Touch of Rogue (12 page)
Authors: Mia Marlowe
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Historical Romance
The butler appeared behind Jacob with a tot of amber liquid balanced on a salver. The man cleared his throat discreetly.
“Your drink is here,” she said, pulling away from him. “Do you keep your vial of laudanum hidden in your walking stick or is it secreted with your shaving accoutrements?”
“Neither.”
He was probably lying. All opium fiends kept secret stashes and lied about their whereabouts. She couldn’t bear to hear another word from him. It hurt too much.
“Good night, Jacob.”
Julianne skittered up the stairs before he could stop her.
C
HAPTER
11
HAPTER
11
J
acob sat in his cousin’s dark parlor, nursing his whisky. Damn it all, Julianne was right. If he’d been home, he might have told Fenwick to add a healthy splash of laudanum to his drink. He’d certainly earned it.
acob sat in his cousin’s dark parlor, nursing his whisky. Damn it all, Julianne was right. If he’d been home, he might have told Fenwick to add a healthy splash of laudanum to his drink. He’d certainly earned it.
The evening had been a cacophony of metal voices. First, the silverware on Lord Digory’s immaculate table wouldn’t stop trilling in his head. Then later in the smoking room, he’d been expected to handle not only the replica of the druid’s dagger he’d brought to the dinner party, but also a number of other arcane blades in Lord Digory’s collection.
Each of Digory’s swords and sabers had its own gruesome stories to share. Jacob was forced to bear up under them in stoic silence while pain lanced his brain. Only being able to rest his hand on the platinum head of his walking stick on occasion had given him the teeniest bit of relief.
The worst of it was he’d learned very little for his pain.
Julianne had actually advanced their cause more by wangling that invitation from Sir Malcolm. Not that Jacob would allow her to attend a gathering of the secret sect alone. If he couldn’t make her see reason, he’d simply follow her. It certainly wouldn’t be the first party he’d attended without benefit of an invitation.
That decision made, he drained the last of the spirits. The pounding at his temple subsided from anvil strikes to imperial gongs.
If a bit of opiate could reduce it further, what was the harm? It wasn’t as if he used laudanum without reason.
God knew he didn’t enjoy the wild, disturbing dreams the poppy gave him. All he wanted was for the pain to stop. To feel normal after a siege from his decidedly abnormal gift.
Not that it had been much of a gift this night.
Rain pattered against the windowpanes, further dampening his mood, but he heard no other sound in the dark house. Everyone else was in bed, without a bleeding cannon going off in their noggins at regular intervals. Even Julianne surely rested, despite her constant internal panic.
He wished he knew what really drove her. Not just what motivated her to find the missing dagger, but what was behind her guilty fear.
Then it occurred to him that there was a way for him to find out, even if she wasn’t willing to tell him.
“Well, old son,” he muttered to himself. “As long as your head hurts anyway, you may as well make it worth your while.”
Jacob pulled off his boots so his tread would be silent and headed up the long staircase. If Julianne caught him spying on her, she’d be furious. But hell, she wasn’t exactly thrilled with him at the moment in any case.
It was worth the risk.
Fortunately, the door to her chamber had been recently oiled. The latch was silent when he turned the knob. Jacob had always been cat-eyed and sitting in the dark parlor with his whisky for the better part of an hour had further sharpened his vision.
Julianne lay on her side in the big bed with one delicately arched foot peeping from beneath the counterpane. Her hair was plaited in a long loose braid and her lips were parted in the relaxation of sleep. She looked much younger, much more vulnerable than the Julianne who’d reviled him at the foot of the stairs.
More welcoming too.
She stirred, rolling onto her back. Her breasts rose and fell beneath her thin nightshift. If he climbed under the cool sheets with her, would her sweet body drive the shards of metal from his mind?
He turned away from her before she could distract him from his purpose and moved to the dressing table, where her jewelry lay in a neat row.
Not the ruby he’d watched dangle in the hollow between her breasts all night. It was too fine and too dear. Jacob suspected the precious metal around that stone would hold only memories of her late husband. Same for the emerald choker.
The thought of Julianne having a husband, late or otherwise, churned his innards.
He scrutinized the jewelry again. It would have to be something old, something she’d had for a long time. He nearly overlooked the cameo since it was carved ivory and wouldn’t yield any secrets to him. Then he noticed it was set in thinning tin. The back of the pin was dented and much scratched.
He lifted the piece with his thumb and forefinger, careful to touch only the ivory. Then he sank to the floor, crossing his legs, Hindu-fashion. He could usually control how much information a bit of metal sent him by breaking off contact. If he was actively seeking answers to an open-ended question, it meant baring his mind to whatever the ore chose to send. For however long it chose to send. Prolonged contact with metal meant he’d probably lose consciousness.
May as well sit lest I fall,
he reasoned as he settled the tin back of the pin into the center of his palm.
he reasoned as he settled the tin back of the pin into the center of his palm.
Two girls huddled together on a lumpy mattress, shivering visibly. Both should have had the apple cheeks of youth. Instead unrelenting want had scraped the excess flesh from their faces, pointing their chins and chiseling their cheekbones. Dark smudges, like day-old bruises, bloomed beneath their oversized brown eyes.
They were obviously sisters.
The bigger one put one of her thin arms around the smaller one. Neither seemed warmed by the gesture. Their breath puffed into the cold room as if a pair of small dragons had taken refuge amid the threadbare blankets and pillows.
Jacob wrapped his arms around himself, feeling the bone-chilling cold along with the children in his vision.
The younger girl sniffled a bit.
“Auntie will be back soon,” the other said, patting her shoulder. “And she’ll bring us something to eat.”
“Turkish delight would be nice, wouldn’t it, Mary?” the littler one said.
Jacob sensed she’d had it once in her young life and he imagined since that time, the child felt anything worth having was “fine as Turkish Delight.” Her lips turned up hopefully, and he recognized the small smile as Julianne’s. Even though she was painfully thin, he saw, in nascent form, shadows of the beauty she’d become.
“I’d settle for an orange,” Mary said with practicality. “Or a lime.”
Jacob’s own mouth began to water as his gut hollowed with their hunger. It was always so when the mental pictures were this vivid. Sometimes, he lived the vision, smelling the smells, feeling the touches, seeing events through the eyes of the shades encased in the metal’s memory. He counted himself lucky when he was simply a watcher of the shadows of what had come before instead of being cast as an active participant.
Then the door burst open and a blast of frigid air followed a woman with a red shawl through the portal. The girls started toward her, but stopped dead when a man in a disreputable hat tromped over the threshold after her.
Unlike the hungry children, the man had not missed many meals. Jowls hung by either side of a thick-lipped mouth and when he narrowed his eyes, they nearly disappeared into his flesh like piggy slits.
He gestured toward the girls. “These them?”
The woman nodded, her face strained. She swiped her reddened nose on her sleeve. “Just the one, you said.”
He reached for the younger girl, but her sister flung herself between them.
“Leave Julie alone.”
The man pushed the older girl away and glared at the woman. “You said she’d come quiet like.”
Julianne scrambled back till her bony spine was pressed against the iron headboard. She bared her teeth in a small growl. It was clear she wasn’t going anywhere, quiet-like or otherwise, with that man. Not if she could help it.
But he didn’t heed the warning and when he reached for her again, she bit him. Blood bloomed in a small crescent on his beefy hand.
The man swore and backhanded her. Julianne’s eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been slashed.
“I’ll take the other one this time,” the man said, sucking at his wound. He handed the woman a brown bottle that she clutched to her chest as if it were her firstborn. “If you want more in a month, you’d better beat some sense into the little one. Come on, you.”
He grabbed Mary’s hand and dragged her into the night, heedless of her sobbing and pleading.
The woman slammed the door on the child’s voice and, with quaking hands, unstopped the brown bottle. A medicinal stench flooded the room, one Jacob recognized. She upended the opiate, not waiting to mix it with anything that would cut the vile taste and make it more palatable. The woman chugged several swallows. She sank into the corner, dark liquid staining her lips. Her eyes glazed over in mellow haziness and her hands stopped shaking.
Julianne moaned, but the woman didn’t rise to tend her. Finally, the child pushed herself upright and looked around.
“Where’s Mary?” Her small voice quavered like a willow in the wind.
The woman didn’t answer. She simply took another swig of the laudanum.
Julianne’s eyes went wide. “You let him take her. You sold her for that bottle.”
She leaped up, skittered to the cupboard and tore through a basket filled with rags the girls were tasked with weaving into rugs. From the bottom of the rubbish, she came up with a cameo in her fist.
“Half a mo’,” the woman said, trying to force the trinket out of Julianne’s grip. “What’s that? Been holdin’ out on Auntie Nell, have ye?”
“It was Mother’s. You can’t have it.” Julianne jerked her hand away and ran straight to the door. “I’ll buy Mary back with it.” She slipped under her aunt’s lunging grasp, her treasure still in tow.
Julianne ran into the night, disappearing into the shadows, crying out her sister’s name.
Pain knifed through Jacob’s mind and he seemed to be two places at once—still seated on the floor at the foot of the adult Julianne’s bed in his cousin’s posh town house and also padding after the young Julianne down a rubbish-strewn lane. He stretched out his hand toward her.
“No,” he tried to warn the phantom in his head, but his voice wouldn’t work. The man would never agree to return her sister for an old scrap of ivory. He’d only take Julianne too.
Don’t go,
he mouthed in impotent silence.
Don’t go,
he mouthed in impotent silence.
He didn’t think he’d made any noise, but the little girl seemed to hear him. She whirled around, still clutching the cameo to her flat chest, and stared past him into the darkness. The whites showed all the way around her enormous brown eyes. Her face was taut with fear, both for her sister and herself.
She was alone in a city that ate its young. And she knew it.
Jacob watched her turn and run from him, her shadowy image growing ever more thin and vaporous until she faded completely into the mist of time.
A fresh blade of pain sheered through his head and Jacob’s vision waivered, tunneled, and finally winked out like a snuffed candle.
The loud thud jerked Julianne from a sound sleep. She lay in the soft bed, holding her breath, listening intently in case the sound came again. Rain peppered the small rectangular windowpanes. She heard the occasional creak of the house settling on its foundations, but there were no more bumps in the dark.
Then very slowly, she became aware of the sound of someone breathing, soft and rhythmic. Her gaze darted around the room, but no intruder skulked in the corners.
Then someone groaned like a wounded boar.
The sound came from the foot of her bed. She sat up slowly, trying not to allow the linens to rustle more than necessary and crept down to peer over the footboard.
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