What A Scoundrel Wants (10 page)

Monthemer’s tinny voice was a hollow void of fatigue and sorrow. “My father and I traveled on the Leicester Road from Uppingham. Those highwaymen slaughtered him. My men and I have been in flight since yesterday evening.”

Meg shivered. Her sister had gone missing—that was all, but it was dreadful enough. And yet she trampled through the woods with a pair of noblemen whose fathers had been murdered. Troubles piled on troubles, adding to her sense of foreboding. “Were they Finch’s men, milord?”

“I haven’t a notion.”

“But that makes two Whitstowe men dead in as many days,” Dryden said, sounding as weary as his kin.

“Two, cousin?”

“My father’s party was also ambushed. Finch’s man, Carlisle, led the assault.”

“Saints be,” Monthemer said quietly. “My condolences.”

Scarlet hacked through brush with his blade. “Is it safe to say my account of the attack is gaining validity?”

“I admit that it does,” Dryden said. “What do you suspect?”

“I suspect we need a safe place to recuperate.” He called a halt to their northward trudge. “Wouldn’t you agree, Meg?”

Prickly anger vibrated through his words, as did an offer of truce. Perhaps he felt it too, as she did—that sense of foreboding, the need to buttress uncertain alliances in the presence of deeper dangers.

She nodded. “To my cabin, then.”

Timber-framed walls filled with waddle and daub protected a simple collection of rough furniture, including a freestanding cabinet, a rope mattress wide enough for at least two people, and a table and bench. A smoke hood made from waddle and covered with plaster hung from the rafters over a central fire pit. Woven mats of rushes covered the packed and swept clay floor.

In all respects, the cabin might be a fitting and anonymous residence for any tradesman or successful farmer—except for the laboratory.

Meg walked unaided, gracefully, to the laboratory and ran her hands along the top of a waist-high workbench. She fingered everything on its surface: an oil lamp on a freestanding platform, plates, numerous sealed containers, cooking pots of many sizes, utensils, a scale, and a mortar and pestle. She assessed them gently but efficiently. Her expression otherwise neutral, she wore the barest touch of a smile.

She had lost her sight, somehow, but if she lived in such a place, her sense of smell had gone as well. The stale air within the cabin reeked like damp garments left in a heap for too many warm days. Pungent chemicals, ever-present vinegar, and the heavy, cloying stench of manure assaulted his nose. Bunches of dried wildflowers lining the rafters and joists did nothing to alleviate the stink.

No matter his reluctant curiosity about Meg’s life, he could not stay in that place. He ducked outside, surprised to be seeking the relatively pleasant scent of leaves and pine—although he still resented the canopy of skeletal tree limbs that marred his view of the sky. A burst of wind ripped tired leaves from the trees, bearing an urgent message about looming winter days.

Worn patches of ground surrounded the cabin, and a series of cultivated beds laid out to his right. Despite the animal stench, he could see no livestock and no pens.

Standing next to his cousin, Dryden covered his mouth and nose with the corner of a brown woolen scarf. “What a peculiar place.”

“For a peculiar girl,” Will said.

“What’s the likelihood she knows half of what she claims to know?” Dryden asked.

Unnerved by his instant and defensive reaction to the question, he shrugged. “You saw her trickery with those woodsmen. Whether it’s magic or manipulation, she won her point.”

The mail Dryden wore clinked together as he crossed his arms. His shoulders pressed in an arc toward the ground, as if weighed by recent events. “I mislike situations where I’m unacquainted with the skills of my allies.”

Monthemer nodded. “You and me, together.”

“She wouldn’t offer her assistance if such a bid would endanger her sister’s release,” said Will.

A tight smile dragged Dryden’s face nearer to friendliness. “Shall I ask for more proof of her skills?”

Will grinned tightly. “Not unless you want your face blackened and your hair singed.”

Meg emerged from the dwelling and walked across the bare stretch of ground between them. Her steps sure, her pace even and unhurried, she displayed no outward sign of her blindness. But her posture spoke to Will. She was not merely walking; she was walking and moving with the utmost control, fighting an unending battle against her impairment. Although betrayed by her body, she refused to admit a hindrance, let alone defeat.

He had assumed that the woodsmen feared her brash assertions and tricks. But her concentration, the mantle of detachment and isolation wrapped around her pale skin, held her apart from the world. No wonder a group of simple peasants shrank from her, holding fast to their superstitions.

“Did you find everything in order?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“In there. You appeared as though you were taking inventory.”

“No, no,” she said, rubbing her nose. “I was searching for the origin of that stench.”

Dryden grinned, covering his mouth with a gloved hand, but Monthemer and Will laughed outright.

“What?” Her frown returned. “Did you think that was normal?”

Will angled his mouth near her ear. “Who can tell what is normal with a witch?”

“I don’t live in squalor,” she said. “Ada would’ve run away before living like this.”

Dryden watched her closely. His expression barely composed, the nobleman lowered his glove and smoothed his close-cut beard. “Then what is the smell?”

“The niter beds, for a start. Do you see those trenches in the ground?”

Will eyed the line of deep furrows that stretched away from the cabin, like graves stripped of their corpses. “What of them?”

“We mix soil, straw, ash, and animal urine. The ferment creates potash, which aids in making fields fertile.” She shrugged, as if explaining the obvious to a child. “We used to sell it.”

“Before you turned to larceny and fraud,” he said.

She tipped her head but ignored his dig. “If I don’t turn the beds and add fresh straw, they begin to stink. But that is only half the problem. One of the jars inside the cabin was not airtight. The chemicals reacted with the air to produce that horrible sulfur smell.”

“And the vinegar.”

“Enough about the vinegar, Scarlet.”

“And here against the wall,” Monthemer said. “What is this?”

She turned to face the cabin. “The furnace?”

“I believe so.”

“Earl Whitstowe offered my father his choice of gifts, thanking him for years of service.” She stopped before a squat, circular clay dome about an arm’s length from the wall of the dwelling. “Father chose to have the furnace constructed. It must have been very expensive, took months to build.”

“But why?” Will asked. “What’s its purpose?”

“Experiments, mostly.” She knelt, swiping leaves away from the rough clay. “The temperatures can become much hotter than cooking fires or the village bread ovens.”

“It must be expensive to run,” he said. “Does it require much fuel?”

She dipped her chin. “It does.”

“What was that look?”

“Money,” she said, standing. “The reason why Ada began selling the counterfeit emeralds. We lived quite well selling the potash. It’s a good commodity.”

Realization rose to the top of Will’s brain like bubbles in yeasty dough. “But not enough to do what you want—your experiments.”

She had the decency to appear uncomfortable, unable to squelch a very human, very unwelcome emotion: guilt.

Finally.

“Alchemy is an expensive pursuit,” she said.

“Did you talk Ada into your scheme?”

“I convinced her to do this for me, yes.”

“And now you feel badly for sending her out to make…to…so you can—I cannot fathom you. She’s your sister. How do you treat people this way?”

“How?” She flung her arms wide. “How can I not? People have yet to prove worthy of my good opinion. You haven’t, and neither has Ada.”

He grabbed her wrist, bones fine and slender in his palm, and tugged her into the cabin. Blinking in the sudden darkness and wrinkling his nostrils against the stench, he struggled to keep hold of his slippery temper. “Are these her flowers?”

“What flowers?”

“Hanging from the joists and rafters, at this moment, are—oh, about three dozen bunches of dried flowers. They don’t look like your handiwork because they’re not on fire.” He watched her fathomless eyes. “You had no notion of their presence.”

“No.”

Air shoving in and out of his nostrils like a wild mob, he stared at the ground. He could not look at her. Anger blotted her face and numbed the sting of regret—regret for having behaved as she expected. She expected disloyalty and lies. He delivered them with one hand, wielding a sword on her behalf with the other.

But no, anger was easier to tend and more comforting to feel surging in his blood.

“I thought I’d come between you and your sister, taking away your only family. I felt guilt and sympathy, both.” When the sudden rush of honesty dazed him, he retreated to familiar ground. Anger warped into mockery. “Now, now I’m with you till the end, Meg. I want to get Ada back if only to see the two of you reunited. That will be precious.”

“Meg?” Jacob stood in the entryway, lit from behind. “There’s no more sugar.”

Wrinkles scratched into the skin above her nose. “Even the underground stores?”

“I looked everywhere.”

“You heard the boy, Scarlet. We need sugar.”

Will could not swallow the foul taste of their argument. Frustrations ground together in his throat. “I admit it. I’m lost.”

“Niter, when heated and distilled, creates an acid. Combined with sugar, that acid creates smoke. A great deal of smoke.” Her condescending tone reminded him far too much of Robin. “The smoke may help us if we need to get into or out of places we shouldn’t be.”

“You’re insane,” he said. “But that’s not a bad idea. Where?”

“The apothecary in Keyworth, I should think.”

“But sugar is expensive,” Jacob said.

Meg shrugged. “He’s not wrong. You’ll have to steal it.”

Dryden followed Jacob inside, his shape blocking more of the gloomy daylight. “We should find horses too, if we’re game for stealing.”

“And Jacob can stay here to help me.”

The young Jew glared at her. “Do you have anything he can borrow, Meg—clothes that don’t shout Will Scarlet? Everyone knows him by the two scarlet lions on his tunic. He’s worn them since his days with Robin Hood.”

She walked to Will, a frown marring her face like indelible dye. She touched his tunic, pilfering his breath, his reason. He hardly minded losing the capacity to breathe, not in that stinking cabin, but he sorely missed the ability to think. She traced the outlines of appliquéd lions, missing nothing with her deft hands, not even the tiny embroidered claws.

“No wonder everyone recognizes you,” she said, lips twisting. “And these have been on your tunic the entire time? How did I miss that?”

“You cannot see,” he whispered. “And when the impulse struck, you seemed more interested in what lies underneath.”

“You vain sod.” She turned abruptly, waving at a molding trunk. “My father’s clothes. Cloaks, hoods, whatever you need.”

“Tomorrow, Dryden, we’ll have errands to run.” He coughed, eager to escape the cabin and inhale clean air again. “But saints be—tonight, I’m sleeping outside.”

“Scarlet,” he said. “And the green vitriol.”

She traced two fingers along the top shelf, edging Jacob aside and counting six jars from the left. Tapping the earthenware pot with the sharply conical lid, she said, “This one.”

“Gramercy. And Scarlet?”

She skirted away. Already unable to keep the man from her mind, she did not appreciate Asher’s son bringing him into their conversation, damaging her tenuous concentration. Never had she experienced such difficulty in stringing together the basic steps of a formula. A decent night’s rest, a wash, and a fresh gown had done little to right her addled thinking.

“I don’t trust him either, but he has reason to help.” She found the double boiler and left the cabin. Jacob followed her to the furnace. “If what we suspect about the sheriff is true, Scarlet is a victim as well.”

“That doesn’t mean you should trust him.”

“If I can keep him and Dryden from estranging each other, they’ll each do their parts. And Scarlet has saved my life more times than I can count, already.”

“He could have to serve his own purpose.”

She slashed her jaw to the side, biting her lower lip. “We’ll find Ada and that will be that,” she said. “Please, hand me the vitriol.”

Jacob placed the jagged crystals in her hands. She conjured from memory their frosty, variegated greens and blues, and the way light refracted through the glassy surfaces. She used to stare at the endless range of hues, imagining the sea, the way her father had described its froth-topped waves and rhythmic, shifting colors.

She pushed through the haze of loss and tossed several handfuls of the crystals into the larger pot of the double boiler. “Would you stoke the fire in the furnace? We need as much heat as you can manage for the sublimation.”

Jacob collected armfuls of firewood to feed the hungry maw of the furnace. From Meg’s vantage, a pair of paces back from the source, the heat rose and expanded from that earthen dome like the sun pulsing, pushing nearer the earth. She tipped her chin. The skin along her neck tingled and stretched beneath the power of that terrible fire. A smile blossomed.

But memory of Scarlet’s angry chastisement ruined her pleasure. He had no cause to throw his outrage at her, not when her fires smoothed their escape—and not when he was as double-minded about morality as a man could be. That her weapon of choice happened to fascinate her did not mean she had acted rashly or without thought. Their lives were more important than a few shabby huts owned by ignorant, scornful peasants.

And if what she did knocked Hugo down from the petty kingship he had established with those gullible folk, all the better.

She inserted the smaller of the two pots into to the center of the double boiler, nestling it atop the crunch of green vitriol. A large lid covered the outer pot. When the intense heat of the furnace burned the delicate crystals, they would release their mystery in the form of a gas. The gas would collect and condense on the inside of the lid, dripping as salt acid into the smaller collecting pot.

Upon setting the double boiler into the scorching furnace, Jacob said, “Well, that’s the first step underway.”

“Now we wait.”

Her words dropped like fat rocks into water. She waited for more than the results of her alchemic process. She waited to see whether Scarlet would return with the sugar, or whether he would return at all. Maybe he was gone, long gone to parts far from her shabby little cabin—a cabin filled with odors and spells and old, nagging ghosts.

But perhaps that was for the best. She had believed as much when she gave him an excess of wolfsbane, preferring the woods to his aid or exasperating company. The only reason she needed either man was because of Ada. One or the other mattered not at all, as long as she played to their interest in helping her cause.

“I’m coming with you, of course.”

“Jacob, do not feel obliged,” she said. “This is not your concern.”

Near enough to keep watch on the boiler, Jacob sat beside her. “You’d have me back at home with Father, mixing chemicals all day. Cruel woman.”

She smiled. “But you’re a brilliant scholar.”

“I have no wish to be. What glory can be found in that?”

“I should find a great deal of glory pursuing alchemy,” she said. “Plenty for my life, leastways.”

He laughed, a vaguely condescending sound she disliked. “And there is the matter of a fair damsel to rescue.”

“You’re too good for the likes of my sister.”

“Ada has not yet broken my heart.”

She stood and stretched her legs, arched her back. The sublimation process would take time, and she did not want to spend those minutes discussing alchemy or Ada or Will Scarlet. Not with anyone. She wanted to watch the flames work their magic, but that was impossible.

“In that, Jacob, you’re among a lucky few.”