“Then I’m the one who’ll take advantage of the chance. His sister has been kind and if I’m a good guest then perhaps I’ll get invited back again. Maybe I can find a way to search his study for clues or uncover an advantage to give us the lever we need to push this son of a bitch into the sea.”
“A good guest?”
“Leave it, Rowan.”
“All he has to do is express disapproval at what he’ll term an “unacceptable suitor” and you’re on the wrong side of that door. Game over.”
“We’ll see. I’m not there as a suitor. I’m a family friend who saved his sister’s life and has a connection to the East India’s fighting forces. If he presses me, perhaps I am looking for a position as a bodyguard.”
“You’re putting yourself in harm’s way, Michael. He’s already got his suspicions. My god, this could twist on you so fast! One moment you’re having tea in his parlor and the next thing, he’ll be burying you in his back garden.”
“No. He kills me without a word? And gains what? Proof that he’s a murderer? I go missing and all you have to do is call the police. He’ll swing for it and it’s done.” Michael stood slowly to test his mobility. Rowan’s expert wrap had eased much of the pain but he knew he wasn’t going to be running up any stairs anytime soon.
Rowan began to repack his doctor’s kit. “Unless the Jackal has handlers and we’re facing the next battle blindly without you.”
“Whatever I learn as I go, I’ll convey it to you as quickly as I can, so there’s less of a chance of me taking any “revelations” with me. Just don’t share any details with the others until it’s necessary. I’m not giving up on this. For the first time, we have an advantage that Sterling doesn’t have.”
“And exactly what advantage is that?”
“He’s the one playing by the rules. I don’t have to.”
Rowan shook his head and relatched his case as it closed. “Michael. If this game is being played indoors and over dinner tables, I’m worried that you don’t even know all the rules. And when you don’t know all the rules…”
“It’s easier to be defeated,” Michael finished the thought. Rowan had a point. He could hardly boast about his skills in good society. His friendship with the Jaded had brought him into the outskirts of more than one gathering but Michael Rutherford was no polished player. “I know enough to wipe the mud off of my boots. It’s a simple dinner inside the man’s home. If I use the wrong fork, I hardly think it matters but if it goes beyond that and I’m forced to jig before the Queen of England, I’ll ask Ashe to give me a quick tutorial on waltzing.”
Rowan smiled. “What I wouldn’t give to see his face when you ask him!”
Michael ignored the jest. “How long until I’m healed?”
“At least a month but that would be if you rested, avoided strain and took to leisurely hobbies like reading.” Rowan picked up his coat. “See how wise I am not to even suggest it?”
“Very funny.” Michael began buttoning his shirt. “And since I have no intentions of taking to my bed?”
Rowan shrugged. “Hard to say. Six weeks? Two months? Are you going to hurl yourself under any more carriages?”
“You are the worst doctor in London,” Michael said with a growl. “I’ll be better in a fortnight and that’s an end to it.”
Rowan stepped back, tipping his head to one side as if studying a great mystery. “Anyone else, I’d say I knew better, but I swear, Rutherford, you do have a knack for surprises.”
“Let’s hope so.” Michael stretched, testing his mobility a bit. “For all our sakes.”
A knock at the door interrupted them, and Michael moved to answer it, opening it to find young Miss Maggie Beecham standing there sweetly holding out a hat box. Mrs. Clay had hired her a few weeks before to help at the Grove but already it was clear that she’d become like a daughter to the landlady and had a good disposition for the inn. She was a rescued “soiled dove” he suspected, but Michael was not the kind of man to judge a person by their past. He simply liked her for her honest sweetness and the way she had already learned to use her hands to talk to Tally, Mrs. Clay’s deaf son.
“I believe this is yours, Mr. Rutherford,” Maggie said. “Although Mrs. Clay said I’m to make you open it immediately and voice an opinion in my hearing.”
“I see.” He dubiously took the box, forced to open the door a bit wider so that Rowan could enjoy the show. “Can’t you just tell her I liked it?”
Maggie crossed her arms, as threatening as a spitting kitten. “You listen here, sir! She’s pacing in her rooms over it and all soft at the thought of disappointing her ‘dear giant’ as she calls you.” She wrinkled her nose and tapped her foot. “It’s a hat! Don’t you be difficult or I’ll…” Her bravado faltered and her eyes threatened tears.
“For god sakes, open it, Michael!” Rowan chimed in wryly. “The girl means business!”
Michael untied the cord and unceremoniously dropped the box on the floor to pull out a black wool felted hat. He’d expected more of a working man’s cap but his eyes widened as he beheld a fine gentleman’s topper with a satin black band around the crown. It was bound to make his simple clothes look a bit shabbier in comparison but at that moment, with the heft of it in his fingers, he was in awe.
“Well?” Maggie asked anxiously.
“I am—speechless. Please tell Mrs. Clay that it is the finest thing I’ve ever owned and I’m…” Michael had to swallow an odd lump at his throat, “flattered that she sees me as worthy of it.”
Truth was, it was the first gift he’d received in his lifetime. Even if it was on his accounts for payment, it was the sentiment behind it that made it precious to him.
“There! That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” Maggie was all smiles. She curtsied and retreated back down the stairs to make her report.
Michael closed the door only to be faced with the sight of Dr. Rowan West staring at him as if he’d grown horns. “What?”
Rowan shook his head. “All this time. How have I always seen you as a hardened warrior when all along…you are just as human as the rest of us, Rutherford.”
“The broken ribs weren’t a more substantial clue?” Michael jibed. “Rowan, you really are the worst doctor in London.”
“Good thing my wife is a physician,” Rowan countered. “I’ll send her to attend you next time you decide to hurl yourself under a carriage to save a damsel in distress. Although I warn you, Gayle is fearless enough to tell you the things I’m not.”
“And what is that?” Michael asked.
“That you’re in danger, Rutherford. And that love makes a man blind.”
“Love? Do not mistake me getting misty over a hat for some crush on a housemaid to—“
“Not Maggie, Rutherford!” Rowan cut him off. “I’m saying between your ties here at the Grove, Mrs. Clay, Tally, all of them, even the Jaded; you have as much to lose as any of us and aren’t you the one who is constantly warning us about needing to protect our blind sides?”
“I don’t need a lecture on this subject, West. I’ve seen to the Grove’s security.”
“You’re deliberately misunderstanding me, friend.”
“I’m not.” Michael held his ground. “I’m telling you that no one I care for will be lost. We’ve made it this far, Rowan, and I won’t drop my guard now.”
“And what if you are on our list of people we’re not willing to lose, Rutherford?”
“I promise you that if I can find a way to survive this mess, I will. Will that suffice?”
Rowan sighed and gathered his bag and coat to leave. “No, but who am I to argue?”
Michael caught his arm for a moment. “You’re a trusted friend, Rowan, and a good man. No matter what lies ahead, you’ll always be the touchstone that they lean on. I hope you know how much I trust in that.”
“Michael.” Rowan pulled his arm free. “If you don’t live through this, I’ll kill you myself.”
He was gone before Michael cou
ld think of a clever reply. He looked back down at the hat in his hand and felt the icy brush of fear trail down his spine. He would talk to Mrs. Clay about adding another man to the watch, but the Grove wasn’t his only weak point.
Not anymore.
Because when he’d seen Mrs. Clay’s gift his first real thought had been that a certain pert little beauty might think him handsome if he wore it to dinner on Sunday…
Damn.
Grace closed and locked the door to her bedroom and leaned against it, hands splayed as if to keep out the strange chaos of the day. The twists and turns of the afternoon had left her reeling and then Sterling’s strange behavior after Mr. Rutherford had left had added to her anxiety.
After his initial anger at her unconventional and unchaperoned return in a carriage with a strange man, Sterling had been practically gleeful after the verbal sparring with Mr. Rutherford had ended. Giddy as a boy on Christmas, he’d left her on the steps and whistled as he went into the house and then shut himself up in his study without explanation.
Grace had waited in her first floor sitting room, jumping at every sound, convinced that at any moment he would return to his senses and the scathing lectures about her stupidity would begin. Or the interrogation about where she was and what she was up to before she’d fallen into the street.
She composed her lies, rehearsing them in her head until she was dizzy with it.
But Sterling never bothered to emerge until dinner and Grace had then endured the strangest meal of her life. In near silence, her brother simply sat in his chair, eating with the zeal of a starving man breaking a fast, pausing only to grin at her like a man enjoying a fabulous jest.
“You…are in a good mood tonight.”
“And why not?” he said with a laugh. “My luck has finally changed! Thanks to my darling sister!”
The endearment was unfamiliar sounding but Grace managed a nod. “Your luck has changed you say? How so?”
He’d shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t you trouble your pretty little head about it! It’s all in hand.” He’d returned to his food with relish and Grace had abandoned conversation. She knew better than to poke a sleeping tiger.
It must have been a quick meal but even afterward she couldn’t remember a longer evening. Sterling had left the table without another word and Grace had helped Mrs. Dorsett clear the dishes before numbly heading up to her room to hide.
She shook her head and stepped from the door. Perhaps he is just happy to see his friend, Mr. Rutherford. But he didn’t seem happy at first. In any case, I should be grateful for the distraction and the reprieve.
Shouldn’t I?
She crossed the room to retrieve her basket where she’d tucked it under her bed. She sat at her vanity and began to lay out the damaged and torn pages, her hands shaking. Grace tried to reorder them, copying out one of the pages that had been torn and realizing which sections were missing entirely. All in all, the story was largely intact and Grace began to recover her work. She hated the sight of her tattered parchment and had to wipe her face to clear away the frustrated tears at the precious hours of work she’d lost.
Not to mention the income.
She’d a steady demand for her colorful stories from a publisher and while the money was modest, Grace had the luxury of saving every tuppence she’d made from her work. The secret income was hers to hoard and she had every intention of doing so until she had enough—enough to leave her brother’s house and make her own way in the world.
But that dream had nearly come crashing to an end today, an end almost as grisly as the one she imagined for herself if Mr. Rutherford hadn’t intervened. If her brother had pressed for details of her errands or if Mr. Rutherford had corrected her lies in front of him, Grace shuddered at the consequences.
She leaned back in her chair, ignoring the ache in her shoulders, and closed her eyes. It was all so tenuous. The publisher had made it clear that there was no shortage of eager writers to fill their pamphlets and that any drop in quality or professionalism would be noted.
And of course, they didn’t realize that the author was a woman. Grace had presented herself as a lowly clerical assistant to the eccentric Mr. A.R. Crimson, a slightly mad artist who (beyond his penny novels and serial chapters) only communicated with the outside world via notes and letters and was never seen publicly. It was pure invention and as it turned out, a very convenient one.
But it was a flimsy illusion her brother could destroy with one word as her closest male relative and legal guardian.
My fate rests in the hands of a total stranger. And yet strangely enough, Mr. Rutherford and I have done nothing but keep each other’s secrets from our first meeting.
Mr. Rutherford’s appeal was potent and extremely distracting.
She leaned forward to study her reflection for a moment but saw nothing beyond the ordinary. Her hair was a reddish-blonde, a common enough hue, though she was grateful it was thick enough to hold a curl. Two blue eyes; a decent nose, a touch long and sprinkled with unfashionable freckles; good cheekbones but her cheeks seemed too chubby to her critical eyes. Her lips were… Grace squinted as she pouted at herself to try to make them more bow-shaped and succeeded in making herself laugh.
The inventory of her physical attributes was at an end.
“I do not look mysterious, at all!” she sighed. She frowned at the notion, disappointed. She didn’t really want her face to betray the inner workings of fairy kingdoms and blood-thirsty ghosts but it appealed to a shielded part of her soul that Mr. Rutherford alone could see something in her that others couldn’t.
Her brow furrowed. He’d encouraged her where her brother would have expressed curt disapproval and even complimented her on her stubborn refusal to tell him about her pages. He’d stumbled onto her greatest secret without realizing it and nothing was certain. Sunday loomed in her mind, the blade of a guillotine above her neck.
If her strange alliance held, then an escape from Sterling was still possible. But if Mr. Rutherford made any reference to her awkward accident on Oxford Street, she’d better be ready with a good lie or two or Sterling would drive her out of the house and onto the streets.
Grace smiled at the oddly liberating thought of selling gruesome pamphlets by A.R. Crimson from a little cart along the streets. What song would I call as I walked down the lanes? “Grim entertainment to make you swoon, come for your pages, come!”?
She pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and by sheer habit, began to write down the images and ideas that bloomed inside her head of a vendor of mysteries who sold cursed stories to deserving victims. She penned “The Merchant of Death” and then let her imagination ramble and roam where it wished only to realize that most of her thoughts still centered on a certain tall man with salt and pepper curls. Without hesitation, she pulled out her diary and through the written word, she described the strange fire that had blazed through her as Mr. Rutherford had been pressed so closely against her in the carriage; she relived the terror of seeing him fall into the street and narrated her defiance in attempting to shield him from Sterling’s aggression.
He is better than any hero, she decided. Mr. Rutherford was beyond ideal but even he was probably a man of the age and would be as scandalized as her brother if he realized her true intent. His admiration would dissipate like smoke.
For all the swooning and passionate undertones in her stories, Grace was not a woman prone to romantic notions. When she was thirteen, her father had informed her very coldly that the reason he had spent any money on her education was that he had no illusions of her flowering into any great beauty.
“You’ll make your way by your wits, Grace. Or not at all.”
He’d followed the dire announcement with a lengthy speech on her potential future as a governess, tutor, teacher or lady’s secretary if the fates were kind. Grace didn’t recall the rest of his words exactly but that was because her mind had wandered back to the grisly turns of a book she’d been
reading on gladiators and the Roman coliseum.
It wasn’t that she was a disrespectful girl. But once you agree with your father that your life will probably hold little beyond the corralling of other people’s children or being a glorified servant, there is really no point in dwelling on the finer details of your future misery.
It was such a strange compulsion; to slip away into daydreams powered by her love of books and her need to scribble down her stories. Grace knew the limitations of her meager education, despite her father’s complaints of the cost and had never aspired to write great fiction. She’d feared for a long time that she really was simply odd and that the workings of her mind might be a sign of illness. But since the obsession was her only consolation, Grace had abandoned worry and embraced it.
With her foolish stories, Grace had survived all the years of her father’s icy disregard, her stepmother’s cruelty and an unwanted daughter’s exile to London to finally fulfill her destiny and prove that her father’s investment in her education hadn’t been a waste—she was a glorified servant at last!
Time slipped away from reckoning as she patched and repaired the story, and then began a new tale. Instead of a bloody confrontation with underwater mutants for Captain Martin, her hero would be sold into slavery and bought by the beautiful and deadly Princess of Atlantis who was fascinated by his very tall male human form… She wrote into the night until she fell asleep with her head on her desk…and fell into the strong arms of Michael Rutherford.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The following afternoon, Grace returned to Oxford Street to complete her errand but this time she hired a carriage to avoid the crowded walk and any chance of mishaps. She had never before missed an appointment and was nervous at the breech. She asked the driver to wait and then walked past the tobacconist shop to enter a green painted door with a simple plaque next to it that read, “S&Y Publishing”.
Up a narrow staircase, she climbed carefully avoiding touching the banister or walls for fear of soiling her beige kid gloves. The grime and disrepair of the hallway would have given anyone pause, but Grace was too familiar with her path to pay it too much attention. At the top of the stairs, she went inside the first door, painted the same repulsive green as the one on the street, and squared her shoulders to face whatever lay ahead.
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