A Heart Deceived (28 page)

Once through the gate, they stopped and waited for the keeper’s key to turn in the grate. Twenty paces more and they stopped again while he unbolted another iron gate, allowed them to pass, and relocked that one as well. This same routine played out yet one more time, until finally they entered a room. Roland needed to be persuaded with a shove.

The chamber was tired, with a worn rug at the center. More rag than rug, actually. In one corner near the ceiling, large curls of paint peeled off the wall. Dirty streaks ran the length of the single window, which mimicked the outside bars. The entire space was hardly large enough to contain the bench, bookshelf, and desk crammed inside.

A man entered from a side door. In two steps his legs covered the distance to the table, where he paused and folded his lengthy arms. Everything about the man was elongated, from the stretch of his nose to the stripe of his thin body. Stubbly black hair crowned his head and most of his face. He eyed the group, frowning. “Did you not tell them we are full up, Mr. Beeker?”

The fellow that had led them through the labyrinth shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Naturally, Mr. Spyder. They would not be put off, though. And their paperwork is faultless.” He stepped forward and slapped down several documents, emphasizing his point.

Looking from the documents to Beeker, Spyder pursed his lips. “You know Dr. Pembernip will be put out by this. He won’t like it at all, I tell you. And Alf’s gone home for the night. We can’t properly receive inmates without Alf.”

A small hope fluttered in Miri’s stomach.

“Still …” Beeker shrugged. “They’ve got papers and all.”

Spyder retrieved a ledger from the bookshelf and paged through it as he inched onto the chair behind the desk.

Miri took the opportunity to step forward. “Sir, there has been a terrible mistake. I do not belong here. Would it not serve us all well were I to leave?”

Mr. Spyder ran an ink-stained finger down the length of a page, nodding all the while, then rose. “Very well.”

The tension in Miri’s shoulders uncoiled. “Thank God. And thank you, sir. I am—”

“Very well,
Mr. Beeker
.” Spyder shot her a pointed look, then redirected his glance at the man. “If you could please summon Graves to my aid?”

“Yes, sir.” Beeker disappeared out the same door Spyder had used.

Miri frowned. “But you just said you were full.”

“None of your concern, miss,” said Spyder.

“Surely you can see I am not mad, sir.” She looked over at Roland, hoping Spyder would follow her gaze and make the contrasting observation.

Roland didn’t disappoint. Spit bubbles gathered on his lips and dribbled down his chin.

Spyder shook his head and bent, his fingers scrambling across the parchments on his desk for a quill. “It is not for me to say.”

“Make it yours to say. You obviously document the admitting. One less inmate to house would lighten your load, and I daresay your Dr. Pembernip would not be nearly as ‘put out.’” She leaned forward, schooling her face into the most pleading of looks. “You would earn my eternal gratitude.”

Spyder lifted his face, meeting her gaze, and scratched the black stubble on his chin. Slowly, he stepped away from the desk and crossed to Mr. Handy, stooping toward the man’s ear. “Why did you bring this woman?” Though he kept his voice low, the small room projected it.

“Hysterics,” answered Handy.

“Ahh,” said Spyder, an all-encompassing “ahh” that clearly meant she’d committed a sin.

An unforgiveable sin.

“I am not hysterical!” She didn’t shout, but it reverberated as if she had.

Roland snapped his head toward her and raised his manacled hands. Chained or not, he managed to point a finger at her. A stream of Latin flowed out of his mouth, competing with the bubbles. Loose hair covered one eye. The other glared at her. Passion possessed him, and he jumped atop the bench, swinging his arms like a scythe.

“Get down.” Mr. Handy reached to pull Roland off. “You crazy nit.”

Roland smacked him in the head.

Mr. Handy went for his throat.

“Don’t!” Miri cried. She turned to Mr. Spyder. “Do something.”

Barely flicking his eyes her way, he strolled back to the desk and sat.

Mr. Handy cut into Roland at the knees. Her brother fell forward, his face making a sickening crack against the floorboards.

“Please!” cried Miri.

Spyder lifted his hand, examined his fingernails, then nibbled on one as if there were no chaos erupting in front of him.

Roland wailed and flailed about. Blood snaked a trail down his chin from a cut lip. Handy kicked him.

“Mr. Spyder, do you intend to sit there and watch my brother take a beating?” Miri reeled back a step. “This is insane!”

“Exactly,” he said.

At that moment, Mr. Beeker and an enormous fellow, presumably Mr. Graves, entered the room. Beeker handed Spyder a long stick with a loop of wire at one end, matching one that Graves held.

“Thank you,” said Spyder.

He turned toward Miri, lifting the stick as one might a butterfly net. She threw her hands up—but too late. The loop cleared her head, settling on her neck. Wedging her thumbs between wire and flesh, she tugged.

Spyder yanked it tighter, as one might do to a naughty pug on the end of a leash, then looked past her. “Graves, the one on the floor is yours. Put him … somewhere. Good night, Mr. Handy. Mr. Beeker, see Mr. Handy out, would you?”

Then he pivoted and dragged her along.

The wire bit into the back of her neck. Either she followed willfully or got decapitated.

He tugged her through a door and down a dimly lit corridor. She choked on a scream. If rot began in one’s bones, then the outside of Sheltering Arms had been an accurate indicator of the inside. Great patches of plaster from the walls lay in crumbles underfoot, leaving gaping holes that exposed the lath bones of the building. The floor rose and fell at whim, sometimes requiring a step up or down to resume walking. Soot darkened the upper halves of the walls and ceilings, adding a cavelike effect to the corridors.

Spyder paused, withdrew a key from his pocket, and opened a door. Monkey shrieks and howling gibberish shattered her ear bones as he pulled her through. The noise crawled through every part of her, invading the smallest spaces, then swelled until she might burst.

They entered a large area ringed with more doors. Each contained a slit at eye level, just enough to peek through. Nearing one, Spyder leaned forward for a look. The stick between them forced Miri to remain behind. A sharp thud jarred the door, and Spyder reared back, key in hand.

Gooseflesh rose on Miri’s arms, and she was suddenly glad for the stick separating them. She had no desire to look through that peephole.

Another thud smacked the door. Louder. More violent.

Spyder set the key in the lock.

Was he seriously going to put her in there? Tears welled. Her throat clogged.

“Please …” That she managed to speak was a miracle. “Anywhere but in there.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. That he’d heard her choked voice was miracle number two.

The key slid out from the lock. Miracle three.

Miri exhaled a heartfelt sigh. “Thank you.”

Spyder pivoted so fast, the wire cut into her neck. She ran to keep up with his long strides. They exited the big room with all its teeth-rattling noise and ascended a narrow stairwell. By the time they reached the top, she could hardly breathe. It opened onto a small landing with one door. A solid door with no peepholes, and no noise behind it except for—

Miri listened hard.

As Mr. Spyder inserted the key into the lock, a clicking sound came from the other side, like a crayfish scuttling backward over rocks. Many of them. An army with snipping and snapping pincers.

Fear stopped her heart as Spyder opened the door.

He yanked upward on the stick, freeing her neck, then reached to grab her forearm and threw her in.

Miri screamed.

The women looking back at her had no faces.

30

“Move it!” Nigel shouted, fed up with Ethan’s belligerence. He gave him a hard shove to the shoulder blades and smiled when Ethan stumbled through the scarred door of Newgate prison. Once it clanked shut behind them, all his pent-up tension drained like waste down a sewer. Nigel circled his shoulders, stretching out the kinks, then tipped back his hat. Though he’d kept the brim low and his collar flipped up, he’d felt exposed trekking through London proper. Prodding an uncooperative prisoner attracted attention—a veritable calling card, letting Buck know he was back in town.

“This way.” A guard motioned for them to follow down a sconce-lit corridor. The flickering light cast freakish shadows against the stone walls, and a dull haze filled the air. If ever there was a picture of hell on earth, this was it—especially with the added scrape from Ethan’s chains against the floor. The moans muffled behind locked doors gave it a nice touch too.

Drawing alongside Ethan, Nigel nudged him. “We can still turn back. It’s not too late. Just say the word … er, sorry, mate. Forgot. Nod yer head.”

Mouth gagged, Ethan fixed his stare on the guard in front of him.

“Pigheaded fool.” Nigel flattened his lips into a sneer. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be beggin’ me to get you out.”

He cuffed Ethan in the head, delighted that it made the blighter stagger.

“In here.” The guard directed them through yet another door, closer to the entrails of the jail. The deeper into the guts of Newgate, the more putrid the stench. Disease, waste, and death combined into a stink that violated the nostrils and ravaged the senses. Nigel flipped his collar back up and breathed through it.

They entered a large room with shelves upon shelves of leather-bound books. One lay open on a desk beside an ink bottle and several quills. Behind the desk sat a man, rather gawkish, with one eye that couldn’t seem to decide which direction it should look. It roamed free, the iris romping about in its field of white, while the other eye hooked and reeled them in.

“Name?” he asked.

Nigel stepped forward. “Nigel Thorne.”

It was a little disconcerting how one eye remained on Nigel while the other focused on the man’s quill as he wrote in the book. The pen stopped scratching, and the man looked up. For the briefest moment, both pupils stared at Nigel. “Crime?”

Gads, was the man lazy of mind as well as of eye? “No, no. I’m not the bleedin’ criminal. He is.” He hitched a thumb over his shoulder.

The man’s jaw jutted forward, baring a crooked rack of teeth, then he dipped his head and made an excessive show of crossing out his last entry.

“Name?” he repeated without looking up.

“Ethan Goodwin,” Nigel answered.

“Crime?”

“Pending.”

The pen froze in midair, and the man raised his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Uh …” Who could think while watching an eyeball do loop-de-loops? “Probably murder.”

Setting down the pen with one hand, the man corked the ink bottle with the other. “Who did you say you are?” he asked.

Behind him, Nigel heard the distinct scrape of chain against floor. Apparently he wasn’t the only one Mr. Crazy-Eyed-Keeper-of-the-Books was annoying.

“I am Nigel Thorne, bailiff to the Crown, serving the parishes of Old Nichol, Ramsgate, and Walpole.” He puffed out his chest and nodded toward Ethan. “And a bounty hunter, when needs be.”

With raised brows, the man skewered both of them with a look—simultaneously. “Judging from the way you’ve got that fellow trussed up, I can see you’re capable of fancy knotwork, but perhaps you’re not familiar with the legal process. You can’t go locking up a man based on probability.”

Nigel’s impatience swelled into anger. He widened his stance. No half-blind clerk would question his authority. “Of course I’m familiar with the legal process, and I said his charges are pending.”

“What does that
mean
?”

“This!” Nigel rushed toward the table, intending to choke the blasted weasel until his eyes popped out. The guard’s footsteps sounded from behind, forcing him to rethink his strategy. Instead, he thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled bill, holding it inches from the man’s face. Neither eye would miss it at that distance.

The clerk pinched it with thumb and forefinger, then secreted it away like a squirrel with a nut. He uncorked the ink, picked up the quill, and mumbled as he wrote, “P-e-n-d-i-n-g.”

“Duration?”

Nigel glanced back at Ethan. Cold steel glimmered in his gaze. Good thing he couldn’t voice that rage. Persuading such a mule could take longer than he thought. He turned back to the desk. “Indeterminate.”

Crazy eye slapped down the pen. “Believe it or not, Mr. Thorne, Newgate has certain standards, one of which being accurate records. I must know the expected length of sentence, or how will we know when to release—”

Nigel held out another bill.

The man plucked it away as fast as the first. “Indeterminate,” he said under his breath as he wrote.

Chains rattled again. Nigel ignored them. “Now about this man’s stay, I’d like it to be … memorable.”

“Hmm …” Tapping the quill against his chin, the man let both eyes wander. “Memorable as in holiday to the countryside, or as in suffering through a severe case of the pox? Either way, it will cost you.”

Nigel’s anger flared as out of control as the man’s ridiculous eyeball. He emptied his pocket and slammed the contents down on the table. “A pox on you and on Ethan Goodwin!”

He spun and stalked out the door, not giving the record clerk or Ethan a second glance. He had half a mind to leave him in there to rot. No one would know or care. He didn’t slow his long strides until the grey fortress spit him out onto the street.

“See? That man can’t get outta there fast enough … hey—hey, Thorne!”

“Hey, Duff,” Nigel answered before he turned around, so familiar was the snuffling voice.

Duffy’s long snout twitched, usually a sign he was thinking hard. Either that or Nigel smelled funny, which could be the case after the last few days of hard travel. Duffy held the collar of a ragtag boy in one of his hands and scratched behind his ear with the other. Yep, definitely thinking hard.