by Rose Lerner
He hadn’t expected softness from this woman and he wasn’t finding any. But she didn’t fight away from him either. She appeared to be considering the matter.
He kept talking. “I’ve been in the East too long. I’m out of practice with England’s climate.” He kept his hands dispassionate as they held her. His hands were gentlemen, even if the rest of his body wasn’t. “The wet goes right to my bones.”
A minute slipped by and another minute. Warmth curled up between them where they pressed together. It was not entirely the kind that showed on a thermometer. Bit by bit, she relaxed. The dim, dusty space cupped around them, oddly protective.
“I will stay with you in the warmth,” she said. “Because it is sensible.” She wriggled in his hold to bring her arms to where they’d be comfortable and laid her cheek against his shirt. Her shoulders moved gently up and down with her breathing. The awkwardness left her muscles. The complex shapes of her fit to him perfectly.
She said softly, “I am cold. I’m tired. I will take warmth where I can find it tonight. I no longer know what is good judgment and what isn’t. I no longer care.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
“I would not be so sure of that, if I were you. In any case, my life will become even more complicated after you leave. The rest of the evening does not bode well.”
Then they stood motionless, holding each other without speaking. Her arms wrapped around him, tight. Her hands rested flat on his back, under his waistcoat, soft on the linen of his shirt. He wouldn’t mind if they stayed like this for a while.
She was a lovely woman to look at. Now he discovered she was exquisite to touch. Her body was both sturdy and elegant, vibrating with energy. Her breasts nuzzled against him, soft, with a brush of hard nipples.
He usually controlled his body better than this. Tonight, he seemed to have lost all his self-discipline. His cock throbbed insistently in his breeches. If Aimée noticed, she gave no sign.
He hoped she didn’t think he was doing this on purpose. There could be no time and place less suitable.
He said, “What happens to you when I leave and you go back in there?”
“That is not your concern.”
But it was. He hadn’t thought out clearly why, but he knew that much. She was in trouble. He sifted through the hundred impressions of the night. “You and that boy were on edge when I walked into this house. You two and the black man. I interrupted some scheme. Something’s going on.”
“It could be. We’re a busy collection of thieves. You showed up on an especially eventful night.”
“So eventful that a man with a gun is just an annoyance who needs to be shuffled out of the way. When I offered money, Lazarus had half his mind on more important things. Tell me what’s going to happen.”
“Nothing in particular.”
“You’re about to go back and face whatever it is. It scares you.”
“I’m easily scared.”
She wasn’t. She hadn’t been scared of him for an instant. He said, “On this especially eventful night, is Daphne safe?”
He thought she wasn’t going to answer. She said, “The men are gone from the yard. You can leave.” Almost gently, she disengaged from his arms and stepped away. “Do you know what makes your sister unsafe?” He heard anger rattle at the bottom of her voice like little rocks. “You, being so certain you understand what’s going on. You, storming in with a dozen men at your back to take her by force. That puts her in danger.”
“Or she gets hurt in the fight your Brotherhood is about to let loose.”
They waited out a long, tense, considering silence before she said, “What makes you say that?”
“Do you think I don’t recognize the signs?” He’d been at the center of too many bandit squabbles, survived the succession of power in too many petty Eastern courts, been party to too many ruthless intrigues. “If I go back to that room and confront Lazarus, I might touch off what’s coming. That’s why you’re helping me escape. That’s how close the balance is. One stranger could tip it.”
“You see too much, Gideon Gage.” The tiny sound was her swallowing. “I think Lazarus chose the wrong man’s sister to kidnap.”
“I think I’ll get Daphne out of there. If she’s been hurt, I’ll destroy the man who did it.”
After a minute Aimée said, “I won’t let her get hurt.”
“I doubt you have a way to stop it.”
“I said I won’t let her get hurt. She’s my responsibility now. Go home. Do nothing. Don’t make this more difficult for me.”
He didn’t like that, but he didn't have a better plan right now. “We have to talk. Where can you meet me?”
She was the color of gray mist on one side, the color of darkness on the other, and both halves of her looked tired. She said, “The apothecary on Crispin Street, Plumley’s Apothecary, across from the Crown and Cup. At noon tomorrow.” She’d started shivering again. This time, when she wrapped her arms around herself, it was as if she were holding her body together. “I heard men talking, out on the street. Don’t let them see you. Go.”
She stepped aside. He lifted the grille out and set it against the wall at his feet. Took hold of the window frame. It was sturdy enough to hold his weight.
He said, “The apothecary at noon. If you’re not there, I’ll come looking for you.”
Chapter 11
* * *
Aimée shuffled down the long halls of what had once been the servants’ territory, up two flights of the back stairs, and toward the old ballroom. She was annoyed with herself for old decisions. If she’d taken her savings and run away six months ago, she’d be in the warm soft night of New Orleans in the New World, among French people, making a new life. She wouldn’t be trudging back into Lazarus’s hands. Back into the cage of circumstances that held her.
A strange sort of loyalty drove her. Lazarus had treated her well, after his fashion. He’d dealt her no worse than sarcastic comments and the odd, offhand threat. From that first day, Lazarus had stood between a fifteen-year-old girl and the pimps of London. Between her and the magistrates and their charges of dealing in stolen goods. Between her and freezing to death in an alley.
If she kept him from dying in a bloody mess on the oriental carpet it would settle that score. It would also keep a whole list of her friends alive. Daffy, too, possibly.
“Our wanderer returns.” Lazarus lifted his eyes from the game of Patience laid out across the little table in front of him. “Where is Mr. Gage?”
“I don’t know.” Which was true in the sense that she couldn’t have said the exact street and direction.
“You quibble,” Lazarus said, “to the point of lying. I suggest you stop.”
Close up, Lazarus was white-lipped with deep-cut creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He slid the cards along the table instead of lifting them because his hands shook where they rested against the wood.
“I assume Gage is away and safe or you wouldn’t be here,” Lazarus said. “Unlike Hawker, you don’t clutter the landscape with dead bodies.”
“You wrong me. I am tidy as ginger.” Hawker sat cross-legged on the floor, a whetstone in his lap, setting a precise edge on one of his knives. “Aimée, did he hurt you?”
Lazarus ran his eyes over her. Eyes cold and dispassionate as brown agate. “She has acquired no bruises.”
“That don’t mean nothing.” Hawker drew a graceful, unbroken arc across the whetstone with his knife. “In the whorehouses men learn to ’urt women and leave their skin smooth as a peach.”
“Is Gideon Gage such a man? We will ask Aimée.” Cynical eyes, old and very young, turned in her direction.
“Did he lay hands on you?” Lazarus asked.
Her skin held the memory of Gideon touching her. Hands hard as the knots of trees had been careful as they enclosed her arms. His weight, that could have been stone and iron upon her, had lifted itself away. He must have been filled with rage, but none o
f it escaped into that scuffling fight between them.
She said, “He didn’t hurt me.”
Lazarus murmured, “I see.”
“He wants Daffy. He doesn’t much care who he hurts getting her. He may be a decent man, but right now he’s single-minded and he’s angry. He’s also devious.”
“I’m devious,” Hawker protested.
Lazarus slid a nine of diamonds onto a three of spades. “Moderately. But Gage made a fortune in the squabbles of the East and lived to bring it home. You haven’t worked up to that level of cunning yet.” Lazarus studied his cards. She studied the room.
It was too quiet. Too empty. Only ten or twelve men sat on benches and chatted. Some of the whores had taken the best corner to comb out their hair and put it in curling rags. In the crowded and cluttered sleeping places, in the nooks that opened between columns, a few men and women slept, rolled in their blankets.
“Where is everybody?” she said.
“Out looking for our guest.” Lazarus laid a Black Jack on a Red Three. He was moving the cards at random. “You will be amazed to learn that Gideon Gage somehow managed to get blind staggering drunk right in front of us, was put to bed, and has now gone off to collapse somewhere in the rain. I offered five pounds to the man who brings him in.”
Hawker said, “The distraction is wholly successful. Nobody’s going to think about anything else.”
“You’ve done well,” Lazarus said. “Both of you. Assuming he’s clever and quick on his feet tonight, he’ll get away. He’ll have arranged to meet Aimée tomorrow. Where and when?” His tone didn’t encourage lies.
In three years she’d learned when it was possible to go against Lazarus and when it wasn’t. “In Crispin Street, at noon.”
“Well done. Convince him to delay armed assault on my house for a day or two.” Another card moved. “Be persuasive.”
“It’s his sister.”
“Be very persuasive. Our Daffy is almost ready to confess to the Brotherhood. It will be salutary for her and interesting for the rest of us.”
“I got a pound with the Bishop that she’s not a murderer.” Hawker put his knife away. “She don’t act like one.”
“Maybe she’ll sneak out tonight and slit your throat,” Lazarus said genially. “That would be instructive.”
Aimée yawned openly. This was her second night without sleep. She was exhausted. Her mind had decided, all on its own, that she was going to relive the moments of pressing close to Gideon’s body, not once, but over and over. The heat of it. The purr of sensation. She was keyed up with a tense, demanding heat that twisted in her groin and her breasts and her belly.
Lazarus and his games. She was very tired of them. She said, “Can’t you just give him the girl?”
Lazarus raised an eyebrow. “So soft-hearted?”
“So sensible. He’s going to come roaring down on us with guns and knives. He isn’t one of those wobbly-chinned, weak-kneed aristocrats you usually fleece.”
“You’re right. He isn’t.” Lazarus selected another card. “Go get some sleep, Aimée. Tomorrow will be taxing for all of us.”
In the dark of night she opened her eyes, not sure what had awakened her. It was the last cold hour before dawn. She recognized it by the silence. Villains and thieves were home safe, their business of the night completed. The house slept.
She stared toward the ceiling, which she couldn’t actually see, not in the light of the low fire on the hearth. There was a medallion of acanthus leaves set in the plaster up there. Inlays of yew and ebony decorated the bookshelves. This had once been a library.
She slept wrapped in a long, beautiful sable cloak. She’d kept warm inside it for three years, from her first days with Lazarus.
It had been winter when Papa was killed on the ship that should have taken them from the riots of Paris to safety. The smugglers brought her to London to sell with the rest of their goods. She’d been poked and prodded and handled in one brothel after another, but none of the brothel keepers would meet the smugglers’ price. By the time she was brought to Lazarus there was no fight left in her.
The Brotherhood had been quartered in an old factory in those days. The smuggler captain dragged her in and let her stagger and fall. The floor was concrete and scraped her knees, even through her skirt.
A man’s voice said, “Pretty. But if she’s virgin, you’re a eunuch.”
Men laughed. Then the leering, grimacing faces were replaced by one face. Lazarus. He said, “She’s bruised everywhere. You bring battered fruit to market.” He put his fingers under her chin to tilt her head and take a look at her.
He was wearing a ring. Even through the strange numbness that had held her since her father’s death, she recognized what it was. She said, “S ang de pigeon. Très rare.”
Lazarus said, “What’s that in English? Do you speak English?”
“You wear a ruby of pigeon blood color, monsieur. It is a rare stone. The setting is old.”
Lazarus pulled her to her feet and dragged her to a table piled with a wild miscellany of goods. He picked up a ring. “Tell me about this.”
That ring had been citrine, not topaz. Then she examined a Ming Dynasty ivory. A garnet stickpin. A length of Mechlin lace. After a while Lazarus went to bargain for her with the smugglers.
Someone gave her a bowl of stew and she was left alone in a corner to eat it. It came to her that no one was watching her and the door was open, so she walked away, out into London.
She knew nothing of the city. She had no friends and nowhere to go. She was fifteen. She walked miles, finding not one respectable woman who would take in a babbling foreign girl, bloody and filthy from being mistreated by the smugglers. Not one rich house that would give her a job in their kitchens. Not one church that would let her shelter inside.
Night came. The streets were a wilderness of terror, full of men who grabbed at her and spoke in an accent she couldn’t understand. She ran the soles out of her shoes. Finally she huddled against the bricks under a bridge, alone in the cold.
Hawker and Thin Mary found her when she was finally beginning to be warm and comfortable and going to sleep for the last time.
When they brought her back to the padding ken, Lazarus said he’d beat her when she was alive enough to notice, but he never did. He’d said, “Take care of her,” to Hawker and walked off to do criminal things.
That night Hawker had plucked the sable out of a pile of loot and put it around her. He tugged and pushed her over to the fire. She remembered that fire very clearly. It had been a coal fire, lit on a dirty hearth in a sort of metal basket. Very English. In France the hearths held great logs.
Hawker pulled her down to lie on the floor, curled next to the heat of the fire. He said, “You got just about no sense at all, French girl. You know that? Don’t run away again. If you do, ask me for help.”
When she woke the next morning, one of the many flea-ridden dogs of the Brotherhood was breathing into her face. Hawker slept back to back with her, his knife on the floor beside him where he could get to it quickly.
Now, sometimes, it seemed as if she’d never lived anywhere except among thieves. She dreamed in English now.
She sat up, holding the fur around her and shivering where it fell away and left gaps. Her nightshift was no protection against the clawing of cold. She had the feeling she should be awake.
This decrepit mansion was home to a hundred small noises, quite apart from anything the Brotherhood contributed. Wind shrilled through the window sashes. Floors creaked. Rain pattered on the roof and plinked, drop by drop, from many leaks. She heard men talking, far away. Not the words, only a tone of voice that carried no menace.
The closest sounds were a variety of young snores. That, too, was ordinary.
They were tucked up against her on every side and scattered in heaps across the floor—the abandoned children who scavenged in the wake of the Brotherhood. They slept, young boys and girls tumbled together, sharing blankets, hu
ddled for warmth. A few favored dogs, just as unwashed, found places among them.
It had been like this from the beginning. She was protected by Lazarus. Untouchable, day or night. No predators came to the corner where she slept. Where she laid down her pile of overcoats and the sable and set her little trunk at her feet, the most vulnerable of the company crept in and wriggled close. Nine-year-old boys. Six-year-old girls. She’d wake in the morning and there they were. She’d never had the heart to send them away. In the lonely midnight, the sniffles and coughs and occasional dreaming “woof!” were a comfort.
Tonight, especially, she was glad to have them around her. She listened to the house, delved under the accustomed sounds, sorted shades out of the shadows, and knew something was wrong.
She didn’t move, but one of the dogs growled low in its throat. The blankets on the floor around her swelled and shifted and began to reveal elbows and hands and tousled heads. Bright eyes blinked open.
And she saw him.
On the far side of the room, behind a battered sofa, in a space between darkness and darkness, someone watched. A huge ungainly shape. A tall, thick, heavily muscled man. Bent Thomas had come to look at her as she slept.
He didn’t hide. When he saw her sit up, he walked into plain sight.
There was the scratch of claws as curs untangled themselves from the blankets. A vicious little murmur emerged from the human mongrels, the child rats who survived on the streets, who were deadly when they swarmed in attack. The protection she gave the children wasn’t one-sided.
Bent Thomas ran his tongue over his lips. He backed away and left.
By tomorrow morning, everyone will know he was here. I am the bone of contention and he’s just come sniffing at me.
Hawker was right. Somebody should stab the man.
At her elbow, half covered with his blanket, the Mole said, “We don’t let ’im get close ta yer box wif yer chink.”
She made a noncommittal sound.
The Mole clarified. “Yer box wif the books in it. Where ya keep yer banknotes. We don’t let ’im touch that.”
