The Dark Affair (3 page)

The earl lit his cigar and then lifted it to his lips, appearing so remarkably calm given his demeanor a few moments before. It was as if he was finally on ground he understood. The ground of arrangement. “I don’t expect you to marry my son without proper motivation. So, in addition to having the power of a viscountess, I would set up funds and land entirely in your name.” He waved his hand, but there was a sharpness to his movements. “Here or in Ireland. I would ensure that after my son’s death, you had a portion entirely of your own. You’d be reliant upon none, not even in marriage. You could continue to help soldiers. I have no objection to such a noble undertaking, and then, of course, there is the money you can send home to your brother’s earldom. As I understand, the young earl is bankrupt, unable to look after his people, and travels in questionable political circles. I would be willing to offer him my support, giving him a stronger voice here in the House of Lords. The only conditions I have are that you keep my son in a state that allows him to retain the title and produce an heir.”

Produce an heir
.

The thought ricocheted through her head. She didn’t know Powers. The possibility of sharing his bed should have horrified her.

It didn’t.

More important, it suddenly hit her that the earl had given this extensive thought and had investigated her suitability not only as a nurse but as jailer-cum-broodmare.

“I’m Catholic,” she protested, searching for any reason that might dissuade the older man. She hadn’t been to Mass in years, but the English were very clear about their opinions of those of the faith she’d been born to.

He narrowed his eyes and puffed at his cigar. “Such things can be got around.”

She stared at him, unblinking. “You wish to hire me as your son’s lifelong keeper?”

“Exactly. Yes. It must be done. He cannot be left to his own devices.”

She raised a hand and pressed it to her stomach, wondering how the devil things had gotten to this point. Never in a month of Sundays would she have seen things heading in this barmy direction. “You are blunt.”

“I have no choice but to be so. I will not be here to protect my son forever. And I want an heir. That must be absolutely understood.” He rolled the cigar between his fingers, agitation making the motion jerky.

The implication was clear. The earl was aging and was worried about the fate of his only child and the earldom. And though she felt for his predicament, she would not sacrifice herself on the altar of his peerage. Not even for what seemed such a lucrative proposal. “I shan’t do it.”

“Why not?” he scoffed. “It is a better offer than many women could ever hope to have.”

Any sympathy she’d had for him vanished. Just like the English. She never should have expected anything but this sort of calculation and drive to further his own wishes. “I cannot be bought in such a fashion.”

“So,” he mocked. “You will be bought all your life by others until you are old and alone?” He pointed a finger at her. “I offer you security.”

She did not care to be pushed, and if it weren’t for the man abandoned in the cell in this ward, she would have turned on her heel and left the earl twisting in the wind. She valued her own independence and self-worth far too highly to sell it. “What you offer is out of the question.”

That strong entitlement that had wrapped him up these last moments cracked again, exposing the desperate man. The man the earl doubtless wished had never been allowed to see the light of day, let alone be exposed in the presence of a woman. “Please.”

“I will help your son, my lord, but I shan’t give up myself to do it.”

All the bravado, all that English stiffness, crumbled away, once again leaving a man who had no control over the fate of his son’s mind, and as a consequence, the legacy he’d worked all his life to pass on would vanish. The earl nodded slowly, and Margaret couldn’t help but feel as if she’d slid a dagger between the old man’s ribs. Still, she wouldn’t bring herself to do it. Who knew what a life shackled to a stranger would bring? Misery, she guessed. She couldn’t believe he’d even considered such a thing. “Don’t worry yourself. I shall set him to rights,” she said gently.

The earl drew in a tight breath and turned away. In the firelight, Margaret could have sworn she saw the sliver of a tear trace down his cheek. She wished she could reach out to him, but it would be enough that she’d do everything within her ability to bring Viscount Powers back to himself. Soon the earl would see that.

•   •   •

Matthew Cassidy lurked outside the rickety stairwell that led up to his sister’s dodgy lodging. He took a long draw on his cigarette to calm his frayed nerves. The tip glowed demon red in the murky London night. Faith, he hated the English. He hated what they had brought him to. And now he hated London Town. How he wished he was back in the peat-tinged air of Galway, overlooking the bay. But he couldn’t go back. Not now. Not ever. For many reasons. Reasons too bleedin’ frightening to think about.

So, instead of thinking, he smoked. Again and again until he held naught but a scrap between his shaking fingers. He tucked himself further into the shadows, desperate not to be noticed.

The scurry of a rat darting over his boot sent him jumping into a scummy pool of stagnate liquid. Most likely from the cesspool that had gone far beyond its capacity one rabbit warren over.

“Fecking shite!” he hissed as he flicked his boot back and forth to get the stuff off him.

He trembled with the horror of the place and his situation. Sure, he’d seen hell in Ireland. But this place was something different. This was a hell where more humans dwelt than any other place in the whole of the world and a man could buy a baby for a shag, gin over half acid, or enough opium to smoke away his brains. This was Gomorrah, and he’d come here to escape so-called British justice and kill the bastards who’d done worse to his people . . . bastards who apparently had no qualms about keeping their own people in the dregs of half-life.

Holy wounds, if the British could do this to their own people, no wonder they’d systematically starved the Irish. Rubbing his hands up and down his wool sleeves, he hunched, trying to stay out of the muck.

“What in the name of the Holy Virgin are you doin’ here, Matthew Vincent?”

The knifepoint digging through his thick seaman’s jacket pinched just enough that he froze lest she be giving it a new hole. And as he held still, his cigarette, which had burned so far down to the end, singed his fingers. “Fecking Christ, Margaret,” he hissed.

She dug the knife just a little farther, hard enough to warn but not rip his coat. “Answer the question.”

“Is this how you greet your little brother?” He held up his hands in supplication. “What would Mammy say?”

The knife relented, and the sound of Margaret mumbling under her breath mixed with the howl of drunkards stumbling out of the gin shop down the street. She then proceeded to smack the back of his head, knocking his cap over his forehead. “She’d say you needed to spend a month on your knees, fingering the beads before the Holy Virgin.”

Slowly, Matthew turned. The sight of his sister twisted up his heart. She looked just like their mammy had when he’d been all of about five years old. Before she’d begun to lose herself, praying on her knees ten hours a day, begging God and the angels to end the famine that ravaged their country, while Da had gone out fruitlessly trying to save the children with bellies out to their knees. “Ya look good, lass.”

She arched one brow and skimmed his appearance with skeptical eyes. “Can’t say the same for you, Matthew.”

He forced a grin and brushed a bit of the dust from his lapels. “I’d do a lot better over a cuppa.”

She scowled.

“Ah, Margaret, will you not take me upstairs?” he wheedled, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. He wasn’t quite ready to tell her what he’d done and what straits he was in.

But he needed to get off the streets. The bobbies would be looking for him soon. Sketches of his face were coming out in the morning, or so his informants had told him. It was a most unpleasant thing, being wanted in his home and all over the empire. But London, with its warrens and packed-in districts, was the best place for a man of his reputation and intention to hide.

“I’ll let you up, Matthew, but none of your . . . your business in my house.”

He gave her an oh so innocent stare, batting his lashes. “Sure, and don’t I know how you feel about the lads?”

She said nothing but turned and started up the creaking stairs. Long strips of her red hair had slipped free of the twist at the back of her neck. A clear sign she’d been worrying at it and had been disturbed by some event of the night.

He followed quickly, gratefully.

Margaret was a saint and there was no question, but she needed a taste for blood. With any luck, he’d find a way to give it to her. For a woman such as she? Glory! If she’d just take up the cause, nothing could stand in their way.

M
argaret climbed the narrow steps, her long skirts gripped in her bitterly cold fingers. The stairs were rotting shards of wood and twisted nails sticking half up like some devil’s daisy heads waiting to be plucked. In the black, fog-drenched London night, she went ever so slowly. She’d no desire to miss a step, plunge to the rotten ground, and die of a broken neck on the edges of a slum.

If she was entirely honest with herself, it was her heart that made her heavy and slow as a granny as she ascended. Matthew. Matthew’d left Ireland, the land he loved with every fiber of his heart and soul, to come to London. There could be only one meaning in such a thing.

A price was out on his head.

Pressing her lips together lest she lash out at him for putting himself into such danger, she reached into her reticule and pulled out her small iron key. As she fumbled to shove it into the lock and push open her door, her breath blossomed in white puffs before her face. Without moonlight or any sort of gas lamp in this part of town, she used the tips of her numb fingers to find the latch, and at last, she pushed the key home and tumbled the lock. The door creaked crankily for lack of oil on its rusting hinges and too many years of service.

The chamber was small, pokey, and square with a tiny coal fire burner in the corner. A bed just big enough for her lurked in the shadowy corner, and her small table bore a daguerreotype of her mammy, her da, and Matthew as a baby. Beside it rested two books. Victor Hugo and the new writer Marx, who’d been living in Soho for years.

She crossed to the table and swiped the small matchbox up from beside the single candle and struck it. The strong scent of sulfur sizzled through the room. Once she’d lit the wick, she dropped her reticule and the matchbox to the splintering tabletop. “Light the fire, will you?”

Without urging, Matthew hurried over and picked up a few pieces of coal with his cracked fingers, tossed them in, and had a blaze going in the black iron burner within a few breaths. As soon as he clapped the little iron door shut, he shoved his hands into his pockets and then turned his beautiful, cheeky face to hers. If there was mischief in this world, it lay in Matthew’s handsome face.

How she loved those features. Had done since he’d been all of two, stumbling about the house with nicked knees and jam on his cheek. It didn’t matter that he was seventeen now, almost a man.

His russet hair feathered about sharp brows and cheeks hollow with lack of food, but his eyes, green as the grass of Eire, had a spark that would have lit the devil himself. Despite that gorgeous, cheeky glow, she knew all too well that under his boyish charm rumbled the hardness of a killer and a boy who’d been forced into manhood by the bitter taste of death and then more death.

A boy driven wild by his passion for justice and hunger for revenge.

She should send him on his way. Now. Without delay. Her own inner sense whispered how foolish she’d been to let him in. Matthew involved himself with dangerous men, and by letting him stay, she was opening her door to possibly their presence and, worse, their schemes. But she couldn’t boot him. Not her Matthew. Her little brother who had sat more oft upon her knee than their mother’s. Their mother who offered herself up to a God that had never answered her prayers. Prayers that had been more numerous than the sands upon the shore. Nor had that God been swayed by the sufferings she’d undertaken to save her fellow Irishmen.

Even now, if Margaret listened, she could hear the whisper of the Hail Mary, the beads clinking as Brigid Cassidy shuffled them through milk-white fingers until her skin had worn, exposing raw flesh. Margaret shook her head, determined to dispel the memory. Determined to find out just what had driven her brother to the country he hated so much.

She reached inside her skirts, pulling forth a small linen sack. It was a small affair, barely bulging with her meagerly purchased wares. “Are you hungry, Matthew?”

He rubbed his coal-stained hands together before the fire, the glow lighting his face. “And couldn’t I eat an entire cow?”

A laugh lilted out of her throat. Matthew, for all the heartbreak, with his charming smile and wheedling voice, could tease a smile out of the weepiest woman. “A bit of bread and cheese will have to do, my lad. Still, I’ve an apple for our dessert.”

He flashed her another cheeky grin. “A grand feast, then.” His hand slipped inside his frayed coat. “And perhaps a wee sip of God’s own nectar?”

She shook her head, tempted to join him but knowing the danger. “I don’t drink anymore, Matthew.”

Matthew slipped the green bottle out of his coat, holding on to it the way a child holds her dolly. “But you wouldn’t make your poor brother suffer, now, would you?”

“You go ahead.” She placed the small sack down upon the table, pushing her precious books out of the way. Sometimes she wished she allowed herself the luxury of more books, but that money went to people who needed it far more than she. “But not too much, mind.”

The cork slipping free of the bottle popped through the small space. “I’ve no desire to drink away my sorrows, love.”

She rolled her eyes, thinking on the crowds out on the streets this very night, buying nine-penny gin bottles that would rot their innards faster than it would their brains. She’d done it herself once too often, unable to bear the sorrows surrounding her. “You’d be the minority.”

Matthew blew out a disgusted breath. “Sure, and from this piss pot of a town, who wouldn’t want to drink their heads in?”

It would be so easy just to engage in the easy banter of their childhood. Even when the people had been falling about them like sheaves of wheat during the fabled harvests, they’d teased and laughed. What else could they do? But now she had to face up to reality. No matter how her brother wheedled into her heart, he was not a little boy anymore. Nor could all his teasings wash away the sort of man he’d become. She could bear the banter no longer. All at once, her breath seized in her throat with fear for him. “Why are you here?” she demanded.

Matthew’s smile froze, and his pale face turned ashen. “Get a bit of food in me first, eh?”

She whipped the chunk of dark bread baked by a woman around the corner out of her sack and tore it in two. The grainy scent filled the air, and crumbles of the thick, dark bread spilled over her palms. She tossed one piece to him, then rummaged about for the small, slightly green-edged cheese at the bottom of the bag. She felt its spongy texture and fished it out. Her eyes darted to Matthew’s lanky frame, trying not to hurt at his thinness. Perhaps she should have sent him a few of her precious coins, what with the bankrupt earldom. But he had his causes too, and she’d had a strong feeling that he’d starve and use the money for his political leanings. She’d not been willing to support that. Still, he was so thin. Swallowing back her sorrow, she tossed the small block to him too. “They fed me at the asylum, lad.”

Matthew caught the cheese, his smile entirely gone now, replaced by the haunted look that seemed to have captured every Irishman. “You know what Father Rafferty says about liars.”

She
tsk
ed. “Father Rafferty can talk himself blue, for the whit I care.”

His throat worked slightly as he eyed the cheese. “Thanks, love.” And then he tore into the small bit of food, eating voraciously. His fingers moved more like an animal’s hungry paws than a man’s—or an earl’s.

Tears stung her eyes. She’d seen that often enough. All her childhood and here in London, where the rats were part of a proper meal in some parts of town. Still, it broke her heart to see Matthew acting like the wild, starving masses hoarding the streets.

When had that happened? When had Matthew lost all his genteel ways? When her father had used the majority of his funds for ships to help the peasants leave? Or when he’d made those many trips to London’s House of Lords to beg help from men who didn’t care that millions were dying.

She crossed to the bed and lowered herself down onto the unsteady frame, her corset creaking slightly. She stared at her own bread for a moment before putting it aside, her stomach roiling with sadness and suddenly a good dose of anger at how cruel life was.

Matthew’s gaze flicked to her grain-stuffed bread, a wary beastie considering a leftover bit of feed. Wondering if he could get it or if it belonged to another in his pack. “Are you not going to eat that?”

She bit down on her lower lip, sucking back a cry of fury that he had come to this. She needed to hear what he’d done back in Ireland, but she couldn’t deny him a bit of food first. Not when he looked like a starved hound. “No, Matthew. I’m full to bursting.”

As soon as he choked down the last bite of his bread and cheese, he reached for hers. Drawing in a slow breath, he turned the slice over in his palms, and then his face creased into a mask of sorrow. It was a horrible thing to behold, her brother’s face twisting up. Tears slicked his lashes and then tumbled down his cheeks. “Oh Christ, Mag Pie.”

The use of her nickname nearly undid her. It was all she could do not to throw herself down to the floor and pull him beside her so that they might cling to each other. But she stayed on the bed. Still. Unwilling to break. She’d be strong for him and she would not cry. She’d never cry or wail again. Her mother’s carryings-on had taught her the futility of such madness. “What is it?” she whispered.

He turned that piece of bread over and over until at last it began to fumble apart. “I—I—”

“Get it out, Matthew,” she said harshly. She’d learned so long ago that a soft touch and a loving word changed so little and often kept the sufferer in their suffering. No. It was better to face up to the ugliness of the world.

He nodded and wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. “I killed someone.”

She said nothing. She was not surprised. She’d seen his temper flare. And yet her stomach dropped to the floor, her innards heavy as stones.

“You remember the Boyles?”

She gave a small sound of acknowledgment. She didn’t dare do anything more. She could only recall old Danny Boyle. He’d survived the famine to see two of his sons, ten and twelve years old, transported to Australia for stealing corn. After that, he’d barely been able to work his fields and feed his other six children.

“The new lord over at Axely Hall . . .” Matthew swallowed several times as if the bread was stuck in his throat. “He came in and decided to clear. The rents just don’t match the price of cattle.”

She choked back her own anger, knowing it wouldn’t serve her. “And?”

Matthew lifted his face, the tear tracks glistening in the weak candlelight. “He sent in the army to evict them.”

It was nothing she hadn’t heard before. But she felt the fury building within her. A fury that did her no good, but it was there all the same.

“The youngest, Nancy, she’d been sick with the consumption. Poor girl only had days . . . Couldn’t barely catch her breath for the coughing. And I’d come to lend my support. She was such a sweet little thing. And—”

Margaret closed her eyes. “Whom did you kill?”

“A lieutenant. He knocked Nancy down when she couldn’t move fast enough. Called her a lazy, stupid cow. They burned down the cottage.” Matthew’s face whitened with the memory. “And the rage. It just came upon me. I fetched up one of the cottage stones and dashed it at his head.”

“Oh, Matthew,” Margaret gasped. With one blow, her brother had ruined his life . . . Not that he hadn’t already been on a dangerous path.

Matthew’s hands curled into fists. “You can’t say I didn’t do right in helping Nancy. In fighting injustice.”

She wanted to scream. Her entire body was trembling with anger and helplessness. “Will it help them?” she forced herself to say quietly. “Murdering British soldiers? You know what happened after ninety-eight.”

Matthew’s eyes narrowed. “They were right!”

“They were dead!” The words lashed out of her. She’d not been alive during the last big rebellion. But it had been a disaster and had ended in hideous executions and worse conditions for her people. “They murdered them, Matthew, high lord and low pikeman alike.”

“And what would you have me do? Stand by while—”

She bolted off the bed and grabbed his shoulders, forcing him to look into her eyes. “I would have you live, Matthew. I would have you
live
.”

“Then you must help me now, sister mine.” He placed the ravaged piece of bread down on the floor. Tears still gleamed in his eyes. The tears of the disillusioned. Of a child truly seeing how the world worked. She sighed and let go his shoulders.

The moment she did so, Matthew reached for his whiskey bottle and drank. “I can’t go back to Ireland. Not now. ’Tis too dangerous for the moment.”

She propped her hands on her hips, marveling at his logic. “And so you’ve come to London?”

He took another pull of the whiskey, then wiped a hand over his lips. “’Tis better to hide in the open, so London it is.”

“Perhaps, Matthew, but how shall I help?”

“I need a place to hide, protection.” He recorked the bottle and then looked sheepishly at the faded Jameson label. “Money. I need money.”

Margaret closed her eyes for a moment, wishing she could vanish back to those carefree days when she’d been small. When the world had been beautiful. When the fields, studded with stones, had swept down to the sea and people had still smiled despite the manageable hardships of life. A time when her father’s face had not been plagued with doubt and failure. “What would Da say to this?”

Matthew shoved his bottle back in his jacket and looked to the coal burner. “Da was a weak man.”

“He was a good man,” she corrected. Matthew had never seen him strong. He’d seen only his broken nature as he’d struggled. For he’d had no real power against starvation and the English belief that the Irish were too lazy to feed themselves, not even as a lord. None. Not a jot. And he’d worn away as he watched all his efforts to help the death in their county diminish and become as nothing.

Abruptly, the Earl of Carlyle’s face came to mind. He’d offered her power. Money. More money than she could ever hope to have, even if she spent the rest of her life saving Powers and dozens of heirs like him.