Steadfast (29 page)

Now she knew what Dick did not—that if he did harm Jack over her, it wouldn’t matter
to respectable society that he’d done it to keep her. Respectable society would howl
for his blood, and get it.

But Jack would still be dead, so what would it matter that she was free?

Her only hope lay in keeping him happy—manage to keep him too drunk to get into a
rage and beat her, if possible—and endure. Just as she would not soil the innocence
of her Fire Elementals by letting them defend her, she would not let Jack be killed
by letting him defend her. The two were more nearly the same thing than she had realized
before this moment.

She loved them both. She would not let either of them sacrifice themselves for her.

And so, for their sake, she would only concentrate on keeping Dick happy, and bend
all the magic she knew to one single wish, a wish that applied to Elementals and Jack
alike.

Stay away . . . stay away . . . stay away.

•   •   •

Jack was sitting at the dining table, looking like hell, and no longer staring into
a candle. “Did you learn anything?” Lionel asked.

Jack shook his head. “They can’t get near her, she’s keeping them away, to protect
them I assume, and I’m too angry to scry.” He didn’t have to say who “they” were;
the Fire Elementals, of course. So Katie was keeping the Elementals from coming to
her aid by keeping them away from her.

As for Jack, he was far more than just
angry,
of course, but Lionel let that pass. “I have a bit of good news. The blackguard can
be moved by money, and presumably, by what he regards as a life of luxury as supplied
by the money Katie earns. He’s cunning enough to have discovered what she does. He’s
already worked out that he doesn’t need to lift a finger, and can live off her. So
he’s not at all eager for Katie to lose her positions at the hall. I’ve made it very
clear that if she doesn’t turn up on time, I’ll see she’s sacked immediately, and
he has no idea that Charlie would move heaven and earth to keep her dancing act. She’ll
be at rehearsal in the morning at the usual time.”

Jack’s expression eased the least little bit. “That’s something, anyway,” he murmured.

“It’s more than
something.
It’s suggested a way to handle him,” Lionel replied. The idea had come to him as
soon as he realized how fundamentally lazy and greedy the circus strongman was. “But
that will depend on us finding one of the nobby Masters who’s deep enough in clover
that buying the wretch off for the sake of gaining a Fire Mage is worth the expense.”
It had happened before that one of the elite had “rescued” someone from a dismal life—although
it had generally been someone that one of the Masters had sent off to university,
or taken out of an orphanage, or something of the sort. He’d never heard of any case
like this one. Nevertheless . . . what was the harm in asking? The worst that would
happen would be that his plea would be politely ignored. That was how the toffs were.
If they didn’t like something you’d asked, they’d pretend you never asked it. “It’d
have to be a right royal buy-off too; enough to ship him off to the colonies, or some
such, besides setting the swine up for life. That won’t come cheap.”

“Still . . . it’s a good option.” Jack drummed his fingers on the table. “I might
know one who’d take an interest. And it might be worth me writing to Almsley directly.
I’ve worked with him, and he was less . . . stuffy than most of the upper crust.”

“Hmm. And we could remind him of what
might
happen if the girl gets desperate enough and
does
unleash her Elementals.” Lionel sighed at that. He trusted Katie. He knew she was
a good girl. But how much torture could you expect someone to endure before their
resolve broke and they called in everything they could think of to save them from
an intolerable situation? “It’s damned hot enough, and the buildings hereabouts are
tinder-dry . . .”

Jack shuddered. He didn’t have to hear anything else to know what
could
happen. As they had both taken great pains to drill into her, Fire was the most emotional
of Elements, was the most prone to losing control, and the most prone to allowing
emotion to take it over.

“I’ll write to Lord Almsley,” he said. “You write Alderscroft. But meanwhile—”

“I thought of another thing we might do, but it’s risky,” Lionel warned. “The man’s
already a drunkard. We could make sure he stays that way.” This, too, had occurred
to him once he was out of Dick Langford’s presence. There was some danger in this,
for Katie. It would depend on what kind of a drunk the strongman was. If he was an
angry drunk, it would make things worse for her, unless she could get him to the point
where he was an unconscious drunk, and quickly.

“It might not work,” Jack warned him. “I knew men who you couldn’t tell from sober
when they were dead drunk. They get used to it. The only difference between them drunk
and sober was that sober they were nastier and meaner than drunk.” He stroked his
moustache thoughtfully. “I’ve heard of men that were nicer sober than drunk, too.
If he’s a mean drunk, that would be bad for Katie.”

It seemed they were both thinking the same way.

Lionel shrugged. “I think it’s worth trying. We can arrange for deliveries of Blue
Ruin to the door. He might drink himself to death and save us all a great deal of
expense and worry.” Gin was the curse of the lower classes as well as the tipple of
choice (with tonic) for the upper. Cheap gin got you drunk faster and for less money
than almost anything other than home-brewed beer. Cheap gin was also frequently adulterated,
or distilled in apparatus that used lead pipes. It was hard to drink so much beer
that it sent a man into a sodden coma; it was easy to do so with cheap gin. So cheap
gin could, and frequently did, kill.

“He might well cooperate by drinking himself to death, and gin is the way to do it,
if it can be done.” Jack nodded.

They both stared at each other. “I can’t think of anything else at the moment,” Lionel
confessed, after a long pause.

Jack sighed. “All right, then. We’ll write our letters. I’ll tell you where to find
the worst gut-rotting gin in Brighton, and you arrange for a jeroboam of it to turn
up at Katie’s every couple of days. If he doesn’t drink himself to death, maybe he’ll
be poisoned by it.”

“Keep at your Elementals,” Lionel urged. “They might still be of some use.” He already
knew his would not; although the sylphs made excellent spies when they chose to do
so, they flatly refused to go near the strongman. Dick Langford evidently frightened
them as much as he terrorized his wife.

He’s so foul he frightens creatures he can’t even see . . .

He wondered if there was anything that could be made of that.

Probably not. Except that it would make an excellent line in that letter to Lord Alderscroft.

He went to the desk and brought back pens, ink, and paper for the both of them. “Soon
begun, soonest done,” he said, and set to work.

•   •   •

Dick woke, splashed some water over himself, drank the entire pot of strong tea Katie
had made for him, ate the fried ham and the tinned mushy peas she’d made for him—then
went to the carpetbag he’d brought with him and left in the corner of the cottage,
a bag she had not dared to touch. He stripped down naked as she averted her eyes,
oiled his hair with his favorite violet oil, and began to put on his “best” clothing.

If he hadn’t been so big and muscled, he would have looked ridiculous in it. Blue
trousers, green shirt, red braces, a bright red scarf around his neck—he was inordinately
fond of the peacock outfit, and anyone else wearing it would have found himself the
butt of jokes and mockery.

But of course, no one was going to laugh at anyone the size and strength of Dick Langford.

Or if they did, they were soon going to regret it. He’d broken plenty of noses over
this clothing, and blacked plenty of eyes. No one had ever laughed at him for wearing
this twice.

“Oi’m goin’ out,” he announced, scooping some of the money from the dresser into his
pocket. “Yer stayin’ ’ere, yeah?”

“Yes Dick,” she whispered, even though somewhere inside her a little voice was screaming,
Now’s your chance! Run!

But she knew what would happen if she did. Dick was not threatening idly to break
Lionel’s back.

There were stories all over Andy Ball’s circus of how Dick had broken necks, backs
and even killed men who’d offended him, but had been so clever about it he was never
brought before the law. Plenty of those men had been in rival shows, or shows Andy
had wanted to buy out.

But others had been troublemakers or local bullies among the country-folk; bullies
who’d taken one look at Dick and decided to challenge him in some way or other.

This hadn’t troubled the circus folk of Andy Ball’s establishment; they’d rather taken
it as a mark of pride, that Dick would, in a way, avenge them for the often shabby
treatment they got at the hands of country-folk, who treated them only slightly better
than they treated Travelers. Katie didn’t doubt that at least some of the stories
were true, because there were villages that the circus would go right around and never
stop, and why would Andy Ball ever do that, foregoing a chance at a profit, unless
there was a very good reason for it?

So no. She dared not run. For the same reason that she would not allow Jack to come
here and challenge Dick, she would not run and put Lionel, Suzie, and who knew who
else at risk. Even though Dick would be caught and hang for it and she would be free.
She dared only bend her head and whisper, meekly, “Yes, Dick.”

“Oi’m gonna hev mesel’ a good toime, yeah?” He sneered at her. “None o’ yer tea an’
cakes. Oi want that Blue Ruin on the table waitin’, an’ food fit fer a man. An’ you
be up i’ that loft th’ minute ye hears me, an’ not a peep outa ye. Oi’ll be beck i’
an hour. Mebbe less.”

She almost gaped at him. He couldn’t possibly mean what she
thought
he meant. Surely what he intended was to go find someone to bring back to drink with?

But as the church clock struck nine, and she put the cold ham, cheese, bread and gin
on the table, she heard him at the door. And the unmistakable giggles of not one,
but two women.

She had thought her humiliation was at its nadir. As she scuttled up the ladder and
hid in the loft, and Dick led two of the cheapest floozies she had ever seen into
the little cottage she had once considered her shelter, she discovered that, when
it came to Dick, once again she was wrong.

14

T
HIS might be the most important letter he had ever written in his life, and Jack had
written and torn up a dozen different versions. He was sweating and swearing with
the effort, had to stop himself a dozen times from chewing on the end of Lionel’s
expensive patent pen, and even got up to pace the floor once or twice. Strong tea
didn’t help. Tea heavy with milk didn’t help. Green tea didn’t help, and that was
his court of last resort for thinking. Finally, though, he thought he had one that
would pass muster, and silently handed it over to Lionel to read when they had finished
supper—a supper neither of them had much appetite for.

He waited with his heart in his mouth. Lionel was much better educated than he was.
Lionel had even gone to public school before throwing over the life of a private secretary
to apprentice himself to an illusionist—fortunately both of his masters, the one he
discarded and the one he chose, were also Elemental Mages, so they were far more understanding
than “ordinary” men would have been. But he hadn’t lost his love for letters, nor
his knack with words when he traded the one master for another.

Lionel’s eyebrow rose once or twice, but he handed it back to Jack without commenting
during the reading of it.

“Well?” Jack demanded, completely unsure whether this meant Lionel approved of the
letter or hated it.

A cat fight under one of the windows barely got Jack’s attention, he was so focused
on Lionel.

“I’m not Lord Almsley, but that letter would probably move me,” the magician said.
He pulled at his lower lip a little. “You’re taking a risk admitting you are in love
with the girl, though. Some men might see that as a suspect motive. They might wonder
how much of the story of the brutish husband was truth and how much was you trying
to come up with an excuse to get her away.”

“My father worked more than once with the current Lord’s father,” Jack explained.
“I was in my teens and I met the current and previous Lord Almsley, though young Peter
was barely out of the nursery at the time. The previous Lord not only did not criticize
my father for marrying a girl with no magic, he said it was a healthy thing, and that
all that mattered was that they were happy. If the son is anything like the father,
and I think he is, that’s not a risk, it’s a point in my favor.”

“I defer to your judgment,” Lionel told him. He carefully folded the sheets, and got
up and obtained two envelopes. He wrote something on both—the second address was longer
than the first one. He put Jack’s letter in the first envelope, sealed it, then put
his letter and Jack’s in the second. “I’ll post these in the morning; I’ll enclose
yours in mine and ask Alderscroft to send it on.” He glanced at the clock on the mantle.
“Will you need something to help you sleep?”

“Brandy will probably—” before he could protest, Lionel had gone to the sideboard,
poured him a double, and taken one himself. The magician brought both glasses back
to the table and shoved one across to Jack. “For God’s sake, Lionel, I have my own!”

“And it’s nothing like as good as mine,” Lionel sniffed his own drink. “If you are
going to be unhappy, never drink anything but the best. At least you’ll be unhappy
with style. Besides, if you leave right after you finish it, this won’t hit you till
you’re on your own doorstep, and then if you find you still can’t sleep, you can try
a second dose of your own tipple.”

Jack had to acknowledge the truth of that. He drank Lionel’s excellent brandy with
gloomy appreciation, took his leave of his friend, and Lionel escorted him as far
as the door before retreating into his own house for the night.

There was one distinct advantage to being just a trifle tipsy on the walk home; his
damned stump didn’t hurt as badly as it usually did. And he was no more unsteady than
usual. Walking on stone, like the cobbled pavement, was hard. If he wasn’t careful,
and sometimes if he was, the peg leg slipped off the slightly domed surface of the
cobblestone he set it on and slid into the join with the next stone, setting him off-balance
and jarring his whole body.

It was quiet around his flat when he got there, which was good. He lived in a neighborhood
that seemed to have a lot of young bachelors in it, and they were not always the industrious,
ambitious clerks he would have preferred as neighbors, the sort of young men who wanted
to rise in their firms and went to bed at a sober hour. In fact, for a few of them,
he suspected “sober” was a condition they were altogether unfamiliar with.

But he still wasn’t able to sleep. He lay there in the dark with the window open to
the night air and his thoughts running around in circles, his muscles tense with anxiety,
and his mind always coming back to the same place he had left.

His Katie was in danger. At this very moment, she was definitely frightened, and possibly
hurt. And yet there was nothing he could do at this moment to help her.

He had to get her away from that brute. He
had
to, in the same way that he
had
to eat,
had
to breathe.

But that brute had every right under the law to do what he wanted to with her. He
could beat her, starve her, scream at her, steal her money, even make her work as
a whore if he chose. The only thing he couldn’t do was kill her. That brute had every
right under the law, because under the law she was his property. And there was nothing
Jack could do about that.

Finally as he thought, angrily, for the hundredth time,
the law is an ass,
something unexpected occurred to him.

Suddenly, now he saw what the Suffragettes were on about.

He’d never been particularly in sympathy with the Suffragettes—he’d always considered
they were making a great deal of fuss over nothing—until now.

Couldn’t women already do pretty much what they wanted to? That was the irritated
thought that had always crossed his mind when he was encountering one of their marches.
Why should they be making such a lot of fuss? Why, look at women like Peggy! They
had the best of it. So he had thought, anyway, until Peggy had told him of the three
husbands she’d chucked over at immense expense and difficulty—the drunkard, the libertine
and the brute. But still, she had gotten rid of them, right?

But now . . . now his Katie was in the hands of a brute, and she couldn’t be rid of
him, because she hadn’t put her money where he couldn’t get at it, and he’d threatened
her friends if she tried to chuck him.
And the law was going to let him do that.
Because even if she reported the threat to the police, all he had to do was laugh
and say something like “There, you see, women can’t take a joke,” and it would all
be brushed under the carpet—and probably Katie would get a lecture about making false
claims to the police.

So now one of the tracks his mind was flying off on was how it wasn’t just the vote
women wanted. No, now he could see with unhappy clarity that what they wanted was
to be treated like equal human beings, and not like someone’s possession. Why, he
reckoned that there were more laws in place saying what a man could do to his horse
or his dog than there were ones saying what a man could do with his wife.

He knew better than to toss and turn in his bed; it served no purpose, it frequently
made his stump ache worse. He’d learned long ago that when a black night came, the
only thing he could do was to lie there and wait it out.

It wasn’t fair to Katie. What had Katie ever done to deserve what was happening to
her now?

It wasn’t fair to him, either. They had everything arranged! Within months, she would
be free, and they could be married! What harm had he ever done—

But then, he knew what he had done to deserve this. Granted, it had been in war, and
soldiers were always told that God was on their side, and anything they did in war
was for the sake of God and country. But he had known better, and he had never believed
that. There were things that were immoral, and wrong, and even heinous, and you didn’t
do them even if you got thrown in the stockade and court-martialed over them.

He hadn’t done those things—but—he wasn’t innocent either. He hadn’t done harm on
purpose, but. . . .

Well . . . harm by omission. I followed orders and said nothing, in Africa. I wasn’t
the one who was rounding up kiddies and women and burning them out and herding them
into prison camps to starve and die—but I didn’t say anything either, and I didn’t
do anything about it. Could I have found a way to make people see the terrible things
we were doing there? Probably, if I tried hard enough.

Maybe all of this was his fault, for entangling Katie’s life with his. . . .

Maybe if he gave her up . . . maybe if he promised God he would be nothing but a friend
to her and put distance between them. Maybe God would be merciful and stop heaping
punishment on her that was rightly due to him.

The curtain moved in the breeze from the sea; heat and sorrow weighed down every limb
like a blanket of stones. Distant noises of people moving through the streets only
served to remind him that
other
people were happy, and that he did not deserve to be.

The night stretched on, and despair closed over him like the dark waters of a pitiless
sea.

•   •   •

Katie had resorted to pulling a pillow over her head despite the heat in the loft,
and trying not to hear the noises coming from the bed. It wasn’t just the squeals
and the cries and the panting and grunts, nor the thumps and creaking of the bed,
either, it was smells she couldn’t wall out. Dick’s violet hair oil, some cheap, nasty
scent one of the women had drenched herself with, sweat, and an intense and unmistakable
musky odor that she knew all too well. The smells were actually worse than the sounds,
because they seemed to get right inside her.

The heat in the loft was not helped by the embarrassment and shame that permeated
her, shame that made her whole body seem on fire. Oh the shame! She hated all of that,
and yet, there was a part of her that was going,
but if that was Jack . . .

But eventually, all the sounds stopped, and she got used to the smells, and once a
sort of silence settled over the cottage, she actually dozed off for a little.

She woke, as if shocked awake by a bucket of ice-cold water to the face, to a sickening
and familiar sound—the meaty sound of a hand smacking into a face.

Only this time it wasn’t her face that was being struck.

There was only a little light in the cottage now, from one of the gaslights turned
down low. There wasn’t much danger that Dick would spot her, so she wiggled to the
edge of the loft and peered over.

There was only one floozy in the cottage now; where the other had gone, she had no
idea. The woman was sprawled ungracefully on the floor, wearing nothing but her bloomers
and chemise, her face already going black and blue on the side where Dick had slapped
her. She was a dirty blonde—literally. It looked to Katie as if she hadn’t washed
her hair in six months, or her body in three. It also looked as if she never scrubbed
off the paint on her face, only put on a new layer over the old. Her underthings were
dingy and stained, and the hems were all out and fraying.

Her eyes were screwed up tightly with rage—at least the one that hadn’t started to
swell closed was—and her mouth snarling under the paint. She made a snatch for something
in the puddle of clothing beside the bed. “Ye right bastard!” she spat. “I’ll cut
ye fer that!”

Before she could make good on her threat, Dick had reached out, with that fast grabbing
motion Katie knew so well, hauled the whore up from the floor by her hair, and methodically
punched her once in the stomach. That drove the breath out of her, both her hands
flew wide-open. A knife clattered to the floor out of the right, and one of Katie’s
little keepsakes out of the other.

Dick punched her again and she gasped with pain.

But Dick was far from done. This was his cold rage, much more frightening than his
hot anger. He didn’t say anything, just kept hitting her. It was exactly as he’d beaten
Katie last night; the same silent rage, the same methodical blows, with the sole exception
that with this woman, Dick wasn’t trying to spare her looks or her ability to dance.
He was striking her where he pleased, taking care only to not kill her on the spot.

She couldn’t even scream, because he had driven all of the breath out of her body,
and kept driving it out every time she managed to get a lung-full.

He’d done that to Katie, too. It was his way of keeping her quiet, so no one knew
he was beating her.

When he was finally satisfied with his handiwork, he opened the back door, threw the
whore out into the scrap of yard back there, and threw her clothing after her. Then
he shut the door, dusted his hands like a man who is pleased with a job well done,
and turned.

She knew instinctively that he was going to look up, and pulled her head back out
of sight before he could. She didn’t know if he would be angry to catch her watching,
spying on him, or if he would consider the beating an object lesson for her. He had
to know she had heard everything. She could only compromise by staying out of sight,
and letting him imagine she was cowering with fear in her bed.