Private Dicks (32 page)

He could scarcely believe that he and Teigh were no longer at odds, and might not believe it save for the marks that Teigh left scattered over his body: the one on his neck that clothes barely hid, the bruises at his hips where he had gripped tightly while Esmour rode him, and many more besides.

Feeling suddenly too hot, Esmour quickened his step as he made his way through the mazelike halls of the royal palace. He was dressed in the finest clothing he owned, clothes he found it hard to believe he owned—but really, it was all just one more element of the dream world in which he found himself living.

Reaching the throne room, he tried to calm his nerves. The guards at the door bowed and opened it before he could speak, murmuring politely as they bid him pass. Esmour's spurs jangled with his steps, cutting through the silence that had reigned until his arrival.

He stopped just inside the door and knelt, bowing his head low. When he was bid, he walked until he was halfway across the room and knelt again. When he was again bid to move, he walked until he could kneel before the throne itself and once again bowed his head low.

"Rise," the king commanded, and Esmour obeyed, lifting his head and standing. Teigh was a perfect younger version of his father. The king's red hair had more silver, but his eyes were no less vibrant a green. "Gods grant you good morning, Sir Esmour."

"Gods grant you a pleasurable day, Your Majesty," Esmour replied, only barely able to meet his eyes, terrified, painfully aware of the dozen other men in the room. Of Teigh, who stood just to the left of the throne. His brother, the crown prince, stood to the right, a dark and beautiful likeness of the late queen.

The king chuckled. "I give my thanks again for your saving of my son's life and disposing of the traitor Pearson. There has been much talk of what to do with his holdings. We have decided that, in light of your actions, they should go to you along with the position of Deputy Chief Royal Inquisitor."

"What!" Esmour said, then recovered himself, mortified by the rude outburst. "Majesty—I am honored, but hardly worthy—"

"That is not for you to decide, but for us. Are you saying we made a poor decision?" the king demanded, looking more amused than angry, to Esmour's relief.

Esmour opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally conceded, "No, Majesty."

"There we have it, then. The papers are still being drawn, but from this day forth, you are Lord Esmour Locke, ninth Earl of Halfnight, Deputy Chief Royal Inquisitor. Do you accept or reject the offer, Lord Locke?"

"Accept, Your Majesty, by your pleasure and grace."

"Then it is done. You are dismissed, Lord Locke, and take your bothersome prince with you."

Teigh chuckled softly as he left the dais and joined Esmour, walking with him out of the throne room and into the castle halls. Esmour looked up at him, shivering slightly when Teigh's knuckles brushed his cheek. "I am an earl? I do not understand how that happened. I am just a robber turned inquisitor—" He stopped when Teigh covered his mouth with one finger.

"I said that you are mine. I ask my father for very little, and do everything that he asks of me. I have always served faithfully and done my duty well. It was an easy enough request for him to grant me, and grant it happily he did. It pleases him more than he will ever admit that they call you his Lymer. Come along, poet, and we shall see about the formal papers before I take you to view your new holdings."

Esmour shook his head in wonder and accepted the hand that Teigh offered him, letting himself be led away to assume his new duties and place as the man who belonged at Teigh's side.

It is raining when Jamie gets home, making the streets and steps leading up to his lodgings slick and treacherous and causing his crutches to slide a little against wet stone. He manages to climb the steps and unlock the door without falling, though. Once inside, Jamie slowly hauls himself up the short flight of narrow stairs to his rooms. When he lights the lamps in the sitting room, though, he sees that water has begun leaking from the ceiling into the corner by the window once again.

"Damn and blast!" Rushing across the room as fast as his crutches allow, Jamie gathers up the papers and books within reach of the water as he nudges a basin under the steady trickle coming from the ceiling.

Finally sure that none of his papers have been ruined, he moves towards the fireplace where a wheeled chair sits. Settling into it, Jamie lays his crutches aside with a sigh of relief before stretching his arms out and rolling his shoulders back. Finally relieved of some of the tension in his back and shoulders, he takes a small key from the pocket of his waistcoat. It is shaped rather like a clock key and when inserted into the keyhole on the arm of the chair, the small motor at the back of the chair comes to life with a hiss of steam. Jamie rests his hand on the wooden control box that allows him to guide the chair, pushing the knob on the top of the box forward and propelling himself closer to the fireplace so that he can stoke the flames with a poker.

It's late enough that he won't be able to request tea be brought up to help ward off the cold, so instead Jamie guides his chair over to the desk and starts going through his papers. Work has been limited lately, not that work for him is ever plentiful. He tries hard not to think about the last case he had been offered—his last client had been willing to pay him twice what he'd ended up taking to have him set up her husband for a burglary he hadn't committed.

Jamie rubs his hand across his face. He hates those cases most of all, the ones where he is forced to do disreputable things. It had been so obvious that the husband had been abusing her grievously, though. Plus, he'd needed the money.

Father Hartgrove's voice speaks in his head, There is nothing wrong with the profession of clerk. Jamie can imagine Father Hartgrove frowning at him from across his kitchen table. It is a good, honest, reputable trade, he would say, one which you, my boy, happen to be quite good at.

Jamie rubs his hand across his forehead. If he'd been able to hold onto a job in his own right, he'd have stayed a clerk forever. He might have been bored to tears, but Father Hartgrove had been right: he was good at it. However, Jamie knew none of the positions he'd held as a clerk were because of his talents in that area; instead, he'd held them because his employers all owed Father Hartgrove a favor or two. He enjoyed the private investigating far, far more though, which was why he had quit being a clerk in the first place.

However, living as he did now, with only shady dealings and less than honest work to his name, makes him almost reconsider charity. The private investigating business has not been kind to him since he started. Clients only needed to get a look at the chair before they chose to take their business elsewhere.

"Not everyone had even charity," he reminds himself, thinking of the helplessness and desperation in his last client's eyes. Besides, if not for Father Hartgrove's charity, he would have been dead at thirteen. Jamie's real father had died before Jamie was old enough to remember him. His mother and siblings had worked in the cotton factories, weaving cotton into cloth. Jamie had worked in the factory, too, until one of the wagons baring cotton for the mill had run him over when he was twelve. He was lucky; he should have died that day. Instead, he had been left unable to walk, and his mother had turned him over to Father Hartgrove because she could not afford to keep a child who could no longer work. If it hadn't been for Father Hartgrove, Jamie would have ended up on the streets with no prospects in life.

So, he is lucky.

Jamie guides his chair closer to the fireplace. The entire day spent out in the rain tracking down his contacts had rewarded him with nothing; no work, no cases, nothing. Sighing, he picks up one of the books from the side table.

There are three piled on the table next to the settee: one on botany, one on the history of the Roman Empire written in Italian, which he is trying to teach himself how to read, and a novel about a scientist who creates a clockwork creature. The novel itself is not well-written—the plot is an obvious butchery of Mrs. Shelley's much more elegant tale—but Jamie doesn't care. He loves cheap penny novels. It's that book that he picks to amuse himself with for the evening.

By the time the fire has burnt down, Jamie finds himself staring out the darkened window, wondering if the technology to create the kind of mechanized monster the novel describes does exist. He rubs his hands across the polished wooden arms of his chair as he puts the novel aside and picks up the book on botany to read in bed before banking the fire for the evening and turning the gas lights down as he makes his way to his bedroom.

The man who made his chair had claimed the technology for such a marvel had come from the College of Natural and Computative Science, smuggled out against the wishes of the government. Jamie has never been sure if he believes such a claim. Yes, the technology the chair used was extraordinary, but he'd seen many such technological wonders being sold on the black market or in the backstreets of London.

Yet if such things were from technological discoveries made by the college and smuggled out, there could be much greater scientific masterpieces still within those academic walls limited to elite scientists and the queen. They might have even found a way to make mechanical men.

Jamie maneuvers the chair into his tiny bedroom, which is almost too narrow for the chair to fit in along with his bed and small night table.

As he readies himself for bed, Jamie frowns at his own reflection in the tiny mirror above the washbasin. The mirror shows him a man with a rather thin face and a light smattering of freckles—which he'd always detested—across his nose, large green eyes, and light brown hair curling around his ears. His shoulders are wide, his chest and arms muscled from all of the years he'd been supporting himself on his crutches. The fact that he's clean-shaven makes his face look young, though he is well over thirty, too old to still be a bachelor living on his own, as both Mrs. Stanton and Father Hartgrove regularly remind him. Jamie notes the dark circles under his eyes and lines starting to appear around his mouth with a sigh.

Turning away from the mirror, he guides his chair to the bed. A crank on the side of the chair causes the seat, back, and arms to rise off of the wheels by a couple inches, raising the chair high enough for him to grasp the headboard and pull himself onto the bed.

He settles himself against the pillows before picking back up the book on botany. He reads about mushrooms and how to identify forms of fungus for another hour or so before setting the book aside and turning down the light. Tomorrow, he promises himself, tomorrow a case will come. Still, though, he doesn't sleep easily that night.

*~*~*

Jamie wakes early the next morning after a fitful night of sleep. He dresses and shaves before guiding his chair out of his room. It had stopped raining sometime during the night, he notes as he moves into the sitting room. He opens one of the windows on his way past, since the steam his chair gives off tended to make Mrs. Stanton worry about the state of the wallpaper.

Mrs. Stanton herself pushes the door open and comes bustling in moments later carrying a tray with breakfast on it.

"The roof is leaking again," Jamie notes as she sets the tray down on the table.

Mrs. Stanton shakes her head at that, moving around him and retrieving the basin. "I'll have one of my boys look at it, Mr. Griffith." She sniffs and gives him a shrewd look. "While I'm here I'll remind you rent will come due at the end of the week."

Jamie tries not to squirm uncomfortably; he doesn't have the money, and he's quite sure that Mrs. Stanton knows it. "I'll have the money for you then," he assures her anyway.

"Have a good breakfast." She gives him a small smile and carries the basin out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Jamie shakes his head. Her house might not be the best lodgings in London, but her rates where cheap, her cooking good, and she hadn't batted an eye the first time she'd seen his chair.

He's finishing breakfast when someone clatters down the stairs and bangs on his door before letting themselves in. A slim, blond young man flings a letter and a copy of yesterday's Times down on the table, narrowly missing Jamie's egg.

"Percy," Jamie greets with a small smile.

"My mother has written me another letter." Percy slouches onto the chair on the other side of the table from Jamie and helps himself to some tea. "She's after me to come home and submit myself to an arranged marriage." Percy straightens the spectacles balanced on his nose. "I keep writing her and telling her no. Then she writes me back, distraught, saying 'why won't you marry'; 'why won't you come home'; 'why won't you be a good son like your brother Samuel?'" Percy grimaces and takes a hearty drink of tea.

"It must be hard." Jamie moves the teapot to his side of the table before Percy has a chance to finish off its contents. He's already well-acquainted with Percy's trouble with his mother. "Father Hartgrove often tells me he wishes I would marry," Jamie offers helpfully, finishing his toast.

Percy snorts. "Well, unlike you, I am not opposed to the idea of marriage; far from it, in fact. I am simply opposed the antiquated practice of arranged marriage. If us Jews wish to be taken seriously as modern men in the world …"

Jamie chooses not to comment even though he privately thinks Percy is wrong about that. Jamie is not opposed to marriage as such, but he prefers the company of men over women when it comes to matters of his heart and bed.

As Percy continues to rant about his mother, Jamie stops listening and instead pulls out his pocket watch. "Don't you have work?"

"I do, in fact." Percy finishes off his cup of tea and gathers his letter. "I will see you this evening, then?"

Jamie picks up the copy of the Times and opens it, smoothing it out and smiling up at Percy. "As long as we will be doing something other than discussing marriage or your mother."