Suzanne Robinson (36 page)

Now wasn’t the time to call out. The fool had blundered into one of the rookeries. Inhabited entirely by criminals, these labyrinths sheltered London’s most dangerous inhabitants. Creative murderers and thieves had cut holes into walls and ceilings, cellars and roofs so that a man could disappear into the maze and never be found. Jocelin drew his Colt, crept up to the door, and listened.

At first he heard nothing. Then came footsteps toward him, and Asher’s voice.

“Come on. Mott’s in here.”

Colt first, Jocelin stepped into the darkness. He could see a vague shadow that must be Asher and went toward it, furious with his friend for disregarding their safety. He opened his mouth to deliver a lecture, but pain exploded at the back of his head. He dropped to his knees, his world shrinking to the agony in his skull. Darkness became a spinning vertigo, then nothing at all.

He woke sick to his stomach and moaning with the pain in his head. His face was buried in a pallet stuffed with moldy straw. He tasted bile and smelled a sickly sweet odor. Opium.

Instinct held him in his position on his stomach. Through his lashes he tried to examine his surroundings.
All he could see was a lighted lamp with a blackened glass on the floor and a large, empty crate. He was in a room bare of any other furnishings, and he was alone.

Unfortunately he was also bound. Rope encircled his wrists behind him, and tied his ankles as well. Since he had little feeling in either hands or feet, he must have been in this position for some time. Gradually, by working his hands and feet, he forced sensation back into them. Then he tried to sit up. As he turned on his side, he heard footsteps, and Asher came into the room. Behind him he dragged a girl with hair dyed greenish blond. She giggled and swayed as he tugged her into the room.

Tottering toward Jocelin, she snorted and fell in a heap beside the pallet. He got a whiff of unwashed body and cheap perfume as she patted his cheek.

“You were right, luv,” she said in a gurgling voice. “He don’t want to do it. Cheer up, luv. We’ll soon have you stiff and ready, we will.”

“Ash,” Jocelin said as he looked from the girl to his friend. “Ash, what are you doing?”

“Here you are,” Asher said to the girl as he held out a brown glass bottle. “Have some more before we start.”

The girl snatched the bottle from Asher and downed its contents.

“You’re a right gentleman, you are.” She let the bottle fall, crawled away to prop herself against the opposite wall, and grinned at them.

Jocelin tried again as they both regarded the girl. “What are you doing?”

“Doing?” Asher appeared to be concentrating on something else. “Oh, doing. You’re going to kill yourself, of course. After giving this poor lady too much brandy to drink. Too much alcohol in the blood, you see. Remorse, self-blame, too much for you.”

Jocelin gaped at his friend, then shook his head slowly. “No. No, it’s not you. You didn’t do all those murders. You couldn’t. It’s not you. I don’t want it to be you. Damn you, Ash. Damn you.”

Asher wasn’t listening. He knelt beside Jocelin and tested his bonds. Then he sat back on his heels and rubbed his face over and over, as if he couldn’t wake from some nightmare.

“Ash, let me go.”

Hands over his face, Asher didn’t respond. Jocelin said his name again, but all he got was a low, whimpering moan, rather like that of a hungry wolf cub. The whimpering sent a sensation up Jocelin’s arms and back that felt rather like roaches scurrying for their nest. Then the whimpering stopped suddenly, choked off on what sounded like a growl. The hands lowered, and Jocelin stared into agony.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Ash, untie me.”

Asher shook his head. “Ohhhh, God, why did it have to be you? Sooner or later you would have listened to Liza.”

Without warning Asher leaped up and fetched a coil of rope from outside the door. When he returned, he was panting and his gaze was fixed on the rope. He slung it over an exposed roof beam and, with shaking hands, looped it into a noose. He disappeared through the door with the other end of the rope, evidently to tie it off. Returning, he knelt by Jocelin again. As Asher lifted him to a sitting position, Jocelin tried again to force a response.

“Damn you, answer me!”

Asher lifted Jocelin to a standing position and leaned him against a wall. He shoved the crate beneath the noose, then returned to Jocelin. As he reached out, Jocelin flung himself out of reach and
toppled to the floor again. His head almost burst open, or so it seemed, from the pain. He lay gasping until Asher turned him over on his back. A hand gently brushed hair from his eyes. He was breathing rapidly, trying to fight the pain while Asher stroked his hair and rested a palm against his cheek.

“I’m sorry. It’s the beast. He smelled the danger.”

Jocelin bit his lip and remained quiet. At last he was able to open his eyes and gaze up at Asher.

“If only you’d stopped remembering,” Asher said. “If only you hadn’t married that little drudge. Unnatural, prying little beast, if she hadn’t spouted suspicions and disturbed your memory … but you would have listened to her sooner or later, so now I must let the beast loose.”

“God, Ash, what have you done?”

Asher crouched beside Jocelin, his hand gently stroking his friend’s hair, and began to weep. “I lost my horse at Balaklava, and I took Cheshire’s. I, who came from generations of military heroes, I ran, and I took another man’s horse. There was so much confusion, I didn’t think anyone saw except you, and you were wounded and sick. But then Pawkins said something, and I had to kill him, or everyone would know. I couldn’t bear the disgrace.”

“Oh, no.” Jocelin clenched his teeth against the horror of what he was hearing. Asher kept stroking his hair. “How many? Cheshire, Pawkins. Airey, Elliot?”

Asher sobbed and lifted Jocelin so that he was resting against his lap. He rocked back and forth, head bent over his prisoner, weeping.

“You don’t know what it was like. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, all heroes in
the regiment—ancestor after ancestor, I could tell you about each one—Waterloo, Italy, France, America. They triumphed everywhere, until me.”

“Ash, listen to me.” All he heard was weeping. Closing his mind to the utter madness, he shoved his shoulder into Asher’s chest. “Ash!”

The weeping stopped abruptly. Jocelin felt a hand pat his face.

“I’m sorry.”

Jocelin cursed when Asher lifted him again and dragged him to the crate. The noose dropped over his head, and Asher tightened it.

“You don’t want to do this.” He dared not throw himself from the crate and tighten the noose.

With unexpected strength Asher hauled Jocelin to a standing position on the crate. There was barely room for both of them to stand. Jocelin swayed, but Asher steadied him and further tightened the rope around his neck.

Jocelin had to make Asher look at him, listen to him. “Don’t. I won’t tell anyone. You’re my closest friend.”

“No, not since that Ross fellow came.”

Asher pulled Jocelin’s collar free of the rope so that the noose bit into bare flesh.

Jocelin strained to lower his head and caught Asher’s gaze. “You can’t kill me. If you could, you would have at Scutari.”

Tears flooding, Asher threw his arms around Jocelin and hugged him.

“Untie me, Ash.”

With a groaning wail Asher thrust himself off the crate and put his shoulder to it.

Jocelin cried out as the box shifted. Still weeping, Asher heaved against the crate again, and it creaked and
scraped a few inches. Boots slipping, his throat on fire, Jocelin choked and tried to get his balance. He slipped again as Asher gave another shove, accompanied by a cry of grief and desperation. Jocelin’s lungs caught fire, and his head erupted in agony again.

He heard another cry, but the crate didn’t move. Something wrapped around his legs at the same time that he heard Asher’s enraged scream. The crate moved back under his feet. He heard a shot, and a crash, as someone appeared in front of him. Vision blurred, all he could see was a pair of hands reaching for his neck. The noose came free, and he toppled off the crate to the floor.

Someone cried out his name, but he was engaged in a monumental effort to breathe. Dizziness assaulted him, and his awareness faded. When he opened his eyes, Liza and Nick were bending over him, frowning. He scowled and railed at them hoarsely.

“Bleeding hell, Liza, what are you doing—ah-hum—doing here?” He winced. Then his eyes flew open again. “Asher.”

Nick helped him sit. Asher was lying on his back, bleeding from a hole in his chest. Bending over him was a Metropolitan policeman, the brass buttons of his coat gleaming dully in the lamplight.

“Gone, sir. He just shouldn’t of pulled that revolver. Mr. Ross had no choice.”

Jocelin stared at the body of his friend as Liza slipped her hand in his.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop. It was horrible. He was growling like some kind of animal. I’m so sorry, my love.”

As Nick spoke quietly with the policeman, Jocelin continued to stare at Asher’s body.

“You were right all along,” he said to her. The
thing that had tried to kill him hadn’t been Ash. He winced and turned his face away from the body. The room seemed to tilt and grow colder as he remembered how his friend had transformed into a beast of grunts and howls. Asher seemed to have split into man and animal. The man part had contained his friend, the one who had saved him from Yale all those years ago. The animal? Who knew what abuse and idiosyncracies of nature had produced Ash’s ability to transform into that creature?

All along, Ash had stalked them all, from within the close-knit circle of their friends. Ash, who had been a bulwark, more than a brother, had twisted and fermented and putrefied without Jocelin’s ever knowing. His senses were reeling with the effort to reconcile the ravening beast with his friend Ash. And Liza, Liza had been steadfast in her insistence upon the existence of a murderer. But even she hadn’t guessed at the atrocity they’d found.

He should have taken her more seriously. She deserved that, and she deserved his respect. She sat beside him. He sighed and took her hand.

Without warning Liza threw herself into his arms and began to cry. Bewildered, he ignored his aching head and held her tightly.

“I thought you’d be killed,” she said between sobs.

“Near enough.”

“We went to your father’s house, and to Yale’s club. We searched the streets until we found a hack driver who said he’d seen you, and then we set off in the direction you’d gone. It took us hours, but Nick found your hired carriage. He’d given up on waiting for you and was heading back to the West End.”

He rubbed his temples, then began patting her trembling back as she continued.

“I can’t believe it. I’ve been looking for a murderer all along, but now that I’ve found him … Poor, poor William Edward.” She lifted her wet face to stare into his eyes. “It won’t bring him back. God in heaven, it won’t bring him back.”

She ended on a wailing sob. Her head dropped to his shoulder, and Jocelin wrapped his arms more tightly around her as she cried. Suddenly he leaned his head back carefully against the wall while his vision blurred. “Liza, thank you for saving me, and I regret that I’m in no shape to give you proper comfort. But I seem to have a bitch of a headache.”

He tried to stay awake to hear her reply, but somehow he sank into a state of confused half sleep. He roused briefly when Nick lifted him, then roused again as he was being put into a carriage. The next moment of awareness came when he woke in his own room.

He was lying on his side. Opening his eyes, he saw silvery gray damask and sunlight. Something was weighing down his legs. He moved, and looked down to find Liza half lying on top of the covers, still in her maid’s gown. He sat up slowly, grateful that his head only throbbed a little. He frowned at the sight of Liza’s apron and work-roughened hands, then fell to studying her mussed hair and augmented curves.

A sigh escaped him. He’d already lost the battle to remain stern and authoritarian. After all, she’d saved his life, along with Nick. He would have to persuade her into good behavior somehow.

Then there was Asher.

He still couldn’t reconcile the animal with the friend. He had waking dreams in which Ash’s eyes appeared, disembodied, in front of him. In his vision
they gazed at him without recognition with a reptilian mercilessness, predatory, without a trace of humanity. He would never know exactly what had turned Ash into that. What unbearable atrocities had been committed upon him that would create such a beast within a good man, a beast that could be called up by fear of death, fear of shame.

While bathing and dressing, Jocelin finally gave up trying to understand the sickness in Asher only to remember Liza. She’d saved his life. Dear, stubborn Liza of the rustling petticoats and lemon scent. He could see now that his fears regarding her business dealings hadn’t been warranted. At least, he thought so. Loveday told him she’d remained awake at his side through the night. She was asleep on his bed now.

Policemen came, spent hours taking evidence from him about Asher’s death, and left. Nick called to assure himself of Jocelin’s health. Then, to his great misfortune, his family came. He was resting on the sofa in the library with a pot of coffee at his side when his father, mother, and sister invaded. Georgiana and the duchess fussed over him while his father demanded a complete account of Jocelin’s calamity.