Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  She set her gun down, perfectly useless now. She sat up, making no noise about it, and scrunched herself into the corner of the stairs, knife resting across her knees. She let her breath seep out.

  A thin scream came out of the dark. Then silence fell with a great finality.

  Then some running footsteps. A minute later MacDonald yelled, “Sévie, where are you?” He spoke lower. “Get inside. Get a lantern.” That was to somebody else.

  She called, “I’m here.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Then come to me.”

  All the shared experience of fighting and battle were in those shouted words, and it wasn’t good news. MacDonald wouldn’t call her out of hiding unless he needed help. Someone was hurt so badly that getting her to his side was more important than keeping Séverine de Cabrillac safe.

  She staggered toward the sound of MacDonald’s voice, shaking with reaction. Almost tripped over a body sprawled in her way. He didn’t react when she kicked into him, so he was probably dead. Bluebell and the wagon had stopped there, next to the corpse. Horses do not willingly step on dead people. Just one of many curious facts she’d learned in Spain.

  A swinging light arrived—Peter with a lantern—and she could see MacDonald kneeling in the middle of the street. His hands were pressed down against a man’s arm.

  “He’s bleeding,” MacDonald said, unnecessarily, when she got close.

  Raoul sat on the ground, hunched into himself, red with blood, cursing softly in French.

  Thirty-eight

  SHE dropped her knife and fell to her knees beside Raoul.

  Too much blood. She felt as if she’d been punched in the belly. His coat was soaked in it, shockingly red. How was he sitting up? How was he even alive?

  Her second thought was, He doesn’t act like a man who’s dying.

  Peter shifted the lantern so she could see better. Raoul had been hit at least twice. One hit somewhere on his upper chest. One hit in his left arm. Blood covered his sleeve and ran down to his shirt cuff. MacDonald had his hand pressed on that wound, tight around the arm, and red seeped between his fingers.

  Raoul said, “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine. You aren’t.” The wound to his chest had to be a damnably serious one. The whole front of his coat was shiny with blood from his shoulder down his vest. She angled around to his back, waving Peter to bring the lantern there. “Where were you hit?”

  “Just the arm. The rest of the blood is—”

  “I can’t see. Can’t find it. I need—”

  “Handkerchief,” MacDonald said. “Left pocket.”

  She found it. Pressed it down hard. “I’ll cut through his coat.”

  Before she groped for her own knife, Peter handed down a long, businesslike one, hilt first, across her shoulder. “I found it on the street over there.”

  Peter was turning out to be useful. “Good work.”

  A fine knife. Sharp. “We’ll take the sleeve off. Ready.” MacDonald nodded. She pinched up the wool of the coat and sawed through. She worked as fast as she could and MacDonald kept hold as well as he could. Fresh blood began to drip from Raoul’s shirt cuff.

  Raoul held still, panting. It was loud when everything else had gotten deathly quiet.

  She cut the coat away raggedly. Tore the shirt from the bullet hole outward. Worked the cloth of the coat and shirtsleeve off him. Not hurting him more than she had to. Laid the handkerchief flat on the wound—on two wounds side by side—and pressed it down. Held it with all her strength.

  “Two holes, close together,” she said. “The bullet’s in and out. It didn’t get near the bone.” Or the vein and artery next to the bone. Six inches to the right and it would have gone into his lung. Ten inches, and it would have hit his heart. “This is what they call a lucky hit. Where’s the other one?”

  She pushed her free hand under his blood-soaked coat, trying to find where all that blood had come from. They weren’t going to be lucky with this other hit.

  “It’s just the arm.” Raoul spoke calmly for someone who’d been shot. “One arm. Nowhere else.”

  “You’re hit in the chest. Or the shoulder. Somewhere.”

  “If there were other holes in me, I’d notice.”

  “Men don’t always. In battle.” Her voice came out thin and breathless. She felt as if something squeezed her chest. “There’s too much blood, Raoul.”

  “Not mine.” He touched her right hand, where she held so grimly to his arm. “Sévie, I’m not dead.”

  “I have to see. I need to get your coat off.”

  “Undress me later.” Impossibly, maddeningly, Raoul seemed to be laughing at her. “I hurt. I’ve made some serious mistakes. And there may be more of those men. You have to get yourself off the street.”

  “I should—”

  “We will explore the many shoulds of your life at some time. But later. I have to climb the stairs while I can still walk, and you need to get out of the line of fire. Next time they won’t miss.”

  Right. He was right. She had to get him and everybody else to safety. The warehouse guard had come at a run, holding another lantern that revealed a number of other bodies on the street, all very bloody. She hadn’t seen this many deaths in one place since the Spanish battlefields.

  “We have company.” MacDonald jerked his chin at something behind her.

  She turned away from Raoul to see a pair of half-grown children approach. Lazarus’s street rats. They avoided the dead with the ease of long practice. A third child flitted from one corpse to another, going through their pockets.

  “They’re not ours,” the oldest child said when she got close. It was a rather pretty girl, about ten. “Scum off a ship at port, killin’ without permission. Lazarus’ll thank you for dealing with them. Saves ’im the bother.”

  “Our pleasure,” Raoul said softly. “Don’t steal anything on that wagon.”

  The street rats exchanged glances. “Wouldn’t touch noffink o’ yours, sir.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Raoul said.

  Since she had several members of the criminal classes at hand, she might as well put them to use. She said, “Take the horse and wagon into the loading yard. Guard them. I’ll pay three and six.”

  “To each of us.” The girl didn’t even blink.

  Neither did she. “Of course. Tell your friend over there to see if any of those corpses are still breathing. Don’t stop them if they are.”

  That got no response except a wide, innocent stare. Neither of them pursued it.

  What did Papa always say? Stick to the possible. “The boy here.” She indicated Peter with a twitch of her head. “I’m sending him off to run errands. Keep him alive till dawn and it’s a pound note.”

  “A guinea.”

  She’d always gotten along just fine with Lazarus and the Brotherhood of Thieves. “Done.”

  She said, “Help me get him up,” talking to MacDonald. To Peter, “Get the surgeon, Luke Gentry. You know where he lives. Run. Then go to Meeks Street and tell them I have a street full of corpses and would they like to be part of this. Answer any questions they have.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She kept a tight hand on the bleeding arm and steadied Raoul while MacDonald pulled him to his feet. He stood, swaying a little, and he didn’t faint. That was a good sign.

  Thirty-nine

  BETWEEN them, she and MacDonald helped Raoul stagger up to her office. A long way to go, but safe at the end.

  He was pale and breathing hard when MacDonald unlocked the door. They lowered him to sit on the sofa. MacDonald walked around, lighting lamps.

  All the way up the stairs she’d kept her hands clamped tight around the wound on Raoul’s left arm, knowing it hurt him and that she had to do it. When he was settled, she stood, still s
topping the blood, and he leaned against her. His jawline and the prow of his nose pressed into her belly, warm through her clothes. Coat, waistcoat, and shirt were sticky with blood, thick with it. His right hand and sleeve were soaked in ugly red but there was no bullet hole she could see.

  MacDonald lit one lamp after another, starting with the one at the end of the sofa and then working his way around the room.

  “I’ll cut the coat off,” she said. “Find that other hit.”

  “There isn’t one,” Raoul said.

  “Right.” MacDonald fetched scissors and clean handkerchiefs from the desk drawer. He came to take her place holding Raoul’s wound. “We’ll get you ready for the surgeon either way.”

  It was easier to untie and unwind the cravat than cut it. She hacked through the collar of his coat, across the shoulders, and down the sleeves. The wool weighed heavy with blood. So much of it. A man leaking this much blood should be dead and Raoul wasn’t. Other men’s blood, then.

  She dropped the coat on the floor. She undid the buttons of his waistcoat and snipped down the silk at the back. MacDonald kept his hand tight around the wound, moving out of her way as she circled Raoul.

  Finally, she scissored through the seams of his shirt and ripped it apart and off of him and revealed Raoul’s upper body. He was a collection of dirt, smears of blood, and scrapes where he’d left skin on the cobbles. No more bullet holes though.

  “Just your arm,” she murmured.

  “Not so wide as a church door nor so deep as a well, but t’will suffice—”

  “Don’t you dare quote Shakespeare at me.”

  “I could swear creatively.”

  “Then swear. We’ll need bandages. Peter—” She remembered Peter wasn’t there. “MacDonald . . .”

  “I’ll get ’em. Let’s put him down flat,” MacDonald said.

  “Not needed,” Raoul sat with his eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “And I can keep my own blood inside. It’s not bleeding much.”

  “I’ll do this.” Carefully, she sat beside him and moved MacDonald’s hands away and took over the wound. Raoul’s skin was cold to the touch.

  He opened his eyes a slit. “Since you insist.”

  MacDonald took bloody scraps of clothes from the floor and walked out. She called after him, “Bring a blanket. Get one from my bed.”

  MacDonald answered with a shrug. He had eloquent shrugs.

  She found a comfortable position. “Talk to me,” she said to Raoul. If he kept talking she’d know he wasn’t about to convulse and die from not having enough blood.

  “Of course.” He wiped his face with his good arm, streaking blood on his forehead. “It’s a pleasant evening, Miss de Cabrillac. Warm for so early in the year.”

  All those years ago in Spain he’d been bloody and half-naked. He was bloody and half-naked now. Then he’d been dark as a peasant with the Spanish sun. The mule boys—he’d been pretending to be a mule driver—stripped down to swim almost naked in the streams or to wrestle among themselves.

  He was so perfectly made. Lines of lean muscle ran along his back, lithe and easy-moving under his skin. Ribs in ordered ranks. A flat, hard belly. She’d known a man who was a champion fencer who looked like this. Raoul still wasn’t as pale as most Englishmen. Maybe he worked in those vineyards of his. Maybe it was French sun on his skin now.

  “You have scars.” She would have touched them if her hands hadn’t been busy keeping the rest of his blood inside him.

  “A few.” He sounded more than tired. He sounded hollow.

  A collection of scars. Some were hidden by smears of blood. Some were so old they’d become thin white lines, invisible till she looked for them. He healed well. “How many?”

  “Seven or eight.”

  “More than that. This isn’t even your first gunshot wound. There’s one on your back.”

  “Two. I get shot running away, by choice. It’s my preferred method of dealing with men who point guns at me.”

  “Mine too.”

  But most of his scars were knife cuts. Not from bayonet or sabre, but the slices you got from face-to-face knife fights. She’d seen the results of both and she knew the difference.

  Another damned dangerous man. She lacked any least trace of good judgment.

  His lips were wry with pain and laughter. His pupils, wide and black. She could see tiny lamps in them, the lamp on the table and the far one on her desk. And she saw herself in his eyes. She saw no common sense in him at all.

  She’d misplaced her own sanity. Her thoughts had slipped the reins and gone running off. She wanted to find some welcoming spot on him, maybe his jaw, maybe his lips, and set her mouth there and slowly suck at him. Taste him. Eat the texture of him. In the middle of death and madness when she was busy saving his life and he was bleeding, her mind chose to be full of that.

  I will have to deal with this, eventually.

  MacDonald came down the hall, making noise with his boots so she wouldn’t be taken by surprise. He was carrying an assemblage of useful things in his hands and under his arms. “Bandages. Towels. Water. Blankets.” He’d brought two thick, rough blankets that belonged to Peter, instead of her good ones. In the larger sense MacDonald took orders, but he took them exactly as he felt inclined.

  He laid bandages on the table at her elbow, sorted by size, and stood ready.

  She nodded and peeled the handkerchief from Raoul’s arm. MacDonald slapped a good thick pad of linen in its place. Now a length of cloth to hold that in place. They circled the bandage around Raoul’s arm, pulled it tight, and tied the ends, all with the ease of long practice. Blood wasn’t coming through yet. Good.

  Raoul sat through this in silence, his head bowed and his eyes unfocused, taking air in distinct, individual breaths.

  She pushed hair out of her face with the back of her hand, one of the parts of her that didn’t have blood on it yet. “Where the devil is Luke?”

  MacDonald said, “Give him time. The man has to roust himself out of bed and get dressed and get here. And Peter might run into something on the way.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have sent him.”

  “He’s as safe as you are.” MacDonald scouted around the sofa, picking up red cloths from the floor. One of them was his handkerchief. She hoped he hadn’t been fond of it. He said, “I’ll go load some guns and bring ’em in here.”

  “Mine’s outside in the dirt.”

  “No place for a good mechanism. I’ll tell those thieving rats to bring boxes upstairs. The amount you’re paying them, they might as well do some work.”

  She pulled blankets around Raoul’s shoulders and leaned against him. He put his good arm around her. After another minute, she put her cheek on his chest. Her feelings were complicated, but she didn’t need to look at them closely right now.

  MacDonald stayed at the hearth long enough to get a fire going. When he left the room, he closed the door behind him with an emphatic click.

  Forty

  AN invalid was allowed some indulgences, so Raoul held her close. Her hair, rippling and brown, was pulled tight away from her face into fancy braids and taken into a knot at the nape of her neck. It was soft as warm wind under his lips.

  He loved her hair, the look and the texture of it. He discovered something new every time he got close. He could smell the herbs she washed it in. Lavender and rosemary. Single strands worked their way out of the knot and lay dark on the white skin of her neck.

  He’d seen her hair bound in a loose braid, stray wisps floating like a night cloud around her face when he’d climbed to her window at the inn.

  Against his naked chest she said, “You killed them, didn’t you? The rest of the men lying dead out there.”

  Not the sort of love words a man wished for, but totally characteristic of Séverine. “I was wondering when you’d see that.”
<
br />   “The street rat called you ‘sir.’ They don’t use that word much. MacDonald brought you two blankets when I only told him to get one. That’s him being respectful. They guessed about that or they saw you do it.”

  She’d figured it out. All this going on around her and she still relentlessly unpicked mysteries. Curious, clear-eyed Séverine, with a mind like the sharp edge of glass.

  “And you were covered with blood.” She leaned soft against him. “It’s five or six bodies or so.”

  “Six.” Half a boatload for Charon.

  “I got one, I think. Tried to. I don’t know whether I killed him or not.”

  “He wasn’t breathing when I went by.”

  “The rest are yours,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.” An hour ago they’d been men. Not good men, but maybe ordinary men in their way. Now they were nothing at all. He should feel something. Remorse? Regret? He felt none of that. They could have killed her. With the arm that was still working, he brought her a little closer to him. He’d killed to keep her warm, alive, and breathing. He had no regrets whatsoever. “My small gift for you.”

  “Thoughtful of you.”

  “I never know what to give a very rich woman. I hope this worked well.”

  “A dozen would be too showy. One or two, paltry. Five is the exactly correct number.”

  She used light words that didn’t say what she was thinking. He was doing the same. They leaned on each other and everything important between them went unsaid. If things had gone even a little differently, another body would be a dark mound in the street, empty of Séverine. All she was—the wiry tension and determination, the quick, quick explosions of action, the little gestures, graceful as birds flying—would be gone.

  “It’s not something I can thank you for easily,” she said. “The workshop where they make words doesn’t seem to have made the right ones for that.”

  She stretched with a wriggling movement he felt in his whole body. Sensual, lovely Séverine. She was everything pleasurable and painful, both at once. Temptation beyond measure that he couldn’t act on. Madness trapped in a bottle of impossibility.