Wilful Impropriety (45 page)

Or perhaps I was just too confident in my ability to get away.

I didn’t tell Mrs. Pennyforth or the girls I meant to leave, of course. Just gave my usual wave and nod and struck off toward Paddington Station with my cap pulled low and my coat tight around me, and all my money, little as it was, singing in my frayed pocket.

I was within sight of the station when the two toughs flanked me, taking my elbows firmly and escorting me off toward Shoreditch with nary a word. I didn’t say anything, either. There was no point.

Throughout our long silent walk, my thoughts skipped here and there, like my grandfather’s little birds dashing themselves against their bamboo cages. I thought about how these men smelled of onions and death. How even if I could escape they would most likely take my money. How Billy Jenx and his gang would slink back into Whitechapel and have quite the celebratory swill at my expense.

And of course I thought of Willie. Sweet, sapphire-eyed Willie whose father was the butcher of all butchers.

Jack’s boys didn’t take me where I thought they would. We went into a pub that I reckoned was close to Shoreditch. Its windows were so greasy you could barely see in at them. They sat me down hard on the bench. And that’s when Jack Stirabout came and plunked a thick pint down in front of me.

To say I was confused was a bit of an understatement.

“Drink up, Jonathan. You’ve earned it.”

I sat straighter. “I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t make the delivery last night.”

Jack waved his hand as if he didn’t care. “We’ll discuss that later. But for right now . . .
drink
.” He leaned forward and his eyes bored into mine.

And in that moment, I realized something. I’d been running scared ever since I’d started this job.
I
was the cock of this roost, not anyone else. I’d beaten down thugs aplenty to get where I was. I’d eluded the wiliest of them. (Except for Tom, who I still blamed for getting me into this.) I’d met dozens of big, mean boys, and I’d bested all of them. Even if it didn’t look like I would best this one, I wasn’t going to let him take me down easy.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

Jack didn’t bluster. He signaled to his men. The next I knew they both had my arms and legs secured and Jack was coming around the table with the mug of beer. He pinched my nose closed with his giant hand until I was forced to open my mouth to breathe. Then he grabbed my jaw and held it open while he poured the beer down my throat.

Nobody else in the pub said a word. I screamed and thrashed as best as I could, which caused at least some of the beer to go into my lungs and get coughed out.

“Right then, my boyos,” Jack said. They dragged me out of the pub. My head throbbed and my feet didn’t seem to want to work properly. I stumbled along between them, and they laughed and pretended that even this early in the day, I was already so into my cups that I couldn’t walk anymore.

Not that anyone cared, or would have stopped them in this part of London.

After that, there isn’t much to recall before I woke hanging upside down. I thrashed in terror, scraping the tips of my nails against the stone. It was pitch dark, and it smelled of dank, rotten earth. I quelled the urge to scream. For a strange moment I thought I’d been buried headfirst, but I realized as I put my arms out that I was, in fact, dangling by my ankle down what must be a dry well.

I craned my neck as well as I was able. The moon glowed like a call to heaven over the lip of the well, occasionally darkened by scudding clouds. My head and limbs felt stuffed with cotton.

I twisted and turned like a worm, until finally, with great effort, I lifted myself up enough to be able to get my hands on the rough rope around my ankle. I wished like hell for a knife then. I worked at the knot until even my calloused hands broke open and bled. But, at long last, I was able to get myself free. I very nearly let go the rope before I realized it was taut and that, more likely than not, if I did let go, I’d never be able to leap up and reach it again.

Furthermore, if someone was waiting above and felt the rope suddenly slacken, they might think to look in and see what I was about.

And then they’d find . . . what were they expecting to find? The dankness of the well seeped into my bones. They expected me to be dead. Perhaps they would even use me as a replacement for the corpse I lost last night. Whatever they’d put in that beer had not been enough, though. Not enough by far. I was a child of the opium dens. I could drink many a man twice my size and age under the table. They’d have had to give me enough to kill a horse, if that’s really what they were after.

Climbing up the rope not knowing what I’d find was worrisome enough, but the sheer agony of forcing limbs to work that had been drugged and so long in stasis was brutal. There were times when I thought my nerveless fingers would betray me and open, leaving me to fall to my ironic death on the stones. Others when it seemed that my body was far too heavy for me to carry it back to the world I knew.

I didn’t dare to think of what I would do when I
did
reach the top—who I’d meet, if I’d be able to run on an ankle that felt like it was made of sand. But I kept climbing anyway, hastening my own resurrection, because I would not be another corpse carried on another shoulder to be dissected in Dr. Grace’s theater tomorrow morning.

At last I could push myself up, albeit weakly, with my legs and haul myself over the lip of the well. I half fell, half jumped off, my ankle giving way beneath me. One of Jack’s men snored near me, a flask gleaming on his paunch.

In the brief moon, one eye unshuttered, then the other, as he sat bolt upright and reached for me. The flask clattered away on the stones.

“Oy!” he cried. “Where do you think you’re off to?”

He lunged. I scrambled to get my feet under me. Perhaps it was terror or the sheer will to live that made them finally obey. I plunged away through the dark churchyard, stumbling against headstones and the iron grates of mortsafes meant to protect the dead.

The man’s cries roused his fellows, who were apparently busy at knucklebones in some abandoned sepulcher. They gave chase, shouting their curses at my back.

I looked back once, to spy their distance, tripped over the corner of an ill-hewn tomb and fell so hard I was sure I’d broken something.

Then the first of them was upon me. He seemed reluctant to manhandle me, watching me as I rolled over to engage him, until someone shouted, “Beat ’im to a pulp. Nuffink else is workin’!”

All bets were off. My mother had taught me a few tricks for dealing with men if my life ever became threatened. I don’t think she ever used any of them herself —it probably would have gone hard with her if she had. Most of them involved sharpened hairpins, but there were a few that required nothing but a good show of force and stealth.

I waited until the man was close enough to seize me, even though I knew I was losing time as his drunken comrades wove toward us through the stones. He stooped over me, raining down a few blows on my face and my injured side before I kicked up and out as hard as I could, smashing into his shins with such force that he nearly toppled.

Instead, he bent down to grab the offended body part and I drove my boot into the bridge of his nose. Face burning and swelling, I hauled myself up and ran again before the others could get me.

I ran until I was limping and then until I was hopping on one foot. If I’d seen a lame beggar with a crutch, I swear I would have stolen it from him. As it was, I hobbled until I found myself crawling up the steps to the surgeon’s back door.

What I’d do here I didn’t know. I lay with my face pressed to the dirty stoop, letting the coolness take the heat from my cheek. I was too afraid to ring the bell, but I put my hands on the door as if somehow I could force it open, and therein find sanctuary.

Imagine when my fingers suddenly met air and then silk. When a stifled scream fell on my ears and then hands tentatively reached down for my shoulders. I tried to roll, and groaned. Something was definitely broken.

Willie called for someone, and then she and the silent butler were hauling me up by the shoulders. I could barely stand on my own—my feet sort of dragged and every breath was pure, knifing agony. I must have made it here just on will alone.

They got me upstairs and into a narrow room that had belonged to a maid, or perhaps the butler himself once upon a time. Willie sent the butler to fetch water and bandages, a bit more oil for the lamp, food if he could find any.

She turned up the wick so that the lamp she’d brought shone brighter, and set it on the table by the bed.

“Now,” she said, “what’s happened? Who did this to you?”

I shook my head. How could I tell her that her own father was behind it all?

•   •   •

She cupped my temple and forced me to look at her. She searched my face, taking in all my injuries with an appraising look that was completely unafraid. Her other fingers touched my lips, and I hissed with pain at the realization that they were split. And then I hissed at hissing, because making any noise at all hurt like the devil.

“Where else are you injured?” she said. She reached for my collar and began unbuttoning my shirt, as swift and businesslike as I imagined her father might be in the operating theater. I lunged backward, nearly hitting the table and knocking the lantern to the floor.

“Stop,” she said. She put her hands over mine. “I am a surgeon’s daughter. I’ve watched him for countless hours when he didn’t know I was there. I’ve studied his books and notes. I think I can help you, if you’ll trust me.”

“I know what’s wrong,” I gasped. “I don’t need . . .”

But she pushed my hands away and worked my shirt off, frowning when she saw the binding already in place around my ribs.

I tried to keep her from unwrapping it, but her persistence was the stuff of legend.

At last, when she’d unwrapped me enough to see the truth, she sat back with a soft little “Oh.”

I looked down. I could see the bruise spreading along the curve of my left breast, the ugly swelling where I’d fallen over the rough tomb and then been punched before I’d gotten away. I sighed and winced.

“I’ll bind you back up again,” she said, “before Jameson gets back. Later, we’ll need to put a poultice on it to ease the swelling. Can you bear the pain for now?”

I nodded. She bound me back up deftly, her fingertips sending shivers across my skin.

I pushed her hands away when she would have buttoned up my shirt again. “So, now you know,” I said. I sat up and away from her, careful of the lantern and the table.

“Yes,” she said. “And—”

“And?” I wouldn’t look at her. I couldn’t. A pain had started in my chest that was worse than the blow to my ribs. It was under my ribs. In my heart.

Her hands were on my face again, turning me toward her and forcing me to look at her. Her gaze was as deep as I imagined the ocean could be, and as fathomless.

“And it does not matter.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Whoever you are,
what
ever you are, it does not matter to me. I am infatuated with you, Mr. Wells. I hope you feel the same about me.”

For all its bravery, her voice trembled on that last note, as if she suddenly realized what she was saying, her brashness.

“Pearl,” I said.

“What?”

“My real name is Pearl.”

She smiled and then she kissed me with the lightest of kisses just over the split in my lip. “Pearl,” she whispered.

“And, yes,” I said, as she moved back to look at me. “I am indeed very infatuated with you, Miss Willie.”

I wanted to melt into her arms, but I couldn’t quite melt into anything except the bed. I couldn’t help but think that even if she accepted me, which was miraculous enough in itself, her father never would. I started up, thinking of Dr. Grace and what he would do if he knew I was here, if, even now, Jack was in the surgeon’s study telling him what a thief and a liar I was.

But the pain of that movement nearly made me faint.

“You mustn’t exert yourself,” she said, pushing me back down onto the bed. “And don’t worry. It’s my secret as much as yours, now. All will be well. You’ll see.”

Jameson came then, with the things she’d requested. He raised a brow at the two of us on the bed, and Willie stood up quickly, nodded to me, and then left.

Jameson offered me warm cloths for my face. I pretended as best I could that nothing else was wrong, and as he seemed eager to leave, he didn’t question me on it.

“A sleeping draught for you, at the lady’s request,” he said, placing a cup by my bed. That was the first time I’d ever heard him speak.

I left it where it was, convinced it was the very stuff that had gotten me into this mess, afraid if I drank it I’d end up in the one place I could think of that was worse than the bottom of a dry well—my grave.

•   •   •

Willie came to me again in what must have been the morning. My room had no windows, so I had no way of knowing the time.

She had a furtive look about her, the reason for which she explained as she said, “I slipped away before breakfast. If I don’t hurry, Father will come looking for me—he hates it when I’m not at the table on time. But I had to see you, to make sure you were well!”