by Zoë Archer
“With your excellent tailoring,” Alyce answered, already using her more refined accent, “it’d be impossible for us to fail.”
“For a woman, a smart dress is as impervious as armor.”
“To a point,” Simon warned. “Don’t mistake this”—he gestured to her dark green traveling ensemble—“for steel and chain mail. Confidence we need, not complacency.”
“Look at me, Simon,” Alyce said. “Maybe I’m dressed like a lady, but I don’t take a single pebble for granted. Could hold ore, could be worthless deads. But I have to make sure.”
He had to agree with her on that. Standing on the platform, waiting for the train to carry them to the next and more risky stage of their plan, Alyce radiated determination. She seemed to glow with it, so much so that many men passing by gave her a second look. Simon’s glare sent the men hurrying away.
“Take my arm,” he instructed her.
“Why?” Yet even as she asked, she slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. A sense of rightness flowed through him.
“Because from now on, we’re an inseparable team.”
* * *
Piece by piece, Alyce felt herself changing. She now rode on a train as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The clothes she wore were proper for a sophisticated city woman. She’d been inside an elegant hotel and eaten delicate, toylike sandwiches.
But these were just superficial alterations. Something within her was being reshaped, transformed. She’d entered a world of forged documents and false identities, and the shock of it, the newness and strangeness, all that began to drift away.
As she watched the countryside speed by in a dizzying blur, she said to Simon, “I feel like that other Alice, the one who stepped through a mirror to find herself in a topsy-turvy world of living chess pieces. And I’m one of the pawns.”
“A rook,” he answered. “Not a pawn. Pawns just go where they’re told.”
“Isn’t that what’s happening now? ‘Wear this, Alyce.’ ‘Travel here.’ ‘Say these words.’”
At this hour of the morning, the carriage held many more passengers. Men, women with children. The car buzzed with the chatter of daily life, almost comforting in its dullness.
She and Simon sat side by side, leaning close and speaking in low voices. They both wore soft smiles, as if they really were a newly wedded couple. But it was all part of the disguise, part of the game. It was hard to remember that, though, when she glanced up into the blue, blue, blue of his eyes, or felt the warmth of him as his shoulder pressed against hers.
“Rooks have more power than pawns. They’re valuable in the endgame. Most of the checkmates are made by rooks.”
“Now you’re just throwing words at me to keep my head spinning.”
He took her hand in his, and she was disappointed that they were now both gloved. But her gloves were of thin kidskin. His heat soaked through the leather, into her flesh.
His gaze held hers. “Whatever you believe, know this: I don’t need a pawn, and I don’t need a puppet. I need you, Alyce.”
Curse them both—it would be too easy to think he talked of another need. Not just of his body, but something deeper.
All of this was in service of the mine, though. For the villagers and the workers and her family.
“I’ll play my part,” she answered. “And do a damned fine job of it.”
He grinned at her, a sight that was beginning to feel like a pickaxe to her heart. “Stop stating the obvious.”
She spoke in an even rougher Cornish accent than normal. “Oh, but I can’t help it, sir. Just a simple country lass, I am.”
This made him laugh, and the words formed clearly in her mind. I’m in trouble. Grave trouble. Because she was liking them too much, craving them too often, his smiles and laughs, and now wasn’t the time, sod it, to start dreaming of what couldn’t be.
“Well, my simple country lass,” he said, using the same thick accent, “things are about to get awful complicated.”
They spent the rest of the trip in silence, but he continued to hold her hand. She didn’t object. Everything moved so quickly—she was speeding toward what would be the biggest challenge of her life—and he was warm and solid. She couldn’t let him be her strength. Yet it surely helped knowing that he was beside her.
After the metal grandeur of the Exeter train station, the plain wooden depot at Plymouth came as a disappointment. The machinery at Wheal Prosperity was more impressive. As Simon paid the porter and hailed a cab, Alyce laughed at herself and her newfound airs. And all of this was an illusion, anyway, not truly part of her life. In a few days, it would be as if Plymouth’s railways didn’t exist.
A few days. A lifetime between now and then, and what lay in between … she couldn’t see. For all of her twenty-four years, the shadow of the mine had fallen across her life. She’d stayed in school as long as possible, but then it’d become necessary to work, and from then until not very long ago, her patterns never altered. Wake, eat, walk to the mine, work, walk home, eat, read before exhaustion set in, sleep. Repeat. Only Sundays saw a disruption in that routine. And her forays to the managers’ office, demanding change.
God, it felt so good to break from those chains of habit. Good—and not a little frightening. But she could master that fear.
Simon helped her into the cab. “The Admiral and Anchor,” he called up to the driver. “We can’t risk meeting Jack and Eva at a hotel,” he explained to Alyce.
“If anyone saw us together…”
“Disaster. Yes.”
As soon as the hackney left the area near the train station, she smelled the heavy, briny sea. And when the cab turned a corner, and the narrow street suddenly revealed a broad vista, she fought a gasp. The bay spread out below them, the color of iron, and dotted with ships of every size. White flecks of seabirds wheeled and cried overhead. Plymouth Sound reminded her that the world was much larger than she’d ever imagined. Ships crossed the sea, going to faraway places, bringing back exotic cargo—things and people. Impossible not to feel a little small, when the whole of the ocean stretched endlessly toward the horizon, and brave ships skimmed back and forth from that distant line.
“Have you seen the sea before?”
“Newquay, once. But I was just a little’un. Don’t remember much except Henry putting sand down the back of my dress and my ma pulling me away from the water. I couldn’t swim.”
“That didn’t stop you from trying.”
“And getting a lungful of salt water when I finally jumped in. We went home after that. Not much of a seaside holiday.”
“I’d say we could make up for it now, but—”
“This isn’t a holiday,” she finished.
“Another time, maybe.”
“Another time.” Which they both knew would never happen. So she let herself take in as much of the view as she could, hoping her mind could work like one of those photographic cameras, and capture the image for her to return to again and again later. If she did have a photograph of that moment, she’d write on the back, Simon and the Sea, 1886.
Two things that she’d never fully know.
The view disappeared as the cab turned down another street. Here, just as in Exeter, people of all stripes walked the avenues, including men in naval uniforms and some very grand-looking folks, indeed. Alyce tried to remember every image, all the faces young and old, clothing fine and shabby, the handsome streets and smell of the ocean—souvenirs for her mind, to take back with her to Trewyn and retell. The villagers were always starved for stories of life beyond their small town’s boundaries, and she hoped to sate their appetites with stories when she returned.
She pushed thoughts of the future and going home aside. Everything was about now, and these next few days. Simon had warned against complacency, and that included thoughts of Trewyn.
The cab pulled up outside a stately looking place that she recognized as a tavern by the painted shingle swaying on a brass post.
As Simon climbed down from the hackney, he said to the driver, “Take the trunk on to the Cormorant Hotel. Say it belongs to Mr. Shale, and they’ll know what to do with it.”
The cabman pocketed Simon’s offered coins, and tipped his hat. “Yes, sir!”
Simon helped her down from the hackney, and it seemed so strange, being put into and taken out of vehicles, as if she couldn’t manage the task perfectly well on her own two legs. She’d pushed wagons loaded with ore up hillsides, for heaven’s sake. This was a different world, however, where women didn’t have the same strength and were handled like soap bubbles. She might not pop at the slightest breeze, but in this foreign land, she’d have to follow local custom. And it didn’t upset her to feel Simon’s hand on her elbow, his hand taking hers as he guided her down to the pavement.
After the cab had rolled off, Simon pushed open the door to the tavern. Sunlight poured in through a bank of windows onto a polished dark wooden floor. The bar itself gleamed, including a well-polished brass footrail. Malty ale and lemon furniture polish scented the air. Tables were arranged neatly around the room, and there were high-backed settles lining the walls. If this tavern was a tall-masted ship with sparkling white sails billowing, the pubs at Trewyn were leaky rowboats.
Though the hour was still before noon, a few men were already at tables and lined up at the bar. They looked at Alyce with harmless curiosity as Simon, his hand on her back, guided her up to the bar. In her respectable traveling dress, and the well-mannered way Simon touched and gazed at her, nobody would mistake her for a woman of loose character. Still, her presence in the tavern was odd enough to attract a bit of attention.
“How may I serve you, sir?” the barman asked politely.
“The Dunhams are expecting us,” Simon answered.
“Right this way,” was the prompt answer. The barman stepped out from behind his counter and led them down a hallway lined with framed pictures of naval ships. He knocked lightly on a door. “Your company’s arrived, Mr. Dunham.”
“Fine,” came the response—a voice so deep and raspy it sounded as if it emerged from the lowest part of Wheal Prosperity’s deepest mine shaft.
The barman didn’t open the door. He accepted the coin Simon gave him—where did all these coins come from? Surely he didn’t have them in Trewyn—and disappeared back toward the front of the tavern.
“It’s me and company,” Simon said through the door. The way he spoke, it seemed as if he were warning someone with a large, vicious animal that he was approaching, and they’d better keep their hand on the animal’s collar.
Slowly, he opened the door, then ushered Alyce through it quickly. They stood in a small private room, also with dark wood on the floor and walls, a single window, a round table encircled by a few chairs, and a fireplace.
A woman stood to one side of the room, fair-haired and neatly dressed in a jacket, shirtwaist, and skirt. She carried with her an air of complete control and an intelligence so sharp it could cut steel. The woman stepped forward briskly, and spoke with the same no-nonsense tone. “You must be Alyce. I’m Eva.”
Which Alyce could have guessed.
“This is my husband, Jack.” Eva gestured toward the other side of the room, and Alyce fought a yelp. She’d known large, powerfully built men before—miners earned their strength honestly—but not once in her life had she ever seen a man like Jack.
He was … huge. Thick with muscle and radiating so much raw strength, it was a wonder the entire building didn’t simply collapse from the force of it. Though he wore a respectable suit, a wildness clung to him, something almost feral.
The name registered in her memory. A realization struck her. This was the man who had escaped from prison.
His dark gaze saw the moment she seemed to understand who he was. A small smile curled in the corner of his mouth, and it wasn’t at all comforting.
Simon explained, “Jack and Eva are going to help us in the next stage of our scheme.”
Good God, these two dangerous people were their allies? And if this powerful man and this sharp woman were their partners, how treacherous was the risk they faced?
She summoned all of her nerve, all of her calm, and straightened her back. “Let’s get started.”
CHAPTER 11.
Alyce knew she shouldn’t judge anyone by their appearance, or even their history. She should be the last person to do so.
Still, when Jack spoke, she expected him mostly to grunt or point or speak in a dialect so low, she’d need a translator to understand him.
That’s not what happened at all.
The four of them—herself, Simon, Eva, and Jack—sat at the table in the private room. An aproned server came in with plates of eggs and sausages, and a tray bearing steaming cups of tea. Nerves plucked at her, but she discovered that the sandwiches and tea in Exeter had barely fueled her furnace, and so she, Simon, and the couple fell to their breakfasts with the seriousness of churchgoers. The tea went a long way to revive her after a night with barely any sleep, so she was fully awake when Jack explained his latest activities.
“Been going down to the owners’ offices every day, posing as a government man.” He did talk with a hard accent—she guessed it came from the kind of place where people fought daily to stay alive—but she understood every word, as well as the equally hard intelligence of the man speaking. “I’ve been putting the lean on ’em, saying that they owe hundreds of pounds in taxes, and I won’t stop breathing down their necks till I get the money.”
“You’ve got them shuddering in their sock garters, I’d wager.” Simon smiled over the rim of his tea cup.
“And they believe you’re really from the government?” Alyce asked. Though Jack wore a decent suit amazingly tailored for his giant frame, some fine wool couldn’t hide the fact that he wasn’t a bureaucrat—not that she had much experience with bureaucrats. “You don’t strike me as the sort of lad who normally sits behind a desk.”
Instead of taking offense, he winked. “More comfortable behind a punching bag than a desk.” She believed it. In his massive hands, the knife and fork looked better suited to a doll.
“But Jack’s remarkably adept at intimidation,” Eva said, glancing at her husband fondly. “And with one of Marco’s forged documents proving Jack’s from a taxation bureau, it’s astonishing what can be accomplished.”
Alyce had definitely found herself on the other side of the mirror. Only in the world of Nemesis would a wife take pride in her husband’s skill at extortion. She glanced over at Simon, seeking an anchor. He leaned back in his chair, sunlight from the lone window bright along the clean planes of his face and picking out intriguing shadows, like the one below his bottom lip that revealed its slight fullness. Where Jack was a heavy hammer, Simon was an elegant blade.
She wondered if he found this conversation as strange as she did, but he looked perfectly comfortable, cradling his cup of tea in one long-fingered hand as though it were an ordinary morning and they were talking about if the weather would hold.
This mirror world was his, too. She was the stranger here.
In that book, the other Alice tried to follow rules that seemed to be made up as they went along, being told by everyone and everything that she was the outsider. The only one who’d been kind to her, who accepted that other Alice, was the White Knight. He wanted her to be a queen, and made sure that happened. The sole figure in that opposite world who’d made Alice feel welcome and believed in her.
Simon wasn’t half as foolish or full of ideas for useless inventions as that White Knight, but he’d been Alyce’s supporter all along. He’d had his concerns about her at the beginning—she couldn’t blame him for that—but once she’d proven herself, he’d stood firm in his belief. He trusted her, and seemed to like her for precisely who she was.
None of the men back home had felt the same. They’d tried to court her, and she’d fielded a handful of proposals. But it was a kindness to everyone that she’d always said no. She couldn’t be
a sweet girl, like Sarah. She couldn’t be biddable.
Simon didn’t want her sweet. Or biddable. He cared for her. She could see it in the way he looked at her, feel it in his touch.
Oh, the sly bastard. How could she go back to her ordinary life once he left?
Jack wiped his mouth with a napkin, then stood. “Those bastards aren’t going to just hand the mine over on their own. Better be getting down there.”
“How much time do you need?” Simon asked, still stretched out in his chair.
“Fifteen minutes should do it. Been working them all week.”
Alyce couldn’t believe that anyone could hold out against Jack for so long, but she wouldn’t underestimate the mine owners’ greed—even when faced with someone as terrifying as the escaped convict.
“Ready to do battle against me?” Simon grinned.
“Put us in the ring together, I’d snap you like a tinder.”
“Won’t be as easy as that.”
“No, you were always a tough little bugger.” Only in comparison to someone as big as Jack could Simon be considered little. Alyce also had to wonder about when they’d locked horns before. And if Simon survived that … dear God, what could break him?
“Always put up a good fight against you,” Simon said.
“That you did.” Jack clapped on his hat, and his wife got to her feet. She walked him to the door of the private room, her hand on his sleeve.
“Break some spines, love,” she murmured.
“I’ll bring ’em to you like a bouquet.” He lowered his head and she rose up on her toes for a kiss.
Alyce ought to look away, but she couldn’t. So much heat and tenderness in a single, brief kiss, it felt like a fist closing around her heart. They couldn’t be more different, this couple, and yet only a sightless man could miss how much they cared for each other. And they’d met because of a Nemesis mission.
She glanced again at Simon. He studied his tea cup intently, as if forcibly not watching Jack and Eva.
