empty. Silently, she and Jack ascended the stairs and went into his room. They helped each other out of their clothes and got into bed. With his arms warm and solid around her, his heartbeat beneath her ear, she fell asleep and dreamt of kingdoms disappearing beneath oceans of sand.
When she woke, cold sunlight filled the empty room. She was alone. She had a memory from earlier that morning of Jack getting out of bed, saying he was heading downstairs to use the privy. She must have dozed after that. But the space beside her was still empty.
His minimal possessions were likewise absent. She threw on her clothing, forgoing her corset, shoved her feet into her boots and hurried downstairs.
Simon sat at the parlor table. Newspapers and documents were spread out, and he lifted his head from studying them as she clattered into the room.
“He left,” Simon said.
She glanced at the clock. “It’s only eleven-thirty. The train leaves in an hour.”
“Think he was determined not to miss it. I offered to take him to the station, but he wanted to go on his own. Left this for you.” He dug into the pocket of his waistcoat, then held something out to her.
A tiny, sparkling bead. Picking it up between her fingers, she examined it. A moment later, she realized where it came from. Her gown. The one she’d worn to the ball she and Jack had attended. At some point in the evening, the bead must have come off her dress—most likely when she and Jack had kissed in the carriage—and he’d kept it. As if it were something precious.
But he’d given it back. The only thing he left behind.
She sank down into a crouch, her head in her hands.
Distantly, she heard Simon push back his chair and walk to her. Everything came from a great distance now, including his voice when he said, “Come with me.”
Numbness stiffened her limbs as she rose. She followed him up the stairs, down the hallway, through another door, and up a narrow set of steps. Then they were on the roof, with the neighborhood spread around them and the bustle of quotidian life. Everything resembled a child’s set of toys, as consequential as dolls.
“I never really come up to this place.” Simon turned, taking in the view from all directions. “Shame, that. Gives one perspective.” He gazed at her. “What are you doing here?”
“You brought me up here,” she answered. Pushing words out of her mouth took tremendous effort. Far easier to simply collapse into silence, never to speak again.
“Not on the roof,” he said. “Why aren’t you with Dalton? He asked you to go with him, and you declined.”
Of course Simon had heard every word. All of Nemesis had to have listened to the conversation between her and Jack. Yet instead of feeling the burn of shame because her colleagues knew about her private life, all she could muster was a cold emptiness.
“I couldn’t do that,” she finally answered Simon.
“Why?”
She stared at him. “My life’s work is here. I have a job, responsibilities. I can’t dedicate years of my life to helping right wrongs and then simply toss that aside for a man. I was the one who ensured that button factory with the appalling conditions was closed down, and the children working there were properly fed and clothed. I helped break the ring trafficking in Chinese boys. I can’t leave Nemesis.”
“You’re one of our most valuable operatives,” Simon agreed.
“Then you see how I can’t chuck everything away,” she countered, “just because … because…” She swallowed the words that wanted to come.
“Because you love him,” Simon filled in.
She forgot how to breathe. Or think. Or do anything
at all except stare, aghast, at Simon. There it was. The hidden self she’d kept carefully locked away—even from herself. Now it was out in the open, in the bitter chill of a London morning, naked and shivering.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I do. I do love him.” The words newly spoken stunned her with their truth. She thought she’d reject the idea, find some way to dismiss it. Jack and she hadn’t known each other for very long. And yet … it was exactly right.
But it didn’t matter.
She said, “There are sacrifices that have to be made—”
“Oh, bollocks,” Simon answered. “Naught gets in your way when you’re doing a job for Nemesis. Dalton’s the one that you want, you should let nothing stop you.”
“So speaks the man with a different paramour every fortnight.”
Simon’s expression shuttered. “I don’t play an instrument, but I know when a melody’s out of tune.” He stepped closer to her. “It isn’t your dedication to Nemesis that’s keeping you and Dalton apart.”
She planted her hands on her hips. “Oh, it isn’t?”
“You fear the unknown.”
“I was in a pitched gun battle not two days ago. Didn’t scream, didn’t faint. Not even when Rockley had a spike digging into my jugular.” She glared at him. “I think that proves that I’m not afraid.”
“Of bullets and bullies, no.” Softly, he asked, “What of your heart?”
He may as well have stabbed her, for she felt his words pierce her. God, did he speak the truth?
Images flooded her mind. An endless succession of days—colorless, flat. Fighting battles, escaping danger, but forever anesthetized. Dining continually upon the bitter ashes of self-made heartbreak. Jack had roared into her life, an unstoppable force, and helped break her from the prison she’d constructed. And now he was gone.
She’d pushed him away. She thought it was because her work demanded that she remain in England. But Simon was right. She had been frightened. Protecting herself came at a devastating cost—the only man she’d ever loved.
“How can you claim to fight for anyone else,” Simon said, “when you refuse to stand up for yourself?”