A Soul of Steel (7 page)

Irene smiled at me through her veils of smoke, looking like a snake charmer working with a ghostly subject. “He may suffer from both: fever and poison. Doctors are so unimaginative. From my observation, the puncture wound would accommodate any one of a dozen hatpins I have on hand. Or that you have.”

“A hatpin?”

“Don’t sound so skeptical, dear Nell. I have put a hatpin to good use in my own defense on numerous occasions. Seven to ten inches of sharpened steel is nothing to underestimate, particularly if it is dipped in a toxic substance. Hatpins are miniature rapiers, and often a woman’s best defense. Why could they not be a man’s downfall?”

“I have never regarded a hatpin as lethal,” I admitted, “but then I see the world with the innocent eyes of a parson’s daughter.”

At this announcement, Lucifer narrowed his emerald eyes and leaped onto my lap, there to switch his tail most commandingly. “Why must this creature cast himself upon my skirts?”

“Apparently innocent parson’s daughters are as attractive to cats as they are to mysterious strangers.”

“Oh, I see I will never live it down,” I retorted. “And you still have not said whether the man would live or die.”

“I don’t know, Nell, any more than Dr. Mersenné does.” Irene snuffed her cigarette, then rose and smiled down at me. “All I know is that the swarthy gentleman upstairs requires constant tending. We shall have to take turns nursing him, you, Sophie and I.”

“I can stand guard as well,” said Godfrey as he returned from seeing the doctor out. “Who will take first watch?”

They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, my handsome friends, and eyed me blandly.

“Perhaps Nell should,” Irene suggested at last. “After all, the man is asking for her.”

I stood so abruptly—and unthinkingly—that Lucifer thudded to the floor with a furious hiss. The sound was echoed by the parrot Casanova in his cage, but no noise was louder than the oceanic roar of my inner disbelief.

A sickroom always reminds me of a wake to which no one has yet come. My melancholy in the presence of illness is no doubt due to my lot as a parson’s daughter. From an early age I made myself useful to my father and his flock, and running sickroom errands was one thing a child could do.

Simply closing the shutters in daylight and putting a dormant form in the bed linens had transformed our cheery upstairs bedroom into a slightly sinister place. A paraffin lamp glowed softly on the bureau, casting enough light to reveal the figure in the bed.

“He looks quite different,” I exclaimed, keeping my distance nevertheless.

“A fascinating man,” Irene said, her voice vibrant with its most dramatic timbre.

“How can you say that? You know nothing about him.” Her amber-brown eyes fairly scintillated. “Ah, that is what makes him fascinating. Speculation, darling Nell, is always much more exciting than information. What do you think of him now?”

“He will not—”

“Awaken? I cannot say. At the moment he is quiet. You may study him safely.”

“I wish Godfrey were—”

“We are better off without Godfrey now.”

“Why?”

Irene flashed me a probing look. “You might prefer privacy when you discover who he is.”

“
You
are here, are you not? And I do not require privacy, I require belief. You really think that I know this man?”

“Not... yet.”

I sighed pointedly and examined this most inconvenient person. Against the pallid bed linens, his profile was etched as sharply as charcoal on canvas. Not even illness could bring pallor to that tea-stained face. Yet his gaunt features were well modeled, and the absence of the turban revealed hair of a lighter brown than his beard, grizzled at the temples.

Drawing nearer, I found myself unable to guess his age. Perhaps the extreme thinness made him seem older. Certainly the sun had tanned his skin until it cracked at the outer eyes into a fan of fine lines.

He moaned and I leaped back, my skirts brushing against my shoes like a swiftly drawn theatrical curtain swaying over the boards. My heart beat in the same breathless rhythm.

“He will not bite, Nell. Quite the contrary. Sophie was unable to get even a leek gruel down him.”

“Leek gruel! I can hardly blame the man. An invalid should have barley soup and custards, not some foreign fluid made from disgusting bulbs.”

My indignation must have stirred the sick man. I heard another moan from the bed, and then—to my chagrin—my own name was intoned, or slurred, rather.

“Miss... Huxleigh.”

I leaped backward like a scalded cat, despite Irene’s promise that he would not bite. Who was this man? How dare he know me when I did not know him? Was it some kind of dreadful trick?

Irene’s warm hand took my icy one in a firm grip, the only grip she ever used. “He cannot hurt you, Nell, but obviously you have inspired some powerful memory. Think! If he has been poisoned and should die, you may be the clue to his past, and to the poisoner. Is there anyone you have not seen in some years?”

“M-my late father.”

“Someone alive, or presumed dead, perhaps. Someone from Shropshire?”

I had not thought of the county of my upbringing for many years. “No one from Shropshire would come to such a condition as this.”

Irene’s grip loosened in disappointment. “Oh, come now. As I remember, you yourself had come to a sorry state in London when I met you, only—what?—three years from Shropshire’s genteel safety. You had been wrongly dismissed from your position, had no lodgings, no food... indeed, had I not intervened you might have become as hungry and ill as this man.”

Her words prodded me closer to the bed. Was there truly someone I knew beyond this intimidating appearance? Someone from Shropshire? Or who had left Shropshire before I did?

My heart stopped. At least my hand, which had come to rest over that organ, could feel no flutter in the general vicinity.

“Yes, Nell?” Irene urged, her voice the intense hiss of a demonic barrister conducting a cross-examination. “What have you remembered?”

“Not... what. Who.” I whispered, as she did, not because it was a sickroom, but because I hardly dared credit the notion that invaded my mind.

I leaned nearer the semiconscious man. Could this be what had become of my once-attentive curate, the sole man ever to have courted me in any manner, however tentative? Could this be Jasper Higgenbottom, returned from converting the heathens of Africa, himself converted to sun and turbans and the scent of alien spices?

“Nell?” Irene shook my hand, which she still clutched.

“Er, no. This is no one I remember. The ears are wrong.”

She leaned over me to inspect these organs.

“What is wrong with them?”

“N-nothing. These are quite well shaped and discreet. The person of whom I was thinking had far more prominent—and unfortunate—ears.”

“Oh. A shame. And did this large-eared person of your acquaintance abandon Shropshire for a foreign land?”

“Yes.”

“And why have you never mentioned this interesting globe-trotter from your past?”

“Because he was not! Interesting. I am sorry, Irene, but he was my father’s curate for a time, and rather tedious, I fear. I am certain that he is still being tedious in Africa. But he is not here.”

The patient reached up a hand of bronze. “Miss Huxleigh,” he murmured.

I blushed.

“Most intriguing.” Irene sat on the edge of the bed, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Whenever you go on one of your governess tirades he calls your name. Obviously, the sound of your voice as well as your appearance rings a bell with him. Could it be the schoolroom bell? Could this be a former charge?”

“Irene! I may be past thirty, and some of my erstwhile charges may be twenty or so, but I assure you that this man is not one of them.”

“No.” She regarded him cold-bloodedly. “It is hard to tell, of course, but I would guess him to be our age.” She quirked a brow in my direction.

“Perhaps.”

The sick man lashed his head from side to side, as fever victims do when trying to elude the heat and pain of their malady. I unthinkingly picked up the damp cloth Sophie had left in a Sèvres basin and dabbed at his forehead.

“Mary,” he said suddenly.

I gave Irene a triumphant look and wrung the cloth out over the basin. “You see. Huxleigh is not a unique name. It is
Mary
Huxley, poor woman, who chafes his mind.”

“Hmm.”
Irene looked unconvinced. She rose with a sigh. “Since you are doing nurse duty, you might as well tend him until dinner. Godfrey can stand watch then, and I shall take the first part of the night.”

“You have given yourself the bitterest hours. He will be most restless then.”

Irene grinned impishly. “He will also be most talkative. Call me if his condition should worsen.”

She was gone, leaving me with a cloth dripping onto my sleeve cuff and a delirious stranger on my hands.

“I see her game, of course,” I told my indifferent charge as I swabbed his face again. I was getting quite used to the sun-darkened skin, despite the man’s obvious English origin. No wonder Irene was curious; this man must have quite a tale to tell should he live to murmur more than a few ambiguous names.

“She hopes that I will meditate upon your features and recognize you from mere proximity. But I shan’t.”

I sat back in the straight chair by the bedside to watch and wait. His face had turned toward my voice, although his eyes had remained shut, an arrangement I much preferred.

“Mary,” he murmured again.

A name infinitely more common than Penelope, I reflected smugly. For once Irene the Female Pinkerton was utterly on the wrong track.

“Little Mary,” he repeated, stirring my sympathy, for the man obviously spoke of a child. “And Allegra.”

This name caused me to sit up straighter. Allegra Turnpenny had been one of my charges during my last position of governess a decade before, at the end of the ’Seventies... and a Mary Forsythe was one of her little friends who had come to the house on Berkeley Square!

“And Miss Huxleigh,” he went on in a mumble that I was thankful Irene was not present to hear. “Berkeley Square.” Suddenly I knew! I leaned forward, studying these altered features for any trace of their original expansive merriment. There was none. Yet, oh, I was grateful for Irene’s pragmatic “privacy.”

For somewhere beneath this weather-worn mask lay the face of my charges’ young uncle, Mr. Emerson Stanhope, who had gone so gaily off to war in a dazzling red uniform. Who had once played a surprise game of blindman’s buff with me in the schoolroom and touched my naive heart with a deathless and most inappropriate hope for one who was far above my station.

The door to the chamber swung slightly ajar. I started as if caught filching handkerchiefs. A shadow tumbled in from the passage. Lucifer swaggered over to the sickbed, then bounded onto my lap.

For once I felt no urge to instantly unseat the beast, but let him curl into my skirts and proceed to purr and rhythmically dig his claws against the grain of my plaid wool skirt. I drove my fingers into his long hair as into a muff and finally felt warmth tinge my fingertips as shock eased into a kind of stupor.

And so I was when Godfrey entered the chamber an hour and a half later.

“All well?” asked he.

“He has not stirred,” said I, picking up the sleeping cat and slipping from the room.

If Godfrey noticed anything odd in my manner and gazed after me, I did not look back to see.

Chapter Seven

DELIBERATE DEATH

“How did
your vigil go last night?” Godfrey asked in his most persuasive baritone at breakfast the next morning. He lifted a small crystal jar. “Would you care for some marmalade!”

“Quite peacefully,” I replied, taking the marmalade jar. “And how are the sausages this morning?”

“Excellent,” said he. “So there was no disturbance to your patient?”

“None at all. Slept like a lamb. Would you care for some ham?”

“No, thank you.”

“And did the patient have an episode during your watch?”

Godfrey shook his dark, handsome head almost regretfully. “Nothing. He did not even call out your name.”