You May Kiss the Duke

by Charis Michaels

  He nodded. “All. Except the dead ones, of course.”

  “The dead?” Sabine looked up.

  To date, the investigation of her uncle had not brought her in the path of any dead bodies, and for that she was grateful. She’d been unsettled enough by the prospect of today’s sickly sailors. Corpses would be quite out of the question.

  The sailor looked philosophical. “Aye, dead bodies. Getting on a hospital ship is no guarantee that you’ll get off a healthy man, is it? We stack the dead bodies in the ship’s hold.”

  “How . . . efficient,” murmured Sabine. This conversation had taken an unpleasant turn for the worse.

  The man shrugged. “Can’t rightly bury them at sea if the boat is docked. The River Thames is not the sea, is it?”

  “No,” Sabine managed. She had no interest in the topic of dead bodies or their disposal.

  She redirected. “But might your expertise extend to helping me gain access to the ship? I should very much like to locate these men.” She smiled her most beguiling smile. Bridget growled and she nudged the dog with her foot.

  Ten minutes later Sabine and her dog were being admitted to the tidy, weatherworn gangplank of the hospital ship and directed to Deck Three.

  Jon Stoker was in hell.

  At long last.

  His body . . . on fire. His skin . . . burned away, limb by limb. His throat stung. His very hair was in flames.

  His eyes . . . seared. Wouldn’t open. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.

  Suffocation.

  Needed to cough, needed to swallow.

  Starving.

  Thirsty.

  Sick, so bloody sick.

  Pain everywhere. Cold and hot all at once.

  Call out? No.

  Sit up? No.

  Turn? No.

  Draw breath? No, no, no.

  Try.

  Again.

  Sleep.

  Wake up. Still in hell.

  Misery. Cold, burning, suffocating misery.

  Now, a dog.

  Barking. Barking so bloody loud. Hounds of hell?

  And shouting. Deafening shouting. A woman, shouting in his burning ear. She took him by his burning arm. She pulled.

  Pain. He was going to retch. So much pain.

  Ceaseless barking. She would pull off his arm and feed it to the dogs.

  “Stoker?! Jon Stoker! Stoker!?!?”

  Profanity.

  “Jon Stoker?!”

  He was in hell, he thought, and the devil was a woman.

  And she knew his bloody name.

  Chapter Two

  Londoners have crossed the River Thames by way of man-made bridge for nearly two thousand years.

  History suggests that Romans built the first London Bridge in 55 AD, but a Scotsman called Rennie and his two sons designed and built the newest iteration, a stately, five-arched affair known as “New London Bridge,” in 1831.

  Stretching from the City of London to Southwark, New London Bridge is a spare, clean overpass for wagons and pedestrians (some three hundred vehicles and five hundred people a day), devoid of the homes, shops, and public latrines that lined earlier bridges on the same site.

  Open to the public day and night, densest crowds in early morning and late afternoon.

  —from A Noble Guide to London by Sabine Noble

  Sabine covered her nose with a handkerchief, blotting out the stink of the River Thames. Today had been a day of terrible smells. The makeshift morgue on the Dreadnought exceeded expectations in terms of airlessness and rancidity, and now the crush of vehicles on London Bridge trapped their open wagon over the smoldering river, stewing in the afternoon sun.

  Sabine shaded her eyes with her hand and looked down at the unconscious body in the bed of the wagon. Could a gravely ill man become sicker from a terrible odor alone?

  She took up a broom from the bed of the wagon and nudged him with the handle. He groaned, and Sabine retracted the broom. She frowned down, her head spinning with questions.

  Why, for example, had doctors heaped a not-dead man in a cold, airless room filled with dead corpses?

  What condition had rendered the not-dead man so very nearly dead—unconscious, cold, with only the faintest of breath—but not fully deceased?

  How had a capable sea captain, and one of the most successful men in England, wound up in a floating charity hospital, surrounded by impoverished sailors?

  And finally, most important: Was the man really, actually, truly who he appeared to be: her estranged husband, Jon Stoker, a man she barely knew and had not seen in more than a year?

  Well, to this, at least, she knew the answer. Of course the not-dead man was Jon Stoker. She would not have screamed when she’d seen him; she would not have run frantic through the ship for help—she would not have abandoned her own fact-finding mission, her first solid lead in weeks—if she hadn’t been certain it was him.

  Perhaps she did not know much about the man she married, but she knew he had a distinctive tattoo of a sea serpent on his right arm. She had recognized it immediately, the very thing that had caught her attention as she hurried through a narrow passage in the ship’s hull. On closer inspection, she’d recognized his face. He was a pale, thin, sunken-cheeked version of himself, but it was Jon Stoker, there had been no doubt.

  As for what she would do with him, the answer was unavoidable; she should maintain his not-dead condition (also known as his life) until she could hand him over to someone who could properly revive him, assuming, God willing, a revival was in his future.

  “Can you not maneuver around the ox cart?” Sabine asked the driver. She’d hired a wagon to transport them from the Dreadnought to her cellar apartment in Belgravia. The crush of vehicles jamming London Bridge had slowed to a lurching crawl. A warm breeze mixed the rank smell of the Thames with the odor of standing livestock.

  “And go where, missus?” asked the driver. “There’s a carriage and a mail coach ahead of the cart.”

  Sabine frowned and looked again at Jon Stoker. Should she affect some manner of canopy to shield his face from the sun? It was a warm August day, no threat of rain, and she’d not brought a parasol. She looked around. She saw only her drafting kit, the fresh hay, and two barrels of an unnamed liquid that sloshed with each lurch of the wagon.

  She sighed and pulled her dog into her lap. “He may have been better off in the morgue, Bridget.”

  Nursemaiding was an occupation about which Sabine knew virtually nothing—lack of skill combined with lack of interest with a dash of repulsion. Not a natural caregiver, her dear mother had always said, and this was a generous view.

  Skill or no, it was common sense to protect one’s face from the bright sun . . . unless sun was just what he needed after having been stashed in the dark, airless hull of a ship for God knew how long.

  This same common sense had, for better or worse, caused Sabine to dismiss the doctors who hurried to the ship’s morgue when she discovered his familiar tattoo and familiar face.

  But we must examine him, the doctors had implored her. He should not be moved. He could be contagious.

  This last exaltation had been the only remark to give her pause. She absolutely did not want to contract whatever condition rendered him so very nearly dead that he passed for a corpse.

  But Sabine was proud to a fault, and she had already challenged their competency and humanity. She could hardly back down.

  She’d arrived in Greenwich in a Hansom cab, but it wasn’t feasible to depart in the same way, stuffing her husband’s limp body beside her on the cramped seat. Luckily, the hospital provided wagon service for discharged patients who were too sick (or too dead) to ride or walk away. Sabine agreed to hire the wagon, and Jon Stoker’s unconscious form had been loaded into the straw-lined bed of the vehicle by a shaken and repentant staff.

  And now here she was, riding beside the very same unconscious form in the wagon, going to the only place she knew to take him, which was her own apartment in Belgravia,
a suite of rooms she had taken with her two friends when she left her uncle and moved to London.

  She had been a new bride then—a new bride who had spent all of one afternoon with her new husband.

  By her request, Stoker had not even come inside the Belgravia house; how ironic that he would go there now.

  God help me, she thought. Please let him remain unconscious until his friends come for him.

  His friends. She was already building a plan for the next step in his care, which absolutely could not include convalescence in the care of Sabine herself. She’d meant what she said when she’d disavowed all men in her life, including men who were nearly dead. She’d been absolute—how could she not, after what her uncle had put her through—and the choice had served her well these past four years. Stoker’s closest friends were his business partners, and they would simply have to come for him. One resided in Yorkshire and the other in County Durham. She would write to them at once. There was also a middle-aged London couple from his past, the closest thing he knew as “family.” Sabine knew very little about Jon Stoker’s personal affairs, but she had deduced over the years that he preferred not to saddle this charitable couple with fresh burdens.

  She would write his partners first, she thought. One of them would retrieve him, seek out the care he required, learn how he’d ended up in such dire straits, and . . . set him back on the proper course. In the meantime, surely her spotty and reluctant care was better than slowly dying (the rest of the way) in the hull of a ship.

  “Water?”

  Sabine’s head snapped up and the dog leapt from her lap, teeth bared. She leaned forward to examine the ashen face of the not-dead Jon Stoker, her breath held.

  “Water?”

  Sabine sat up. She had not misheard. Not only was he not dead, he was also making requests.

  She narrowed her eyes, thinking of the doctors proclaiming that he might never reclaim consciousness or even survive the ride to her home. She would write a letter. No, she would write an editorial for the papers—

  “Water?” Jon Stoker rasped again and then mumbled what sounded like French profanity.

  Sabine glanced around the spare wagon. She looked to the vehicles to her left and right. She clasped both hands on the arms of the wagon seat, the posture of someone about to do something. Water, water, how am I meant to produce water?

  “I beg your pardon,” she called to the driver. “Do you happen to have a flask of water? Or perhaps these barrels of yours contain drinking water?”

  The driver shook his head. “No water here, missus. Barrels have water, but I wouldn’t drink it.” He laughed, amused by how unfit the water must be.

  Sabine nodded and looked again at Jon Stoker. His eyes were closed, dark lashes forming fringed half-moons against his stark cheekbones.

  Was it strange that she’d known him from the moment she paused at the door of the Dreadnought’s morgue and cautiously peered inside?

  She’d seen his tattoo first, winding its way up his biceps in the light of the steward’s candle. She’d remembered it from their brief wedding. She’d not seen all of it, of course, but its terrible, sharp-toothed head could be just seen beneath the cuff of his sleeve. She’d asked him about it, one of myriad questions meant to discern his character as quickly and soundly as possible.

  She had not thought of it again until the distinctive, fire-eyed sea serpent stopped her where she stood this very afternoon. She’d marched into the terribly dark, terribly fetid room, her vision tunneling to the ink on his wrist.

  The steward she’d met outside—so far, a willing guide—had called her back in the high-pitched voice of disbelief. At her heels Bridget had barked and barked and barked, but Sabine had barely heard.

  She’d crossed to a limp arm and extended hand, his palm open like a man waiting for a coin. The closer she had gotten, the more certain she had been. Her heart raced but she swam through fear and dread and stooped to see his face. She’d let out the breath she’d been holding and gulped in air; within moments the gulps had turned to sobs.

  She had cried, she told herself, because that was what one did when one encountered death. She cried because the Dreadnought hospital ship was a terrible place, because he had been alone, because even his closest friends must not have known. She had cried because crying was easier than actually pausing to consider what it would mean if this person was dead. Or nearly dead, as it were.

  And then, unbelievably, amid the shock and tears, the dead man whose face and serpent she had known, rolled onto his side and retched.

  And swore.

  And endeavored to sit up.

  After a suspended moment of fraught silence, Sabine’s sobs had turned to screams.

  Even now, hours later, her voice was hoarse from the sobbing and screaming and rebuking of doctors.

  Now she looked again at Stoker’s face, wondering if she’d imagined that he’d called out at all.

  “Water,” he rasped again, causing her to jump. She cleared her throat and bent over him. Bridget growled, uncertain of the unconscious man, and Sabine wrapped her gloved hand around the dog’s bony snout.

  “Stoker?” she said lowly, with due practicality. “We haven’t any water at the moment, but there will be refreshment when we’ve reached Belgravia.”

  She paused and added helpfully, “Which is where we are going.”

  After a moment she said, “Can you manage?”

  Sabine did not expect him to respond—please do not respond, she prayed—but she waited, watching him for signs of consent. It seemed only polite.

  To her alarm, he opened one brilliantly green eye, blinked it, and stared up at her. Sabine reared back and Bridget lunged with a yip.

  “Bridget, please,” Sabine warned softly, staying the dog with her hand.

  “Wh—?” asked the not-dead Jon Stoker, one eye blinking in the bright sun.

  Sabine puzzled over this. Did he mean . . . What? Or, Where? Who? Why?

  It could be any of these. And she had so few answers. She elected to stick to what she knew.

  “It’s me, Sabine Noble. Er, Sabine Stoker. I’ve discovered you in a very bad way, I’m afraid. But not to worry. I’m taking you to my home and will soon hand you over to someone proficient in . . . in care.”

  Sabine winced at her own words. It sounded like the same treatment one might give a baby bird, fallen from its nest. She looked at him. He was nearly dead, but he was no baby bird.

  With no warning, he moved. A protest? Agreement? Relief? It was impossible to say. He affected an agonized expression and seemed to coil his strength and heave upright. That is, he endeavored to heave. Instead, he shuddered, seized, and then collapsed, making a spine-clunking collision with the bottom of the wagon. He closed his eye again.

  Sabine let out a breath and studied his large body carefully, from the toes of his giant feet, bare as they had been in the morgue; up his long legs, covered only by a loose white tunic; over his faintly rising chest, his broad shoulders, to his bearded face. He did not move again. Thank God.

  Bridget barked and Sabine scratched the dog idly behind the ears. “Only because he’s in such a very bad way, Bridge,” she vowed.

  She thought about this and added, “What harm could there be?”

  Another pause. She said, “He cannot even lift his head.”

  She had not thought of his weakened condition as a failsafe, not in as many words, but it was true. She would never have accepted a whole and animate male person into her life and into her home. She would not have accepted a male person who was conscious. Even her husband.

  She leaned back and checked the traffic on the bridge for progress.

  “Just for a day or two, until I can find someone else to take him,” she promised the dog. “The partners in his business are very fond of him. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Chapter Three

  Jonathon Gentry Stoker was not in hell; he was in a woman’s bedroom.

  I’m in a woman’s bedroom,
he thought, the sentence coming to him fully formed, no gaps or blackouts, no confusion, when he . . .

  What had he done?

  Come to?

  Resurrected?

  Resuscitated?

  It was as if he had awakened, but he had no memory of going to sleep. His only memory, as disjointed and tortured as it was, had been of being dead. And in hell. Racked with chills and burning with fever and tortured. He remembered suffocation, muteness, and pain.

  So much pain.

  Stoker took a deep breath and focused his new lucidity on his left side, which had been the distinct source of the most terrible of the pain. Carefully, he endeavored to prop himself up.

  The jolt of pain was so immediate and intense, his vision swam and nausea pitched his gut. He collapsed against the pillow, sweat beading his brow.

  For five minutes he forced himself to breathe slowly in and out, in and out, willing the revolt to subside.

  When his vision cleared at last, when his heart slowed (he would table the notion of sitting up for the moment), Stoker looked around the room.

  First, the door. Am I captive or guest?

  The door to this room stood open. Limp cotton garments hung from a hook—not his clothes, but someone’s.

  He raised his right hand and examined the sleeve of what appeared to be a white nightshirt. He moved his right leg and felt bare skin against a crisp sheet.

  He had the impulse to tear off the covers and examine everything about the alien clothes and his damaged body, but the memory of the pain was too great. He remained supine, sheet bracing him tightly around the chest like a bandage, and breathed in and out, in and out.

  He turned his head and scanned the other side of the room. The walls were bright; the furniture was spare. A cluttered sort of casualness pervaded the space. Not unclean, simply . . . strewn. Bandages and paperwork were heaped in a scramble on a desk. Linens drooped in an uneven stack on a chair. A vase beside the bed held a profusion of flowers ranging from thriving to decomposed. Books were stacked in crooked towers across the floor. Morning sun poured through an open window, the breeze fluttering an apricot-colored curtain that sent a pile of newsprint skating across the floor.