The Smoke Thief

by Shana Abe

  He could have predicted her reaction: she took a step back, caught herself, then lifted her chin. Maddening, captivating Rue, defiant and curious at the same time, a contradiction of ladylike gentility with the secret cunning of a warlord. Who stole and lied and defied a roomful of powerful men just because she could, who trusted in wet dogs and stray children with knives. Who wore her privacy like a cloak, and kissed like she knew the darkest fissures of his heart, like she knew him, and always had.

  “Does he know what you are?” he asked. “Your little mongrel?”

  Her chin tilted higher. “Yes.”

  “That's a perilous secret, mouse. Should the council discover it—”

  “Zane would never betray me,” she said instantly, defensive.

  He was silent a moment, weighing his thoughts, weighing risks and scenarios and outcomes. In the end he said only, “Let us hope not.”

  If he had to kill the boy, she'd likely not forgive him.

  In just the short while he'd been awake, the light in his room had changed, easing from muffled black into pewter, faintly brushing the bed and wing chairs and mantel with gray. He could see her eyes more clearly, the tint of her lips, the green and rust paisley print with its braiding of kingfisher blue. . . . The sun would follow soon.

  He was fatigued. He must have slept only an hour or so, and felt it. But beyond the call of sleep, beyond the threat of the urchin and the small, constant disquiet over the diamond, Kit found he wanted nothing more than to take Rue's hand and lead her back to his empty bed, to feel her bare and wonderful against him there. And why not? She was here, he was here . . . the sheets were already warm. . . .

  While his mind drifted forward into his fantasy—the robe sliding off her shoulders, the stroke of her hair against his chest, the lily heat of her skin—his hand reached out. Like the fit of a familiar glove their fingers slipped together and she allowed it, her focus turning distant, distracted.

  In his mind they were already beneath the covers, and he was already tasting her skin—

  “It is Friday,” Rue said.

  He closed his eyes, willing himself not to move. “Is it?”

  “And dawn.”

  —she was beneath him, her arms around him, sliding her foot up his calf—

  “So our fortnight begins. And I know just where to begin it.”

  He opened his eyes.

  She asked, “Have you ever visited the establishment of Madame Leveillé?”

  It was one of the most infamous brothels in London, a place so exclusive it became something of a Holy Grail among the Cambridge set, most of whom couldn't even broker an introduction.

  Kit had been invited twice.

  “No,” he said curtly, which actually won him a smile.

  “Neither have I. But I know a comte who's quite familiar with it—and its proprietor.” She looked down at their hands, then, almost as an afterthought, pulled hers free. “We'll start there.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  They hired a coach to the House of Leveillé, two lace-bedecked gentlemen emerging in the late-morning coolness to the gray, imposing silence of Threadneedle. Rue let the marquess pay the shot.

  It was still too early for fashion; the people who traveled the street now were either bank clerks or men like what she pretended to be, the blue-blooded tip of society, moving lazily along the sidewalks that led to and from this place.

  She was the comte now. She felt more comfortable in these clothes, like a second skin that fit her to the last stitch. Her peruke wig, her velvet coat of cyan, the rapier and seamed stockings and pocket watch, the gold signet she'd had commissioned for her finger—she knew this person nearly as well as her true self. Whether the marquess liked it or not was irrelevant.

  She had not allowed him into her home. He had agreed to remain outside until she was ready, until the servants were busy and she could slip out again. And even then, he'd only looked her up and down with flat green eyes, taking particular note of the blade at her hip, saying nothing. He'd walked off and found them the hackney.

  As the coachman was counting change, the plum-painted door to Leveillé's opened. Rue kept her head down and watched without watching as a nobleman emerged from the golden shadows of the interior, accepting his gloves and cane with exaggerated care from a doorman. He was younger than the usual sort she encountered here; as he skipped down the puddled stairs he staggered twice, his hat cocked back and his coat unbuttoned to display a vest of vivid orange and yellow stripes. The hot reek of brandy struck her long before the lord himself made it past. Rue smiled to the pavement. The House of Leveillé poured only the best.

  The fresh air seemed to grip him. The man moved more quickly to the nearest intersection, where a shiny black landau rolled up to meet him.

  There was no hint of the true nature of the business that took place behind Madame's door, but the royal-crested carriages tended to remain at a circumspect distance anyway.

  Christoff finished with their coach. She heard the driver's low “chut-chut!” as the horses bounded forward, the steel rims of the wheels grinding against stone. Still she waited, her eyes cast down, and so had an excellent vantage of Christoff's left shoe clipping into view: the fine-grained leather buffed to splendor, the heavy sterling buckle studded with topaz that would fetch more than a barmaid would make in a decade.

  She could live for three months on that buckle. The house, the servants, food, coal, and transport: three months. And she'd wager that he had scarcely even noticed it strapped to his shoe.

  Rue spoke in an undertone, lifting her gaze to his. “From this instant, I am the Comte du Lalonde, an aristocrat with holdings in Corrèze and just enough income to waste as I please. I gamble, I drink, and I enjoy women.”

  His face held a particular taut gravity, an expression that might have masked pensiveness or amusement or anything in between.

  “It is imperative that you not forget any of that while we're here. Don't call me by my true name. Don't treat me as a woman.”

  “I'll try to remember. Comte.”

  Amusement. She narrowed her eyes.

  “If you're not going to take this seriously, you might as well leave now.”

  “Not without you.”

  “Then at least be useful. If you look at me like that while we're in there, people will wonder why we're bothering with whores at all.”

  His gaze darkened, his mouth flattened to a line. She'd offended him. Good. He'd been staring at her all morning when he thought she couldn't see, his features whetted, his eyes ferocious . . . like he would eat her, like he would devour her. But beneath his look was something even worse. Beneath it was something that flickered and caught in her chest, tenderness and recognition and a sparse, empty ache that seemed to penetrate her very being.

  It made her stomach fluttery and her heart constrict. It made her slide back into the memory of his kisses, of his taste, lingering like autumn honey on her lips.

  . . . I want to hear you gasping my name when I'm inside you . . .

  Better to have him angry. She could banish those memories then.

  Rue pulled off her hat, flicking the silvery blue curls on her shoulders into alignment. “I won't introduce you. Just stay with me and try to appear . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Less forbidding. You are here for pleasure, Lord Langford.”

  His lips curved into that bare, familiar smile; he looked as affable as a wolf in a cage.

  “Très bien.” She turned to lead the way up the stairs.

  The majordomo and all the doormen knew the Comte du Lalonde. She had not visited often, but they were paid to remember faces, just as they did cloaks and canes; she was met with formal bows, the marquess just behind her. They were escorted into an empty drawing room in the front of the mansion and politely left alone.

  “How very conventional,” said Christoff, lifting a painted figurine of a stag and hare from its place on a secrétaire. His gaze raked the chamber. “I had hoped for velvet o
n the walls and a hookah, at the least.”

  “I'm sorry to disappoint you.” She stood beside the pink chintz settee with a hand on her rapier, watching him cross to the windows. He dimmed against the panes, a shadow man prowling amid gauze curtains and plaster friezework of fleur-de-lis and ivy. A gilded vase was crowned with plump, creamy tulips in the corner; he stirred their perfume as he passed.

  “Your runner is a patron here?”

  “Perhaps. He'll know about it, in any case. But we've come to see someone else.”

  Kit tapped a tulip with one finger, sending a tremble through the petals and stem. “You move in rarefied circles, Monsieur le Comte.”

  “When I must.”

  A new set of doors opened, the ones that led deeper into the mansion. A woman slipped into the room, advancing to Rue with her hands outstretched. She might have come straight from an evening at court, with her prim, silk-tissue gown that glistened with burnished bronze thread, milky opals at her throat and ears and wrists—but for her hair, which was deeply red and completely unbound, floating behind her in rippling curls.

  “Comte du Lalonde,” greeted Mim in her most cultured voice. Rue accepted both her hands, bowing over them.

  “Chérie.”

  Mim turned to Christoff. For an instant Rue detected a splinter in the other woman's careful veneer, the slightest flare of emotion behind the clear gray eyes—but when Mim spoke, it was in her usual practiced tones. “And you have brought a friend, I see! Welcome, my lord.”

  The Marquess of Langford inclined his head, not smiling but at least with a shade less of that wolfish aspect than before. He seemed not entirely unmoved by Mim's painted charms, dropping his hand from hers neither too quickly nor too late. But he gazed at the courtesan with what seemed to Rue to be something more potent than mere curiosity. She felt a rush of annoyance, and quickly quenched it.

  It didn't matter to her whom he liked. Mim was beautiful, and it didn't matter.

  “It has been too long,” Mim said, transferring her smile back to Rue. “Do come along, my lord. Please, both of you, do come inside.”

  Rue offered her arm. Mim accepted it, her touch as cool and light as the air. Together they walked into the connecting hall, Christoff pacing behind.

  He had anticipated velvet and hookahs, well, now he was getting a nearer taste of it. Beyond the decorous drawing room, the House of Leveillé transformed itself into a more exotic creature, as the windows vanished and the only illumination spilled from frosted-glass sconces in shades of ruby and oyster and gold. The ceiling was draped not in velvet but stiff bombazine; paintings on the walls showed pale moments of men and women coupling amid darkly rich harems or palace chambers.

  Behind the closed doors they passed came occasional hints of what lay beyond: a woman's laughter, hushed and then cut short; the small, brittle splash of liquid against crystal or stone; frantic breathing; the whispered aftermath of opium; a bass viol, unaccompanied, stroking out a passage of deep, resonant notes.

  The opium made her dizzy. She tried to hold her breath until they were past it.

  Mim turned her head. “Will you take breakfast? Champagne? No? Never mind, then; perhaps we'll find something else to tempt you.”

  They entered the heart of the building, a rectangular chamber filled with sofas and chairs and fat pillows and a harpsichord in one of the corners, being played very softly by a girl with caramel skin and sloe-black eyes. There were fewer men here than Rue had seen previously, only five—two she recognized—being teased and petted by a chorus of women. But it was morning. Most of Mim's customers would be in rooms already, or gone home to their wives.

  The girl at the harpsichord glanced up as they walked in. Her hands lifted from the keys; she rose and swept toward them with an unhurried poise.

  “Gaétan,” she said, smiling, and pressed a short kiss on Rue's mouth. She spoke in French, linking their arms. “Have you just come? How I've missed you.”

  Rue answered in the same language. “And I you, dear one. I've been out of town, but see—I've brought you a trifle from Calais.” She lifted a round gold locket from her vest pocket, lavishly scrolled, draped from a royal-blue ribbon. The girl—the name she used here was Portia—danced back and clapped her hands, effectively gathering the attention of the room.

  Rue knew how it must have looked to those wine-sotted gentlemen; she knew how she hoped it looked. But it occurred to her in that moment that Kit Langford was truly her wild card. He could make the moment or ruin it, and it was imperative that he not ruin it.

  Yet he seemed impassive, almost bored, standing with his weight on one foot and his hands behind his back. He appeared to be gazing at a couple on the nearest sofa, the man with his cravat untied and his head propped against the cushions, the woman with her hands curled around his arm—and then Kit's gaze shifted to hers. His eyes burned sharp, sharp green.

  “But is it empty?” demanded Portia, with a comely little pout. “I must have a lock of your hair for it!”

  “Of course!” Rue dropped the locket in the girl's palm and gave a half smile to Mim, switching to English. “In fact, I think we must see to it right away.”

  Mim nodded to the marquess. “And your friend?”

  “There is room in the locket,” said Rue, “for two locks of hair, I think.”

  “Very well. Portia, you'll find the third chamber prepared.”

  “Oui, madame.”

  She took Rue's hand, and then Christoff's, leading them both to an arched doorway past the harpsichord. Someone had gotten up to play in her absence. As they walked away, a new tune began to float lightly, disembodied, down the hallway, rebounding against the floors and walls.

  Portia stopped before a varnished door, opening it for them both. Rue went first, recognizing the shapes of the walls, the cluster of furniture, the chemical-sweet aroma of cosmetics and cologne and, beneath them both, bleach.

  The marquess closed the door. Portia sent him a swiftly veiled look, one Rue had seen a thousand times over, growing up in the shire, then moved to the bed. With her skirts in her hands she climbed atop the mattress, reaching for a carved wooden rosebud in the cornice that lined the walls. There came a click, and a groan; in a puff of stale air the secret door beside the headboard slid ajar.

  Portia stepped down from the mattress and over to the opening.

  “Thank you for the locket,” she said to Rue with a shyer, more natural smile.

  “It's nothing.”

  The girl dipped her head and disappeared. The door slid closed again.

  Rue had been in this room on no less than seven occasions, and each time it felt the same to her, chilled and cloistered, almost suffocating, even with the magnificent bed with its crimson and coral hangings, the round leather table set for backgammon—surely no one ever played—and the twin mirrors on the walls placed to face each other, so that when she stood between them she saw only herself, over and over and over, diminishing down into a silver-backed void. She edged past the line of their frames. There were cabinets she had never opened in here, places she had never looked. It was enough to know about the rosebud, and that the main door was unlocked.

  “You can relax,” she said to Christoff, still over by the door. “No one will hear us in here. There are peepholes but they won't be occupied.”

  He had noted them already, clever gaps in the floral wallpaper designed to fool the senses; places like this seldom allowed for true privacy. He listened closely to the silence. Rue was right. There was no one breathing behind the false walls, no scents emanating from them beyond dust and old rat. They were alone.

  A brass chain lay coiled around one of the bedposts; Kit ran a finger along the links as he walked by. “It doesn't seem to be a room especially conducive to relaxation.”

  “No,” Rue agreed, with a ghost of a smile. She took a seat at the table, adjusting the length of her rapier.

  “Do you trust that girl?”

  “In about an hour she will return to the
harpsichord wearing her new locket. She'll linger another hour, but she's off at ten. She will respond to any inquiries regarding the comte with discreet details: he prefers absinthe to sherry, sugar to salt, flogging to bondage.” She tapped a nail against a mother-of-pearl counter, watching him from beneath her lashes. “You needn't look so shocked. He is French.”

  “I'm not shocked. I'm merely appalled.”

  “Not for Portia, I hope. She's paid handsomely for her lies.”

  “For you,” he said, and took the chair across the table. He leaned forward and very gently touched her cheek. “What a curious life you've led.”

  He'd meant nothing by it other than a simple gesture of communion, but she drew back as if he'd hurt her, her face going stiff. He dropped his hand to his lap and rubbed his fingers together; her skin had held that burning warmth that always seemed to spread straight through him.

  “And for myself, of course,” he added wryly, when she didn't rise or speak. “Only an hour for the both of us! I fear my reputation is going to suffer, after all.”

  And just like last night, her face suffused. He wondered if she truly understood what he meant, his blushing thief, or if she only guessed. He wished he could tell, he wished he could ask her, but so much about her was still a mystery to him. If he asked he thought she'd either laugh or she'd lie. Or both.

  She seemed confident enough in her breeches and the foppish tailed coat, and God knew she could handle the sword. But there were times when he looked at her and glimpsed someone else entirely. The woodsmouse she used to be perhaps, wide-eyed, uncertain. The bow to her mouth as she'd stared out from her old bedroom window at the rain; the way she tended to stand with one hand clasped over her wrist, feminine and unthinking; how she dared him and taunted him but kissed like a maiden, with closed lips and awe, and still it set his blood to boil.

  She was proving damnably resistant to his efforts to break past her defenses. He didn't know how much longer his patience would last.

  Someone was coming. They heard it together, the swish of cloth behind the walls, the small, hollow tap of high heels.