Jane and the Damned (17 page)

“Concentrate!” William grabbed him by the collar and threw him down.

“Let us assume you have stabbed me or bitten me by this time,” Luke said. “We’ll start again. Most of the killing you do must be quick and clean, and above all, silent.”

“May I dine when I kill?” Jane found herself anticipating dining this evening; her fangs had extended again. She got to her feet.

“If you have time, certainly,” Luke said, “but surely you noticed with your Frenchman that it was not particularly quiet?”

She remembered the guttural bubbling wheeze of the dying man and nodded.

“So.” He stepped close to her. “Give me your hand. Here, at my back. Aim upward, and you will reach the heart through the ribs. Now try again. Walk quietly. You don’t want to arouse my suspicions. And Jane, if you please, save my shirt and do not use your knife. I promise you’ll have opportunity enough to make me bleed, and besides, it will hurt like the devil.”

He turned away from her and lounged against the mantelpiece, whistling softly to himself, and she stalked up on him, planting the knife precisely, or so she hoped, in the right spot on his ribs.

“You’re dead,” she said.

He spun around, grasped her wrist, and tossed her onto the floor, his own knife point pressing against the binding on her
chest. “No,
you
are.” He paused. “What will you do? Consider, I cannot kill you—or at least, not like this—but I can certainly injure you and weaken you enough to take you into captivity. Or I can call to my companions to help overpower you.”

She struggled to throw him from her, but the point of his knife pricked through the fabric of her shirt; she heard the small sound as the threads severed. He was stronger than she was, and this time he would not allow her to overpower him.

“If you’re fast, you may throw a man off yourself, and my advice is to either kill him then or run as fast as you can.” He eased himself from her and stood. “But let us suppose you are in a tight corner and there is nowhere you can run and evade him, no shadows in which to conceal yourself. You must fight hand to hand and I shall teach you a little. You have the advantage of speed and strength, but doubtless your opponent will be more skilled and also have a greater reach.”

She stood and faced him.

He took her coat and draped it over his left arm. “Use your coat or hat to distract him and also to protect yourself. Try it.” He tossed the coat to her.

She caught it and used her protected arm to block his attack.

“Good, good, now stab beneath—aim for my belly, Jane, you seek to injure me—” He twisted away from her with the grace and speed of a dancer, circled. “Attack me, don’t wait. Keep coming at me—”

Once more she found herself rudely deposited on the floor, this time landing on her bottom. “You kicked me!”

“I told you, I shall not fight like a gentleman, and neither shall you.”

She rolled away as his blade whipped down. She stabbed upward, punching into something solid with a sound that reminded her again of the French soldier and of Mrs. Burgess
chopping at the joint of mutton. She pulled the knife back and blood spattered over her hand.

“Well done.” Luke dropped to the floor beside her. “Claim your victor’s spoils.”

“Oh, Luke, I’m sorry.” She gazed at the cut on Luke’s knee, blood darkening his breeches and flowing down his boot. Her fangs lengthened. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not much.” He pushed the top of his boot down and fumbled at the buckle on his breeches leg. “You’re fast, better than I thought you would be.”

She bent her head to his leg, canines extending. There was a small white scar on his knee, only just visible beneath the brown hairs, and she wondered if that was a scar from childhood. Had his mother kissed it better for him, decades or centuries ago?

He drew in a sudden breath.

I shall not remember that, not even for you, Jane.

Forgive me.

George and William fell silent, watching as she lapped Luke’s blood. As she breathed the wound into wholeness again she glanced up and saw them both
en sanglant.

“And before you suggest it, sir, the victor shall not patch your breeches,” she said.

Jane returned to Paragon Place that afternoon, already hungry despite the delicious but all too brief taste of Luke’s blood. She went upstairs with the bundle of men’s clothes and hid it in a chest of drawers beneath a shift. Downstairs, to her surprise she found her mother and sister in the drawing room—their hands at their needlework looked pinched with cold—entertaining Captain Garonne.

He stood and bowed. Sleet rattled against the windowpanes and damp, cold smoke gusted into the room from the fireplace.

“I was just telling the captain how well you play, Jane,” her mother said. “Was the water of benefit to you, my dear?”

“I believe, so, thank you, ma’am.” She sat and picked her work from the sewing box.

“I should be honored if you play for me, Miss Jane,” the captain said.

“Pray excuse me. My hands are too cold.”

“She has not been at all well,” Mrs. Austen said in a loud whisper to Garonne. “She is like me—very delicate.”

Jane delicately bent her needle into a hoop and straightened it out again, pleased by the strength in her hands.

Cassandra yawned.

The clock on the mantelpiece, a florid affair of ivory and bronze, ticked loudly in the silence.

The front door opened and closed, and they heard Mr. Austen talking to the footman. He came into the room, his nose reddened with cold.

“Oh, my dear Mr. Austen,” cried Jane’s mother. “Sit down, my dear. I shall ring for more tea and you may tell me of your day. Is the populace still discontented? Mrs. Burgess stood over three hours in the market for a sorry piece of bacon and some beefsteak that must come from a cow of venerable years, but at least we have bread now and a little cheese. And Cassandra was sharp enough to spot a milkmaid in the street, and went out directly for milk.”

Mr. Austen glanced at his daughters. “You look well, Jane, but thin in the face; I do not think it suits you. I must congratulate you, Cassandra, on the purchase of milk. I wish my day had been as successful. I have nothing to show for my pains.”

Mrs. Austen, in the midst of giving orders to the footman who had just entered the room, looked up sharply. “It is too bad they will not let us go home.”

“Believe me, madame, you may be better off here, in the city, than traveling dangerous roads,” Garonne said. “There is much unrest in the country. It is not safe.”

Mr. Austen sighed. “I stood in a line for hours, and then when only half a dozen were ahead of me, the soldiers said the office was closed for the day.”

“They expect money,” Garonne said.

“A bribe? That does not fit in with your republican ideals, surely?”

“It is war, sir, and men are what they are.”

“It is not the way we do things in England, sir.” Mrs. Austen opened the tea caddy that stood on the mantelpiece. “My poor sister is almost out of tea.”

“That is terrible indeed,” Garonne said. “The blockade prevents more tea being brought into the country, so prices are very high.”

“The Navy runs a blockade?” Jane asked.

He shrugged. “It is no matter. We shall defeat you there too, ma’amselle.”

“I have a brother serving in the Navy, sir. It is no small matter to us.”

“Oh, my poor boy!” Mrs. Austen cried. She turned to the footman. “We shall use the tea leaves twice. You may have the leaves downstairs after that.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The footman bowed and left the room, looking distinctly gloomy at the prospect of even weaker tea for the servants in the future.

“So you do not dine with your new friends tonight?” Mrs. Austen turned on Jane. “I regret we cannot ask them to dine. This is not our house. It is very good of them to have you to dinner so often.”

“Oh, I don’t have much appetite, ma’am, and they seem to enjoy
my company.” There, the truth, more or less, although her appetite felt like a raging, growling animal inside her. She glanced out of the window at the darkening sky. Soon the Austen family and their uninvited guest would dine and she would retire, claiming poor health. And after that …

Jane became aware that her mother was talking again of the Sydney Garden entertainment the next evening.

“… and my dear, Captain Garonne was kind enough to offer to escort us. There! What do you think of that?”

Before her father could make a reply, the footman entered with hot water and china and Mrs. Austen busied herself with making tea, chattering on about what Cassandra should wear and whether it would be a fine night.

“And you, Jane, do you wish to go?” her father asked her as Mrs. Austen paused for breath.

“No, sir, I do not. I do not believe we have anything to celebrate.”

“At least one of the family has a sense of decorum. I regret, sir, we must decline your most kind invitation.”

“Oh, Mr. Austen! After I have been so unwell, I think I deserve a little pleasure. And poor Cassandra, stuck here at home while Jane gallivants around taking the waters. I think you will change your mind soon, for you will see it is the best possible thing for us.”

With a sinking heart, Jane saw that a familiar pattern began to emerge. Her mother would chip away at her father’s defenses like a garrulous, lace-bedecked siege engine, until, irritated and exhausted by her persistence, he would allow her to do as she wished. Jane did not want to witness the scene, particularly in front of a man she could regard only as their enemy. Muttering an excuse, she stood to leave the room.

Garonne opened the door. In a low voice, he said, “I regret
you will not come with us, ma’amselle. The party will not be the same without you.”

“There will be no party, sir.” She stepped past him and made her way up the stairs and into the sanctuary of her own room.

Only a few hours to go. She would pick at a small amount of food over dinner, drink tea again, and retire to bed. And after that, her real life would take up again, when, dressed as a man, she would climb down the vine that grew over the back of the house, and go to meet her own.

“Tonight we hunt.”

“Hunt what?”

“Our dinner,” Luke said. “And we frighten the French—it is all to the good. But first I shall teach you how to use the shadows.”

He led her down the steep, narrow staircase that led to the kitchen of the Queens Square house. A few servants worked there, preparing elaborate dishes of spun sugar and fancifully stuffed and decorated fowl; rich and luxurious, but nothing like the quantity of food a normal, wealthy household would serve for dinner.

“Who will eat this?” Jane asked.

“We might, should any of the food appeal to our senses; after all, food is something that should be savored and enjoyed.” He pinched a sugar flower from a dish made of spun sugar in the form of a Greek temple, an intricate work of art that seemed too beautiful to eat. “Try this.”

Jane parted her lips, chewed and swallowed. “Delicious. A sugar rose flavored with rosewater.”

“Or this.” He offered her a small pastry tart filled with cream and custard, delicately flavored with nutmeg and lemon. “We must leave, for I cannot afford to upset our cooks, particularly our pastrycook. But you must try this wine sauce flavored with
saffron.” He dipped a spoon into a small copper saucepan. “This is for the pheasant, is it not, Jacques?”

A man wearing an apron with a large, lethal-looking knife tucked into the waistband nodded. “Yes, milord, it is. Don’t you go spoiling your appetite on Frenchies out there.”

Jane was intrigued by the man’s accent, French overlaid with Cockney, and the admiration he obviously held for Luke, who started a well-informed discussion with him about the uses of saffron and nutmeg, and the different sorts of mushrooms available.

“He thinks he is English,” Luke said to Jane as Jacques turned away to scream, with violent Gallic gestures, at one of his underlings. “He is extraordinarily embarrassed by the presence of his fellow countrymen here. I think he fears someone may recognize him.”

“What would they do to him if they did?”

Luke dipped a spoon into another saucepan. “Take him away and have him cook for their officers, I expect, and his pride in his profession would not allow him to poison anyone. Or only in a very delicious way. But we should leave.”

He took her hand and led her outside. Stone steps led up to the street level, glistening wet in what little light there was.

“Watch.” He stepped into a shadow and faded from view.

She looked around for him but apparently he had disappeared. “How do you do that?”

“Quite easily.” His voice came from behind her, quiet and amused.

“Oh! You startled me!”

“Now you try.”

Obediently she stepped into the dark area by the steps. “Now what do I do?”

“Think of the dark.”

She tried to but the urge to giggle was strong. “Am I still here?”

“Very much so. Now concentrate.”

“Concentrate on what, precisely?”

“Darkness. Stillness.”

She closed her eyes and attempted to contemplate the nature of darkness.

“Jane, my dear, it does not follow that if you cannot see me I cannot see you.”

She opened her eyes. “It’s about as logical as thinking about darkness.”

“Dear, dear, and you a creature of the imagination, an authoress. Very well, think about something, a favorite object, that is dark.”

The night sky? A shovelful of coal? Instead, she thought of a certain beautiful black feather she had bought to trim a hat, its dusky softness and the way it sprang against her hand. Darkness curled and lapped around her like silk. “Oh!” she said in delight. “Oh, it’s like bathing in warm ink.”

“What an extraordinary life you writers lead, to be sure.” Luke put one booted foot on the stone steps, and flicked a drop of water from the iron rail with one hand. “Not bad, not bad at all. Now George, he thought of a black cat, and it made him sneeze, so he might have become invisible, but you could hear him all over the town. Follow me and pray do not try to trim that hat with anything bright and shiny.”

She took his hand and followed him up the steps to street level. He stood, scenting the air like a hound, and nodded.