Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel

by Delilah Marvelle

  “Why not?”

  “Your generosity has already extended past saving my life.”

  “Let me save it twice.” He pushed up his cap, his gaze settling on her. “Those books are collecting dust and there is no reason you should, too.”

  She shook her head. “You are already doing too much for me.”

  “Your definition of much needs to be reassessed given the situation you’re in. It’s an opportunity to be your own person. Take it knowing you owe me nothing.”

  That only made it worse. She would feel obligated. “No. I cannot.”

  His tone hardened. “This is why most females don’t ever get far in life. They’re taught that imposing on others is wrong and then live well beneath what is worthy of them which is what is truly wrong. Take the money, Watkins. If I can better your circumstance, you had better damn well let me.”

  Was his fortune that vast that ten thousand pounds meant so little to him? “I appreciate your generosity, but am already blessed with the offerings Peter has given me throughout my life. I refuse to disrespect the gods by asking for more.”

  He swiped his face and leaned forward, adjusting and re-adjusting his broad shoulders as if his coat was about to be thrown off in agitation. “You listen to me. Is your mind listening?”

  She stilled, noting his intensity had risen. “Haan.”

  “You’re in a situation you can no longer afford to be in. Fate has stepped in and dropped you into the lap of someone who has the ability to change your life: me. Fate does that sometimes. It saves us for reasons we’ll never understand, nor should we question it. Bow to its offering knowing your arrest was the best thing to have ever happened to you.”

  She pulled in her chin. “Are you touched in the head? This arrest is not a fate I would have ever raised my hand for.”

  “No one willingly gets chosen. It’s called being plucked for the greatness we cannot see until it’s done.” He dropped his hand into his lap. “I suggest you dart out of that forest and into the pastures, because your nose is too close to the bark to see the ax that is about to strike.”

  It was obvious Mr. Ridley enjoyed carving out fanciful analogies by the dozen for the purpose of entertainment. “If I were to understand what the bark was and where the ax was coming from, I might have time to dart. Instead, I have no idea what you are even referring to and can do nothing but blink.”

  He leaned in and pointed at her head. “I’ve dealt with your Dr. Watkins very closely these past two days. Enough to say his intentions are vile and beyond nefarious.”

  She pulled in her chin. “Beyond nefarious? For being vile is not enough of a slap to his good name.”

  “What good name? He intends to drag you into his bed.”

  Her startled gaze snapped to his. Her throat tightened. “That is not true.” She almost spit at the thought. “He is a father to me and my love for him is that of a daughter. We have always been that to each other.”

  Ridley leaned far back, draping an arm across the back of the seat and crossing his boot to his knee as if their ride was going to take a while. “It takes a man to know a man. What he sees is what he invested in: a young exotic girl born to serve a white man.”

  She gasped. “Given the sort of white men you associate with on a regular career basis, I have no doubt you think the worst of everyone!”

  “Ey. A little less on treating me like I’m the culprit here. I’m merely pointing out the jagged pieces of his mind. Do you really think he brought you here, all the way from India, merely to showcase you at a university that will never take you? No offense to you as a young girl or your culture, but you’ve been played like a deck of cards without any aces. He only brought you here to settle the last of his estate and chain you to his side.”

  This was outrageous! “Of course he brought me here to settle his estate. He and I are family.”

  His eyes grew flat. “Unlike most, I follow the path others fear to see because they think it’s too deranged. Unfortunately, when it comes to human nature, the deranged is a lot more common than people think. Your Dr. Watkins never married, nor has he ever sought to associate with any women since you came into his care. Do you not find that odd?”

  What was this? How did he know all of this? And why did he know all of this? “You appear to be digging into lives that are not yours to dig into. His profession has always kept him from meeting anyone suitable.”

  “Is that what he told you?” His eyes grew assessing. “How far is your bed from his back in Calcutta? Hm? Down the hall? Or do you and he share a wall and a door?”

  She blinked.

  Peter had her move everything into the room adjoining his shortly after she turned eighteen. It wasn’t something he had insisted on. She had asked for a bigger room. They had always freely entered into each other’s bed chambers at night and often lay shoulder to shoulder reading books.

  Much like a father and daughter would.

  On their journey over and on the boat, they were only forced to sleep side by side, given there were no extra beds, and whilst yes, his arm had been around her every night, it was because she was the one to always tug him close.

  Much like a daughter would.

  She refused to believe it. “In the ten years I have been in his light-loving care, he has never once attempted to touch or kiss me in that way. Never. Not once.”

  “That once is at hand.” He spoke with cool authority. “In his sterilized surgical mind, he sees nothing wrong with it. He invested his time and his money incredibly well given he couldn’t find what he was looking for in the women around him. So he created the sort of woman he wanted. And there you sit. Most men have to justify whatever lines they cross and he hasn’t justified it yet by announcing his intentions, but based on what he did to that constable and that he had an engagement ring in his waistcoat pocket etched with his name and yours, you’re about to have a mess beyond murder on your hands.”

  She choked, her eyes widening. The ring. The one he bought in Calcutta. The one he refused to let her see. Numbness overtook her body, mind and soul. Shiva. Shiva, Shiva. Shiva, Shiva, Shiva.

  He pointed. “What you do with the information I gave you is yours to keep and apply in whatever way you see fit. I merely wanted to say it bothered me. The man is in his mid-forties and you’re a mere eighteen and completely dependent on his generosity which he has groomed you into feeling since you were eight. You have the whole world tipped against you right now. One warped axis spins on a murder you didn’t commit and the other on that of your guardian’s intentions you never invited. It seems cliché for both to find you at once, but life does this to people. It crops not one side of your jaw but both in an attempt to knock you out.”

  Her nails pinched into the skin of her palms. This wasn’t real. Not these charges of murder and not Peter’s intentions. It was as if the world had finally revealed its true self and decided this was all she, as a Hindu, would ever be good for.

  Murder and copulation.

  Murder and copulation.

  Murder and…copulation.

  “The charges filed against you I will overturn,” he confided in a low tone. “That I vow.”

  Her nails pinched into her palms harder knowing what Peter wanted. He’d been grooming her all along. He’d been grooming the perfect surgeon’s wife. One who tended to extensive gardens and made medicinal tonics whenever he asked. One who listened for hours about his work. One who spoke Hindi to be able translate everything in a world that was India. One young enough to survive having his…children.

  She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe knowing she had become the very thing her people were fighting against.

  “Do you want a life apart from Dr. Watkins?” Ridley finally rumbled out.

  She was choking on the air she still couldn’t pull in.

  He held up the vial, drifting it upward to eye level. “Do you want a respectable way out?”

  It was like holding up a key to the rest of her life. “Ye
s.”

  He nodded. “Given you are at a delicate turning point in your young life and need to learn how not to be further dependent on the generosity of others, especially men, how about I let you earn this? Hm? That way, it feels more like an accomplishment earned as opposed to a gift given.”

  Rotating the glass vial between bare large fingers, he offered, “You and I will play a game of deductive marbles involving the mind where you get to keep every last jasper. Guess one of the ingredients steeped in what used to be a tonic and those nine books and the money those books will fetch are yours. That way, you get to invest in your own future apart from any man. You become your own man, so to speak. Does that appeal to you?”

  Her breaths edged to a calm, no longer being sucked in through nostrils. She half-nodded.

  His voice softened. “It’s quite all right, little one. Unlike those around you, I hold out the hand you need.” He continued to rotate the corked glass tube. “Ask me four questions about this vial to make a deduction. Make all four count.”

  Uncertainty twisted more than her mind. It twisted her soul. “Why are you doing this for me? Why are you…helping me? You know nothing of my worth.”

  His eyes grew hooded like a hawk. “My history makes me understand your worth. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a trunk you were bolted into against your will. You can’t breathe. You can’t see. You can’t move. You can’t get your fingers past the wood that surrounds you as your nails have already scraped so far that blood smears the darkness and your skin and your mind. Take your way out, Watkins, knowing you owe me nothing. Nothing but a promise to run from every man who tries to own you. Run knowing I am smashing the lock and opening the trunk for you to get out. Don’t look around lest you get shoved back in. Just run.”

  Her throat tightened sensing this would be her only chance at knowing true freedom from every white man. Her mind was its own maze and its own garden and it had already survived more than this. Run.

  Holding up the vial, he prompted, “I await your first question.”

  The pulsing of her fingertips were eerily bringing to life his analogy of being locked in a trunk as she scraped digging past that wood called life. Run. “Is it horticulturally based?” she choked out.

  “It most certainly is. One question falls.”

  She eased out a breath. “How many ingredients?”

  “Three. Your second question has fallen.”

  “And I am to…only name one of the three?”

  He tsked. “I already told you that. Yes. You wasted a question. That only leaves you with one.”

  She almost smacked her own head for going too fast. Think. Think, think, think and become Limazah. What would he do? What would Limazah do?

  She knew.

  Jemdanee waggled her fingers toward it. “I will save my last question after its inspection. Might I see it?”

  “I’m rather disappointed you didn’t ask for the vial to begin with. Now do something people rarely do: impress me.” He tossed it at her. Hard.

  Her heart jumped and she with it as she caught the bottle with two hands, almost knocking off her own veil. Whatever was he— “You could have been more civil and handed it to me.”

  “Life rarely hands us anything. It usually throws it.” He stared.

  It was like being seated before the mortar and pestle again with her furrowed brow, all-knowing Parsee teacher hovering and expecting an answer.

  She turned the vial toward herself, rotating it and paused. There was very little left within it. Barely a dappling.

  “What?” He lifted a brow. “Is doubt your new god?”

  “Not even a flame or a double boiler can extract a residue from this amount. Nothing remains.”

  “Is that so?” He set his shoulders. “Nine books from the late seventeenth century which are no longer in print is a lot of money, and if you want that money without the burden of feeling guilt, you have to earn it. There is more than enough in that vial.” He dipped his voice. “Hint: break it if you need to.”

  She held it up, pointing to the lack of any liquid moving inside. “Breaking it would be pointless, for your definition of more is my definition of none. How am I supposed to—”

  “In real life, sometimes the chance of amounting to anything in a world that offers nothing is contingent on believing in something. Do it knowing that it’s either this or Dr. Watkins and countless other men who will want the same. What future do you want? Look into that crystal ball and let it roll.”

  She felt as if her composure were under attack.

  As if her entire life was about to be decided by this. This!

  Holding up the glass vial before herself with trembling hands, she angled its innards toward the dim lantern light set above. A thin oily residue spotted with liquid that refused to cling to the sides of the bottle hinted of multiple substances being mixed against nature’s will.

  The only way to make any sense of it was to do the one thing she did best: taste it.

  She had her question. “Is it poisonous?”

  He cracked his knuckles. “No and I’ll even toss in an extra hint: it’s a home-brew tonic.”

  “Home-brew? That means anything can be in it!”

  He sighed. “If I didn’t think you could do this, I would have just given you the money. I’m not evil. I’m merely trying to make this educational for a young girl who wants to get into a university. Regardless of your answer, I’ll still give you a grade and the books.”

  She puffed out a breath in exasperation. All of that torture and angst for nothing.

  Uncorking the glass bottle with fingers that still annoyingly quaked, she dragged its rim through the lace of the veil beneath her nose. The flowered acrid scents of alcohol brewed with other plants drifted through her mind. Rows of speeding shelves and the plants she kept on them tapped her memory as she methodically ticked through a massive list of possibilities.

  She sniffed.

  Two? No. It held more notes than that. He said three.

  She turned over the empty bottle into her bare palm and dabbed the glass hard several times in an effort for the sides to release whatever drops it could. She was rewarded with a faint ring of a darkened reddish substance on her palm.

  Bringing her hand beneath the veil, she sniffed it again and dipped her tongue to it, its sweet-bitterness stinging her tongue and…numbing it. Isolate. She quickly dabbed her tongue to the substance again before the numbing overtook her ability to decipher the other plants. And again.

  The residue hinted at indeed three.

  One biting. One sweet. One bitter.

  One of the three being the rarest of them all.

  She corked the glass bottle. “’Tis a very, very odd combination. Very odd. They should not have been tossed together.”

  “That tells me nothing.”

  She brushed her teeth against the numbness still prickling her tongue. “If I were to exclude the spilanthes numbing the root of my tongue, it appears to an odd confection of….” What if she got it wrong? Eeeeeeee. “Ipecacuaha? And laudanum.” The laudanum was the only one she was certain of. That was easy. She could taste it. “Ipecacuaha would be the rarest originating from Brazil.” She could see it in her mind’s eye on the top sunlit shelf beneath her South American plants. “I have several back in Calcutta.”

  His brows flickered. “You deduced all of that from your tongue? All three?”

  She eyed him. “I could be wrong.”

  “You aren’t.” He weighed her for a long moment, then sat up with a riled thud and adjusted the cap on his head as if he could no longer sit still. “God blind me. It took my chemist two hours to decipher what you just did in a few minutes.”

  She gaped. “Do I get the books?”

  He squinted. “All nine and an two extra for impressing the hell out of me.”

  To clap in the light of what Peter wanted of her would have been morbid.

  What would have happened if this man hadn’t appeared into her life
?

  Her eyes burned knowing the only person she had ever trusted and loved and adored was…a lie. When would the ache in her heart know peace? When? “Thank you.” She swallowed, chanting to herself that tears would change nothing. She’d cried enough of them to know. “I have no words for what you are doing for me. I am genuinely humbled by your generosity.”

  His rugged features softened. “You have your whole life ahead of you. Fly that kite high and don’t worry about hitting any trees.”

  Save her from kneeling before a noble man who clearly wanted nothing but her happiness. Her lips trembled against a smile knowing she had found an unexpected torch in her darkest hour: him.

  She eyed the small glass bottle and did what he did to her earlier: she tossed it at him.

  Only a bit too hard. She cringed.

  He caught it with one hand, his gaze riveted to her face. “Don’t tell me the vase is next or I’m dropping you off right here.”

  She shrank against the seat. “I was merely attempting to follow your lead.”

  “Don’t. You’re likely to lose your mind.” He tucked away the bottle into his inner great coat pocket, still searching her face. His amber eyes bore into her as he cracked his knuckles one by one by one.

  She sank further against the seat. “Might you please not do that? The sound of bones popping beneath your skin makes me want to crawl out of my skin.”

  He sat up, still watching her. “Given where you were born and raised, I’m assuming you’ve already seen a dead body. Have you?”

  That was random. She rarely permitted herself to crawl into the darkness she had come from. She preferred to pretend it didn’t exist. “Yes, I have. Too many.”

  Just beyond the pristine grounds of the rows of Anglo-Indian homes at Chowringhee where she and Peter lived, filthy streets went on for too many miles that led to an equally filthy river. A river she used to bathe in as a child. One where the corpses of people and animals floated by like logs finding the current. Ones lost to disease and forms of brutality too horrid to name. They bobbed in those waters awaiting a justice that never found them.