Wicked at Heart (27 page)

The prisoners
milled around them, trailing them like bubbles after a passing ship.  Damon
brushed past them and tried to ignore the nagging press of his own conscience,
which had been damnably active lately.  Yes, he'd deliberately shunned Lady
Simms's silly party after he'd accepted her invitation; yes, what he was about
to do was going to hurt Toby.  But he could not jeopardize things — the least
of which was his life — on what trust he dared place in young Toby Ashton. 
Peter was a godly man but, at times, hopelessly naive, and Damon had learned
long ago that to survive in this rotten world, you couldn't be naive — nor,
trusting.  Be that way, and you'd damn well end up dead.

Out of the
corner of his eye he saw scores of prisoners, their faces gaunt, their bodies
thin and hunched beneath the overhead deck.  He tried to shut his mind to their
suffering, but such escape was no longer possible.  The emotion that had
swelled his heart, brought tears to his eyes when he'd found himself staring at
the lilacs, struck him now:  a collapse of defenses, a frightening propensity
toward softness, vulnerability, feeling, compassion.  Something that made his
heart hurt.

I truly
am
going mad.

They descended
the last ladder and reached the hold.  Peter lifted his lantern.  Around them
the black, dripping planking swung into focus, curving upward to meet the
hulking old beams of the orlop deck above.  Pools of stagnant brine sloshed at
their feet, and the steady drip of water echoed through the vast space with an
eerie constancy, like the slow ticking of a clock.  And there, tucked against
the hull, was the Black Hole, outside of which the guard Damon had sent down
five minutes earlier waited with his own meager light.

Damon thought of
the last time he'd been down here, of how he'd caught Lady Simms during her
faint.  He remembered how she'd felt like a sack of feathers in his arms, how
her silken hair had tumbled over his wrist, how the swell of her breasts had
tempted his eyes, his mouth.

His loins
tingled.  She was going to be furious with him for not showing up at her little
party after he'd accepted her invitation, but he was still embarrassed about
the attack.  Besides, she'd made him feel real fear the other night, out there
in the darkness in front of her house.  She'd gotten under his defenses, and he
had no intention of letting her do so again.  For the briefest moment he'd
fancied she could be a friend; she had not laughed at him, had showed him
compassion and understanding, and for a short, wary while — especially when
she'd told him about her sister's fear of thunderstorms — he'd felt a rush of
warmth and trust in her.  That rush of warmth and trust frightened him.  It was
too close to intimacy, and he didn't want to feel intimacy with her or anyone
else.  To hell with her silly party.

There it was, that
twinge from his conscience again.

"Damon?"

Peter was
waiting, his eyes silently condemning.  Mouth tight, Damon took the lantern
from him and picked his way over the massive timbers of the keel and ribs.  His
shoe squished in stagnant water, and despite the low din of prisoners on the
decks above, the sound seemed to echo in the gloom.  A handful of them had
trailed down the hatch after them, and he could hear their muted whispers,
their harsh, heavy breathing as they too tried to draw breath from this
stinking air.

The Black Hole
reared out of the shadows, tall and forbidding.

In his mind's
eye he saw little Toby, hopeful, excited, naive in his belief that Damon was
going to release his brother.  If only he could have told him the truth.

Impossible, of
course.

The guard,
Clayton, was waiting.

"Open it
up," Damon snapped irritably.

A sense of doom
hung in the air, silencing even the prisoners poised on the ladder behind
them.  The lantern sputtered and hissed; water dripped steadily from
somewhere.  The Black Hole looked down at them, evil, deathly silent, like a
coffin standing on end.

Producing a key,
Clayton bent and unlocked its door.  Then, his hand on his pistol, he seized
the latch and yanked it open, hard.

Nothing.

Peter Milford,
standing beside the silent, stone-faced marquess, felt his heart catch in his
throat as Clayton shone his lantern into the hole.

"Shit,"
the guard muttered and, crouching down, reached into the dark opening.

A foul stench
issued forth, and nausea hit Peter full in the stomach.

"What is
it?" Morninghall snapped, already moving impatiently forward.

The guard looked
up, his strapping bulk shielding Nathan Ashton's body from the marquess, the
chaplain, and the crowd of men gathered on the ladder behind them.

"I think
he's dead, sir."

~~~~

It was not easy
for Gwyneth to find anyone ready and willing to take her out to the prison
hulk, but in the end she found a fisherman repairing his nets near the pier who
— for the right price — finally agreed.

Now she sat in
his small boat, her feet placed carefully to the side of the sloshing puddle in
the hull, her gloved hands buried in her skirts as he rowed the small craft
through the harbor's light chop.  Beneath her rigid exterior Gwyneth was
seething.  She'd already gone through every delightfully torturous method she
could think of with regards to killing Morninghall.  After she had dared to
trust him, after she had deceived herself into thinking he really did have a
soul after all, he had left her high, dry, and humiliated in front of the most
influential women in Portsmouth.

It was simply
not acceptable.

Strangulation. 
Ah yes, that would do quite nicely.  Her hands curled into claws.

Overhead, low,
heavy clouds were moving in from the northwest, drawing over the sun and
stealing the brightness of the day.  With them came a breeze that ruffled the
water and topped each wave with a tiny whitecap.  The harbor had been a deep, hard
blue; now it faded to gray, and the day was suddenly cold.

Gwyneth
shivered, drawing her arms around herself, and when she looked up, she saw,
beyond the fisherman's brawny shoulder, a boat heading toward them.  It had
come from the direction of HMS
Surrey
, and a single sailor pulled at its
oars.

She frowned.

The fisherman
twisted around in his seat to see what had caught her attention.  "Aye,
another one," he said noncommittally, facing her once again as the two
craft approached each other.  "Came from the prison hulk ye be wantin' t'
visit, it did."

Gwyneth was
watching the other boat as it began to pass them just to starboard.  "Another
one?"

For answer, the
fisherman just grinned — and watched her face in mild amusement.

Gwyneth's mouth
fell open in horror.

No.  It can't
be.

But it was:  a
corpse, lying in the bottom of the boat, a strip of sailcloth thrown over the
torso and face, the feet poking up above the gunwales.

"Dead
body," the fisherman grunted, putting his muscle into another stroke of
the oars that pushed them ever closer to the prison ship from which the other
boat had come.  "Take 'em out of here every day, they do.  Die like flies,
especially once the weather starts getting hot."

Gwyneth felt
sick.  She stared, horrified, at those bare feet sticking above the other
boat's gunwales — and then she looked up and caught the eye of the sailor who
was rowing it.

He leaned on his
oars and let the momentum carry his boat along as he looked across the water at
her.  Sea-seasoned and lean as a nail, he was gazing at her with blatant
appreciation, and she wasn't so far away from him that she couldn't see his
dazzling grin, the laughing charm of his green eyes, and feel affected by both.

"Morning,
ma'm!" he called, gathering his oars in one hand and touching two fingers
to his temple in mock salute.  He appeared tall and handsome in a rakish sort
of way, with rich, chestnut hair caught carelessly at his nape and a day's
growth of beard cloaking an angular jaw.

To think that
anyone could smile while performing such a grim task as transporting dead
bodies for burial —

Gwyneth jerked
her chin up and stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge him.  A moment
later, the two boats were well past each other.

"I hope
ye've got the stomach for this," the fisherman mused, watching the other
craft moving further and further away from them.  "There are bound to be
more where that one came from."

"Yes, I'm
sure there
will
be," Gwyneth muttered, glaring at the approaching
hulk.

The fisherman
merely slanted her a thoughtful look, but Gwyneth wasn't thinking about the
prisoners.

She was thinking
of a certain marquess named Morninghall — and enjoying every moment of his
impending demise.

~~~~

Damon stood in
his cabin at the windows, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched the
boat that carried the body of Nathan Ashton moving further and further away. 
He felt anxious inside, unsettled, but he merely gripped his hands tighter in a
futile attempt to ignore it, never relaxing his rigid stance nor allowing the
barest flicker of emotion to cross his face.

Behind him he
heard approaching footsteps, then the creak of the door as Peter Milford came
in with the boy.

His kept his
back toward them.  He was dreading this with every beat of his heart.

What heart?
he asked himself on a wave of self-loathing, but even as he thought it, he knew
he must have one, for it was burning a hole in his chest with all the kindness
of acid.

He heard the
door click shut behind him, the rustling of clothes, the boy's nervous
breathing, Peter, clearing his throat.

Damon turned
slowly, his hands still knotted behind his back, his eyes veiled and
expressionless.  What pleasure he had found in watching little Toby eat the
hearty meals he'd given him, what pleasure he'd found in restoring some of the
boy's human dignity by ensuring he had baths and clean clothes — pleasures that
even a few short weeks ago Damon would have been too busy licking his wounds
and nursing his anger to care, let alone think, about.  How nice it had felt to
know that he had been able to do something good for somebody, something kind.  And
now, he was about to destroy it all.

He cleared his
throat.

Toby stood just
in front of Peter, never looking so young and frail as he did now, framed as he
was by the chaplain's lanky height.  His eyes were frightened behind his spectacles,
and his shirt — torn and grubby — was fiercely buttoned at his throat.  Damon's
eyes narrowed dangerously.

"What
happened to your shirt, Toby?" he asked, frowning.

The boy didn't
respond, but only looked down at his toes, his hair hanging over his spectacles
and his throat working as he battled with some inner torment.  "The other
prisoners, sir.  They . . . they don't like me much 'cause I'm working for
you."

"Of course
they don't.  That is why I gave you a berth in the guards' quarters, and why I
have advised you not to go belowdecks."

Toby looked up,
biting his lip.  "They're plotting to kill you, you know."

Damon's sigh was
a world-weary one.  "Yes, such aspirations do keep their minds occupied in
the face of explicit boredom.  Hardly worrying, I daresay.  But I told you not
to consort with them, Toby."  His made his voice gentler.  "Must you
learn things the hard way?"

As I did
,
he thought, on a note of bitter disgust.

"Damon —"
Peter began warningly.

"Answer me,
Toby."

Toby looked near
to tears.  "I wanted to tell my brother he was going to be released,"
he blurted, his eyes defiant.

Damon took a
deep, steadying breath.  His gaze flashed to Peter's, just above that ginger
head, but there was no help from that quarter.  "Sit down, Toby," he
said, gently.

The boy must've
seen something in his face, or caught something in his tone, for suddenly his
eyes widened with fear, and he twisted around to glance worriedly up at Peter. 
From his angle he could not see that the chaplain's face was tight with
condemnation as he met Damon's gaze.  When neither man said anything, Toby
slowly pulled out a chair.

Damon sat down
beside him and leaned his elbows on the table.  He raked a hand through his
hair.  He wasn't good at this sort of thing; he really wasn't.  Damn Peter for
not doing this for him — after all, he was a clergyman, well used to this sort
of thing.  But no, Peter had wanted nothing to do with it, had refused to
participate in this part of Damon's scheme.  Just like friends, always
deserting you when you need them most, Damon thought with acid satisfaction. 
He was better off without them.

Mentally
steeling himself, he reached out and laid his hand over Toby's.  The boy pulled
away, but not before Damon felt the thinness of that pitiful little wrist.  The
bones there were like two dowels beneath his fingers, and the thought made him
feel sick.

"Toby,"
he said gently, refusing to meet Peter's angry gaze, "there is something I
must tell you about your brother."

The boy's eyes
filled up and his lower lip began to quiver.  "You've changed your
mind?"

"No, Toby, I
have not."  Damon took a deep breath, feeling sadly inept, loathsome, vile. 
"Your brother is . . . dead."

Toby only stared
at him.  Not a muscle moved in his gaunt little face, and he seemed to forget
to draw breath.  Behind him Peter looked down at Damon and slowly shook his
head, condemning him, before placing a steadying hand on the boy's shoulder.

"H—he . . .
he can't be dead," Toby said, blinking.  He shook his head, denying the
words.  "Connor was supposed to . . .  No.  I won't believe you, he can't
be dead!"