Unraveled (33 page)

S
MITE ARRIVED AT THE
hotel where his brother was staying just as the clock struck one. He found Ash pacing before the mantel, shaking his head.

“You’re late,” Ash said, turning around as he entered the room.

“My apologies. The delay was…” He stopped, catching himself on the lie. Those last minutes with Miranda hadn’t been
unavoidable.
They’d merely been vital.

“You’re so rarely late.” Ash dropped the watch he’d been holding into his waistcoat pocket. “I was beginning to worry. And wonder that I’d done something wrong. Again.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Smite said. “Not everything I do is about you, you realize. You can’t fix everything.”

Ash’s forehead crunched, developing parallel sets of grim lines.

“In any event,” Smite added, “nothing needs to be fixed.”

Ash grimaced.

They had had some variant of this conversation a hundred times over the last decades. Ash apologized, and tried to ply Smite with things to salve his conscience; Smite refused, and tried to convince Ash he truly preferred not to be cosseted. Somehow, Smite’s insistence that nothing was amiss had turned into a cycle of accusation and recrimination.

Smite was too bone-deep tired to try to fend off such well-meaning attacks. He sat down wearily.

“Let me explain,” he said. “I don’t need anything from you. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you, or that I wish you ill. It doesn’t mean that I’m rejecting your offers. It simply means that I don’t need or want anything.”

Ash didn’t respond to this. He simply wandered over to the fireplace and looked up at the ceiling, as if wondering what he had ever done wrong.

“You act as if I’m damaged,” Smite continued. “As if one foot put wrong will cause me to collapse. But nothing is wrong.”

Silence stretched. Ash set his hands on the mantel. Finally, he spoke. “I see. You live in cramped quarters on your own, eschewing all servants, when I know damned well I’ve given you enough money that you could afford an entire estate. You do that all for the fun of it?”

Smite stared straight ahead.

“You scarcely visit, and you never spend the night. That’s because you’re just an ordinary fellow? And you harbor no resentment toward me at all.”

“I never said I was
ordinary
. Just that I wasn’t…wrong.” He was feeling more and more wrong now. As if he’d given away his center. As if he’d sent it via train to London.

“Oh, no.” Ash rolled his eyes. “You’re not wrong. You’re
never
wrong—always damnably precise, you are. Still, I must wonder—why are you always so angry at me?”

“I’m not angry!” Smite growled. “I just don’t need you to do anything for me. How can I make you understand that?”

Ash threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to believe that nothing is wrong? I remember when I first found you on the streets of Bristol. My God, Smite. I left you and Mark with Mother at her worst. You won’t even tell me what happened. How can you
not
hate me for that? I can scarcely stand to think of it myself.”

Smite spread his hands. “It was noth—”

“It’s always nothing with you. I don’t believe you.”

Smite could almost hear Miranda, could almost see that resigned smile on her face.
You are the worst liar
. But that unbidden memory nearly overwhelmed him. He shut his eyes and turned away. It was almost a physical pain, that tearing in his gut.

He took a deep breath and thought of the only thing that could dislodge that wave of sorrow.

“She locked me in the cellar,” he said flatly. “It flooded. I nearly drowned. I have nightmares about it still, and I can’t bear to be around other people. I hold no grudge against you specifically. It’s everyone.”

Close enough to the truth.

“I’m so sorry,” his brother began.

Smite slapped his fist into his palm so hard that it stung. “Don’t be. It made me who I am. I don’t wish what happened to me undone. And when you do, you wish me less of a person.”

Ash crossed the room to him. He lifted one hand a few inches at his side, and then let it drop. “Very well,” he finally said. “If you say you’re not angry with me, that there’s nothing you wish I had done…”

“I didn’t say that,” Smite heard himself rasp out. He didn’t know where the next words came from. He surely hadn’t thought them out. But still they spilled out of him. “You should have saved Hope.”

It was an ugly thing to say. Ash’s face grew pale. It was entirely unfair. Ash had been little more than a boy when their sister had died. What he could have done to combat that ugly fever, Smite didn’t know. And yet, cruel as those words had been, they felt
right
. True.

“You should have saved Hope,” he repeated. His voice shook. “You were older. You were stronger. You always knew how to do everything. You should have found a way to save her. But you didn’t, and I had to face the fact that my big brother was human. That you made mistakes.”

“Oh, Smite.” Now Ash did set his hand on Smite’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Smite shrugged the touch off. “I’m not finished yet. You should have saved Mark. When Mother truly began to go mad, you should never have left. You have no idea what I had to go through, keeping him fed, keeping him safe. Keeping him away from her notice when she was at her worst. You should have been there. You should have saved him.”

He hadn’t even known he felt this way—black and ugly and unforgiving. But he couldn’t hold back the tide of his anger, now that he’d given it voice.

“You should have been a god. I’ve never forgiven you for being merely mortal.”

Ash shook his head. “Why don’t you say what you really mean? I should have saved you.”

For a second, Smite felt choked by floodwaters. He could feel his hands numbing, beginning to lose their grip no matter how hard he held on. But what brought him back to the here-and-now wasn’t his brother’s concern, but the sharp feel of metal cutting into his skin. Miranda’s hairpin was in his pocket. That much of the present, he could hold on to.

“There you’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t need saving. Nothing is wrong with me.” He took a deep gulp of breath. He didn’t need saving, damn it. And yet…

“Still,” he found himself whispering, “sometimes I wish that this quest had not come to me. Justice is an impossible beast to track. The trail is lonely, and she offers no reward when she’s caught but the promise of another hunt.”

Until today, he’d not minded so much. He’d given up a great deal over the years. It had never seemed so much, compared to what he could have lost. But now that he’d had Miranda… No. He wasn’t going to think of her. If he did, he might do something foolish. He might demand a horse and ride for the railway station. He still had a quarter of an hour before her train departed.

Ash laid a hand on his shoulder. Smite flinched, and his brother took a step back, stricken. “Don’t touch me unaware,” Smite heard himself mutter. “One time, Mother—never mind why. Just… don’t.”

“God, Smite.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t fuss over me. I’m not broken,” he heard himself say.

Ash nodded, but he looked so damned concerned. The room smelled of wood and wax, with the faint, lingering scent of astringent black tea. Black tea, not mint.

He couldn’t call to mind the scent of mint, that sweet calming scent that Miranda always seemed to carry about her. His memory of Miranda had gone cold already, devoid of the animating spark that he’d most cherished. That, more than anything, nearly overset his emotions.

“I’m not broken,” he repeated. “Although at the moment…” This was what came of violating the sentimentality quota. Everything he kept bottled inside him came out. He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “At the moment,” he muttered numbly, “I may be coming a bit unraveled.”

Ash let this pronouncement sit. He didn’t say anything as Smite gasped for air. And maybe this was what they’d always needed—the chance to be silent with each other. This time, when Ash reached out, he paused, waiting before he took his brother’s hand. Smite took his palm and clutched it hard. It was just a little touch, but he was almost undone by it.

The clock ticked, counting past Smite’s allotted sentimentality. It counted the minutes while Miranda sat and waited onboard some railway car. Smite didn’t trust himself to speak until she had gone.

“I did save Mark,” Ash finally said.

“Oh?”

“I left him with you.”

It was too much. Smite felt his throat close up.

“I mean it. When I found the two of you in Bristol, you were shadowed. Mark…Mark was just
hungry.”

Smite nodded.

“I have never wanted to think about what you must have done to keep Mother’s madness from falling on him. But you must have done
something
. Just look at him. How he can stand to live in that house, I don’t know.”

Smite found himself smiling through a shudder. “It gave me the cold sweats, just being there for a few hours yesterday.”

Another pause. “Why did you go? When you said you went to Mark, I knew it had to be dire. Neither of us would go into that house otherwise.”

Smite shrugged. “It was for Miranda,” he finally said.

“Miranda.” There was a subtle change in Ash’s voice. “And what can you tell me about Miranda?”

Her train was pulling away, right at this moment. He thought of her looking up at him and saying that she loved him. He thought of her leaving. Her hairpin bit into the flesh of his palm.

He thought of her finding someone else, and he let out a little breath of air. Finally, he managed a small half-smile and he looked his brother in the eye. “I saved her, too.”

T
HE ROAD
M
IRANDA TOOK
to the railway station was all too familiar. And yet to Miranda’s eye, it seemed entirely different. After the long weeks of her absence, Temple Street had altered. Now, it seemed forlorn and dirty. She’d never noticed the refuse that spilled onto the streets when she lived here. She must have blocked from memory the blackening muck that was never swept from the cobblestones. The smells of manufacturing were thick about her: the scent of vinegar from the foundry warred with tar from the shipyards. The splitting shriek of a steam engine cut through the clatter of horses’ hooves.

Strange, that this neighborhood had changed so much in just a few weeks. The cart she was in rumbled past taverns she had visited, fishmongers she had argued with, shops she had patronized…

Better to concentrate on all that she passed, than to think about— “Stop!” she said.

The cart came to a halt. Dryfuss peered at her. “I’m not supposed to stop,” he said. “My orders are—”

“New orders,” Miranda said briskly. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“But, Miss…” This protest came from the maid Smite had insisted should accompany her for good measure. It had seemed so excessive; Miranda had never needed a chaperone in Temple Parish. “We were told to take you straight there.”

“I need to say farewell to someone.” She hopped down out of the cart. She was too visible on the street now. Even though she’d donned a traveling habit, a dull brown high-necked gown designed to hide the dirt of a journey, passersby glanced at her. The gown was tailored to her form, leaving no room for the bending and moving that a working woman required. The bustle and petticoats were too wide. And even though the material was plain brown, it was well-made and lustrous. People watched her idly. Speculatively.

And then someone knocked into her from the side. Gray fabric flew everywhere. Miranda turned, catching herself before she fell. Dryfuss stepped forward.

“Oh, dearie me,” said a familiar voice.

“Mrs. Blasseur!” Miranda said. “I’m so sorry. I was just standing here, looking around—I didn’t even see you coming.”

Mrs. Blasseur began to pick up the laundry that had spilled from her basket. The tips of her fingers were blue, her movements slow. Miranda knelt beside her as best as she could in her stiff corset, and helped her collect towels.

When they’d finished, Mrs. Blasseur looked up. “Well, look at you.” She paused, took a step back. “You look well. Very well. I haven’t seen you in an age.” She wrinkled her brow. “When you said your father had left you a bit of money, I hadn’t realized it was quite so much.”

Miranda simply shook her head and picked up the basket. “You’ve never been stupid, Mrs. Blasseur,” she said. “You know quite well how I came by this.”

The woman gave her a small, pained smile. “Indeed.” She coughed heavily into a handkerchief and looked away.

“I’ve come…I need to talk to Jeremy, actually. Is he in?”

Mrs. Blasseur gestured in front of her. Miranda opened the door, and then held the basket for the other woman.

Once inside, she turned to her. “Do you need—”

Mrs. Blasseur rescued her load of laundry. “Shoo,” she commanded with a shake of her head. “Go talk to Jeremy.”

Miranda smiled. The store was like Temple Street itself: the same as always, and yet substantially dingier. The bolts of fabric looked cheap to her eyes, the ribbons pale and faded. She was almost afraid as she made her way to the back of the shop. Afraid that she herself would have altered so much that…