Dark Season (20 page)

“Are you an artist?” she asked. His eyes narrowed.

“Blackwood told you.”

“No.” She waited before elaborating. She wasn’t versed in drawing-room theater, but she understood the basics of dramatic timing. Maybe she would get the hang of this after all.

“It’s the way you look at things,” she said at last. “Dissecting them. Though I suppose I might as well have guessed you were a zoologist.”

“Yes,” he agreed dryly. “Or a doctor.”

“But there’s also a watercolor signed
St. Aubyn
in the Tromblys’ sitting room.”

“A detective
and
a medium.” He laughed, a surprisingly harsh sound. “No secret will be safe.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. She saw the sudden turbulence in his eyes.

Classically handsome, tall, blond Lord St. Aubyn wasn’t a statue, after all. He was a man, wracked by some torment she couldn’t comprehend. Her intuition stirred, guiding her.

“Oh, I can keep a secret,” she said, smiling. “But secrets can eat away at you, my lord.”

There.
He flinched. She wasn’t mistaken. He struggled under some terrible burden. She stepped toward him, pursuing her advantage.

“Perhaps some secrets need to be told,” she whispered, focusing all of her attention on his face. Letting the rest of the room fade away. “Perhaps, my lord, it’s time to tell.”

He recoiled.

“Are you a witch?” he rasped.

“No, she is not.” Lord Blackwood stepped between them. His approach had been silent.
That lethal tread.
“She is not a witch. She is something else entirely.”

His eyes flicked over Lord St. Aubyn, noting his pallor.

“Clement,” he said, but Lord St. Aubyn shook his head warningly.

“Don’t speak to me,” he said. “Sid, I can’t … ” He almost lurched as he left them. Ella watched him make his way to Mr. Tenby. Making his excuses, it seemed. He was leaving. She had shaken him badly.

It wasn’t witchcraft. No one’s conscience was clean. Give a hint. Make an insinuation. A man’s guilt supplied the rest. She was learning lessons she wasn’t sure she wanted to learn.

“What did you say to him?” Blackwood stood no closer to her than St. Aubyn had a moment before, but she could feel the heat from his body. She could smell his spicy scent—not cologne, something subtle, natural. It made her want to step closer. Everything about him drew her in. The black current …

She couldn’t form a word. She could only study him. Midnight blue. Ivory black. He was made up of so many contrasting colors. So many irreconcilable elements. The planes of his face were so harsh. But his lips could be so tender. She
had
to look away from his lips.

Music began to play. Her lips parted. For a moment it seemed like magic. It wasn’t, of course. Mrs. Hatfield, dislodged from the sofa, had sat at the piano. She had opted for Beethoven. A bold choice. Her touch turned the notes to mud.

“Let’s talk about something else then.” Lord Blackwood leaned over her. “How did you come by the jewels that you carried hidden in your skirts?” His voice was barely above a whisper. The question hit her like a sledge. She felt pain in the crown of her head, and a sheet of darkness came down to obscure her vision.
This
was the nightmare. It was being set into motion now. The tempo of the sonata was all wrong. She couldn’t think.

“Tell me where they came from.” His face was tense; his eyes brilliant.

Had he searched the room? But how would he know she had hidden the pouch in her dress? Someone knew, of course, in the Tromblys’ house. Whoever undressed her when she was first carried into the house unconscious … Whoever took the gown into the laundry room …
Stupid.
Stupid of her to count herself lucky the articles were all there and think nothing more would come of it. That it wouldn’t be mentioned. Who had told him? Mrs. Hexam. Lizzie.

“Are they under your skirts now?” His gaze slid down from her face. He stepped closer to her. Everyone else was arrayed around the piano, watching Mrs. Hatfield torture the keys.

This was why he had not returned her smile. He thought she was a thief.

“Tell me,” he whispered. Was there the hint of a plea in his voice? Did he hope she would give him an explanation that he could accept?

She couldn’t. She tried.
They were left to me by my father, Mr. Reed. A simple, poor man, a poet, yet possessed of a few very fine pieces of jewelry and silver. As poets sometimes are
. She tried, but no sound came out. Why would he believe her? She could produce no proof. If he began to look into the Reeds of Somerset and found nothing that matched her stories, what then? If he began to investigate her identity …

She shook her head mutely.

“Miss Reed,” he said. Cold. Detached. “Do you know the punishments for theft?”

She took a shuddering breath and met his eyes. She said nothing. The room fell silent. Mrs. Hatfield had finished the first movement.

She heard Lady Berners’s acid voice. “Do stop there, Mrs. Hatfield. I can’t imagine the other movements add a thing.”

And Mr. Huntington. “Bravo! Miss Tenby, won’t you oblige us? Perhaps something lighter? A Celtic air?”

Blackwood stepped back from her. His chest heaved as he drew a deep breath. He spoke rapidly, as though he needed to get the words out before he could reconsider.

“I will pay a visit to Trombly Place tomorrow afternoon. If you are no longer in residence at that time, I will consider the problem taken care of by itself. If you
are
there when I arrive”—he lifted his hands, considering them before they folded into fists—“then you will leave with me,” he finished. “And I will drag you straight to Newgate.”

She had moved beyond fear. She gave a short nod. Tomorrow then. She would be back out in the storm. Her gaze wandered across the room to Mrs. Trombly. She would leave without saying goodbye. It would be easier that way.

“You have nothing to say?” Again, that faint note. So faint she could almost believe she had imagined it. But she knew she hadn’t. He wanted to believe something better of her than this. How strange that she felt she could understand him, the complex of emotions that raged within him. Maybe he would understand her too.

My name is not Miss Reed. I am not a thief. I am …

“Nothing, Miss Reed?” The note was gone. His voice was like black glass. Blank. Smooth. Hard. His lids half hooded his eyes. He was dispassionate. Absolutely unmoved. Unconcerned.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

“I won’t be there, my lord,” she said. “You won’t see me again.”

The London night matched Isidore’s mood. The city looked like lead; the rain ran down like ink. Sleep would be impossible.

“Covent Garden,” he told the coachman. He wanted to watch a fight, or pick one. The coach rolled east, away from the splendor of Mayfair. Soon the wheels rattled on broken pavements and cobbles. The vibrations set his teeth on edge. He stared out the window at the heaps of bricks that passed for buildings, at the hovels, booths, and stalls. He caught a whiff of the air as the coach slowed. Pestilential stench.

Disease billowed from these winding alleys. Maybe it was in the water. Maybe it was in the foul vapors that rose off the river, or in the saliva of the rats that scurried in mobs over the refuse. Most likely, it was in the city itself. The opulence of Park Lane produced the squalor of Seven Dials. The only thing to do was raze the metropolis, the whole thing, not only the flash houses but Buckingham Palace, and start again.

He pressed his forehead to the glass and focused his eyes on the beaded water glowing sickly yellow with the light from the coachman’s lamp. Bennington had accused him of radicalism. He wasn’t a radical. His mind went to extremes so he could reject taking action and resign himself to doing nothing. He was a fatalist.

Penn, on the other hand, acted with the courage of his conviction. He made a difference, a small difference, every day. He was a good man. He’d never been a member of their set. His older brothers were—both of them notorious rakes—but David wouldn’t carouse. Too serious. Isidore regretted that he hadn’t made the effort, years ago, to get to know him. He’d been too busy drinking and climbing in and out of windows. Back then he was far more interested in the Mrs. Hatfields of the world than he was in skinny, bookish medical students. He
had
saved Penn from a beating at Eton. He recalled grabbing the boy’s two assailants and knocking their heads together. Bloody mess that had been. He wondered if Penn remembered it.

How different they’d turned out. Penn helped people. Saved people. Isidore only hurt people. Even when he meant to do the right thing, someone ended up bleeding.

And now he was driving into the slums, hoping to find a strongman he could punch until his knuckles split. That was the one difference between him and his father. He didn’t target the weak. But he was filled with the same violence, the same hatred, that he had seen so often glittering in his father’s ice-blue eyes. Nights like this he couldn’t deny it.

The coffeehouse he remembered, across from St. Paul’s, always open until the wee hours of the morning and filled with pugilists pounding one another in mills both sanctioned and spontaneous, was abandoned. By men. Not rats. He could hear them squeaking as he stood outside the moldering hulk, looked up at the chimneys from which no smoke rose, black against the leaden sky. He climbed back into the coach and rolled away from the open square; the coach turned onto narrow streets, moving further east, or maybe south. It was impossible to get his bearings in that warren of mud and stone, plank and brick.

After a time, he stopped the coach. He chose a public house with music filtering out into the street. An iron signpost stuck out above the door, but the sign had long since fallen. There was a dead crow by the door, wing outstretched. He stepped over it. Not everyone had.

The Sign of the Dead Crow
, he thought.
Perfect
.

Once inside the taproom, the fight went out of him. Such a grimy, greasy, undernourished lot. Men in threadbare coats fastened by pins. The comic vocalist who accompanied the piano was hunched and gray as a gargoyle.

Isidore ordered a glass of raw gin and sat on a deal bench to drink it. A woman swayed at a nearby table. Drunk. Her cheeks were sunken. Her left eye was bruised and swollen. Who had done this to her? It could have been any or none of these wretches. She saw him looking.

“Ain’t you a swell.” She winked at him with her good eye. “Two penn’orth of gin.”

He glanced around for the potboy and saw him sitting by the bar fire with his own pint pot. His apron may have been white once. Isidore signaled, but the potboy, shooting to his feet at the proprietor’s call, went in the other direction, through the red curtains that blocked the passageway to another room. Isidore rose, shouldered his way to the bar, and bought two glasses of gin and a few biscuits from the basket. He put one glass and the plate of biscuits on the table in front of the woman. She laughed at the biscuits.

“Plenty of sawdust on the floor without paying for it,” she said. “Sit ye down. You ain’t ugly.”

He sat with her. Gloom weighed heavier and heavier upon him. Luckily, she didn’t want to talk but lapsed into vacancy. The room was warm and smoky. The comic vocalist retired to a table, and a sailor leapt up to begin an Irish melody. He had a rumbling, deep voice and sang the notes true.

“’Tis never too late for delight, my dear. And the best of all ways, to lengthen our days, is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear.”

Isidore finished his gin. The glass had sweated a new ring on the table. The table’s surface showed easily a dozen such rings. Some overlapped. He thought of chains. Chains symbolized bondage. They symbolized forever.

He set his glass down. The woman snapped to attention.

“Not a drop,” she observed. “Me neither. And warn’t I a nickey to think you’d buy me another?”

He bought her another, which she took without thanks. What could he do for the woman other than this? Buy her a drink. Treat her like a human being. She had a story too, a story similar, no doubt, to many others, but her own nonetheless. She was an individual, though her life, with all its particulars—petty cares and great loves, memories, dreams—would go unrecorded, unremembered. Drudge. Whore. He caught her ungloved hand—cold, the skin dry and yellow as parchment—and kissed it goodbye. She laughed again at that. The eye that wasn’t swollen shut was a muddy green.

His mother’s eyes had never been blackened, swollen like hers. His father was almost surgical in his precision. He aimed to instill the most fear, to inflict the most pain, and to leave the least visible traces. He wasn’t crude, like the man who had marked this woman. The upper classes beat their women below the neck. Or cut or burnt. Or relied on threats and humiliation.

Sometimes he wondered if the world had in it already every kind of monster. Or would new monsters arise, specializing in brutalities as yet unimaginable?

Had he thought
London
should be razed? Make it the whole miserable world of man.

It was a quarter after twelve. He left the Sign of the Dead Crow feeling darker than he had when he’d entered. He wasn’t ready to return to the coach. He walked through streets so narrow his shoulders almost brushed the bulging bricks on either side. It reminded him of Cairo. But Cairo didn’t smell as strongly of pig shit. Must be sties in the courts that opened here and there, behind the butcher shops and taverns. The rain had stopped. He headed toward the water, the wind coming hard against him, sweeping away the pig and replacing it with a thick, briny smell. Tide was running in.

Clement had left the party looking as though Miss Reed had stabbed him through the heart. Isidore should have followed him. They could have gone to the club, talked it all out over brandy and cigars. Clement would tell him what Miss Reed had said to him, and he’d tell Clement that she was poison. A liar. A thief. Clement would tell him he’d done what he had to do. Discharged his responsibility, and as mercifully as could be expected. He’d be home by now in front of the fire, sleepy, relieved, instead of wandering by the riverside. But for some reason, Isidore hadn’t been able to let Miss Reed out of his sight. He couldn’t go after Clem when she was still in that parlor, standing in the far corner, slim and strange and silent, those dark eyes so full of pain.