Written on Your Skin Page 8

  The opium smelled repulsive, like dimly lit hellholes where rats scurried over bodies too stupefied to take note. It smelled like weakness, like the hungers that had driven his father so far down in the world, to that wretched garret in Calais. But as he inhaled the smoke—coughing only a little at the burn, for he had mastered the art of it now—everything began to dull. He breathed in a deeper puff, loathing himself for the scalding of his lungs, but distantly, clinically, comfortably. He did not feed his weakness, as his father had done; rather, he blunted it.

  He put down the pipe and stared into the twilight, watching the sky turn to pasteboard and the chimneys’ cold, sharp lines dissolve into brushstrokes from an impressionist’s palette. Azure and charcoal. Violet and viridian. The clouds above them looked like gauze tacked on by a clumsy hand. His thoughts drifted, formless as gauze, harmless as gauze, enjoying a freedom he did not dare permit them when his muscles were sober and his reflexes functioning. He pulled the envelope out of his pocket. The seal split beneath his lax fingers, and Ridland’s bold, slanting script punched into his eyes.

  He did not crumple it fast enough. As his fist began to close, the angry black swarm resolved into words that his brain could not unlearn.

  …Mina Masters…

  The syllables themselves were so ordinary. Their combination, her name, the rhythm of it, he had erased from his brain four years ago. He had never let himself think on her again.

  The crumpled edges of the letter formed points, directing his eyes to a single word:…help…

  He would gladly consign himself to the fires of hell before he helped Ridland. Eight months since he’d fired a gun. Ten since he’d snapped a neck. These were privileges to be guarded more carefully than diamonds, more jealously than freedom itself. To rebuff the title’s gifts and return to the game when he had, of all things, a choice in the matter, seemed nothing short of blasphemous.

  His fingers opened.

  …claims that she requires your help, and I beg you…

  Every door in the world stood open to him. He could not decide which one he wanted to walk through, or whether he could manage to walk through it properly, but that made no difference. Tangling with Ridland would be like sticking his finger into a wolf trap. He could not expect to retrieve it unscathed, if he managed to retrieve it at all.

  I am indebted to you.

  Yes, she had said. You are.

  He let the letter fall from his fingers. Chain mail, he thought. Its great weight must have chafed crusaders’ skin, but habitual pain was of no worth to them; still they had knelt on the cold stone floors of churches, and used whips to flog what flesh remained from their bones. True penance was not meant to feel comfortable, and numbness had seemed no excuse to them. Whip harder, and ride straight into the enemy’s lands: this was the solution they’d devised for themselves.

  Chapter Five

  Bells were tolling from nearby Stepney. Their high, eerie chimes wound in muted bursts through the fog. Mina counted them off as she pulled out the gun. No light escaped from the cellar doors in front of her, but the corroded nameplate left no doubt: this was her destination.

  A breeze coasted across her cheek, icy and moist, like the breath from an open grave. It riffled through the detritus of the dusk-lit street, sending fish skeletons skittering, stirring potato peels that had blackened in the damp. Tarbury had come here to Whitechapel this afternoon to seek Mr. Cronin, an old army comrade who might be able to help her. He had left her in a cramped garret a quarter mile away, promising to return by three o’clock.

  All day she’d waited, her nose pressed to the window. But Tarbury had never reappeared. And as the clock ticked onward, her frustration had mounted. She hated this city. How small it made her feel. In New York, she never felt so powerless.

  She counted seven gongs before the bells fell silent. Tarbury never missed his appointments. It was not unwise to come looking for him. What other choice did she have?

  Taking a deep breath, she rapped her knuckles on the rough-hewn doors. Her hand was shaking. The cold, she told herself.

  Silence.

  Her fingers twitched around the butt of the pistol. The gloves she was wearing fit tightly enough to delineate the edges of her nails—a favorite, foolish affectation of London girls, which Tarbury had thought it wise for her to emulate so as not to appear conspicuous. But the constriction suddenly seemed unbearable.

  She knocked again, harder. Then, on an afterthought, she reached up to knock the cheap shawl away from her hair. She did not want her peripheral vision impeded.

  “Who is it?”

  She moved the pistol behind her back. “A friend of Thomas Tarbury.”

  After a second, the doors creaked outward. A squat, rawboned man with black muttonchops stood looking up at her. He held a lantern in his hand, which illuminated the grease spots on his trousers and the rude wooden step beneath his feet. The shallow stairs descended to a straw-covered floor. She could see no farther into the room; he looked to have only the one lamp. “You’ll be Miss Masters? Come in, then. He’s in the back room.”

  He knew her name. It should have soothed her. “Have him come out to me.”

  “Can’t, miss. He’s bad off. Some two-bit sharper stuck it to him in the lane.” At her gasp, he retreated a pace down the stairs. “No call for worry, I’ve bandaged him up. But he ain’t goin’ nowhere tonight. I would’ve sent a message, but he’d not tell me where you stayed.”

  Still she hesitated. The darkness beyond him made her stomach jump. She did poorly in darkness. “He can call out to me, at least.”

  The man gave her a disbelieving look. “I’ve given him enough laudanum to drug a horse. He was bleedin’ his life out in the street, and his only thought was to go to you. A man has his duty, and I can respect it—but I couldn’t let a friend kill hisself, could I?”

  “No,” she said, but her instincts troubled her.

  “Come in quickly, if you please. He said someone’s after you. Best not to draw notice.”

  She glanced behind her and saw a curtain twitch in the house opposite. “All right,” she said, and took a step inside. He retreated onto the packed floor. It reassured her that he willingly gave her a bit of space, but she didn’t want him to know just yet of her gun.

  At her next step, her foot knocked against a pile of chain. It lay coiled around a padlock, which she supposed Mr. Cronin must use to secure the doors, although…she hadn’t heard the scrape of a chain before he’d opened them.

  The doors hadn’t been locked.

  He would have locked them had Tarbury been attacked.

  She whirled and lunged up the stair.

  A sharp curse and a clatter. Darkness washed up the stair; the lantern had dropped. One more step—

  A heavy weight slammed into her back. She fell across the threshold, the uneven floor stabbing her ribs. Hard hands closed over her arms, pressing down to her wrists. Fingers closed over her grip on the gun.

  She twisted, pushing her weight down more firmly, the better to secure her grasp.

  “Easy.” The fingers squeezed a demand. “You’ll shoot yourself in the stomach.”

  She panted, holding very still. That wasn’t Cronin’s voice. Nor Ridland’s. Of course it wasn’t. Ridland was not spry enough to tackle her.

  “Let it go.” The voice spoke quietly, its composure a jarring counterpoint to the vise on her wrist. “I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Masters.”

  She stiffened in realization. It was Monroe. She did not recall his voice being so deep. But then, he had never spoken in his natural accent, save when the poison was in him. And then, he’d been muttering and hoarse.

  The revelation rattled her. He owed her gratitude, not violence. She stared out at the free world, forced to new calculations. She had no desire to go back into custody. But Monroe owed her. She had liked him, in Hong Kong. And it seemed he had Tarbury. Without Tarbury’s help, she was good for nothing in this blasted country. “Let me up,” she said. The
long body that pressed into hers felt immovable, hard as granite. “Please,” she added softly.

  He made some adjustment that brought his cheek against her hair. Stubble tickled her earlobe. His skin was hot. “Give me the gun first.” With that voice, low and golden and slightly rough, some women would have counted the words poetry.

  She resented them anyway. Why could she not keep the gun? She was not his enemy, but he tackled her like a wolf on a rabbit. Maybe she could not count on him at all. Her grip slackened reluctantly. “Take it, then.”

  His weight eased off her. His left hand smoothed around her waist while his other plucked away the pistol. He pulled her up so quickly her vision sparkled at the edges. Obviously, the poison had inflicted no lasting harm; in one unbroken movement, he hauled her off the steps and set her on the ground below.

  She pushed at the arm around her waist. It banded more tightly, pinning her as easily as though she were some querulous child. “Are you otherwise armed?” His manner was pleasant; he might have been asking her to dance. Which he never had, she remembered suddenly. She had asked him.

  How ridiculous that such a trivial fact should increase her irritation. “No.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Already she knew she liked him much better as an American. “Yes!”

  His arm slipped away. As she turned, a match hissed. The flame illuminated a broad, long-fingered hand with a single ring on the fourth digit, gold, bearing some sort of symbol. The flame cut a sweeping arc through the darkness. It caught on a lamp wick. Light spread across Monroe’s face, sliding shadows beneath his cheekbones and his full lower lip; his lashes were still long as an angel’s, his jaw squarer and more inflexible than stone. His eyes met hers as he settled the lamp on the floor, and the contact made her flush. How stupid. But she had admired his eyes, in Hong Kong. Their steadiness had tempted her to trust him, despite all her reservations.

  “We meet again,” he said.

  She opened her mouth, but suddenly thought better of honesty. She had saved his life, and he’d never gotten to thank her properly for it. Surely he should sound happier to see her? Something was amiss here. If he wanted her trust, he was going to have to demonstrate that he deserved it. “Oh,” she said. “Do we know each other?”

  A strange smile quirked his lips. He straightened, the motion unusually fluid. His grace, too, had made her breath catch in Hong Kong. She decided not to admire him anew. “Perhaps not,” he said. “But we did once. Don’t you recognize me?”

  In fact, had circumstances not suggested his identity, and had she not gotten a good look into his eyes, she might not have known him. He seemed taller than she remembered, leaner, whittled down. Far more raffish, as well. Gone the clean-shaven cheeks and slicked hair; now he had a lion’s mane, waving past the stubble that darkened his square jaw. The cut suited his dark eyes and skin, if his aim was to look criminal. Certainly, he no longer appeared capable of masquerading as a financier.

  His devilish presentation also had something to do with how he held her gun. He toyed with it absently, turning it over and over in his hand as he considered her, as if a firearm merited no more caution than a child’s toy. Or…as if he sought to remind her who was armed, and who wasn’t.

  What on earth had Ridland told him of her? It seemed she would need to disarm him, in every way, if their time together was to be comfortable.

  She reached up, realizing too late that she’d bound her hair very tightly, and not a single strand was available for twirling. “Perhaps…” She licked her lips. “Is it…oh, could you be…Mr. Monroe?”

  “I could be,” he said, and the faint trace of sarcasm in his voice struck her like a slap. She should have known better than to expect gratitude from him. Businessman or spy, no matter; he’d fitted in very well with her stepfather’s friends.

  In lieu of a lock of hair, she wound her fingers together at her waist. It was not difficult to make her voice tremble; she did not enjoy being knocked onto dirty floors. “Mr. Monroe. Thank goodness. You will help me!” And then, on a manufactured sob, she threw herself into his arms.

  He caught her by reflex, and thank God the gun had a trustworthy trigger, or there’d have been blood all over.

  As her small, warm body burrowed into his, a curious feeling broke over him, more complex than déjà vu. For a moment he thought another attack was descending on him, and then he realized the sensation was purely interior, a sense of things opening that he’d tried to seal off. Some things the body could not forget—the fit of her breasts against his abdomen, the way a gun balanced so comfortably in his palm. Touching her felt like brushing up against a dark part of himself, a place where his regrets had gone to die from studious disregard. I was done with this, he thought. God above, he should be done.

  He wanted to reach up and scrub away the sensation prickling at his nape, but her arms wound around him and his own tightened without consultation of his brain. She was still toxic to him, then. “I’m so glad you came,” she whispered.

  As her head fitted beneath his chin, the subtle scent of her hair, like the first strain of long-forgotten music, touched off a whole symphony in his brain: his grim irritation with her, that kiss, Dance with me, Mr. Monroe. He had seen her as an obstacle, a temptation that laid bare all his inherited weakness, a needless weight trying to thrust itself onto his conscience. There had seemed no other way to view her, not until that moment when he’d fallen from the window. Rude shock: running down the lawn, the turf exploding from the bullets’ impact, he had wondered, only once and without understanding his own feeling of loss, exactly what he was leaving behind. And then he had never allowed himself to think of her again.

  He detached himself from her arms, a breath shuddering from his throat. For the first time in months, he felt fleshly, grounded, steady on his feet. He knew better than to like the sensation.

  A delicate flush was spreading across her face, bespeaking, perhaps, embarrassment. “Are you all right?” he asked. He hadn’t wanted to tackle her, but the gun in her hand had limited his options; had he attempted gentler measures, she might have shot him from sheer surprise.

  She knuckled her nose like a little girl after a tantrum. “Yes. Forgive me, I’m…you gave me a scare, that’s all.”

  He studied her clinically, trying to diagnose the accuracy of his memory. He recalled her being quite freakishly beautiful, but the reality was less unsettling. Her each feature seemed, in fact, too perfect to combine with the others into a harmonious whole; the eye, not knowing where to fix, grew frustrated in its search for peaceful lodging. “I’ve spent six days looking for you.” She’d been damned hard to find, and at one point it had occurred to him that he might be the butt of some obscure joke of Ridland’s. But, no, here she was, in all her soft, flower-scented flesh, and he should be relieved to know he’d not made himself a fool. “I feared you might vanish again,” he said, and paused, recalling the question that had seemed uppermost to him before her appearance. “Where were you hiding?”

  Her blue eyes swam like the sea off Amalfi, crystalline and dizzying in her heart-shaped face. “Six days, you say? Poor Mr. Ridland! He must be frantic. I didn’t mean to worry him.”

  Those eyes did not distract him from the fact that she hadn’t answered his question. “Didn’t you? You disappeared from your rooms without a trace.” From the looks of it, she had smashed the window and clambered down a wall—not an achievement he could match with the petite body before him, those wrists as slim as flower stems. Even if she’d had the help of her manservant, that climb would have taken a nerve of steel, and a temperament unlikely to be trembling after being knocked to the floor. Either there was more to her escape than he knew, or less fear in her than she wanted him to realize. “Surely,” he said more slowly, “you expected someone to worry.”

  Her little shrug could have meant anything. She glanced past him to where Cronin sat on a stool, his boot heel scuffing the floor. The man had sold his loyalty quite cheaply, a
nd for the past hour, at a guess, he’d been entertaining regrets about his price. “Is my man all right?” she asked. That she did not address this question to Phin seemed telling. Her apparent relief at his appearance did not extend to trusting him.

  “Reckon so,” Cronin muttered. “This one tied him up and had him carted off, but he was well enough, last I saw him.”

  Her large eyes returned to Phin. “Where is he, then? Does Ridland have him?”

  Not Mr. Ridland. Simply Ridland. It seemed a peculiarly masculine form of address for a sheltered girl to use. I drink nothing but champagne. Had her tastes changed in the intervening years? “I have him,” Phin said. “And it seems I have you, as well. Perhaps it would serve you better to wonder what I mean to do with you.”

  “Why, you will protect me, I hope. That’s why Ridland sent you, isn’t it?”

  He smiled, and perhaps she saw the grimness in it, for her eyes dropped. Ridland did not send him anywhere these days. He’d made that clear enough. I am not going to help you, he’d told the man.

  Then why are you here? Anxiety had etched sweet shadows beneath Ridland’s reddened eyes. To gloat? I heard of your meetings at Westminster.

  Good, Phin had thought. Let him stew. I came to tell you that she is no longer your concern.

  Ridland’s laughter had grated. Good luck to you, then. She is a hard woman to hold.

  The words had struck a chord. Someone had told him something similar once. Someone wiser than he, perhaps. He recalled her as buffleheaded, and her quivering manner supported the recollection. But for all that her hands fluttered from her nape to her waist, tangling there helplessly, her eyes held his too steadily to silence his mounting caution.

  There was always the possibility, however peculiar, that Ridland had facilitated her escape. Phin could think of no reason for it; but then, he’d been trying very hard not to think of Ridland at all. And certainly, the man had shown uncharacteristic restraint in his treatment of her, for Miss Masters’s pearly nails appeared wholly intact. Indeed, the whole of her appeared too damned pristine for an innocent American girl who’d spent a week wandering the London slums.