Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles (13 page)

I did not have to wait long. “If you complete whatever you are meddling in now,” he told me, “come and see me again.”

Certainly, I could give him that. I inclined my head. “I promise.”

Chapter Nine

To his credit, Lord Piers did not argue when I asked to borrow his attire. He left me to sort out the things I needed to traverse the street. I heard him leave by way of the front door, perhaps to give himself some air—rancid as it was outside the carefully maintained filters he’d obviously had installed for his lady’s benefit.

It must gall to be trapped with me. I sympathized immensely as I rolled the hem of a pair of entirely too long trousers. Piers’s waist was larger than mine, which made lashing it down comical at best. Nevertheless, I borrowed an informal jacket of herringbone tweed—generally too fine for an urchin as I resembled, but it wouldn’t be the first bit of apparel nicked by a bantling and worn for boasting rights.

I left the lovely blue dress upon Miss Turner’s perfectly made bed, careful not to wrinkle the skirts any farther than I had already.

I wondered what it meant that I had begun to miss wearing pretty dresses. Or perhaps it was something else that I associated with them that I missed—such as my family. Not my parents, may their souls forever rot in peace, but the family that had taken me in when I was but a devil child in denial for my new life.

Fanny had always been the mother I’d never had. I missed her dearly, but the loss of her companionship and that of my staff was the price I paid for this double life I had chosen; a double life that had become only one.

This one.

Was there any room in this new life—this identity that I had not yet fully formed without smoke to fill it—for those I had only come to love wholeheartedly after I had chosen to leave them?

I could, all too well, hear Fanny’s appalled words in my head as I peered at myself in the vanity mirror. I had never seen the woman swoon outright, though I suspected she might have were she to see me now.

My intent was to become something not worth looking at, but the obviousness of my hair was still too red, especially against the brown tweed jacket. And no one in their right mind would fail to recognize me as a female, even with the thick braid hidden down the back of the coat.

When all else failed, there were older tricks I’d come to abandon over the past few months.

My boots left unfortunate bits of dried mud in my wake, and I mentally apologized to the mistress who would be forced to sweep it, but time was of the essence. It had been less than half of an hour since Maddie Ruth and her companion had departed.

When Piers returned fifteen minutes later, so measured by the clock upon the wall, he found me working a handful of black into my hair. A bit of oil and soot combined to make an old trick, learned by happy accident years ago. It dulled my hair, turned it black as the night sky with none of the gleam.

Piers halted in the entryway of the parlor, an eyebrow rocking upwards. “You provoke the damnedest things.”

I smiled from underneath my elbows, crouched by the dwindling fire. “They will be searching first for a female with red hair.”

“That hair has always marked you, hasn’t it?”

A fine grit drifted like a cloud into my face, and my nose twitched. “Well-remembered,” I managed just before I muffled a sneeze.

As he watched me, I scraped my blackened fingers once more over my braided hair and scrubbed them across my cheeks for good measure.

He snorted a laugh, promptly covering his mouth with hands he’d stripped the gloves from. His amusement, warm though it was, quickly faded. “Are you truly a collector?”

“I am. For some years, now.”

“Mm.” A thoughtful noise. “I don’t truly understand what it is you do. The collectors I know have never quite evoked this image you present.”

“Society collectors,” I sneered, scraping my nose across my borrowed sleeve. The lord’s eyelids flinched. “Oh,” I said, staring down at the blackened sleeve. “I beg your pardon.”

“No, no,” he returned, albeit it somewhat weakly. “Please keep it for future, ah, endeavors.”

Terribly sweet of him. “Any word yet from Maddie Ruth or your lady?”

“None.” He did not sneer or wince at my use of
lady
, as some lordlings might. Adelaide Turner was no lady, but I liked that Piers thought her near enough for his purposes.

“Keep an ear out for the rear exit, then,” I said, glancing again at the clock that ticked and tocked in mindless rhythm. “Maddie Ruth will send a bantling—ah, a child runner,” I amended for him.

“Right, then.” Piers acknowledged, for all he could not hide the bemusement with which he regarded me.

We lapsed into a silence that was not overly easy, but companionable enough. I did not feel as though his stare weighed upon my shoulders like a verdict of guilt, but he did not look at me directly very often.

Perhaps I continued to pluck those emotional chords that he regretted now.

I did what I could to be as unobtrusive as possible, which meant a great deal of twiddling my thumbs and watching the clock hands shift. He pottered about. We shared this kinship of awkward awareness. The tableau in which I had trapped him, the mixed emotion with which he regarded me, made for unusual bedfellows in Adelaide’s pretty parlor.

All that I thought to say seemed like a hammer to the fragile glass of the peace we held, and so I said nothing at all.

Instead, I sat upon one of the young lady’s paisley armchairs and watched the fire crackle and pop.

It seemed to me that for some time, I could not look at the heart of a flame without being reminded of Micajah Hawke. That unusual streak of blue in his brown eyes had always made me think of the color buried in the very center of the fire, and now was no different. That his gaze was mostly blue spoke of esoteric matters, for I knew of no physical ailment that could change a man’s eyes so easily.

The question I had to ask myself was a blunt one: Was Hawke still Hawke, for all his perceived differences?

I dwelled on this subject for a time, mulling it slowly in the silence of the parlor.

Although I might accuse the ringmaster of a hedonistic streak to rival any in Society, I could not believe that he would treat any woman who visited his prison as he had me. The first time I had freed him from the shackles forced upon him, he had claimed my body.

This time, I had not touched the locks, but he had claimed a kiss.

The pad of my thumb smoothed over the small bump left by the flash of his teeth, a reflexive gesture I had not realized I’d done until a small pain flared underneath the pressure. Frowning, I tucked my hand back to my lap.

The facts as I knew them were slim. Hawke was most definitely under the influence of something I did not yet have a label for, and thus I had no ideas on how to fix it—if, at all, it could be fixed. What could make a man alter so much that he show three faces instead of one? The wicked ringmaster, the vile showman and the unseemly beast were all aspects of one—and yet were I to put a fine line upon it, I’d say that the showman and the beast were simple extremes of the ringmaster he’d been.

Did that mean the true Hawke was as I’d once known him, kept in balance by weight of some internal will or external source?

How would I go about verifying this?

The Veil was not a helpful source. I had learned only two assumed truths—an internal fraction appeared to have afflicted the once-unified organization, and the Ferrymen could only have achieved such power in Limehouse with the Veil’s wherewithal. There was no other explanation. Were it any other way, the residents of the district would not be so easily quelled.

Say what I would of the Chinese immigrants I knew little enough of, they bore strong ties to one another.

The Chinese girl might have had more answers, but neither of us were in a position to ask them. After witnessing Hawke’s unbridled assault, I could understand rather more clearly what she’d meant by threat of devouring.

Yet I remembered all too clearly how he’d plucked the blade from the air, how he’d pulled the Veil’s footmen from me.

How he had avoided hurting me direct.

Was it wishful thinking on my part?

Piers returned to the parlor to take seat upon the sofa, a book in hand and gaze firmly not on me. Whether or not he intended to ignore me, or if perhaps he—like me—did not know how to break this silence, I was not certain.

I shifted in my chair, leaning my head back against the brocade.

If Hawke was that tiger they likened him to so often, and the Veil claimed the role of the godlike dragon, why bother keeping him around? Unless the Veil preferred to keep that what it saw as dangerous and show it off as they did their lions.

That might explain why they continued to make claims on my freedom, rather than murder me outright; though this appeared to have altered somewhat in my absence.

I was left with a distinct impression that were it to come down to my imprisonment or Hawke’s servitude, the Veil preferred the latter.

I could not blame them. He had been, at one time, a most admirable servant. I had once thought his will inseparable from the Veil’s. The whisper of warmth in my chest—a fragile and fluttery feeling—forced me to splay a hand across the front closure of my gifted coat.

Ambitious, no doubt, and too soon for such fragile optimism.

There was nothing to say for certain that Hawke had chosen me, despite his efforts to refrain from hurting me directly. He had, no doubt, protected me from the Veil’s various attempts to bring me to heel, but he still remained within the bounds of the Menagerie.

I could not believe that he be held unwillingly.

And yet, I could not walk away until I tried to free him.

That I wanted to laugh was not indicative of amusement. Instead, as the fragile warmth of cautious optimism shifted to a sharp pang, I wondered instead which one of us—the ringmaster or the collector—was truly the imprisoned soul.

My sigh gusted from me, and Piers glanced up from his book. In my peripheral vision, I saw his gaze level upon my face, but I dared not meet it direct.

If he asked me, I was not prepared to answer—or to lie.

What was Hawke to me?

An unfinished thread.

I could think no further than that. Anything else seemed too great a step into a yawning chasm from which there was no going back. I was not prepared to address this aspect of my feelings. A laughable state from any angle; wholly aware that I avoided myself, and unwilling to address just what it was I avoided.

It was an interminable two hours of this cerebral dance I engaged in before a knock came at the front door, and not the back.

I tensed. The multitude of concerns I nursed upon simmered to a taut silence.

While it was not entirely out of the question that Adelaide had returned with her carriage and now expected to escort me to wherever I was meant to meet Ashmore, I found it rather unlikely.

This was her home. She would walk in, would she not?

Could Ashmore be on the other side?

Also unlikely. He was polite enough to knock, but not so foolish as to stroll up to the front door of a lady’s home when it was being watched. To assume otherwise would be to doubt the intelligence of Ashmore, Maddie Ruth
and
Lord Piers’s lady.

“Wait,” I said quickly as another knock, more insistent, rapped through the small home. An unnecessary command, for Lord Piers did not rise from his lazy sprawl upon Miss Turner’s sofa. He stared up at the ceiling, hands laced casually behind his head and book left upon the floor beside him, but there were grooves at the corners of his mouth.

I may have lost the acuity of my fog-sense, but the instinct carved into me by way of old habits wasn’t dead—merely sluggish. It warmed now, its refrain like the pinging retort of an aether engine in one of Lord Piers’s gondolas above.

My gaze fixed upon that tense face. “What did you do?”

The lines carved into each side of his mouth deepened. The guilt I read there, the haggard tension as his eyes closed, reassured me my senses had not gone awry.

Even as it painted Piers the villain.

My innards dropped, anxiety merged with bitter disappointment. “Piers,” I whispered, too close to a plead for my taste but too raw for anything but honesty. “Why?”

“Please understand.” A strained whisper; a sharper scrutiny revealed that it was not laziness that kept him upon that sofa, but a fixed rigidity. He clutched the armrest beneath his head with white-knuckled intensity. “The Veil has been searching for you for months.”

“Why?” I asked again, sharper now.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Bloody hell,” I hissed, and leapt over the back of the chair. “What did you tell them?”

“Only that you remained here,” he said, throwing an arm over his face. His voice muffled into the bend of his elbow. “Things are different, my dear sister. The Veil has marked every person you knew. If we do not play along...”

The sentence trailed, but the threat remained implicit.

The door thudded hard enough that I knew someone on the other side had tested it with a boot. I flinched. “How powerful is the Veil that you would be caught in such a scheme?” I demanded.

His laughter trembled with exhaustion. “Powerful enough that I would trade you for protection.”

“For you?” When he said nothing, I understood. More than he hoped I would, I had no doubt. “For Adelaide.”

I could all but picture his weary smile now; a paler shade of that gentle expression he favored the young lady he’d taken into his protection. I understood what it meant. Perhaps more than he thought I might.

I understood, but I did not like the cost.

“Damn it, Piers,” I said tightly, and dashed for the parlor’s exit.

“I told them I would have you prepared for delivery,” he called after me, still muted by his own lethargy. “Take the back door. They’ll expect you through the front.”

It was the least he owed me. Or perhaps it was not enough that I owed him.

The weight of this swinging balance was impossible to track.

Had I listened less to the wounds of my heart, I would never have placed my trust in a man whose own wounds were not yet healed. More fool I, who thought a friendly embrace and a bout of tears could mend them so completely.