Dark Jenny elm-3

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Who says I haven’t?” She rinsed the blade in the water basin.

  “No ring.”

  “Most doctors don’t wear jewelry. Tends to snag on the edges of wounds.”

  “That’s nice to know. But you didn’t answer my question.”

  The razor skitched up my cheek. A big blob of soapy beard dropped onto the towel over my chest. She said, “I don’t care for soldiers much. I know lots of women swoon over a man in uniform, but I’ve seen them at their worst. Once a man is taught to be violent, it becomes his first instinct. And when there’s no war to fight, way too many of them turn it toward their women.”

  “I was a soldier once. And my current job requires violence on occasion.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re here.”

  She rinsed the blade in the bowl. “You’re different. You stuck up for that girl when you didn’t have to.”

  “I just happened to be there. Any decent guy would have.”

  “My point exactly. There aren’t many decent guys in armor. Some are better than others, of course. Bob Kay comes close. But even he wouldn’t take a swing at Dave Agravaine. And believe me, that guy’s needed his face smashed in for a long time.”

  She began working around my mouth, so I stayed quiet. I felt the swell of her breasts against my arm as she leaned over me, and I smelled her light perfume. I resisted the urge to glance down when the neck of her dress gaped slightly. Well, I mostly resisted. I felt like a kid entranced by the thought of seeing his first naked female body.

  Finally she finished, wiped my face with a towel, then nodded toward the mirror above the mantel. “Check yourself out.”

  One glance at my unadorned features reminded me why I’d grown the beard in the first place. I had to admit, though, that I looked completely different. “You’ve successfully removed that ugly growth,” I said, “and revealed the uglier one beneath it.”

  “So the patient will survive?”

  I turned to her. “The patient will grow it back as soon as he can. But he appreciates the effort.”

  She stepped forward, so close that I reflexively put my hands on her waist. She pressed her hips against me and let my arms take the weight of her upper body. Her hands lightly touched my bare cheeks. “Now that you won’t scratch me up if you kiss me,” she said in a husky, unmistakable voice, “let’s discuss my fee.”

  “I thought you worked for the government.”

  “I do. But you don’t. You’ve run up quite a tab, what with an office visit and two house calls.”

  I felt her breath on my upper lip. Her hands moved down to my chest, and one fingertip ran along my scar. I said, “I certainly wouldn’t want to stiff you.”

  She giggled. “Are you sure about that?”

  She was so close I could hear her slightly ragged breathing. “ Now who’s a horny teenager?” I said.

  The smile left her face, replaced by the kind of look men dream about inspiring in women like her. She said, “I’m no teenager, sword jockey.”

  Then she proved it.

  Later I looked up at Iris as she sat astride me in bed. The moon was now centered in the window, and its light cast her in pale blue, edged with orange from the dimmed but persistent lamp. Her skin glistened with sweat, and her lips had that delicious puffy quality some women get when they’re aroused. She rolled her hips slowly and bent over me; her breasts slid against my chest. With her eyes closed, I wondered for a moment if she pictured someone else beneath her. Then she smiled down at me and traced her fingers along my hairless cheek. “You clean up nicely.”

  “And you dirty up well.”

  She laughed and kissed me. I looked past her shoulder at the moon, did some quick calculations, and decided it would reach the pinnacle of the hill within the next half hour. “I have to go soon,” I said into the kiss, which showed no signs of stopping.

  “I know,” she agreed, and pulled back enough to look into my eyes. She ran a hand through her sweaty hair. “I should probably mention that this is not characteristic of my normal behavior.”

  “Or my normal luck.”

  She laughed again and wiped the perspiration from her eyes. She had a slender, trim shape under her clothes that spoke of her active life, and a couple of scars of her own that I intended to ask about someday. “I’ve just never met anyone like you,” she continued. “And I knew I’d regret not doing this if I never saw you again.”

  “Really.” It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of disbelief; I did not generally inspire unrestrained lust in intelligent, beautiful women.

  She nodded. “I know myself, Eddie. I know what I respond to. It’s not the shallow surface, no matter how handsome or wealthy it is. You can believe me or not.”

  I rose and put my arms around her waist, feeling the muscles of her back move beneath her skin. “I believe you.” I rolled her onto her back. She went willingly, opened herself to me, and together we pounded out the last of our lust with much noise and effort. We finished with barely enough time for me to dress, pack, and head downstairs. Getting out of that bed was one of the most heroic things I’ve ever done.

  We made no awkward promises, except the unspoken one that was in our kiss as I slipped out the door. My last sight of her like that, naked in the moonlight, would stay with me for a long time.

  FOURTEEN

  Even indoors my newly bare cheeks felt the night’s chill, and my footsteps, despite my attempt at stealth, sounded loud against the stone.

  The rush from the time spent with Iris, which left me feeling as if I could kick the whole world’s ass, had burned itself out by the time I reached the top of the staircase. I paused for a moment and listened for any movement or voices. Only silence reached me. I took the steps two at a time, knowing that I’d come out near the door to the great hall.

  My typical luck held. At the bottom I ran smack into a trio of men starting upstairs.

  They stared at me. I stared at them. Two of them were pudgy, dressed in expensive clothes a bit too small for their corpulence. The burgundy veins stood out on their noses and ears, marks of their long-term dissipation. I didn’t know them, but they seemed typical wealthy landowners and had no doubt been among the courtiers howling for my entrails for the past two days.

  The third I recognized at once as my old pal Ken Spinkley, the Lord Astamore. But his face was as blank as the others.

  A long moment passed when no one moved or spoke. “Well?” said the nearest man, who wore amber eye shadow. He humphed with impatience. All three were drunk, and one had to lean against the stairwell door for support.

  “I think I’m going to be unwell,” the leaning man said, his voice thick from drink.

  “Ladies are unwell,” Eye Shadow said. “Gentlemen vomit.”

  “Would you kindly step aside?” Astamore snapped at me, making no effort to hide his annoyance. “We’ve been run out of the great hall.”

  Suddenly I realized what was going on: they didn’t recognize me. I was clean-shaven and dressed differently, and they were pig-porking drunk.

  The leaning man warned, “Watch your shoes, here it comes.”

  “Oh, no, get out of the way!” Eye Shadow demanded, and pushed me aside. He grabbed leaning man under the arm and hauled him to his feet. They stumbled up the stairs toward the guest floor, but the retch-and-splash sounds that followed told vividly that they didn’t make it.

  “Morons,” Astamore muttered. He looked at me again, and a glimmer of familiarity gleamed behind the drunkenness. “Say… I know you, don’t I?”

  It was late, I was on the spot, and I pulled out the only name I could think of at that moment. With immense dignity I tucked my injured hand behind my back and looked imperiously down my nose at him. I let a bird twitter in my voice when I said, “I, sir, am Lord Huckleberry.”

  Astamore blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. Kenneth, Lord Astamore, at your service.”

  I pursed my lips in annoyance. “If ‘my service’ includes roughing me
up with your boorish gallivanting, then that is true indeed. Perhaps I should have a word with the king, whose company I have just left.”

  “No, I assure you, we meant no harm,” Astamore quickly said. Nervous sweat popped out around his hairline. “We were simply looking for the way back to our rooms, there’s certainly no need to bother King Marcus about this. Is there?” He added the last so pitifully I almost laughed in his face.

  “Perhaps not.” I swept past him. “But should you inconvenience me again, I shall certainly take measures.” I didn’t see the look on his face as I went through the door into the great hall, but I’m sure it was suitably aghast.

  As promised, the room was empty. The only illumination came from moonlight through the narrow windows. I crossed the room to the Tarpolita Hill tapestry and slipped behind it into the designated serving room. I snagged one of the small table lamps, lit it, and went into the darkened corridor that connected the rooms. The drain cover creaked as I lifted it. I climbed down the ladder, paused to pull the grate back into place with my good hand, and dropped with a splash into an inch of running water. I turned the lamp up all the way.

  As with everything else in this damned storybook kingdom, the tunnel was ridiculously clean. They must’ve sent people down here once a year to make sure no vegetation or wildlife was able to take hold. The lamplight reflected off the eyes of a lone pair of rats, but it was nothing compared to the horde I’d have found in any castle off this island.

  How the hell did Marcus Drake do that? This went beyond any sense of duty, into a realm of pride in one’s kingdom that I’d never before seen. Sure, you could order men to clean these tunnels, even force them to do it. But they wouldn’t do it this well unless they felt they had a personal stake in it.

  I realized, of course, that I knew exactly how Drake did it. He did it the same way he’d got me to take this stupid job.

  Annoyed with myself, I looked behind me and saw the vertical bars that covered the cliffside opening. Beyond it stars burned in the clear sky. I turned landward and began to walk. The tunnel’s ceiling was about half an inch shorter than I was, which kept me in a crouch, and the passage sloped gradually upward. Steplike notches lined the floor just below the water, so that if you fell, you wouldn’t slide all the way to the spout. My lower back did not take long to express its disapproval, followed quickly by my knees and, in sympathy, my busted hand.

  This distracted me enough that I didn’t spot the body on the tunnel’s floor until I was almost on top of it.

  I stopped immediately and took in the scene before moving closer. The body lay on its side, the water trickling around it to continue downhill. Its feet were bare, and ropes tightly bound its ankles. I couldn’t see its face or tell its gender from its wet clothing. A handful of rats waited nearby, disturbed by my light but not frightened off.

  I waved the lamp, and the vermin scattered. I knelt beside the body. Its hands were tied behind its back. The small fingers curled limp, and the ropes hadn’t bitten into the skin. That told me the corpse was bound after death.

  I also saw it was a woman.

  I slowly turned her over. The long, wet hair hid her face, so I had to brush it aside. I recognized her.

  It was Mary, the serving girl.

  Yet it couldn’t be. There wasn’t a mark on her face.

  I stared at her for a long time. I was absolutely sure it was her. I’d watched her closely in the great hall, just before Patrice fell dead. Yet Agravaine had given her a black eye and a split lip just two days earlier. Those injuries simply couldn’t heal that quickly.

  I ran my finger along her cold cheek. Her eyes were closed, and her features slack. She hadn’t drowned. Using just my good hand, I sought the fatal injury beneath her clothes and found it quickly enough: a single knife thrust between her ribs, no doubt angled toward her heart. The edges were white and puffy, washed clean of blood by the steady water.

  Her joints were stiff; she’d been dead at least several hours. She could’ve been killed anytime after Iris said she left the infirmary.

  But why was she here? I looked back down the tunnel toward the cliff grate, which blocked anything bigger than a rat. She couldn’t just wash out to sea, even if there was enough water flow to carry her. There weren’t enough rats to dispose of the body, or even render it unrecognizable. So the only explanation was that it wasn’t dumped here, but stored here. To be disposed of later.

  I looked at her face, verifying the impossible truth that there was no trace of her injuries. The flesh was unmarked, unswollen, unsplit. There was still a touch of baby fat in her cheeks, and an innocence that had survived her death.

  I’d mocked her possible future back in the great hall before the murder. At the time it had been the worst fate I could imagine for her.

  I considered carrying her with me to meet Kay. She deserved better than this, lying facedown in a glorified sewer for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there were more undercurrents than just the water in this tunnel. Had I been set up to find this girl? Was a contingent of armed men waiting for me to emerge with the proof of my guilt tossed over my shoulder?

  Against all my better instincts, I carefully put her back the way I’d found her. Wherever her spirit now resided, I hoped it understood.

  The tunnel opened at the bottom of a small, empty pond. The even, bowl-like sides were lined with round rocks to prevent erosion when rainwater filled it. At the top of the slope, Kay sat smoking a pipe, eyes heavy with exhaustion.

  He smiled as I emerged into the moonlight. “Well, hack off my legs and call me Shorty. You look ten years younger without the beard.”

  “I’m in disguise.” I did not tell him about Mary’s body, or my run-in with the courtiers, or that I’d claimed to be the mythical Lord Huckleberry. Nodlon Castle was a surprising distance away, down the slight slope toward the cliffs. I hadn’t realized the tunnel was quite so long.

  He fingered my jacket’s lapel. “You might be a little overdressed to be inconspicuous.”

  “Once the road dust settles on me, I’ll be fine.”

  “There’s your horse.” Kay indicated a nearby tree where the animal was saddled and tied. “She’ll do fine for a long, fast trip. And here.” He handed me a sword and scabbard.

  “I guess you trust me now.”

  “I’m not sending you out unarmed. But I should warn you: If you intend to leave Grand Bruan without completing your job, Marc will send Tom Gillian after you. And Gillian won’t stop until he’s found you, and one of you is dead.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I knew it was too easy.”

  “Yeah. And here’s this.”

  He tossed me a small money bag. From its weight I could tell it included more gold than I’d asked for. While the threat of Gillian’s retribution was definitely a factor, this was the real reason he could trust me. Not the money itself, but what it represented: my word. I said, “For what it’s worth, if I take payment for a job, I see it through.”

  “I hope so. Because so does Tom Gillian.”

  I put the money in my jacket pocket, then with great difficulty, thanks to the cast, I buckled the sword around my waist. Kay offered no help. When I finished, I said, “One more thing. Seriously, how will Spears take it when I show up and tell him to drop everything and come here?”

  Kay snorted. “It’s Jennifer. If she says spit, he’ll ask how far.”

  “So there is something to the gossip?”

  He shook his head wearily. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe, once. When we were all a lot younger, we all did things we’re not proud of now. But it’s old news, and the people involved have made their peace with it. Bringing it up now does no one any good.”

  That comment set my mind working. “Bob… who would benefit if Marc lost the crown?”

  “No one. He doesn’t have an heir.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?”

  Kay shrugged. “It’s not from lack of trying, believe me. Those two are all
over each other. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Then he has no next of kin?”

  “Just his sister. She’d never be accepted as a ruler, though. And neither would her son. I hope she’s dead in a ditch somewhere on the mainland.” He looked up. Although the moon was still overhead, the sky to the east was growing visibly lighter. “You should really get going. If anyone from the castle sees you, this’ll all be pointless.”

  “All right. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

  “You’re coming back? I thought you’d drop off your message and then haul ass back home.”

  “Well, with the threat of Tom Gillian hanging over me, I have to follow through to the end.”

  “Right,” Kay said with a knowing little smile. “It has nothing to do with a certain feisty castle doctor, does it?”

  “Nothing at all. But if you happen to see her, tell her to be sure to remember the ow until I get back.”

  “Inside joke, I assume.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  We reached the horse. She was a beauty, dark with a few white patches. In the dim illumination I couldn’t see if her base color was brown or black. She tossed her head in either greeting or intimidation.

  I was, in the estimation of my old riding instructor, a piss-poor horseman, probably because I hated horses. They were too big, too smart, and too enigmatic for me to ever trust. This began in childhood, and at the time nothing had yet changed my opinion. In fact, most of my experience reinforced it.

  Once I’d seen a cavalry officer, Colonel Bierce, approach an obstinate stallion that kicked him in the head so hard it actually tore away his jawbone and sent it flying out of the corral. From the upper teeth to the throat it left a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The worst part was that the injury wasn’t immediately fatal; the poor bastard never even lost consciousness.

  The road was deserted as I started the long trip to Blithe Ward. Many things bothered me, not the least of which was that I still didn’t know who really killed Sam Patrice. I was sure Jennifer Drake didn’t, and that gave me the moral clearance to take this job; but the list of suspects had otherwise gotten no shorter. And how had Mary the apple girl ended up miraculously healed and dead in the sewer?