The Devil to Pay (23 page)

“Not me.” Pug sounded suddenly horrified.

Budley shoved at her shoulder. “Well, what say we get them navy togs down round his ankles, and bugger him good?”

“Christ Jesus!
Here?”

Budley grinned. “Why not?” he said. “I like the looks of ’im, I do.”

“Gawd, Budley, you want your cock ter rot off?” said his cohort. “Let’s just nick what’s in ’is pockets and pike off.”

Sidonie seized the moment of uncertainty. She threw back an elbow for all she was worth. Air exploded from Budley’s lungs, and he bent forward on a loud, gagging sound. She whipped around and caught Pug across the throat with the edge of her hand. It connected. Budley lunged, but Sidonie danced away, whipping out her knife.

“Back off,” she snarled, “or I swear to God, I’ll trim both your sails.”

Budley blanched and dropped his hands. The hooligan called Pug still clutched his throat. Sidonie took three steps backward, then turned and plunged into the darkness, sprinting in the direction of the Strand.

But they did not, apparently, mean to give up. She could hear the pounding of footfalls in the darkness behind. Sidonie rushed headlong into an alley, splashing through puddles and worse, bursting out near the Scotland Yard coal wharf, gasping for breath. The wharf lay steeped in darkness. Nothing human stirred.

“In here.” Budley’s voice echoed ominously down the alley. “I seen ’im go in.”

Sidonie ran blindly then, twisting and turning through the maze of yards, one leading into another, and then along the river.
Northumberland,
she thought.
Northumberland Street led to the Strand.
Desperately, she looked about. A little light leached in. A candle in an upstairs window. A lantern swinging from a passing boat. She could hear someone following relentlessly. She turned again. The river vanished. Her breathing seemed loud in the dark.

Suddenly, a face floated from the gloom. “Yer purse!” Pug growled. “Now give it over!” The glint of metal came at her.

Sidonie screamed, and drove at him with her own blade, catching him across the hand. He grunted, cursed, and fell back. Sidonie ran, flying past the Hungerford Market, its stalls dark and empty. She turned the next corner. The glow of a streetlamp burst into view.
Northumberland.
Thank God. She could see the odd angle where it met Craven Street, and bolted for it.

It was only then that she felt the pain. Still running, she clasped her upper arm with her empty hand. Warm. Wet. Lamplight swam before her. Sidonie faltered and dropped her knife. It clattered onto the cobblestones.

George Kemble was savoring a glass of twelve-year-old vintage port, and rereading his favorite passage from
The Age of Reason
when a decidedly unreasonable pounding commenced on his door downstairs. Kemble was a night owl, yes. But he did not approve of anyone disturbing Thomas Paine and a bottle of Quinta do Noval ’18 without an appointment.

The pounding came again. Across the room, Maurice stopped snoring and lifted his head from the back of his club chair. “We’ve got drunks again, George,” he grumbled. “In the alley.”

With a withering sigh, Kemble laid aside his book, withdrew a pocket pistol from the sideboard, and took up his candlestick. Thus reinforced, he went down the stairs leading to the rear of his shop.

The pounding was actually slowing, more of an irregular, halfhearted thump now. Kemble turned the three massive bolts which secured his back door, then lifted his candle as he cracked it. In the gloom, a young naval officer slumped drunkenly on his doorstep, one shoulder braced on the brickwork, one hand clasping his opposite arm.

“Please…”
he managed thickly.
“Please…Cut…”

Kemble wasn’t about to put down his pistol—he’d learnt the tricks of his trade in a hard school—but he set aside his candle to slip a hand under the lad’s elbow. Alas, too late. The midshipman’s eyes rolled back into his head, his knees buckled, and he fainted dead across the threshold. It was then that Kemble noticed the blood. It stained the blue fabric, which was torn where the lad’s hand had been, and it was worse in back.

Kemble let his hand drop. “Well!” he muttered. “There goes my evening.” Then, louder, up the stairs, “Maurice! Maurice, you’d best come down! Some clod-pate middy managed to get himself frog-gigged out in the alley.”

“Again?” Maurice was already thundering down the stairs.

They were halfway back up the stairway, the boy slung over Kemble’s shoulder, and Maurice bringing up the rear, when the latter spoke. “Hold up, George,” he said, lifting the candle higher. “The lad’s losing his bi-corn.” Maurice caught the hat just as it fell. “Well, well!” he went on. “What have we here?”

Kemble looked back over his shoulder, trying not to buckle under at least nine stone of deadweight. “I don’t know about
we,
Maurice,” he said. “But
me
has a bad knee. Move on.”

Maurice tilted the candle. “But George, this boy is wearing a wig,” he said, hooking a finger under its back edge.

“The devil!” said Kemble.

Maurice was silent for a moment. “More accurately…it isn’t even a boy.”

“The devil!” said Kemble again.

“No, it’s worse than that,” muttered Maurice, holding the wig between two fingers like a louse-ridden rat.

“Worse?” Kemble’s back was about to give now. “What could be worse than a bleeding bluejacket on your doorstep?”

Maurice straightened up, lifted his candle, and shrugged. “Well, old thing, I do hope I’m wrong,” he said. “But it looks like
this
bleeding bluejacket is your sister.”

Five minutes later, they had the erstwhile midshipman laid out in an empty bedchamber. Kemble had quit wondering aloud what manner of harebrained, half-cocked scandal broth his sister had gone and gotten herself involved in, while Maurice had dashed off to roust the kitchen maid.

“Good God, I cannot believe you!” He ripped the buttons from Sidonie’s waistcoat as he tore it open. “Wasn’t sailing around the world whilst hanging off the rigging with a knife in your teeth dangerous enough? You had to go and join the bloody frigging navy?”

On the bed, his sister began to stir.
“Oooh,”
she murmured.

Snip! Snip!
went Kemble’s scissors, chopping open the waistcoat’s shoulder seams. “I mean, I could have bought you another ship, Sid,” he went on. “If that’s what you wanted. Was it?
Was
it?”

“Ow,”
she murmured.
“Stop.”

He couldn’t stop. His heart was in his throat.
Was there just the one wound? Was it shallow? Not a stab wound, please, God.
Already, he’d hacked the bloody coat from her body and tossed it to the floor. He yanked the blood-spattered waistcoat from beneath her, shocked to see that his hands shook. Good Lord, his hands
never
shook.

Blood had soaked like thick claret through her shirt. Bright white. Brighter red. Kemble felt a moment of panic, an emotion now all but unknown to him. He snatched up his scissors and slit the sleeve from wrist to shoulder. The first cut slashed across her upper arm, ugly and gaping. Still, the neckcloth he’d wrapped round it downstairs had stanched the bleeding.

Maurice brought in a shallow pan and hastened away again. A white face flannel floated like a small, ghostly presence in the steam. Kemble slit through Sidonie’s other sleeve, saw nothing, then hacked through thicker fabric which covered her chest. Too late, he realized she’d bound her breasts with a strip of bleached linen. He tore away the scraps and tossed them to the floor. Sidonie would probably be embarrassed when she realized he’d seen her half-naked. Too bloody bad. It was punishment enough for scaring him so.

On that thought, Kemble laid aside the scissors, looked down at his sister’s naked torso, and had the breath abruptly crushed from his chest.

Good Lord. Oh, good Lord…

“George?” she murmured weakly, her lashes fluttering. “Oh, George. So…stupid.”

Stupid.
Yes, that was one word for it. Kemble shut his eyes, then opened them again, but nothing had changed. The appalling thing—that
vile stain
—was still there, black as a scorpion on her breast.

Sidonie’s hand crept down the coverlet and felt blindly for his fingers. “George,” she whispered. “George…am I…going to bleed to death?”

“No,” said her brother grimly. “Oh, no, my dear. Because I am going to strangle you first.”

In the end, Kemble forced a strong dose of black drop down his sister’s throat, then stitched her up himself. Oh, she squalled and flailed and threatened to maim his private parts, using words no lady should know, let alone use with fluency. But eventually, the drug dragged her under. Kem finished his job, snipped off the last little bit of silk, then swallowed half a pint of brandy.

Certainly, it wasn’t the first time he’d stitched someone up—and it was far better than the hangman’s noose she’d likely get if the wrong person saw that bloody tattoo on her breast. So he sponged her face and paced her floor until, sometime that afternoon, Sidonie began to stir. Then, his wrath and his horror and his awful, gut-wrenching fear knew no bounds.

“So you are the infamous Black Angel!” he said that evening, as she sat up with a mug of weak broth. “That patron saint of fallen women! That Robin Hoodesque crusader!
L’ange noire!—
which is, of course, French for
goddamned bleeding idiot!”

“George!” she said, as he whirled around and stalked back to her bed. “You never curse in front of ladies!”

“But
you
aren’t a lady!” he countered.
“You
are a suicidal lunatic with a tattoo on your breast!”

Sidonie glared at him over the rim of her mug of broth. “I cannot believe you cut my clothes off!”

“What would you have preferred me do?” he countered. “Leave you to turn septic from some gut wound I’d missed?”

Sidonie sighed and set away the mug. “I begin to wish you had done,” she said. “I never dreamt, George, that you would cut up so.”

“Oh, what a bounder!” said Kemble. “You never meant me to know—because you
knew
what I’d do.”

“What?” she challenged. “What would you do? You’re not my husband, George. Certainly you are not my father. You cannot stop me.”

Kemble leaned across the bed and gave her his nastiest sneer. “Can I not, my dear?” he growled. “Just try me. I’ll have you hogtied on your arse in the hold of a Boston-bound freighter so fast you can’t say ‘Shiver me timbers!’ ”

Sidonie could not believe her ears. She’d never heard George speak so coldly. Well, not to her. She tried to draw a deep breath, so that she might haul him over the coals properly, but something went wrong, her breath hitched, and she burst into tears instead.

Her brother was beside her on the bed and dragging her against him before she knew what he was about. “Oh, Sid, don’t cry!” he begged. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Ouch!” she said, hiccupping the word on a sob. “My stitches, George.”

Gingerly, he set her away. “Oh, Sidonie,” he said. “What in heaven’s name have you been doing?”

She couldn’t catch her breath. “Oh, it—it—it’s so hard to explain!” she wailed.

“You must try,” he said, extracting a handkerchief and holding it as if she were a child so that she might blow her nose.

And so she tried; tried to tell him everything, but it came out in a blithering, tear-choked ramble. How she’d begun to feel so world-weary and useless. So pained by the void in her heart that Pierre’s faithlessness—and eventually, his death—had left. London had brought back too many memories of their mother; of the sadness of it all, and she was beginning to wonder if coming home had been a mistake when, somehow, all of it seemed to conspire and catch up with her one afternoon.

She had been window-shopping in Bond Street, in some vain hope that a new hat might change her life—or at least cheer her—when a lordly gentleman had strolled out of a millinery shop with a delicate, well-bred lady on his arm. Sidonie had watched as a servant girl hastened toward him, her expression fearful, her belly swollen with child. In response, the gentleman simply shoved her from his path and lifted the lady into his phaeton.

The servant began to beg. “How can you let your child starve?” Sidonie heard her whisper.

The man had laughed and whipped up his fine matched grays.
“Whores!”
he had muttered, looking disdainfully down from his perch.
“They have so many customers, they can’t tell one from another.”

The girl looked as if she’d been struck, then burst into tears. The pretty lady had simply stared over her shoulder as they drove away, her expression a strange mix of pity and contempt.

Something in Sidonie had snapped. Her ennui was gone, and in its place burned a righteous indignation. She discovered the gentleman’s name, and the Black Angel was born. His scullery maid now had four hundred pounds in the three-percents, and a cottage near the fens.

George surveyed her coolly and began to pace the floor again. “Please, my dear, continue.”

Somehow, Sidonie blithered on with the rest of it. Everything, that was, save for Jean-Claude’s involvement. She told her brother of the individual women she had helped and of the money she often delivered to the Nazareth Society, always in her widow’s weeds and heavy veil.

“Ah, the Nazareth Society,” said her brother warningly. “Have a care, my dear. The good ladies who volunteer there are not fools.”

Sidonie thought again of Lady Kirton’s shrewd gaze. No, hardly a fool. Sidonie shrugged it off and finished by telling George of Amy Hannaday’s bruised face and of how she’d stalked Lord Bodley in St. James’s Park.

George had suddenly lost all his color. “Good God!” he cried, sitting down on the bed and seizing both her hands in his. “Bodley! Listen to me, Sidonie—you have no idea the risks you are running!”

Sidonie narrowed her eyes. “I can handle men like Bodley.”

“No, you fool, you cannot!” her brother whispered. “Bodley is not one of your spoilt, indolent noblemen. He lives a life you know nothing of—a life I pray God you never know! You cannot fathom the workings of his world; that sphere of bawds and bullyboys and child prostitution. Sidonie, they will kill, even children, without so much as a backward glance. You have no comprehension of the danger.”

“Oh?” Sidonie lifted her brows. “And you do?”

George’s expression darkened. “I know far more of it than I should wish,” he said. “You forget that I have lived by my wits since I was barely fourteen.”

“In that sphere of bawds, bullyboys, and so on?” she pressed.

“The fringes of it, yes,” he snapped, his eyes glittering with anger now.

She looked at him accusingly. “But you did not have to live by your wits, George,” she said. “You could have come home. To Mother, and to me. Surely a life with us was better than a life on your own?”

George was silent; so silent, she feared she’d just rent an irreparable tear in their relationship. “I daresay it was,” he finally answered. “I should have come home, Sid. But I was young and prideful. And I hated Father. I hated his visits. I hated his lies, and what he’d done to us. All of us, Mother included. Good God, she was so wheedling. So manipulative.”

“So desperate,” Sidonie softly interjected.

“Yes,” he said. “That, too.”

“George,” said Sidonie softly. “Did you…did you know men like Bodley?”

His eyes were grim. “I learned how to avoid them,” he said. “And I learned to be ruthless doing it. That, Sidonie, is the only way you survive on the streets.”

Sidonie looked away. George would not let go of her hands. She drew a deep breath and pulled them from his grasp. “Mamma once said”—her voice fell to a whisper—” she said you sold yourself, George. To rich men. And she said you did it deliberately. To shame Father.”

The anger glinted again. “Whatever I did, I did what I had to do,” he gritted. “And by God, I changed my name—took up the first one that came to mind. I have not been George Bauchet in decades. And I have done what neither Mother nor Father ever did, Sidonie. I have made something of myself, by my wits, and by my relentlessness, and by the sweat of my brow.”

“Oh, George!” Sidonie whispered, reaching out to him. “I have never been ashamed of you.”

But her brother seemed no longer to hear her. “Yes, perhaps I was a thief and a sharp, or very near it,” he rasped. “But I worked my way up, dear girl. Was I a gigolo, too? Some might say so. I don’t give a damn. I learnt class and style, and I learnt it from the best-dressed men in town—a kind of class that always eluded Mother, for all her delicate ways.”

She reached out to touch him. “George, I think I understand.”

But George wasn’t finished. “And when I became a valet, Sidonie, I was the best in London. And when I became a shopkeeper, I made myself rich in three years’ time. I did all this because I never forgot what I learnt on the streets—what men like Bodley taught me.
Be ruthless.
No, Sid, I’ll never be what Father was. I’ll never be the Duke of Gravenel. But whatever I am, I made. I did not wait for my blue blood to bestow it on me. And whilst people may call me names behind my back, they bloody well don’t do it to my face.”

Sidonie felt her eyes well with tears. “No one calls you names, George,” she whispered. “No one would dare. But no one would wish to.”

George laughed a little bitterly, took her fingers again, and bowed his head until it rested on their joined hands. “Devellyn does,” he said, addressing the counterpane. “I saw it in his eyes in Covent Garden.”

“You goaded him, George.”

Kemble sighed, and lifted his head. “Whatever it is you are doing to him, Sidonie, you must stop it now. He’s a worthless scoundrel, I know, but we should wish him no ill.”

“What do you mean?” she challenged. “What do you think I’m
doing
to him?”

Her brother shrugged. “Whatever it is, it is madness,” he gently insisted. “Just stop it—
all
of it. You aren’t changing the world, my love. You aren’t reforming these men. It’s futile.”

His tone cut her to the quick. “How dare you say my work is futile!” she demanded. “I am helping these exploited women. I know I am! Perhaps I shall do it until they hang me.”

Her brother seized her roughly by her good arm. “Sidonie, you fool, they
will
hang you!” he said. “There are safer, better ways to help the oppressed. And in case you are deceiving yourself, robbing a few selfish noblemen won’t make us any less illegitimate. It won’t elevate me and bring Devellyn down. It won’t change what Father did to Mother—and it damned sure won’t make what she became any more respectable.”

Sidonie looked at him incredulously. “Why, I never thought it would!”

“Yes. You did. You are trying to avenge Father’s sins as much as you are trying to avenge the sins of those foolish gentlemen you humiliate. Do not deceive yourself.”

“What nonsense!” she said. “I shan’t listen, George, do you hear?”

He shook her again. “Sidonie, I won’t sit idly by whilst you get yourself killed trying to avenge a wrong that cannot be fixed. And that is what you’re trying to do. Even I can see it.”

Suddenly, Sidonie wanted to cry. Her head hurt, her arm hurt, and everything in her life seemed turned upside down. Was George right? Was she living out some sort of silly childhood fairy tale, where the wicked got what they deserved, and the good lived happily ever after?

“Oh, God!” she finally said. “Is there no justice, George? Mother had none. And no hope, either. Father did that to her. He took her hope away, but he never paid for it.”

“And you can’t make him pay, love,” he returned, his voice gentler now. “Oh, perhaps you can make some of the others pay, some of the time. But only if you catch them. And only for a little while. It isn’t worth your neck.”

Sidonie sniffled. “So innocent women will continue to be deceived, used, and made miserable?” she said. “And no one can avenge it?”

“It’s time to grow up, Sidonie.” Her brother’s voice was tender. “Mother was never miserable—oh, perhaps at first, but it did not last. She liked high drama. She liked fine things. And she most assuredly liked being the center of attention. That’s why
you
got sent away to school, my dear, remember? Your youth and beauty became too great a contrast.”

Sidonie’s head was beginning to throb now. “Perhaps you’re right,” she whispered, pressing her fingertips to her temples. “Oh, God, George! I just don’t know anymore!”

Her brother kissed her lightly on the forehead, then rose from the bed. “I wish to show you something,” he said. He left the room and returned with a newspaper, folded open. He pointed at a small notice of some sort.

“This is why I want you to stay away from Devellyn,” he said. “He is looking for you, my dear. Asking questions. Poking. Prodding. And sooner or later, someone may talk.”

“There is only Julia, and she would sooner die.” But Sidonie took the paper. The type was tiny, but the words were clear.

“Good Lord!” she whispered. “Is this today’s paper?”

“Several days old,” he admitted. “But you are running a grave risk, Sid, by even allowing Devellyn to see you stroll down the street. And whether you’re the Black Angel or not, you’ve certainly got no business going about town on his arm.”

George was right. She knew he was. She bought herself time by reading the message again. “George,” she said curiously. “How do you know this?”

“Know what, my dear?”

“That Devellyn placed this notice,” she answered. “The name
Ruby Black
has doubtless been bandied about in half of London’s clubs. Obviously, you have heard it. Perhaps someone else placed it?”

George shook his head. “Not likely,” he said. “Brown and Pennington are, after all, his solicitors.”

“But how do you know?”

George gave a slow shrug. “Well, I merely assume it,” he admitted. “But they have been the solicitors to the Duke of Gravenel and his heirs since time immemorial. That’s why the ad caught my eye.”

“The Duke of Gravenel?” she echoed hollowly.

“Father’s solicitors, Sidonie,” he reminded her. “God knows I’ve seen the name on enough documents. That little annuity Mother received? It came via Brown and Pennington. Every quarter-day, like clockwork.”