Having a self-righteous Indian herbalist living in the house with him for three days was going to be more of a nuisance than he originally thought.
He stepped back, breaking the contact of her finger against his mouth lest he bite it off. “Before you assume the worst, these were prescribed to me by the best apothecarian in London. They’re incredibly useful for long nights and keep me focused.”
“That apothecarian ought to be hanged so he might be re-born as a pile of manure. English apothecarians are quacks! Their knowledge is acquired not through practice but reading books that have long since expired.”
“Cease riling that mind or you won’t be of much use to us. That was the whole idea of arranging the theatre lockdown for tomorrow night. So you could actually sleep, have a full day of rest, and think clearly. Had I known you wanted to stay up all night like an owl on coffee beans, we would have been there not here.” He stared her down. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to work.”
“Not with those leaves in your mouth.”
It was getting harder to stay calm. The coca was spiking his heart rate and making him talk faster than he could keep up with. “You appearing into my life for two minutes doesn’t mean I give up what enables me to function whenever I have to work beyond what my physical body cannot do on its own past certain hours.”
She lowered her chin, her blue eyes flaring. “You are addicted to coca.”
He usually had more control over it, but the amount of cases he’d been handling since his new, under-the-table agreement with Finkle meant he had to keep up. There wasn’t any room for him to fail given his reputation and what Finkle was now offering: immunity to himself and anyone he named in return for solving cases Scotland Yard couldn’t.
After being arrested well over thirty-eight times since becoming a private inspector, he needed the immunity more than he was willing to admit. “I have to work.”
“Between the two substances you are combining, Mr. Ridley, if ingested irresponsibly it will result in seizures and/or death. Peter and I have witnessed seizures so violent at the hands of coca/limestone that it bleeds the brain from lasting too many minutes. Did your quack ever tell you that?”
Death was the least of his concerns. The only reason he hadn’t hanged himself from his own rope and done away with the uselessness of his sense of being was because he had promised his mother he would never attempt suicide again after she found him barely in time at thirteen.
Work enabled him to function and gave him purpose.
Work also erased his own sins. “I’ve been around enough death to know what my chances are. I’ll take them.”
“If you disrespect what I believe is right for you,” she warned, “I will disrespect you, in turn. Is that what you want?”
He sped up his chewing to keep up with his thoughts. “Are you threatening me?”
“I will offend you for offending me and offending the body the gods have given you.”
The maestro in him was awfully, awfully curious. “Go on, Kumar. Amuse the grim side of my soul and offend me. Simply know I’ll keep doing what I have to do to be the best: chew the coca.”
A determined breath escaped her. “May Shiva help you. You may be twice my size, but I will take you down in a way all men fall.” Bumping in close, she grudgingly held his gaze from well below him and grabbed him by the bollocks, twisting it like a rope.
His body bucked from the pain as his senses roared against the stabbing that flared his nostrils.
Eyes watering, he choked and almost gagged against the leaves he was chewing. He coughed. Shoving her away from himself, he attempted to push the coca leaves to the right side of his mouth, wincing.
He didn’t need that.
Kumar’s cupped hand breezed up to his chin again as she met his gaze. “You may spit or choke, phaujee.” Her tone indicated she was not going to do it with any pleasure. “I will permit you to decide how the coca will be relinquished. If you prefer to be uncouth, you will fall in pain against the nearest wall giving into what you are: a man. Now relinquish the coca or I will do it again knowing you are too much of a gentleman to backhand me for doing the right thing.”
Mighty words for an eighteen-year-old.
Ridley swilled the juice in his mouth which he now felt too conscious of to swallow in her presence. “You certainly knew how to pull the lever,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
She crossed her arms. “I grew up seeing women do far worse in the name of saving those that matter. Now thank me. Do you think I enjoyed that? Do you think I enjoyed reducing myself to hurting you or touching your stamen as if I were a whore in a hovel looking for food?” Her voice cracked.
Numbness was overtaking his entire mouth and jaw as his bollocks ebbed from pain. He released a slowing breath through still flared nostrils in an attempt to control the overbeating of his heart knowing what she had resorted to in the name of her concern for him.
Why was his deranged soul endlessly honored?
Probably because he was usually at the other end of this, reprimanding others.
In kudos to her and that, he snapped out a handkerchief from his pocket, the one she had cried into (how symbolic) and spit the wad of coca leaves and limestone into it along with all the juice he’d been holding. “Ici.” He gave her a pointed look and turning, folded it and set it onto the side table. “Your concern is acknowledged given that I am first and foremost a gentleman. That doesn’t mean, however, I will cease chewing. I simply won’t do it in your presence.”
She kept her gaze trained at his head. “I will continue to be the conscience you clearly do not have, Mr. Ridley. I will find those leaves and I will burn them right along with tossing every pinch of limestone into the street.”
It irked him to hell that she was lecturing him.
He knew right from wrong. He defined it. “Those leaves aren’t yours to burn. So be wary of overstepping your bounds. This is my body and I will do with it whatever I please.”
“Do not chew coca and the limestone again. For if you die between this hour and before my departure to Calcutta, I will be left to hang! Or have you forgotten the charges being brought against me?”
Most women were too silly in the head to compete with his head.
And maybe that was why this one was so…marvelous.
For despite her age, and despite the antics that reflected that age, her mind was still sharper than most and that uncanny ability to sniff and taste plants as if she were a chef in the kitchen throwing nearby items into a pot was unnerving.
It gave him too many ghoulish ideas.
Ones that wanted to drag a very young girl to murder scenes as if it were the carnival in need of hot air balloons, ponies, and wood-painted toys.
She dropped her hand to her side. “There is a raven upstairs in your room,” she grouched. “Why am I not surprised you have a raven living with you in your own personal cemetery? The way he kept staring at me whilst I attempted to use the chamber pot was unnerving. Nothing I did prompted him to leave. It was like death staring at my piss, insisting I cross over.”
An exasperated breath escaped him. The cheeky bastard. “Chaucer!”
The raven flew out from his room upstairs into another room, giving him the tail.
Dragging back his hair, which kept falling into his eyes, Ridley flopped his hand to his side and offered, “For him to have stayed in your presence that long is a compliment. He never watches me piss.”
She blinked. “Is that supposed to be a compliment, Mr. Ridley?”
The last thing he needed or wanted was a pea hen with downy feathers telling him how and when to spit. This was his realm and the overlord in him wanted to roar about it, especially after Elizabeth. Edging back, he gestured toward the open doors of the study behind him. “If you will excuse me, I have to finish my notes. By all means, break a few vases if it’ll entertain you. All I ask is that you clean up afterward and above all…let me work.”
“You will not
be rid of me that soon. You owe me over two hundred thousand rupees.”
This one needed to be roped. “If you keep at it, I’ll let you and all eighteen of your little years marry all forty-four years of Dr. Watkins and what few hairs he has left on his ‘stamen’.”
“Cease using my age as an excuse for your inability to engage a woman in any civilized form of conversation.”
Ouch.
Peering past him and toward the candlelit room beyond, she said, “As your associate, I wish to see your study.”
“Associate?”
“Haan. You require my expertise tomorrow night, do you not? You are also investing in my independence. That makes us associates.”
He didn’t need to be a private inspector to know where this was going. “Let us be clear in this, little Kumar, lest the money I am giving you and the elaborate prison escape I conducted was not enough to translate your situation. You need me more than your plants will ever need the sun. Don’t disrespect that.”
“So announces the man who needs me to solve this crime. Given what I did in that carriage with a mere dappling, I believe my talents are far greater than anyone you have ever met. I am a botanical savant and if I were conceited – and fortunately, I am not – I would demand you bow.”
Touché in French, Latin, Spanish and Italian. With a smack.
She angled past him with a head wobble. “If you must work despite the late hour, I will assist you so you may retire sooner without the use of coca. Is that not thoughtful of me? Given how young I am? Usually the youth of this day is accused of thinking of nothing but themselves and having no common sense. Yet here I stand before you providing you the two that you clearly lack.”
Not even the fading remnants of coca humming through his veins could calm him.
Three days of this? And no coca?
Finkle I hate you enough to want to gouge you with a fork.
Because three days, that included, morning, day, and night, was a liiiiiiifetime in his investigative world. She and her chatter and her gorgeous eyes and her charming accent were going to be part of all four thousand, three hundred and twenty minutes of his life.
It was a lot of minutes.
And he had to work. He had to. Or he’d be up in the attic stringing rope around his neck waiting for the snap because he thought about suicide far more than any man should.
That was the glory of coca.
It muted those thoughts.
“Are you going to show me your study or not?” she prodded.
Ridley heaved out a breath. The entire world was against the poor thing, there was no reason he ought to join in. Fortunately, he didn’t have to be anywhere in the morning or the afternoon.
They had nowhere to be until tomorrow night.
“As you wish. Touch nothing.” He turned and stalked past her and into his study, angling past stacked books and newspapers and into the room. He jumped over papers and crossed the expanse of the room, weaving through furniture and stacks of more books.
Removing his great coat, he tossed it onto the bigger mess known as his desk.
Kumar pattered excitedly after him from the corridor with quick steps.
The level of that excitement toward seeing his study was mildly adorable.
Few appreciated what he did.
Lowering himself into the well-worn leather chair, he let it creak beneath his weight. With her tendency to do nothing but talk, talk, talk, he doubted he was going to get anything done tonight.
She veered into the cluttered piles of books and paperwork that covered the room and paused. Her full lips and eyes widened as if what she had stumbled upon a nightmare.
Why did he feel a need to defend his lifestyle? “It’s far more organized than it appears.”
“Is it?” Glancing around the lamp-lit space, she very carefully wove her way through stacked files, papers and old books that covered almost the entire floor up to her waist. She eventually paused before his desk, peering over a sizable pile of medical books separating them with the prop of her chin. “Your study is unusable,” she pointed out.
Polite though it was, he knew she was pillorying him. “The books were here well before I was, but insulting the mess changes nothing. It represents eleven years of the greatest work this city has ever seen or known.”
“You certainly know how to compliment yourself.”
“If I don’t do it, no one will. Not even Finkle.”
Too many took him and his work for granted knowing he worked for free and lived off the estate. It was how he honored the vast fortune his father had left him. One that had been bestowed in a most unusual form of ‘paper’ currency known as rare books.
He sold them off to collectors monthly like the bank notes that they were. Ten massive rooms in the house, not including the entire cellar, were filled from floor to ceiling and corner to corner with an unusual array of books dating back to as early as 1291.
As with all things, his father had been obsessive and had spent his already vast fortune by re-selling antiquities scavenged from aristocratic estates in France during the revolution.
It was all blood money.
Since inheriting the house almost eleven years earlier and moving into it, Ridley had made some progress in organizing the house. His bedchamber and the one adjoining it were finally properly furnished with French pieces, as were the corridors and the parlor.
In between whatever time he found, and before he sold off every book, he read them.
It was the one pleasure he gave himself: reading.
Unfortunately, every time a section of a room was emptied, it only warned him that the money was limited to the size of the house. There was no doubt in his mind that his father’s overly bizarre obsession with books and French revolutionary antiquities had resulted in the man’s demise. For the objects he hoarded had always meant far more to his father than people.
More than his own wife. More than his own son.
And now the books and French antiquities were here but his father wasn’t.
It was the very definition of irony.
Kumar peered toward the desk in renewed curiosity and gestured toward random, uneven piles of ledgers, newspapers, ash pans with several unfinished cigars, pieces of hemp rope, his shaving bag, and missives. “If this is what the inside of your mind looks like, I fear for you.”
“Ha. Ha.” He paused and added, “Ha.”
Her lips curved in prim amusement.
Oh to be young again and find the world funny. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d actually laughed. If ever.
He’d always been an overly serious child even well before the murder. The murder simply tapped a few more coffin nails into place.
Propping his elbows on the chair he was seated in, he bridged his fingers together. “Now that you have seen it and commented on it and have insulted the man who is saving your life – twice – I hereby bid thee a good night and you may go. Rest well.”
“I think not, Mr. Ridley. Your study is in dire need of attention. ‘Tis fairly obvious you have no desire to address it on your own.” Reaching out a hand, she picked up his great coat, ensuring she didn’t knock over any of his ledgers, and folded it over her arm. She then turned with the flick of skirts and the robe and wove through the piles, hurrying over to the coat stand in the farthest corner of the room.
He squinted. It took Elizabeth two weeks into their marriage for her to even realize it was there. This one was observant.
The overlord in him liked that. A lot.
“I will organize everything for you,” she conversationally offered. “Everything, everything. I will treat your papers as I do my plants. Which they once were. Wood.”
Tilting his head, he watched her sling the coat onto the brass arm of the coat stand. His jaw softened noting that her black braid was coming undone.
The end of that braid brushed her round, tight rear.
He didn’t like that he noticed. It made him feel like a thirty-two-ye
ar-old deviant standing at the window of a girls’ boarding school waiting to see more than skirts.
She smoothed his great coat and glanced back at him over her shoulder, her pale blue eyes looking for approval. A lock of onyx hair fell further down onto the side of her bronzed face.
He waited for her to adjust it. Tuck it back.
Lifting her hand to her hair, she tucked it back into place.
It was as if she could follow a command without him giving it. Rare. Nice.
“What shall I organize first?” she asked.
It was almost two in the fucking morning. “I would rather you not touch anything,” he confided. “Everything is where it needs to be. It may look like a mess, but I know where everything is.”
Most of it.
Some of it.
A quarter of it.
She lingered. With her dirt-smudged stockinged feet peering out beneath his robe, she wove back through stacks of newspapers toward him and paused before the desk.
“You need new stockings and an hour-long bath,” he pointed out. “For you, Kumar, still look like prison and that isn’t a compliment.”
She intently held his gaze and veered closer to the desk separating them. “Might you pretend to like me? Or do you not like women at all? Do you not associate with them anymore after your wife?”
A primitive warning sounded in his head.
He knew what she was asking: the wrong questions.
A part of him was deeply disappointed that an intelligent young girl like this would be drawn to an older morbid son of a bitch like himself. The last thing he wanted was to crush the idealistic petals off that little petunia. For whilst, yes, he was known for being incredibly generous in nature, and offered that generosity to everyone from sweeper to oyster shucker, he knew when to slam the door on a female nose when it tried to lean past the frame and see the rope.
Skimming her hand across the desk, she pursed her lips. “Given we have no choice but to co-exist over these next few days, I wish to know more about you, Mr. Ridley. I wish to know what the world does not.”
She wouldn’t be the first woman to be curious.
Too many tried to drape themselves across his cluttered desk with nothing but garter-tied silk stockings as if that was enough to grab the brain lodged in his skull. Give him Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon. That he would fuck on the hour.
Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Page 11
