by Anna Elliott
“James—hurry. We have to get away from here.”
Susanna pulled on him again, and this time he followed without a word, keeping to the darkest part of the shadows as Susanna tugged him further along Broadmead Lane, away from the warehouse.
James moved quickly, his jaw set—but Susanna saw that he was limping, and one hand was clasped to his side, where Philippe’s first blow had landed. He would never be able to outrun Philippe and his men if they were pursued. And they would be pursued; she could not let herself hope that the barred door would contain the Frenchmen for long.
Susanna looked round desperately for somewhere they might hide. And then she saw it. An iron ladder, built onto the side of the brickwork building beside them, leading the way up the roof above. She pointed.
“James—look there. Can you climb it, do you think?”
James did not waste breath in a reply. He was hunched over with pain, but he nodded briefly.
“Let’s go, then.”
The ladder ended several feet off the ground, but by standing on a broken crate, Susanna was able to take hold of the first rung and scramble her way up towards the top. Behind her, she could hear the sounds of James’s breathing, harsh and labored, as he followed. Once he stopped, and when she looked round, his face was white in the moonlight and drenched in sweat. But he set his jaw and motioned for her to go on.
At last Susanna reached the low brick parapet and swung herself over—then turned to see James swaying, white faced, on the final rung. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and she saw him shake his head as though dizzy, his fingers starting to relax their hold on the ladder.
“James!” Susanna sprang to catch hold of his shoulders, pulling him towards her, trying to drag him up and across the parapet to safety. Good lord, he was heavy. Susanna felt the muscles of her shoulders burning as she hauled on his weight. But luckily her touch seemed to rouse him; he managed to grasp the parapet with his own hands and, with Susanna’s help, to drag himself over.
They crashed together onto the flat rooftop, and Susanna felt the warm, sticky wetness at James’s side as he landed on top of her. The cut Philippe had given him was still bleeding freely.
“Sorry.” James rolled off her and lay, panting for breath, one arm flung up over his eyes.
“James—” Susanna scrambled upright to kneel beside him, slipping her arm about his shoulders. “James, how badly are you hurt?”
She thought at first he had lapsed into unconsciousness. But then he sat up with a jolt and shook his head, motioning her to silence. An instant later, Susanna heard it, too: from the street below them came angry shouts in French and the sounds of running feet. Philippe and his men must indeed have broken their way out of the warehouse back room. And now they had spilled out onto the street and were searching for James.
“Spread out!” Susanna heard one of them call. “He cannot have gone far.”
Susanna felt as though she and James crouched there on the rooftop an eternity. Her pulse was beating to the tips of her fingers and the saw of her breath felt painful in her chest. But finally, finally, the shouts of Philippe’s men grew more distant. The searchers were moving away from them.
“James?” Susanna stirred—and realized as she moved for the first time that her muscles were cramped with having remained unmoving all the time the search was going on below. “James, are you all right?”
James was slumped back against the parapet, his eyes closed. But at Susanna’s words he straightened with a suppressed grunt of pain. The moonlight was bright overhead; Susanna could see the muscle twitching in his cheek. “Susanna, what in the name of all that is holy are you doing here? You promised me—”
“I promised you that I would go back to Admiral Tremain’s house. I did not promise you that I would not go back out again.”
“You—” James opened his mouth, then closed it again. Then he turned his head away, his breath going out in a strangled sound that was almost a laugh. When he turned back to her, his eyes had darkened and his voice was low and unsteady. “God, I love you.”
He framed her face with his hands and kissed her. Though when Susanna returned the embrace she felt him flinch, and instantly drew back. “James, the knife wound! We have to get you to a surgeon—”
James’s face had tightened with pain, but he shook his head. “No. No surgeons. I can’t take the risk of explaining to anyone who I am and how I came by the injury.”
Susanna started to protest, but James said, “No. It’s all right. I don’t think the cut is very deep.” He pulled himself upright, grimacing, but went on, “Just . . . give me something to make a pad with and we can be away from here.”
Without speaking, Susanna slid her cloak from her shoulders and pulled at the lining, which gave way with a rending tear. “Here, let me.” She lifted James’s coat and pressed the wad of cloth against his side. Philippe’s knife seemed to have glanced off his ribs and skidded downwards across his chest; James’s shirt was torn open and saturated with blood, though in the moonlight it was difficult to tell just how bad the injury was.
James sucked in his breath, but nodded. “All right.” He placed his own hands over the padded wound. “Now let’s get away from here before Philippe and the others return—and before it occurs to them to start checking rooftops.
#
Somehow—Susanna thought it was more a miracle than anything else—James managed to climb down off the roof. She offered to go before him, but he shook his head. “So that I can take you down with me if I slip and fall? No. I’ll go first, you come after.”
He did slip twice—Susanna heard the sound of his boots skidding on the iron rungs and her heart froze—but he made it the whole way down without falling, and at last dropped the last several feet to the ground. Susanna followed, landing beside him on the pavement.
It was darker here than it had been on the roof, but even still Susanna could see that James’s color was bad, his breathing harsh and ragged.
“Lean on me.” She moved to James’s side, drawing his arm over her shoulder.
James tensed, starting to object as she moved towards the public house at the end of the street. But Susanna kept moving, and said, “It’s all right. If anyone sees us, they will only think you drunk. It would help if you could manage a bawdy song or two?”
James grinned at that. But it took all his breath to manage their slow walk to the corner of Broadmead Lane, and when at last they reached the light and raucous music and laughter that spilled from the pub, James was gray-faced, his muscles shaking.
“Wait here.” Susanna helped him to sit down on an empty beer barrel that stood to the right of the pub’s entrance. And it was, she thought, a mark of how bad James felt that he did not object but only slumped down, breathing hard. “I will go and try to find us a cab.”
She had no idea if she would succeed—cabs seemed to be not at all common in this part of the city. But she was lucky; she had barely gone half a block before she happened on a cab driver leaning on his carriage and smoking a pipe.
The man looked her up and down with brief, impersonal scrutiny. But he nodded when Susanna explained that her ‘man’ was back at the public house, too drunk to walk home.
Susanna had drawn her cloak about her shoulders once again, hiding the bloodstains she knew spotted the front of her gown. And she blessed the darkness of the street for keeping the cab driver from noticing that her gloves were stained, as well.
The driver had also apparently conveyed his share of drunks home from the pub; he drew the cab up abreast of the barrel where James sat, and barely glanced at either James or Susanna as Susanna helped James into the carriage.
“Where to?” The driver grunted.
Susanna looked at James. “Is it safe to go back to your lodgings, do you think?” she asked in an undertone.
“I should think so.” James had tipped his head back and closed his eyes, but his voi
ce sounded steadier as he said, “I’m going to be even more irritated with Philippe if he forces me to find new lodgings yet again.”
He gave the driver an address that meant nothing to Susanna, but the cab man seemed to know where it was. He nodded and clucked to his horses, urging them into motion, and the cab rolled off.
Susanna heard James suck in his breath every time the carriage hit a bump or rut in the road. But at least the ride was a short one. The carriage drew up in a narrow lane outside a tenement house whose outline leaned so much it looked as though a strong gust of wind would knock it over.
But at least no one appeared to notice their arrival. Even so late at night the street was crowded with children playing ball in the street, dock laborers either coming home or going out to their jobs, women sitting in groups and gossiping on front steps. Susanna had lost all sense of direction, but she thought they must be near the river; the night breeze had the muddy, fishy scent of the Thames.
James paid the driver, the driver tipped his hat in thanks, and the cab rolled off. Then James took a key out of his pocket and, still leaning heavily on Susanna, climbed slowly up the steps of the tenement house.
When they reached the door of James’s room, his hands were unsteady enough that it took him three tries to get the key into the lock. Susanna only watched, though, without offering to help. He had already taken far more aid tonight than she would have thought him capable of accepting.
Once inside, James directed Susanna to a striker, tinder and an oil lamp that stood on the room’s only table. She got the lamp lighted, and the room sprang into illumination around them: a cramped, tiny space, barely big enough to hold the bed that covered most of the floor. The bed sagged and was covered with a faded blanket, the paper on the walls was stained and peeling, and the air smelled of mildew and boiled cabbage.
“Not . . . exactly . . . Russell Square.” James spoke between breaths as he eased himself down onto the bed. “But with any luck, we should be safe here.”
Susanna knelt beside him. She helped him out of his coat, and for the first time got a good look at the wound, visible between the torn flaps of his shirt.
Susanna sucked in her breath. “James, this ought to be stitched.”
Mercifully, the knife cut was not deep so far as Susanna could see—but it was long and jagged, wrapping from his ribs and down around to his stomach. James opened his eyes and squinted down at the injury. “I do not—”
Susanna interrupted. “I know you said no surgeon. But I still think it ought to be stitched.” She swallowed. “I can do it for you.”
James had a makeshift surgeon’s kit amongst his things—needles and thread, lint and bandages. Sorting quickly through the supplies, Susanna reflected that this was not be the first—and would likely not be the last—wound that he was forced to tend to without a surgeon’s aid. He even had a small vial of syrup of poppy flowers, though he refused to take anything for the pain.
“No. If anyone finds us here, I cannot be drugged and insensible. There should be a bottle of brandy . . . under the pillow.” James still spoke with labored effort. “Give me some of that, and I will be fine.”
Sewing up a knife wound was, in fact, nothing at all like sewing a rent in a gown. Susanna was sickeningly conscious all the time she worked of the pain she must be causing James. At his insistence, after he had taken a swig of the brandy, Susanna also used it to douse the wound—which wrung a muffled expletive from his lips. But that was the only sound he made. All the time she was stitching the cut, he sat absolutely still, the only sign of pain the whiteness of his knuckles as he steadied himself on the bedpost.
When at last Susanna knotted the final length of thread, her skin felt sticky with sweat underneath her gown, and her hands were shaking. She fixed a bandage over the wound, let out the breath that she felt as though she had been holding seen she had begun—and then looked up to find James watching her, an odd look on his face.
“James? What is it? What are you thinking of?”
“What?” James shook his head and seemed to come back to himself. “I was just thinking of the night we first met. You patched me up then, as well. Do you remember?”
“That was a bullet wound,” Susanna said automatically. “Not a knife cut.”
James’s lips quirked up at the corners. “Obviously an important distinction.”
He was still looking at her, though, with the same odd intensity to his dark gaze. Susanna straightened, pushing a loosened lock of hair back from her forehead. “James?”
James shook his head again. “I just . . . I just keep expecting this . . . all of this”—he sketched a gesture that encompassed himself, the bloodied rags on the floor, and the squalid little room—“to be too much. Too much to ask you to accept. I keep thinking that any sane woman would have run screaming from me by now.”
Susanna raised her brows. “You consider me insane?”
James exhaled a half laugh. “Perhaps that did not come out quite as I intended. What I meant to say—” James rubbed a hand across his face. His jaw was stubbled by a half-day’s growth of beard, and he looked utterly exhausted, as though he continued to hold himself upright and to speak through sheer force of will. But his fingers moved to brush her cheek, sliding along her jaw to tangle in her loosened hair. “What I meant to say was that . . . that I am glad you were there tonight.”
Which was, Susanna thought, very nearly another miracle, if James could admit to having been actually glad of her aid. Would James have lived though this night had she not been there?
He might have; he was resourceful. And strong. And well able to take care of himself. He could likely—given time and necessity—have stitched his own wound.
Still, Susanna leaned forward, touching her mouth to his. The kiss tasted of the brandy James had drunk, and the whole room now smelled of blood as well as the cabbage and mildew. But Susanna still wrapped her arms around him—carefully, mindful of the newly bandaged wound—and whispered against his lips, “I am glad, too.”
Chapter 22
The sun had fully risen by the time Susanna at last returned to Admiral Tremain’s house; she heard a nearby church clock chime eight in the morning as she climbed from the cab that had driven her across the city from the East End.
She had left James still weakened and slightly groggy with pain—but better than he had been last night. He had slept several hours while she was with him the night before. Susanna had slept, too, lying down beside him on the narrow, sagging bed. James had not known she was there; he had been already deeply asleep when she at last succumbed to her own exhaustion and lay down. But in his sleep, he had rolled towards her, gathering her against him. Susanna had fallen asleep with his arm about her waist and her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder, her last conscious thought that when she next fell asleep in James’s arms, she would be his wife.
She had hated to leave him. Every part of her had wanted to stay there with James, to make sure that he ate and drank today and that he did not take a fever from the knife wound. But she could not leave Aunt Ruth wondering where she had vanished to. And even apart from that, James needed her to return to the Admiral’s house.
Just before she left him, he had sat up, wincing as the movement stretched his stitches, and said, “Susanna, do you think you could get me into Admiral Tremain’s house?”
“Of course, but why? Surely you can call on the Admiral yourself any time you like?”
James shook his head. “I can’t risk it. There’s always the chance that Philippe may find a way to warn the traitor—or at the very least inform Major Haliday—that M. de Castres is not to be trusted.” He shifted positions, grimacing again. “I’m afraid London has seen the last of Jacques de Castres. And besides, I meant that I’d like to get inside the Admiral’s private offices and have a look around.”
Susanna looked up quickly. “You think
the traitor may be the Admiral himself?”
James lifted one shoulder. “It is a possibility we must explore. But even if he is not the traitor, there may be some other proof—something that could point us in the direction of the guilty party.” He looked up at her, abruptly sober. “I know I am asking you to take a risk, but can you let me into the house tonight? Sometime after the servants and the rest of the household are all in bed?”
Looking down at him, his face still grayish pale in the early-morning light, his eyes smudged with fatigue, Susanna thought that James did not look fit for anything but staying in bed. She closed her mouth tightly before she could say it, though. She only nodded and said, “There is no risk. I can let you in at about midnight? The Admiral keeps early hours. The whole household should be long since abed by then. Meet me at the windows in the Admiral’s library.”
Only at the last, as she bent to kiss James goodbye, had Susanna felt worry catch in her throat. She had not been able to stop herself from saying, “James? Will you stay here today? Not go out?”
James looked up at her. “Worried?”
Susanna made herself smile. “Only that you will tear out your stitches if you attempt any exertions. I went to a great deal of trouble putting them in.”
James grinned. But then he had sobered and taken her hand, tangling his fingers with hers. “I think I have already cost you worry enough this night. I give you my word that barring Philippe or one of his men knocking on this door, I will not go out—nor attempt any other dangers today.”
And now Susanna was back at the Admiral’s house. With all the long hours of an entire day to be put in before she could see James again. Before she could be certain that Philippe’s gang had not somehow discovered the address of James’s boarding house.
They had, after all, given the cab driver the address the night before. If Philippe’s men found the cab driver, questioned him about the fare he had taken from the public house in Broadmead Lane—
