Green Eyes (9 page)

At least the thieving little vixen hadn’t returned the gems to Graham. With any luck, the stones, along with whatever proof they offered, would be safe from Graham’s machinations until Julian figured out a way to retrieve them.

Which, of course, was easier said than done. His situation was looking increasingly dire. He had only some six or seven hours of life left in which to elude the hangman. The proof against him, even in the absence of the emeralds, was overwhelming. The trial had been speedy, the verdict swift and harsh. At dawn he was to be hanged in Newgate’s small inner courtyard; they were not even going to drag him off to Tyburn and thus offer him one final chance to escape.

Probing his psyche, Julian decided that his uppermost emotion was anger. Furious anger, which was at least an antidote to fear.

Anger because he, Julian Chase, had endured the ignominy of being arrested, the pain and humiliation of torture, and finally the dread of hanging, for a theft he had been unsuccessful in committing.

While that green-eyed little fraud of a witch had endured nothing—and gotten clean away with a fortune in emeralds with no one but himself the wiser.

A pretty trick. He had to give her that.

He’d like to give her something else, too, if he ever got the chance. Like the sole of his boot planted hard against her fancy-nancy backside.

The rattle of keys warned him that a guard was coming. Julian just had time to arrange his face into a hard, blank mask when the lock clicked and the cell door was thrust open. Immediately the dozen or so poor souls with which the cell was filled crowded away from the opening toward the rear, obscuring the corner where he sat.

This was the cell where the condemned awaited execution, and the visit of a guard at such an unusual hour brought primal terror. More than one of their number had been taken in just such a way, without warning, never to return. To hang? Who knew? Maybe to be tortured to death. Maybe … but speculating was worse than useless.

Julian could smell the fear of his cellmates even above the stench of their excrement, which lay in an open pile in another corner as no other facilities had been provided to deal with it. With the coming of the guard, the fear-smell intensified nauseatingly.

“Chase!”

Good God, surely they weren’t going to torture him on his last night on earth? But of course they were. They wouldn’t get another chance to wring his supposed knowledge from him.

Corpses keep their secrets.

“Chase! Get yer bloody arse out ’ere!”

The guard was a fine Cockney lad named Shivers, all six and a half feet and three hundred pounds of him. Julian was willing to bet that for sheer meanness, he hadn’t an equal even here, on Murderers’ Row.

“You gonna make me come in an’ get ya, Chase?” Shivers’s voice took on a taunt. Wincing inwardly while still careful to keep his face blank, Julian rose to his feet. His cellmates, relieved that the call was not for them, had already cleared a path to his corner. As he stretched to his full height—still some inches short of Shivers’s—he hurt in places he hadn’t known he possessed.

None of the dread he felt showed on his face.

“We both know you know better than that, don’t we, Shivers?” The insolence would cost him, Julian knew, but his pride was about all he had left. He wouldn’t let that be stripped from him along with everything else.

“Get out ’ere, ya bloody bugger! An’ it’s Mister Shivers to the likes of you!”

His movements severely hampered by the chain linking his ankles, Julian was not quite able to achieve the careless saunter for which he strove. Still, the leisureliness of his gait earned him a clout on the head from the stout staff Shivers carried.

Julian’s ears rang, but he didn’t even wince. By this time, he thought sourly, he’d grown almost accustomed to skull-splitting blows on the head.

“You deserve ’angin’, you do, and drawin’ and quarterin’, too! I jest wish … ah, weel. Some things a body’s got to do to live.” With this obscure speech, Shivers relocked the cell door and turned to prod Julian along the narrow corridor. From either side came the catcalls and jeers of desperate men. None wasted a word of sympathy on Julian. Instead of promoting camaraderie among the prisoners, the brutality of life in Newgate turned them into little better than beasts. If they couldn’t reach the guards, they were more than willing to attack each other, physically or verbally.

Wherever they were going, it was someplace Julian had never been. The hellhole where they usually tormented him was in the opposite direction.

Surely they had not decided to go ahead and hang him tonight.…

Fear made his mouth go dry, but he allowed no sign of it to show in his face or bearing.

Shivers taunted him, and Julian responded in kind, earning another clout on the ear as he shuffled ahead of the guard. Once, he stumbled on the uneven stone floor, only to be jerked to his feet by a hand in his collar. The ragged cloth ripped in half down the back. Shivers laughed. Julian felt an almost irresistible urge to turn and wrap the chain linking his wrists around the guard’s stocky neck.

Only the knowledge that, in his present condition at least, he was no match for Shivers stopped him.

This might be his last night of life, but while life remained to him it was sweet. To grapple with the burly guard would be nothing short of suicidal.

Shivers nudged him to the left, down a passage so dark that Julian could barely see where to put his feet. The hideous possibility that Shivers meant to murder him himself, for his own amusement, occurred to him.

Why else would they be moving down this little-used passage? Julian tensed all over, ignoring the shooting pains that wracked his muscles. At any minute he expected Shivers to put a stranglehold on his neck.

At the end of the passage was a small wooden door.

“Turn around,” Shivers ordered. Julian, stiff with suspicion, turned.

Shivers knelt and in one quick movement unlocked the leg irons. Julian’s heartbeat quickened. Was he to be hanged, or …

Then the guard removed the irons altogether and stood up to repeat the operation on the chain linking Julian’s wrists.

“What … ?” Julian began warily as his hands were freed. His eyes never leaving Shivers, he began to rub his raw wrists.

“Keep yer bloody mouth shut. You done been bought and paid for,” Shivers answered with an unpleasant curl of his lip. “Pity, too. Yours is one ’anging I woulda enjoyed.”

Then, before Julian could do more than blink, Shivers unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Beyond the door, which Julian saw to his amazement was set into Newgate’s formidable outer wall, lay a stinking gutter, a deserted alley—and freedom. Stars glinted in the black velvet of the sky; a chilling wind—never mind that it bore the noxious odors of slum London with it—ruffled his hair like a doxy’s carcass. Almost involuntarily he looked back down the passage through which he had come. The slight upward slant of the last few yards and his memory of the darkness and dankness of the rest brought with it realization: he had just traversed one of the secret underground tunnels with which Newgate was supposed to be rife.

“Get the ’ell out o’ my sight,” Shivers snarled, and pushed Julian out. Before he could so much as recover his balance, the door slammed shut behind him.

“ ’E gave us some bloody good advice, guv’nor. ’Ere, wrap this cloak around you and let’s be away.”

“Jim!” Julian whirled to see the wiry form of his groom cum valet cum henchman and friend step from one of the deep pockets of gloom at the base of the wall.

“None other.” Jim threw the cloak around Julian’s shoulders and secured it as though the bigger man was naught but a babe. Then he took Julian’s arm, tugging him along the alley toward the only slightly less menacing-looking street that lay beyond. From the occasional glances Jim cast over his shoulder, Julian deduced that he was anxious to get the looming walls of Newgate safely behind them. Despite the surprising lack of strength in his legs, Julian stepped up his pace. He’d breathe easier, too, when they were well and truly away.

“How the hell did you manage that?” As they approached the end of the alley, Julian looked down at Jim in amazement. It was becoming increasingly clear that somehow Jim had performed the impossible: he had secured Julian’s release!

“It cost us plenty, don’t think it didn’t. In fact, that bloke ’ad almost the last coin we ’ad in the world between us. ’E was dead set on seein’ you ’ang, but ’e was a greedy bastard. What finally saved you was you weren’t worth nothin’ to ’im dead.”

“Shivers may have been greedy, but I can’t believe he’d be stupid enough to put himself in jeopardy for a few pounds. They’ll miss me when they come to hang me in the morning. They’re bound to suspect he had a hand in my disappearance. Not that I’ll mourn his passing, but they’re liable to hang him in my stead.”

Jim cast Julian a sideways look as he hustled his master around the corner onto the shadowy cross street. A spluttering street lamp glowed faintly about a block farther along. All else was in deep shadow. Jim hurried him toward the lamp, ignoring the skulking figures that slunk out of their way as they passed as completely as he ignored the furtive eyes watching their progress from recessed doorways.

“Prison’s rotted your brain, Julie my lad. I tell you, it’s all fixed. Come the dawn, they’ll be ’angin’ somebody. It don’t matter to them or to us who.”

Julian saw it all then. Jim had bribed Shivers to let him go and hang someone else in his stead! Neat, very neat.

“Poor soul,” he said of his replacement, and meant it.

“Aye, but better ’im than you, right?”

Julian barely saw the closed, darkened carriage that waited at the curb before Jim was opening the door and thrusting him inside. After climbing in behind him, Jim banged on the roof. The carriage immediately lurched into motion.

Resting back in the far corner of the seat, Julian regarded his henchman with some fascination.

“You amaze me. Half an hour ago I wouldn’t have bet a groat on my chances of seeing another nightfall.”

Jim grunted and settled onto the seat beside him. Julian said nothing more for a few minutes, savoring the idea that he was really, truly free. Without an abiding fear for his life to dull lesser aggravations, he was becoming slowly aware of a variety of ills. His ribs, where they had been nearly stove in with a cudgel by Shivers and his cohorts, ached abominably. His wrists and ankles, rubbed raw by the shackles, stung. His head pounded, his empty stomach growled, his parched throat burned. But he was alive—and free!

“It’ll be good to get home.” Julian allowed his head to drop back against the seat. Christ, he was tired! In the aftermath of this nightmare, he firmly expected to sleep for a week.

Jim snorted. The carriage was dark inside, but by the light of a street lamp they rattled past Julian was able to see Jim’s expression. The thin, weathered Cockney face was twisted into a rueful grimace.

“What is it?” Julian asked with resignation. He’d seen that expression on Jim’s face before.

“Well, you see, the thing of it is I ’ad to sell the ’ouse. I ’ad to sell everythin’ the both of us owned, and it still weren’t ’ardly enough. ’Ad to bargain ’ard with that bloody guard, I did.”

“Samson?” Julian asked faintly.

Jim snorted again. “ ’Ell, I never even got a chance to sell ’im. They took ’im off somewheres when they took you.”

“Is anything left?”

Jim shook his head. “Not much more than’ll pay for a night or two’s lodging and a few decent suppers.”

Julian was silent for a moment, absorbing the enormity of the loss. Not that he had been a wealthy man, but he’d earned enough from his business enterprises—some of which were legitimate and some of which weren’t—to allow him to live very comfortably indeed.

As a green lad, he’d managed to accumulate a tidy nest egg by a series of increasingly risky robberies, which Jim had assured him would one day get him hanged. But Julian, no fool even then, had known enough to realize when to quit. He’d taken the proceeds from his thieving and bought a gambling hell, and with the profits of that hell he’d purchased another. Making money wasn’t hard, once he’d gotten together his stake. In fact, he had discovered that he had a knack for it. Now he’d have to start over again. But at least he was alive, and that was enough for the time being.

“You could have let them hang me, and then the lot would have been yours.”

Jim regarded him sharply. “Aye, and you could ’ave let me bleed to death in that gutter all them years ago, but you didn’t. Just a couple of bleedin’ ’earts, we are.”

This reminder won a grin, though faint and rueful, from Julian. He’d met Jim a year or so after he’d escaped from the Royal Navy. Knowing that without his granny he had no place in the gypsy tribe that had always considered him an outsider because of his mixed blood, he’d made his way to London from Portsmouth, where he had jumped ship. One of his shipmates had been full of tales of London’s glories, and Julian had decided that it sounded like the kind of place where a clever lad could make his own luck. In fact he had barely succeeded in keeping starvation at bay, and that in ways that he shuddered to remember. After turning his hand to everything from pickpocketing to begging, he fell in with a gang of older boys whose lay was robbing drunks. Jim had been lying in a London gutter, a great deal more than three sheets to windward, when the gang had fallen upon him, intent on lifting his purse. Drunk or no, Jim had put up a hell of a fight, which had ended when one of the lads sank a knife in his gut. Blood had spurted everywhere, Jim had fallen gasping to the street, and the rest of the lads had run for it. But Julian, victimized by another of those quixotic gestures that he had to constantly guard against, had stayed to help the flailing, swearing victim. They’d been together, one way or another, pretty much ever since.

“I’m grateful, you know.”

“And so you should be. I ’ave to tell you, it was awful temptin’. Only I figured, ornery as you are, you’d probably ’aunt me. I ain’t got no use for ’aunts.”

Julian didn’t even bother to reply to that. The truth was, he and Jim were the only family either of them had. Julian would have done as much for Jim had the situation been reversed.