Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

  “Tell me where they came from.” His face was tense; his eyes brilliant.

  Had he searched the room? But how would he know she had hidden the pouch in her dress? Someone knew, of course, in the Tromblys’ house. Whoever undressed her when she was first carried into the house unconscious … Whoever took the gown into the laundry room … Stupid. Stupid of her to count herself lucky the articles were all there and think nothing more would come of it. That it wouldn’t be mentioned. Who had told him? Mrs. Hexam. Lizzie.

  “Are they under your skirts now?” His gaze slid down from her face. He stepped closer to her. Everyone else was arrayed around the piano, watching Mrs. Hatfield torture the keys.

  This was why he had not returned her smile. He thought she was a thief.

  “Tell me,” he whispered. Was there the hint of a plea in his voice? Did he hope she would give him an explanation that he could accept?

  She couldn’t. She tried. They were left to me by my father, Mr. Reed. A simple, poor man, a poet, yet possessed of a few very fine pieces of jewelry and silver. As poets sometimes are. She tried, but no sound came out. Why would he believe her? She could produce no proof. If he began to look into the Reeds of Somerset and found nothing that matched her stories, what then? If he began to investigate her identity …

  She shook her head mutely.

  “Miss Reed,” he said. Cold. Detached. “Do you know the punishments for theft?”

  She took a shuddering breath and met his eyes. She said nothing. The room fell silent. Mrs. Hatfield had finished the first movement.

  She heard Lady Berners’s acid voice. “Do stop there, Mrs. Hatfield. I can’t imagine the other movements add a thing.”

  And Mr. Huntington. “Bravo! Miss Tenby, won’t you oblige us? Perhaps something lighter? A Celtic air?”

  Blackwood stepped back from her. His chest heaved as he drew a deep breath. He spoke rapidly, as though he needed to get the words out before he could reconsider.

  “I will pay a visit to Trombly Place tomorrow afternoon. If you are no longer in residence at that time, I will consider the problem taken care of by itself. If you are there when I arrive”—he lifted his hands, considering them before they folded into fists—“then you will leave with me,” he finished. “And I will drag you straight to Newgate.”

  She had moved beyond fear. She gave a short nod. Tomorrow then. She would be back out in the storm. Her gaze wandered across the room to Mrs. Trombly. She would leave without saying goodbye. It would be easier that way.

  “You have nothing to say?” Again, that faint note. So faint she could almost believe she had imagined it. But she knew she hadn’t. He wanted to believe something better of her than this. How strange that she felt she could understand him, the complex of emotions that raged within him. Maybe he would understand her too.

  My name is not Miss Reed. I am not a thief. I am …

  “Nothing, Miss Reed?” The note was gone. His voice was like black glass. Blank. Smooth. Hard. His lids half hooded his eyes. He was dispassionate. Absolutely unmoved. Unconcerned.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “I won’t be there, my lord,” she said. “You won’t see me again.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The London night matched Isidore’s mood. The city looked like lead; the rain ran down like ink. Sleep would be impossible.

  “Covent Garden,” he told the coachman. He wanted to watch a fight, or pick one. The coach rolled east, away from the splendor of Mayfair. Soon the wheels rattled on broken pavements and cobbles. The vibrations set his teeth on edge. He stared out the window at the heaps of bricks that passed for buildings, at the hovels, booths, and stalls. He caught a whiff of the air as the coach slowed. Pestilential stench.

  Disease billowed from these winding alleys. Maybe it was in the water. Maybe it was in the foul vapors that rose off the river, or in the saliva of the rats that scurried in mobs over the refuse. Most likely, it was in the city itself. The opulence of Park Lane produced the squalor of Seven Dials. The only thing to do was raze the metropolis, the whole thing, not only the flash houses but Buckingham Palace, and start again.

  He pressed his forehead to the glass and focused his eyes on the beaded water glowing sickly yellow with the light from the coachman’s lamp. Bennington had accused him of radicalism. He wasn’t a radical. His mind went to extremes so he could reject taking action and resign himself to doing nothing. He was a fatalist.

  Penn, on the other hand, acted with the courage of his conviction. He made a difference, a small difference, every day. He was a good man. He’d never been a member of their set. His older brothers were—both of them notorious rakes—but David wouldn’t carouse. Too serious. Isidore regretted that he hadn’t made the effort, years ago, to get to know him. He’d been too busy drinking and climbing in and out of windows. Back then he was far more interested in the Mrs. Hatfields of the world than he was in skinny, bookish medical students. He had saved Penn from a beating at Eton. He recalled grabbing the boy’s two assailants and knocking their heads together. Bloody mess that had been. He wondered if Penn remembered it.

  How different they’d turned out. Penn helped people. Saved people. Isidore only hurt people. Even when he meant to do the right thing, someone ended up bleeding.

  And now he was driving into the slums, hoping to find a strongman he could punch until his knuckles split. That was the one difference between him and his father. He didn’t target the weak. But he was filled with the same violence, the same hatred, that he had seen so often glittering in his father’s ice-blue eyes. Nights like this he couldn’t deny it.

  The coffeehouse he remembered, across from St. Paul’s, always open until the wee hours of the morning and filled with pugilists pounding one another in mills both sanctioned and spontaneous, was abandoned. By men. Not rats. He could hear them squeaking as he stood outside the moldering hulk, looked up at the chimneys from which no smoke rose, black against the leaden sky. He climbed back into the coach and rolled away from the open square; the coach turned onto narrow streets, moving further east, or maybe south. It was impossible to get his bearings in that warren of mud and stone, plank and brick.

  After a time, he stopped the coach. He chose a public house with music filtering out into the street. An iron signpost stuck out above the door, but the sign had long since fallen. There was a dead crow by the door, wing outstretched. He stepped over it. Not everyone had.

  The Sign of the Dead Crow, he thought. Perfect.

  Once inside the taproom, the fight went out of him. Such a grimy, greasy, undernourished lot. Men in threadbare coats fastened by pins. The comic vocalist who accompanied the piano was hunched and gray as a gargoyle.

  Isidore ordered a glass of raw gin and sat on a deal bench to drink it. A woman swayed at a nearby table. Drunk. Her cheeks were sunken. Her left eye was bruised and swollen. Who had done this to her? It could have been any or none of these wretches. She saw him looking.

  “Ain’t you a swell.” She winked at him with her good eye. “Two penn’orth of gin.”

  He glanced around for the potboy and saw him sitting by the bar fire with his own pint pot. His apron may have been white once. Isidore signaled, but the potboy, shooting to his feet at the proprietor’s call, went in the other direction, through the red curtains that blocked the passageway to another room. Isidore rose, shouldered his way to the bar, and bought two glasses of gin and a few biscuits from the basket. He put one glass and the plate of biscuits on the table in front of the woman. She laughed at the biscuits.

  “Plenty of sawdust on the floor without paying for it,” she said. “Sit ye down. You ain’t ugly.”

  He sat with her. Gloom weighed heavier and heavier upon him. Luckily, she didn’t want to talk but lapsed into vacancy. The room was warm and smoky. The comic vocalist retired to a table, and a sailor leapt up to begin an Irish melody. He had a rumbling, deep voice and sang the notes true.

  “’Tis never too late for delight, my dear.
And the best of all ways, to lengthen our days, is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear.”

  Isidore finished his gin. The glass had sweated a new ring on the table. The table’s surface showed easily a dozen such rings. Some overlapped. He thought of chains. Chains symbolized bondage. They symbolized forever.

  He set his glass down. The woman snapped to attention.

  “Not a drop,” she observed. “Me neither. And warn’t I a nickey to think you’d buy me another?”

  He bought her another, which she took without thanks. What could he do for the woman other than this? Buy her a drink. Treat her like a human being. She had a story too, a story similar, no doubt, to many others, but her own nonetheless. She was an individual, though her life, with all its particulars—petty cares and great loves, memories, dreams—would go unrecorded, unremembered. Drudge. Whore. He caught her ungloved hand—cold, the skin dry and yellow as parchment—and kissed it goodbye. She laughed again at that. The eye that wasn’t swollen shut was a muddy green.

  His mother’s eyes had never been blackened, swollen like hers. His father was almost surgical in his precision. He aimed to instill the most fear, to inflict the most pain, and to leave the least visible traces. He wasn’t crude, like the man who had marked this woman. The upper classes beat their women below the neck. Or cut or burnt. Or relied on threats and humiliation.

  Sometimes he wondered if the world had in it already every kind of monster. Or would new monsters arise, specializing in brutalities as yet unimaginable?

  Had he thought London should be razed? Make it the whole miserable world of man.

  It was a quarter after twelve. He left the Sign of the Dead Crow feeling darker than he had when he’d entered. He wasn’t ready to return to the coach. He walked through streets so narrow his shoulders almost brushed the bulging bricks on either side. It reminded him of Cairo. But Cairo didn’t smell as strongly of pig shit. Must be sties in the courts that opened here and there, behind the butcher shops and taverns. The rain had stopped. He headed toward the water, the wind coming hard against him, sweeping away the pig and replacing it with a thick, briny smell. Tide was running in.

  Clement had left the party looking as though Miss Reed had stabbed him through the heart. Isidore should have followed him. They could have gone to the club, talked it all out over brandy and cigars. Clement would tell him what Miss Reed had said to him, and he’d tell Clement that she was poison. A liar. A thief. Clement would tell him he’d done what he had to do. Discharged his responsibility, and as mercifully as could be expected. He’d be home by now in front of the fire, sleepy, relieved, instead of wandering by the riverside. But for some reason, Isidore hadn’t been able to let Miss Reed out of his sight. He couldn’t go after Clem when she was still in that parlor, standing in the far corner, slim and strange and silent, those dark eyes so full of pain.

  Earlier in the evening, he’d told himself he needed to look at her, because he was assessing her, coolly evaluating her every gesture, squaring his impressions with Lizzie’s revelation.

  His impressions did not square with the revelation. This irritated him immensely, his inability to see her as the larcenous, nasty baggage Lizzie had described. Maybe that was why he’d needed to keep staring. He wanted to see it, the mercenary strumpet. The filcher who would violate any trust. The woman who spoke of the world’s need for kindness then took advantage of kindness when she found it.

  Without that hideous bonnet, she looked even more unearthly. Her head capped with that shining, silvery blond hair, upswept to reveal the delicate curve of her neck as she stared into the candle flames. He knew how those tresses felt, slippery and soft.

  She didn’t speak at dinner. Made no attempt to dazzle the company or ingratiate herself. She was the opposite of crafty baggage. She was utterly withdrawn. Even absent. She had looked at him once, and smiled. That smile transformed her features, illuminated her pale face, kindled something darkling bright in those enormous black eyes.

  He’d had no choice but to devote his attention then to the tedious Penny Tenby, who was bland as a dinner bun, and whose agenda was almost pitifully clear. She wanted to make a brilliant match. With him, if she could. If not, with someone else. Flattering, to be sure. He couldn’t feel too badly about disappointing her.

  He hadn’t looked in Miss Reed’s direction again until he’d let the table’s reaction to Penn gall him into idiot speeches. She was nodding as though in perfect agreement. He could tell she was in sympathy with Mr. Penn and had little patience with Berners, Tenby, and the rest. That irritated him too. Everything he liked about her chafed. Desiring her was bad enough. Liking her … It was out of the question.

  After dinner, in Tenby’s parlor, he very nearly failed to do it. He’d stalled, reconsidered, and recommitted himself. Daphne and Miss Reed standing close together across the room presented a startling contrast. Daphne, with her auburn hair and red silk gown, was so richly colored, small, rounded, and supple. Miss Reed, in black, so slender and straight, was pale as a moonbeam piercing a dark cloud. Day and night. He preferred Miss Reed’s eerie beauty, which seemed to go through phases like the moon. Sometimes she dimmed, vanished into herself. Sometimes she was wan, glancing. Sometimes she turned to him, full-faced and radiant. He felt that he could watch her forever. That it would be a rare delight to come to understand her cycles, what made her show her face, what made her slip away.

  But he couldn’t just watch. He’d had to steel himself and approach her.

  Afterwards, he expected to feel some release, but he felt worse. He’d joined the circle by the piano and waited there until she and Mrs. Trombly departed.

  The expression in her eyes had nearly unmanned him. Like a wounded deer awaiting the coup de grace. He wished she had tried to defend herself. If she had lied to him, pleaded with him, displayed any kind of cunning … he could hold her in contempt. But she had only looked at him, unwavering, until he felt like the criminal. There had been no hint of accusation in her face. That too would have made it easier. He could have felt the comfort of righteous indignation.

  She was possessed of innate nobility. This charlatan housebreaker.

  He could see the river now. Black and high. Barges moving slowly out on the little waves. The red lights of coal fires winked as they bobbed up and down. Smaller boats were drifting beneath the arches of the Waterloo bridge.

  And he could see a figure walking along the embankment. Not a typical waterside character. A cloaked woman, straight and slender, with a peculiar gait, as though she walked with stiffened limbs, as though she were powered by a mechanism tightly wound. A clockwork walk.

  He had to stop in his tracks. Blink. Convince himself she wasn’t a figment. A conjuration of his inflamed brain. How could it be? But it was. Miss Reed, walking in the dead of night alongside the dreary river. She had stepped out of his very thoughts. He was too stunned by her appearance, at this hour, in this chill and desolate place, to call out. What was she doing, walking so close to the shelving-wall, the river at flood tide, moored boats floating? She risked assault. Robbery. Rape. Murder. His muscles tensed.

  She stopped and faced the water, and the wind blew her cloak around her.

  He remembered the bleakness in her gaze. You won’t see me again.

  A dog barked nearby. She didn’t turn. She stepped up on the wall.

  Christ almighty. She was so small and the river vast and foul, tons and tons of black water surging with the blind power of annihilation. It had swallowed who knew how many miserable souls.

  No, he thought. No. And some more obscure voice from deeper inside him cried out too. Cried, Not again.

  He ran. He threw himself across the uneven ground, threw himself into the teeth of the wind. He splashed through puddles, vaulted rotten wood, reached her in moments. He launched himself onto the wall behind her, barely checking his momentum as he hugged her against his body, grabbed her shoulders, the two of them carried forward even as he jerked them back. They balanc
ed on the river’s edge. Her body went rigid with shock. Then she thrashed her head, threw her elbow into his side, and kicked and screamed, fighting him like a wild thing. He tried to still her, whirl her around so she could see him, know him, the whole time saying her name, but she was beyond hearing. Her feet slipped out from under her on the dank stone, slick with deposits, and she was suddenly clinging to him, pulling him forward.

  “Don’t fight me,” he grunted. “Little fool, don’t fight.” But she twisted again in his arms, crazed, off-balance, pitching her weight, and then they were both of them over the edge, falling down into the black water that closed—frigid, filthy, final—above them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cold. She had never been so cold. She tried to struggle, but fabric wrapped her arms, her legs. She was paralyzed in the freezing, breathless dark. No air in her lungs. She didn’t know if her eyes were open or shut. No way of determining up or down. She opened her mouth to scream, to breathe, both impossible, and the water rushed in, choking, thick, and now her chest burned, burned like fire, even as she sank like a stone in the icy fathoms. Was that the sound of her blood, that rushing in her ears? She had to get out, to claw her way out, out of the clothing that was weighing her down, out of her body, it was too clumsy, too heavy, if she could only wiggle free and rise, but she was trapped in wet wool and silk, in cold, cold flesh. She was squeezed from all sides. She could feel her heart beating, beating, beating, but the water, which had no rhythm, was beginning to cancel everything out. The terrifying darkness—silent, featureless—filled her. Still. Blank.

  She could see a light, far off. The moon floating on top of the river. All the talk of heaven and hell … empty bluster. It was just the moon in the end. Papa was waiting on the moon. He beckoned, or it was the light waving, waving through the water as it found her. Cold, and a little frightening, the light waved. How strange that it could find her, even here.