It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (14 page)

The more she thought about it, the more it became just another potential obstacle to overcome, and what had her life been but a series of obstacles not only overcome, but triumphed over?

She would clearly, simply need to find another doctor.

The question of what was to become of Sally was perhaps a more pressing one, however. The little girl swung her legs.

At three o’clock in the afternoon she left Sally in the care of Rutherford to see if she could bargain for some bread and cheese and maybe, just maybe, a bit of beef, confident Rutherford would send The Doctor packing should he arrive.

The THUD rocked the building. Sweet Mary, Mother of—only one thing was capable of making such a sound. She scrambled through the door, not pausing to bar it, and plunged inside, dashing down the corridor, up the stairs, and into her rooms.

At first glance, naught was amiss.

And then she saw The Doctor seated casually on the settee, a glass of brandy clutched in his hand.

Mounded on the floor like a great marine mammal, an arm flung over his chest, was Rutherford.

Her heart stopped. She dropped her bundles and staggered, then fell to her knees next to him. Her hands went up to her face.

She shot to her feet again, her words terrified gasps.

“Is he . . . did you . . . ?”

“No, no. I’m not in the business of killing. I’m in the business of
healing
.”

“Oh. Silly me,” she said bitterly. She could see it now: the rise and fall of Rutherford’s rib cage. “Then what have you
done
to him? Where is Sally?”

“He’s merely in the arms of Morpheus. And will be for a good long time. Certainly long enough for us to take our pleasure. We had a drink together, he and I—what man can refuse a bit of good brandy? I pretended to be quite reasonable and resigned and understanding, begged his forgiveness, asked if he would like to toast our parting. I slipped a powder into
his
. I used the weight of a horse to calculate how much I ought to give him. The
sound
he made when he went down. The child is simply napping, as children do—she seems to have slept right through it. I looked in on her, and she seems quite well. Shall we repair to your bedroom?”

He was loosening his cravat.

“Shall we . . . ?” she choked. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Oh. Do you prefer to do it here, then?” He perused the room. “Perhaps I can take you on this little table, and you needn’t bother getting completely undressed. More efficient for the both of us, and Rutherford is unlikely to be conscious of anything for a good long while. Or there’s the settee, and you can climb on top of me. Perhaps you know some new and interesting ways we can both enjoy?”

He was actually
unbuttoning his trousers
now.

“Not if you were the last man on earth, Doctor.”

She desperately, desperately, desperately did
not
want to get a look at the man’s worm.

He paused, a little wounded. “Oh, now, surely that is an exaggeration. I’m not entirely repellant. Be a good lass, sit back here, and lift your skirts. It’ll be over before you know it. I’ve an appointment in an hour or so, so I’ll be off right after.”

His arid uninflected voice made it all the more hideous.

He was advancing on her now. She reflexively backed away, but she encountered Rutherford, tripped, and ricocheted off him to find herself flat against the wall.

“Perfect. Excellent idea. Right here against the wall will do.”

A knee to the baubles. A stomp on his instep. These were time-honored ways of deterring a man.

But quickly, briskly as he did everything, he’d seized both of her wrists in one hand and pinned them against the wall.

She growled low, like an animal.
God
how she hated anything wrapped round her wrists.

She tried to get a knee up, but he’d anticipated that. He pinned her with his body. His soft belly pressed against her, and she could feel his cock beginning to swell. Her stomach heaved.

His hands were cold and peculiarly moist, and for some reason it was this more than anything that made her want to scream and scream. Confirmation that he was indeed part fish.

And with his free hand, he began awkwardly dragging her skirts up.

If she twisted her arms, he’d likely break her wrists.

Fine. Biting it was, then.

She felt her father’s medal burning inside her bodice, and willed courage and protection from it. She twisted her head in preparation to sink her teeth into his hand.

Suddenly his eyes bulged. His mouth fell open. He dropped her hands in favor of scrabbling for his throat, and gagging hideously.

And then he abruptly levitated.

Before her horrified eyes, his dangling feet kicked and thrashed, and his body arced. Every bit as though he’d been speared on a fishhook.

When she finally was able to tear her eyes away from the macabre spectacle of his face, she looked farther up.

To discover that The Doctor was thrashing at the end of Jonathan Redmond’s fist. Jonathan had gotten him by the collar.

The Doctor’s eyes were bulging dangerously. He was purpling rapidly.

“You’d best drop him now,” she said faintly.

Jonathan did.

The Doctor landed with a nasty thud on his knees. Gagging and wheezing, struggling for breath.

Jonathan toed him with his boot gingerly, speculatively, as if he were a fungus of unknown origin on a forest floor.

He looked at her then.

“Are you unharmed?” What a terrifying expression he was wearing.

“. . . unharmed?” she said faintly. “Yes. Thank you. You’ve exquisite timing.”

They both stared down at The Doctor then.

“I can’t decide whether to kill you now,” Jonathan mused to the creature on the floor. “Or hunt you on the street, for pleasure.”

The Doctor’s voice was a scornful, tortured rasp. “You’ll . . . never . . . find me. And your sort doesn’t commit murder. You would have done it now, if you were going to do it.”

“My sort?” Jonathan was amused. “I’m afraid it’s just that I haven’t time in my schedule today to dispose of a body. Tommy, if you will hand The Doctor’s bag to me?”

She did. Jonathan fished around inside and came out with a pair of scissors. He clacked them together, tested the point with his fingertip.

The Doctor struggled to rise, truly unnerved now. “Now, Your Lordship, or whoever you might be . . .”

Jonathan lifted his leg and casually pressed The Doctor into a kneeling position again with his boot.

“Point to something in the room, Doctor. Some part of the décor. Aaaaanything at all. Do it.”

The Doctor didn’t ask questions. He looked about the room. And then he pointed with a trembling finger at a small framed portrait of Tommy, dressed in green and gazing boldly out at the room. It was hung over the settee with a narrow ribbon. Fifteen or so feet away.

Jonathan eyed it. Tommy had never seen anyone so still.

And then his wrist flicked and the scissors hurtled across the room.

The painting crashed to the floor.

The scissors remained embedded in the wall, vibrating. They’d severed the ribbon.

Tommy slowly turned to stare at him in awe.

“I’ll replace the frame,” Jonathan said absently.

The Doctor was gaping.

“It makes surreptitious murder so easy, as you can see, Doctor. When I throw it at you, the dart tip will be dipped in poison, and it will enter that vein throbbing right there in your slimy scrawny white neck. I never miss. Would you like another demonstration? Shall I give you a head start and then track you down with a dart?”

The Doctor had gone a peculiar pale shade of green. “That demonstration will suffice, thank you,” he managed.

“Get up,” Jonathan ordered.

The Doctor struggled first to his hands and knees, and then to his feet. He coughed wretchedly.

“Shall I break one of his cowardly bones for you, Tommy, before he leaves, so that he can’t practice medicine? Choose a bone,” he said, as if offering up a platter of sweetmeats.

The man was sweating now. “I’ll go. I’ll go.
Please
just . . . let me go. ”

“Really? Begging already? I’m not certain I’ll let you go yet. Usually I torture my victims until they wet themselves first. The ones who want to harm women, that is.”

The Doctor was terrified now. He squeezed his eyes closed, and something that may have been prayers wheezed from him.

Jonathan sighed. “Stop it. First, you’ll apologize to the lady.”

“I apologize,” he whispered hoarsely. “I, in fact, rue the day I ever saw you.”

Tommy suspected this reflected Jonathan’s sentiment, too.

“And you will never set foot near her again, or your death will not be pretty.” Jonathan cocked his pistol. His hand whipped out and he seized him by the collar once more, and nudged him at gunpoint down the corridor and out again.

Tommy stood frozen, dumbstruck.

Jonathan returned, tucking his pistol into his coat. As if this sort of thing was something he did all the time.

He paused, staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. And he shook his head slowly to and fro. Lips compressed thoughtfully.

She spoke first. “How did you find . . .”

“. . . your house? Marzipan raspberries,” he said absently. He was still white-faced with fury.

She felt it wisest not to request him to expound.

“The door was unbarred, which struck me as wrong, and when I approached your door, I could hear your . . . exchange . . . with The Doctor through it.” He swept a look over her, ascertaining she was unharmed. “Are you certain he didn’t hurt you?”

“Yes. Thank you,” she said faintly. “He was going to.”

She saw his jaw set at that. He strolled over to the wall and plucked the scissors from it. He hefted them in his hand thoughtfully.

“I’m going to need an explanation. Now.”

His voice brooked no argument.

She began to babble. “He’s a doctor. I brought him in to see to Sally. He’s always been professional, if mysterious . . . He really
is
a doctor,” she concluded lamely. “He decided he preferred a different type of compensation.”

“Clearly,” Jonathan said flatly.

She bit her lip and aimed her glance at Sally’s door. It was still closed.

“What the hell happened
last night?
Did we kidnap a child? And I’m warning you. I won’t tolerate evasion.”

The warning was unnecessary. She knew better than to be evasive in front of this particular version of Jonathan Redmond.

She took a deep breath, and prepared to say aloud something she’d never said aloud, in its entirety, to anyone on earth.

“She was a child sold from the workhouse into indentured servitude as a scullery maid. She was given a shilling to sign a paper that says Lord Feckwith essentially owns her until she’s twenty-one. She made that decision when she was six years old, Jonathan. Could
you
make that decision at six years old? They’re disposable, these children.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you stole Feckwith’s servant?”

She shook her head violently. “Do you think she would have lived to be twenty-one? Lord Feckwith beat her. Violently. More than once. Once, because she dropped the coal hod and it rattled when he was trying to sleep, and another time because she was accidentally underfoot in a corridor. That’s when he swung an arm at her and knocked her over. She should have had a stitch in her forehead. Her shoulder was—” She struggled with the next word. It emerged faint. “—dislocated.”

His head went back a little, as if he’d suffered a blow. He took this in wordlessly. It was a moment before he spoke again.

“How do you know these things?” His voice was steady. But subdued.

“This I can’t tell you.”

“So other people besides you are involved.”

She was silent.

“You’ve done this before.”

A long, long silence.

Suddenly, without warning, he reached out and lightly seized her arm and turned it slightly.

The bullet wound. With his sharp eyes, he’d seen it, and known it for what it was. And the sleeves of her day dress were short enough to expose it.

He gazed at it for a long while. She didn’t pull away.

His face was darkened, unreadable, pensive.

“Oh, God,” he said softly to himself. “I
knew
you were trouble.”

Gently, gently he released her arm.

Jonathan’s gut tightened. He could almost span her arm with his hand. The skin was vulnerably silky. And someone had
shot
at her.

Then again, it seemed as though she had a gift for putting herself in harm’s way.

“Who
else
is going to help them?” She was anguished. “It all started quite accidentally. With the cooperation of, yes, a few other people, I was able to help a little boy get away from where he was being ill-treated, and find him a new home away from London, a place where he’ll learn a trade and be treated well.”

He couldn’t speak through the enormity of this. His hands went up to push through his hair.

“It’s madness, Tommy.” His voice was frayed. He was awed by just
how
mad and dangerous it truly was.

Mad and dangerous and . . .

. . . grand and
noble
and wildly unexpected.

Never would he have dreamed it about her. The slimly elegant Tommy de Ballesteros, she of the gossamer clothing and effervescent charm. She was a Robin Hood, of sorts. A bloody lioness.

And he thought for a moment of beautiful, brittle, distantly charming Olivia Eversea and her antislavery pamphlets and her earnestness. And suspected passion drove her. And he understood a bit how Lyon could be drawn to that sort of thing, would want to warm his hands over it.

“No. Hurting and using children is madness. The practices that somehow allow it are madness. The laws are inadequate and never enforced, and not a single bloody politician seems able to change this. I’m nobody, really, but if
I
can help, if only one child at a time . . . and there are so many, Jonathan. So
many
. Tell me—” She lowered her voice to a fierce hush, and jerked her chin. “—Would you hit her?”