Against the Tide (6 page)

Bane stepped outside the shop and noticed the first crisp hint of autumn as someone burned leaves on a distant corner. Strolling down the twisty street, he spotted the besotted young Romeo who had just ordered flowers staring into the window of a jeweler’s shop at a case of rings.

Bane’s footsteps slowed. “Going to take the plunge, are you?”

Romeo startled, but then a dazzling smile spread over his face. “Yes. It’s time.”

How could a man reach adulthood and still have that wide-open, innocent expression of adoration?

An unfamiliar feeling niggled at the corner of Bane’s mind. Envy? If Bane had not spent his entire childhood under the influence of Professor Van Bracken, perhaps he would be innocent enough to hanker after a woman with that dumbstruck expression. Then again, if the serpent had never offered Eve the apple, they would all be living in Eden.

Bane gave Romeo a brusque nod. “Good luck with it,” he said, turning to hike up the hill curving toward Chapman Square, where he needed to meet with the head of the local police union. There were a million things he needed to accomplish during these few short weeks in Boston, but it was hard to drag his mind back to business.

What would it be like to be in love? Bane wouldn’t waste time with flowers or jewels to impress a woman. He would sweep her away to see the pyramids of Egypt or sail down the Rhine River to discover the great cities of Europe. When they were exhausted from exploring the palaces and grand museums, he would take her to a secluded villa, somewhere overlooking the rocky shores of the Adriatic and sheltered from the world behind a thick layer of wisteria vines.

He straightened and quickened his step. Pure rubbish, of course. From the moment he escaped the Professor’s grasp he had known a normal life was out of his reach, but every now and then these pathetic longings plagued him.

He was good at killing them.

5

L
ydia had the Turkish translations in a burlap sack on the floor of the coffeehouse as she waited for Lieutenant Banebridge. This translation job had been as interesting as a cold cup of coffee, a twenty-page discussion of the shipment and distribution of wool from Morocco in mind-numbing detail.

Lydia was tired from only two hours of sleep, but nothing was quite so comforting as a piping hot bowl of chowder and a mug of Big Jim’s coffee.

“Clam chowder again?” She looked up to see Lieutenant Banebridge standing beside her. Without asking, he pulled a stool out and sat beside her.

“When I find something I like, I stick with it. Why aren’t you in uniform?” Lydia asked.

If possible, he looked even more attractive in the open-collared white shirt and dark wool frock coat. “I’m not in the navy anymore,” he said casually. “I turned in my resignation papers a while back. Now I’m just plain Alexander Banebridge.”

Something was not quite right. Not that she was an expert, but she
would have thought quitting the military was a little more complicated than he made it sound. She narrowed her eyes and scrutinized his perfectly sculpted face, looking in vain for the tiniest hint of embarrassment. “You know,
Bane,
” she said pointedly, “I suppose it is common for people to switch jobs, but they rarely switch
names.
”

Lydia forced her misgivings aside when Bane slid a crisp ten-dollar bill across the table toward her, and, as if in answer to her prayers, he had another set of documents for her to translate. This time the documents were from Greece and Albania.

“I have to charge more for translating Albanian,” she said as she flipped through the pages. “It is not one of my better languages and it will take a while.”

“Slacked off during Albanian lessons, did you?” Bane asked with a casual air. “Slothful as well as greedy, what a combination. Twenty-five dollars for the lot.”

She raised her eyebrows. “No haggling?”

“Nope. I knew Albanian would be a stretch for you. You’re half-Greek, half-Turkish, so it is only fair to pay extra for the Albanian.”

She folded the ten-dollar bill and tucked it into her reticule, amazed at her good fortune. “How did you know that? About my ancestry?”

“Eric told me.”

It was disconcerting to know she had been discussed like that, but at least she was earning additional income. And the admiral did plenty of business with Bane, so that meant she could trust him, right?

Except that the admiral seemed moody and remote every time Bane set foot in his office.

“Are you really friends with Admiral Fontaine?” she asked impulsively. “He seems so glum every time you darken our door.”

The lazy smile he sent her made her heart skip a beat. “Nonsense.
I bring sunshine and delight wherever I go. You should have seen how your eyes lit up when you saw me just now. I feared the place might catch fire.”

“That was because I wanted the ten dollars you owed me,” Lydia said. “Those documents were so boring you ought to have paid me double.” She gestured to the Greek and Albanian documents he had brought her. A cursory glance at the top page showed it to be about taxes on Greek plaster. Another thrilling read. “When do you need these?” she asked. “Please don’t say tomorrow.”

“No, I’ll be out of town for a few days. How about Friday? I can swing by your office at the Navy Yard.”

Lydia eyed the stack, knowing the work would be quite a slog. But with three evenings to work on them, she ought to be able to complete the task. “Done,” she agreed.

It wasn’t until after he left that Lydia realized Bane had neatly evaded her attempts to gain some insight into the sobering business he had with the admiral. As she spent the next few days translating Albanian tax reports, her mind kept straying to Bane and his mysterious business with the admiral. He was paying her a shocking amount to translate documents, and accepting such payments from a virtual stranger made her mildly uncomfortable. How easily he deflected the conversation whenever she even attempted to learn anything personal about him.

On Thursday she entered the admiral’s private office to ask if Bane was trustworthy. Unlike the front office where the walls were whitewashed, the admiral’s office was lined with oak paneling, and a rich oriental rug covered the floor. Outside the window she could see the hull of a battleship in the dry dock.

The admiral appeared surprised by her question. “Naturally,” he said. “Banebridge is an extraordinary man, and I never would have put him in touch with you were it otherwise.”

“Oh.” She stood awkwardly, wishing he would elaborate and give her some tiny glimpse into why Bane’s visits always perturbed the admiral. But she could think of no elegant way to pose such a question without being shockingly forward. “Is that his name, then? Banebridge? I have heard him called Alexander Christian.”

“Just call him Bane. Everybody else does.”

Lydia still felt ill at ease doing such highly paid translation work for a man she knew nothing about. “But who
is
he? He has never told me why he needs these strange translations. I’m not sure if he is in the navy or not. Is he one of the foreign attachés scooping up naval intelligence?”

The admiral did not blink as he scrutinized her, but he took a long time before he formulated an answer. “Bane has done some work for me in the past,” he said. “Occasionally I call him back into service for a . . . special project . . . but he hasn’t officially been in the navy for years. He is a good man to know in a pinch.”

It was an evasive answer, but she knew it was all she was likely to get.

Then the admiral surprised her. “As highly as I regard Bane, you should keep him at arm’s length. The man is dangerous. He likes to hide it beneath a veneer of charm, but don’t let that fool you. Bane is as lethal as a scorpion. Take his translating work, but stay away from him otherwise.” A look of concern was carved into the admiral’s rugged face and his voice was earnest. “Is that understood, Miss Pallas?”

“Yes, sir,” Lydia murmured as she left his office.

On Friday, Bane came by the Navy Yard to retrieve the translations. She still needed to earn over five hundred dollars if she was to save her apartment, and she had been hoping Bane would
have another batch of translation work for her. He came breezing into the Navy Yard office, looking flushed and windblown from an early autumn chill. It was maddening that even with his blond hair tousled by the wind he still looked gorgeous, but Lydia gladly pocketed another twenty-five dollars toward her slowly growing account. Better yet, Bane brought her more documents to translate. Before he gave her the pages, he braced one hip along the edge of her desk and teased her about everything from her hairstyle to her handwriting.

“Rigid, cramped letters,” Bane said as he flipped through her translated pages. “There is a Frenchman publishing on the psychology of handwriting analysis and what it reveals about the human psyche. He would have a field day with you, Lydia.”

“I have perfect handwriting,” she said. Penmanship was one of the few things that had been drilled into her at the Crakken Orphanage. She sat a little straighter and noticed him fiddling with her framed pictures while he paged through her translation. “Quit touching that,” she said. “I’m tired of having to put my desk to rights every time you pass through.”

Bane set the translated pages down and picked up the picture. “Why an ocean scene?” he asked. “I should think you see it every day and would have no need of a picture.”

“It is a Mediterranean island in the Adriatic Sea,” she said. “Where I grew up.” When Lydia first saw the small watercolor in a shop, the crystalline sky reminded her so vividly of the sun-filled years of her childhood that she saved up her coins to buy the painting. She had no pictures of her parents or Baby Michael, but when she looked at this image, she could almost hear their voices carrying on the warm breeze that whipped across those choppy blue waves.

She snatched the picture from his hand and returned it to its proper place. “Quit fiddling with things on my desk. And what
is wrong with my handwriting?” she asked to switch the topic. “I took great care in preparing that translation.”

Bane shook his head in mock disapproval. “Look at the uniformity of these letters, the perfect spacing between words. Such control, such order. Charming, but I have an urge to mess them up. I think the Frenchman would say you are afraid of risk. Perhaps even a little repressed, Lydia.”

Karl shot to his feet. “That is enough!” he said. “If you have translating work for Lydia, give it to her and be done with it.”

Bane didn’t budge an inch from the corner of her desk, just kept swinging his leg and looking at her as though she was an object of endless fascination. “What of it, Lydia? Are you up for a little reading about Turkish timber exports?”

Lydia grabbed the pages from him. “I’ll have them translated by Monday,” she said.

6

T
hank goodness for Bane’s translation work. Over the coming weeks the steady stream of translation jobs allowed her to amass almost two hundred dollars for her apartment fund. Bane came by her office at the Navy Yard every few days to bring more work. He would drop off a stack of documents on her desk, flirt outrageously with her, and succeed in sending every rational thought in her head whirling away like a butterfly caught in a windstorm.

There was never any consistency in the documents he asked her to translate. He brought her legal documents from Russian courts and scientific research on currents in the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping logs, tax records, census reports, agricultural records, stock market offerings. Most of the work was mind-numbingly dull, but it made use of the full range of Lydia’s linguistic abilities. Sometimes the documents were crisp and new, others were crumpled and stained. She was certain one set of ledgers had the juice from a spittoon smeared across it.

The only consistent thing was that Bane never brought any
documents for Jacob or Karl to translate. Only Lydia. Was it possible . . . was it conceivable Bane harbored some sort of romantic interest in her?

It might explain the never-ending stream of pure nonsense he brought her to translate. If he had a logical explanation for the bizarre assortment of claptrap he brought her, she might feel better about his regular visits to the Navy Yard, but he refused to provide truthful answers. Whenever she asked what he needed the information for, he shot her one of those damsel-slaying smiles and told her a bold-faced lie. “I’ve always been intensely curious about Albanian municipal tax structure,” he said in response to her question. “It has been difficult for me to sleep knowing you were about to present me with this new tax schedule. I simply live for such gems,” he said as he took the freshly translated tax schedule from her hands.

She forced her misgivings aside because the income from translating was too important to pass up. Lydia knew what it meant to be bone-grindingly poor, and she would never let that happen to her again, but she was growing increasingly uncomfortable whenever Bane was near.

Frankly, she was growing suspicious of Bane. Two weeks ago she had unexpectedly come upon him outside the Massachusetts State House. She sometimes did minor translation work for the government and had been asked to translate business letters written to the Italian foreign minister. She had dropped them off with the clerk, pocketed her five dollars, and been about to leave when she had seen a man she was almost certain was Bane standing with the admiral, the governor of Massachusetts, and some of the state’s chief justices.

Lydia had slid behind one of the tall, fluted columns rimming the lobby of the State House. At first she was only able to see the
back of the man, but he had a slender build like Bane and the same pale blond hair barely brushing his collar. Even the casual, negligent stance was the same. But she was not quite able to believe what she was seeing. The man was dressed much finer than she had ever seen Bane, almost like an aristocrat. When he turned to greet another justice, she saw the side of Bane’s sculpted face, as beautiful and perfect as an archangel.

There was no mistaking Bane’s smooth voice. “Justice Stevens, have you met Admiral Fontaine? He has been in charge of the Navy Yard these past nine years.”

Lydia leaned closer. She tried not to be obvious as she clung to the side of the pillar, but it was vital she hear what he was saying. Why on earth was Bane mingling with such exalted people? He never presented himself as anything other than an unemployed sailor to her.

“Lethal as a scorpion,”
the admiral had said about Bane. And yet, there he stood, glad-handing with some of the most powerful men in the state.

She tried to listen through the din of footsteps and voices echoing off the marble floors and vaulted ceiling. They seemed to be speaking about an election. She heard one of the justices say that someone was not likely to “play ball.” There was a burst of laughter and some backslapping. “Get Bane to bring him into line! He has already got Senator Wilkinson shaking in his boots,” one of the men said. More laughter and then Bane spoke, but his voice was too low for her to hear. As the group broke up, Lydia leaned around the column to get a better look as Bane and the admiral were leaving. Just then Bane swiveled around and locked his eyes on her.

Lydia was frozen to the spot, but Bane did not seem particularly surprised to see her there. He had just dipped his head and flashed her a wink before leaving.

It was the first time she had seen Bane since that day in the State House two weeks earlier. He strode into the office with the catlike grace he seemed to possess effortlessly. Logical thought abandoned Lydia, as it did every time Bane stepped into her view. Her heart started to thud, a flush warmed her face, and she felt like she was floundering without any moorings. It was intensely annoying that he always caused this reaction in her. How could a woman who craved stability and order as much as she did allow a man like Bane to get under her skin? For the sake of her sanity, she needed to keep her distance.

“Are you here to see the admiral?” she asked.

“Yes, but I’d rather chat with you,” he said. Did he just flash her a wink? It was impossible to tell because he had turned to retrieve a stack of documents from a leather case at his side. “I’ve got a bit more translating work for you,” he said as he set a short stack of documents on the corner of her desk.

“What were you doing at the State House last week?” she asked. “Those were awfully powerful men you were with. How is it you are acquainted with the governor?”

“Is that a new blouse?” Bane asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear lace before.”

Lydia glanced down. The Irish lace collar was an extravagance from before she started saving every penny to buy her apartment, but she still took care to press and starch her treasured collar. “Don’t try to change the subject. Besides, you looked awfully dashing yourself, conducting business with the governor at the State House. I’m surprised you didn’t have a trail of women following you.”

Bane flashed her one of those negligent smiles. “Well, it is true I’m terribly sought after. I can hardly walk down the street without women pestering me. I am a victim, really. You should be much kinder to me.”

She tried to stop herself from laughing because it would only encourage him, and this was exactly the sort of amiable sidestepping he so skillfully practiced. “What I ought to do is stop translating the nonsense you bring me.”

Bane reached into his pocket and held a shiny gold coin before her eyes. “Ah, my little mingy wench. The problem is I know how dazzled you are by the almighty dollar.”

And it was such easy money he was offering. The memory of her belongings piled in the center of the street was painful motivation, and Lydia snatched the coin from his hand. “I’ve done the potato diet,” she said as she leaned over to tuck the coin into her satchel. “I’ve done the roach-infested tenements. Don’t think I am insulted by the term ‘mingy,’ because I see it as insurance against a backslide into grinding poverty.”

It wasn’t until Bane left that Lydia noticed the paper dust jacket on her Albanian dictionary had been swapped with the Turkish cover.

And she still hadn’t gleaned a bit of insight into what business Bane had in Boston.

Traffic was heavy at the Long Wharf, as Bane knew it would be. Stretching two thousand feet into the Boston harbor, it could accommodate dozens of ships from all over the world. The air was filled with the call of peddlers hawking oranges and ribbons, flags snapping in the breeze, and the slosh of waves against the massive boulders that supported the wharf. Warehouses lined the north side of the wharf, but the south side was open to the water. As he walked down the wharf, Bane scanned the crowds of peddlers, sailors, and longshoremen until he spotted Admiral Fontaine with his two young children.

Could that possibly be Lucy Fontaine? Bane remembered the first time he had seen the child. She had been trying to catch butterflies. Too young to walk and swing a net at the same time, she had constantly toppled over as she scampered after butterflies in the admiral’s front garden. That was three years ago, but how quickly children grew at this age.

And nine-year-old Jack Fontaine was unmistakable. Bane had never seen the boy without a smattering of army paraphernalia pinned to his clothes. Sometimes it was an army buckle, sometimes a whole set of regulation buttons. He suppressed a grin as he approached the family from behind to eavesdrop on what Eric was telling his children in such passionate tones.

“You see the cruiser pulling in behind that clipper ship? It is homeward bound after more than a year at sea.” He pointed to a narrow pennant on the mast, the signal all ships were entitled to fly as they pulled into port after long voyages. “After they lower the pennant, the top portion goes to the captain. The rest will be cut up and divided among the crew.” Jack did not look impressed. Poor Admiral Fontaine, doing everything possible to sell the glories of the sea to his boy, but it was hopeless. Bane knew the key to this boy’s heart was clear for all to see, sitting right on the lad’s shoulder.

“Is that a regulation braid for the U.S. Cavalry I see?” Bane asked.

All three heads swiveled to look at him. Jack straightened the braid, and his grin threatened to split his face in half. “I bought it with my own money,” the boy said proudly.

No surprise there. After four generations of men who made money from the sea, young Jack Fontaine was itching to buck the trend and join the army, but Admiral Fontaine had not yet conceded the battle. Even as Jack collected army hats, army regulation buckles, and books about the army’s exploits out west, Admiral Fontaine was determined to sell the sea to his only son.

“Look what I found for sale at the Quincy Market,” Bane said, bringing forth the slouch hat from where he’d been hiding it behind his back. Jack’s eyes widened in delight, and he reached with both hands toward the hat.

“This is what soldiers in the army wear out west,” Bane said. “The brim will keep the rain off your face, but the soldiers pin up the right side so it won’t interfere with carrying a rifle.”