Lady of Desire (30 page)

“Daphne Taylor?” he exclaimed in contempt.

“Yes, that’s the one. Daphne,” he said with a goatish leer.

“Father, that girl is a harpy. I’ll be marrying Lady Jacinda.”
If she ever conies to her senses
.

“The hell you will.”

Every authority-flouting bone in his body bristled at the order. “Why not? Lady Jacinda comes from an excellent family.”
Just like buying a milch cow
, he reminded himself cynically. “She’s beautiful, healthy, and she’s got a dowry of a hundred thousand pounds.” That ought to please the man.

“I don’t care how many damned thousands she comes with,” Truro slurred. “She’s a haughty little bitch an‘ I don’t like her.”

She doesn’t like you much, either
. Rackford struggled to hold his growing fury in check. “Well, I do.”

“Don’t you know what kind of little whore she is, you stupid sod? Just like her mother! No son of mine is going to end up wedded to a little round-heeled slut—”

“
Enough
!” he roared in his father’s face, losing his temper.

With a grunt, Truro took a swing at him; Rackford caught the man’s fist squarely in his right hand. His defensive reaction was smooth and automatic, flipping him over his shoulder, a move honed in countless street fights. His father sailed through the air and landed flat on his back in the marble corridor, the wind knocked out of him.

Rackford loomed over him with murder in his eyes and planted his foot on his father’s throat. A thousand memories of his suffering rushed through his mind and coursed like poison through his bloodstream.

“Do you know how easily I could kill you?” he whispered through gritted teeth as his heart hammered.

His father stared up at him with stark fear in his eyes. It filled Rackford with savage but fleeting satisfaction.

“Why—” Rackford started, but his voice turned to ashes in his throat. His pride refused to let him ask the aching questions that still bled in the core of his heart after all the years.
Why do you hate me so much? What did I ever do to deserve the treatment I received at your hands? How did I fail to live up
?

The moment of weakness veered past.

“Say what you want about me, but if I ever hear you speak another disparaging word about my future wife, I swear I will give you a beating you will never forget.” He removed his foot from atop his sire’s windpipe, squared his shoulders, and forced himself to walk away.

His father climbed to his feet and bellowed all manner of abuses after him down the corridor, reminding him, lest he forget, that he was a waste of life, bad, stupid, weak, worthless for every purpose but doing the work of the devil. “I should’ve let you rot in Newgate. Better the line should die than leave a sorry excuse like you to fill my shoes!”

Rackford laughed at the sheer, mad cruelty of his father’s words, but by the time he reached his room, he was shaking, and the happiness he’d felt driving home from the ball had fled.

He looked around hollowly at his dark, silent room and did not know what he was doing here. Closing the door behind him, he did not light a candle, but walked wearily to his bed; the sheer heaviness of the past seemed to press him down as he lay across it. For a long time, he stared up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes as the old, half-forgotten pain of his unworthiness rose up and enveloped him, and from it there was no escape; the failure, the flaw, was inside him.
Isn’t anyone ever going to love me
?

In the darkness, his heart scrabbled toward the one light he had found, the light that was Jacinda, but at the thought of her the pain doubled, trebled. It was so very easy to fear that everything his father said was true—and how could she ever love someone like him? Who was he fooling?

He could give her pleasure, but at core, he was still not worth a damn and certainly not deserving of her love. Anguish convulsed inside of him so sharply that hot, angry tears stung the backs of his eyes. He swiftly sat up, scowling them into oblivion. Rising sharply to his feet, he raked his hand through his hair and drove the demons back with a vengeance, willing himself to remember her many kindnesses to him, her caring questions—and the way she looked at him. She never looked at anyone else like that.

And then, of course, there was the matter of her diamonds. She had left them for him all those weeks ago, a gift freely given, aye, because she had seen something good in him.

She was mistaken
, said the insidious voice in his mind.
You’re worthless. You’re nothing
.

He didn’t know which side of himself to believe. With a low, angry growl, he got up, tugging restlessly at his cravat. He paced across his room in the darkness and went to the window. Moving the draperies aside, he glanced down to where his guards were stationed in the street. His eyes flickered with brooding violence.

He let the curtain fall and went to change his clothes.

A few minutes later, a vengeful hiss of metal sounded faintly in the darkness as he took out his favorite knife from the hidden compartment in the drawer. He looked toward the black city skyline beyond the window.

It was time to go hunting Jackals.

Before long, Rackford was stealing through the shadows of the rookery. He left his churning anger over his father’s scorn behind as he prowled through a narrow passage between buildings, making his way toward the entrance of the abandoned carriage factory that he had been using as his portal into his former gang headquarters.

The moon shone down like a watchful eye. The rookery was quiet.

Too quiet.

Maybe more of O’Dell’s men had deserted, he thought, for he knew he had them on the run.

It had started with Bloody Fred, spreading hysteria with all his ranting about having seen the ghost of Billy Blade. Rackford had heard that O’Dell had finally taken Fred back to Bedlam, where he was now kept safely in a cage, but the damage had already been done.

Chaos reigned in the rookery. Just as Rackford had planned, the Jackals gang was imploding, O’Dell’s control over his men slowly slipping away.

Baumer and Flash had killed each other in an argument over the pocket watch. With the scourge of his nocturnal visits, three other members of the Jackals had been found dead either in their rooms or in the surrounding dark alleys. All were those who had participated in the rape of Murphy’s daughter. Numerous others had deserted, for now all of St. Giles knew that the Jackals were being stalked, picked off one by one, by the ghost of Billy Blade. Wild rumors flew, fueled by the gothic imaginations of the illiterate Cockney ruffians and dirt-poor superstitious Irish stuffed into the surrounding tenement houses.

They had whipped themselves into a frenzy. Half the denizens of the rookery claimed to have seen his shade in numerous different places at the same time. Blade had come back from the grave, they said, to carry out his vow to avenge the honor of the innocent young girl. He was said to be a ruthless phantom, capable of cutting a man’s throat—but only the wicked need fear him. He could appear in different quarters of the neighborhood within seconds, they claimed, and would vanish without a sound. The only solid trace he left behind when he killed was the scattered petals of a red carnation.

Aye, he thought darkly, even if O’Dell did not believe in ghosts, his men were spooked, and that made it all the easier to defeat them.

Creeping up alongside the abandoned factory, Rackford glanced around to make sure no one saw him, then laid hold of the barnlike door.

Without a sound, he pulled it open just wide enough for him to slip through. The second he stepped over the threshold into the pitch darkness, pain exploded in Rackford’s skull as someone dealt him a crushing blow to the back of his head.

He let out a bellow and staggered down on one knee, stunned and half blinded with pain. Three men jumped on him, wrestling him to the ground. He fought to keep his balance, his head throbbing. He couldn’t see straight in the darkness. A fist socked him in the stomach, doubling him over. He fought blindly as they went for his weapons.

Someone tripped him, and the next thing he knew, his face was in the moldy sawdust. He could feel a man’s boot on the back of his head. Rackford spewed curses, but the boot heel only pressed his bleeding head down harder, mashing his cheek against the filthy floor. They jerked his arms up tight behind him.

“Well, I’ll be damned. He’s a live one, all right.”

“Pick him up.”

“O’Dell was right—Blade is alive!”

“Not for long.”

Someone spat very near him; then rough hands on each side of him grasped him by the arms and heaved him to his feet. With blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, Rackford lifted his chin and found himself eye to eye with Tyburn Tim, O’Dell’s right-hand man.

“Hullo, Blade. You look diff’rent. Aw, ye cut yer pretty hair. O’Dell’s gonna cut your throat.”

His only answer was an icy stare.

A cruel smile spread slowly across Tim’s face. “Cocky as ever. Well, we knew we’d get you one o‘ these nights.”

Tim punched him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. “That’s for Jones, you bastard.”

While he struggled to absorb the blow, the men holding his arms jerked him upright again at Tim’s curt nod.

“Bring him.”

He was half dragged, half carried next door into the headquarters, where they threw him into a storage room on the first floor and locked him in. Two stayed behind to guard him while Tyburn Tim left to fetch O’Dell.

His head throbbing, he dragged himself up slowly off of the floor with a silent groan of pain. He moved up onto his hands and knees, then sat back on his haunches while the world wove dizzily. God, what had they hit him with? He could feel the warm ooze of his blood trickling down the back of his neck from the blow to his head.
Guess I got careless. Or merely arrogant
. He hadn’t thought O’Dell was clever enough to discover how he had been sneaking in, but one thing was crystal clear despite his dazed wits. If he didn’t get out of here, he was dead. Rackford reached for his knife, preparing to defend himself, then realized grimly that they had succeeded in disarming him.

Standing a few feet away, one of his guards held up his lucky knife, taunting him with it. “Guess you’re just plain old Billy now—eh, Blade?”

Rackford cast a baleful look around the storeroom, trying to orient himself. He knew the storage room was situated off of the warehouse, not far from the loading dock and the few back steps where he had brought Jacinda in the night he had found her. As a matter of fact…

His gaze snagged upon the floorboards in the center of the room. By barest chance, he recalled that this room, too, held a thief’s trapdoor. He remembered because Eddie had once popped up merrily through the floor and interrupted him in the middle of enjoying the favors of a juicy lass whose name at the moment eluded him.

If he could do something about his two guards, he could slip down to the clammy, packed-earth foundations under the building and escape in a trice. The thought of running from Cullen O’Dell filled him with loathing, but he was unarmed and wounded; if he could not fight, he had to flee.

Just then, the door opened. Rackford looked up, but instead of Tyburn Tim returning with O’Dell, young Oliver Strayhorn prowled cautiously into the room. He was a newer member of the Jackals gang, a tall, lean, serious-looking lad with black hair and hazel eyes. Rackford’s pair of guards stopped their jeering and sobered at the young man’s entrance.

Rackford had heard that Strayhorn was gathering the other men’s confidence with his intelligence and natural ability as a leader.

Strayhorn approached him with measured paces. “So, you’re the great Blade. At last we meet.”

He said nothing.

“I have heard a lot about you.”

“None of it good, I’m sure.”

Strayhorn passed an assessing glance over his face.

“Quite the contrary. You ran the largest gang north of the Thames. You created it.”

He nodded. The Fire Hawks had been the result of several merged gangs, including his own former organization, the Tomahawks, and the Firedrakes of Clerkenwell.

“Even those closest to O’Dell admit that you knew how to make money,” Strayhorn remarked, studying him.

“Aye, takes time,” he conceded with a nod, trying to focus despite his throbbing head. “And nerve, and a little ingenuity. That’s all. What of you? Aren’t you among those closest to O’Dell?”

Strayhorn’s wary eyes flickered. He shook his head in a subtle negative to Rackford’s question. An old proverb came at once to mind:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
. Perhaps he and Strayhorn could be
of use to each other
.

Without further remark, the tall, lanky young man rose again and left the room, casting Rackford a shrewd, parting nod before pulling the door shut behind him. Though he suspected that Strayhorn had gone to see what he could do to help him, Rackford knew all too well that the law of the rookery was to look out for oneself first. He had no intention of trusting his fate to either Strayhorn’s scheming or O’Dell’s mercy, for the man had none. He had to get out of here now.

Furtively sliding his hand along the seam between the floorboards, he felt one of the boards give slightly. It was thick and weathered, only resting in place, not nailed down. It would prove a handy weapon as well as an escape hatch, he thought, eyeing his guards.

He lured them closer with a faint plea for water. They neared him, grinning.

“You want something to drink, you bloody bastard?” One started unhitching his trousers. “I’ll give you—”

With a sudden heave, Rackford brought the board up and swung it at them, knocking both men’s legs out from under them. The image of Jacinda’s face bloomed in his mind, filling him with new strength. He hit one a second time with the board to make sure he stayed down, kicked the other in the stomach, then tore back the other three floorboards and jumped down the narrow chute, landing agilely on the old, clammy flagstones. Before his guards recovered, he dashed out from under the building and raced across the street into the labyrinth of the rookery.