Bound by Your Touch (21 page)

He started down the stairs. The balustrade was rough beneath her palm; a splinter speared her finger, and she lifted her hand to her mouth, sucking absently. Such wild ideas were flooding her mind. He was not a butterfly after all, but something more predatory. His bright colors, his laughter, and his flirtation were empty facades. She had been fooled again, but by an even more nefarious sort of man. And she had gone waltzing around town with him, as if she had no cause to know better!

They passed the fourth landing, and then the third. One of the floorboards was broken away, yielding a God's eye view of the flat below. A pot of soup boiled on the stove and the smell of onions brought bile into her mouth. She could not have been so badly mistaken.

"Sanburne." His name burst from her. "Wait."

He pivoted on his heel.
"What?"

The snapped word had her retreating a step. All at once, his face transformed. Sanity returned to it. He raised his hand to span his temples, his eyes closing briefly. "I'm sorry. Christ, I—" He slid his hand up through his hair. His knuckles were raw; one was bleeding. That man's nose. Dear God. "Lydia," he said quietly. "Don't look at me like that. I wouldn't hurt you. You must know that."

She had seen him battered before. He'd claimed pain was the point of it. What sort of man desired pain? "Of course not," she said. But her tone was not convincing.

His hand fell, and he drew a long breath. "No," he said. "You would be right to mistrust me. Especially after that. Of course you would. I cannot blame you."

She was an idiot. For at his admission, her instincts rose up in protest; they clamored to make excuses for him. "You lost your head," she said tentatively.

"No. I fully meant to strangle him."

"But not to death!"

His laughter was not pleasant. She didn't know what had birthed it, but she recognized its proper clime: a darkened room, solitude, winter. "Do you really want me to answer that?"

"Yes," she whispered.

He slouched against the wall, tipping up his chin to study the ceiling. "Perhaps," he said at length. "I don't know." His head rolled toward her. "I should have killed him," he said conversationally.

She was listening to a man speak casually of murder. Of his desire to commit it. Why was she not running? Why was everything in her inclining toward him, in sympathy, in the desire to
comfort
him? "Don't say that," she murmured. "You don't mean it."

"Don't I?" He shrugged. "It's his life, or hers. If she stays with him—and she will—he will kill her. She will leave in a coffin, long before her rightful time."

"You can't know that!"

"Yes," he said flatly. "I can."

"But—" She swallowed. "She did not want your help."

His face shuttered. "No. They never do."

"Perhaps she
will
leave on her own."

"She was groveling at his feet. After he blackened her eye. Did you miss that bit, Miss Boyce?"

His incredulous tone was intended to mock her and perhaps, too, the woman upstairs. The latter possibility infuriated her. He had seen that garret. He knew as well as she did that there was no fancy coach waiting to carry Mrs. Ogilvie to safety. "Everyone is brave in his own way. You can't blame others if they don't fit your mold."

For a few heartbeats, he simply looked at her. "You are so incredibly naive," he said softly.

A memory awoke in her, then. There had been rumors, during Lady Bolands trial, of misbehavior on her husband's part. "Is it your sister?" she asked slowly. "Is that why?"

The question acted like a tonic: he blinked, looked away, and when his face turned back, he had reacquired the way of it, that regular mask of smiling amusement. "What a clever girl. Why, you're a regular Athena, aren't you?

She stiffened. He was striking out, as Sophie sometimes did when confronted with a difficult truth. It was childish, but that did not make it less hurtful. She watched helplessly as he started again down the stairs. "Wait," she called, and followed after him. He stopped three steps below her, his posture uncharacteristically rigid. She screwed up her courage. "You are right to be concerned," she said to his back. "It is noble. But there are other ways to help. You cannot simply go around attacking men—"

He turned on her so suddenly that she flinched. "I know," he said in a rough voice,
"exactly
what I can and cannot do. I live with it every day, Miss Boyce. I do not suffer from it, if you have noticed. Under-employed, under-occupied, and thoroughly useless: it is a glorious way to live, if you have the bank account. So why don't you save your goddamned preaching for someone who needs it. I know I will thank you for it."

She stood there, blinking blindly at the wall. After a moment, the sound of his bootsteps came again, but they sounded very dim, lost as they were beneath the mortified pounding of her heart. He was walking away. He was finished with her.
My God, I will never learn.

She had to continue down after him. There was no other choice. She knew that, but her feet would not obey her. A deep breath, a nod of her head.
Straighten your shoulders, and now you will move.
Her feet went down the steps, out into the cooling air and dim light. A thin rain started to fall as she walked up to him, announcing itself by a drop on her nose, and then another on her wrist, stardingly cold. "I did not mean to offend you," she said quietly.

"You didn't." He sounded exhausted. "But you are right; I am thoroughly useless. You should find someone else to help you."

The words disquieted her. She had not called him useless. But no doubt he was right: it had been foolish in the extreme to ask him to accompany her. She hugged her arms to herself and walked past him, keeping her eyes to the ground. Water began to freckle the cobblestones. By the time they reached the hack, it was raining steadily enough to churn mud between the stones.

As the driver came round to open the door, she threw Sanburne a quick glance. His expression was aloof, his posture formal; he had detached himself from the scene. And only a quarter-hour ago—it seemed like a lifetime, now—she had been on the roof with him, and the sun had still shone, and she had felt so carefree.

An impulse seized her. It was not quite so wild as to be called recklessness. She recognized the logic of it: she did not want those earlier moments to have led only to this. It would diminish them so terribly. She heard herself ask, "Do we go to the gin palace, then?"

This won his attention. She could not read his face, but after a beat, he shrugged and said, "Why not. God knows I could use a drink."

Chapter Ten

Lydia did not know what she was doing. She felt breathless and unsure of how to look at him. This urge to mend things seemed to have taken her into new territory. It had led her to a gin palace, hadn't it? She had never laid eyes on such a place before, but as she gawked up at its exterior, this fact seemed less a consequence of righteous living than a stupendous fluke. There was no way she could have missed such a building, had she passed one. Three stories of ornately molded and gilded plaster hovered over her, like a fairy tale castle placed direcdy into the weary surroundings of the slum. But surely no castle had ever emitted such a tremendous reek: the sourness of alcohol mixed with the rich aroma of fried food. She inhaled deeply. Oysters, or perhaps whilks.

Inside, the heat and noise hit her first. The long saloon was crowded; a variety of customers yelled, laughed, slapped each other, banged mugs, thumped the bar, stamped their feet. Laborers in rough-spun woollens rubbed shoulders with clerkish lads in sober suits. The lady in the drooping boa, her face painted with lacquer and blush, did not surprise Lydia, but the middle-aged matron in the modest dress, sharing a glass with her husband, seemed less likely. A few paces away, two girls in patched gowns flirted with a young man; none of them looked a day above seventeen, and their pallor suggested that their money would be better put to food. But they were laughing so merrily that Lydia's lips moved in automatic response.

She cupped her mouth, surprised by herself. "The addiction knows no class."

Sanburne's laughter was brief. "So
all
of them are addicts?"

"Why else would one be consuming deleterious spirits at this hour?"

"Boredom? A happy way to pass an hour?"

"Happy! To rot one's brain on poison?"

"Spoken like a woman who's never been drunk."

"You speak as though that's a failing."

He cocked a brow. "And if I say it is?"

She arched a brow back at him. "Then I will remind you that I've never needed a stranger to fix my bustle."

He looked at her in surprise, and then, after a moment, smiled. A simple and commonplace thing, but she saw the appreciation in it. Her heart gave a sudden, sharp thud.

Stop it,
she told herself.
You don't know the rules to this game. It is beyond foolish to try to court his favor.
She started to move past him, in the direction of the bar, but her path was blocked by a man carrying a basket of boiled shellfish. Mussels—she'd been wrong all around. The two girls bounded forward, handing over a coin in return for a bounty packaged in greasy cones made of newsprint. She was glad to see them eating.

A hand took her elbow. She let Sanburne steer her through the crowd, craning her head this way and that to absorb the place. She knew gin palaces as pits of doom, where poor people met their ruin, but this room was as gaudily resplendent as the lobby of an opera house. Gas lamps bloomed from the walls like exotic flowers of gold and glass. The ceiling was gilt laid over sculpted plaster. Cherubs peeked from the four corners, and mirrors polished to high clarity covered the wall behind the pewter-topped bar.

Oh, and there was the gin! Opposite the bar, behind a brass rail, sat row upon row of barrels, each painted in cheerful shades of gold and green. Handpainted signs announced their contents. The Superior Cream. The Regular Flare-up. The Dew off Ben Nevis. "What are the numbers written on them in chalk?" she asked, gesturing.

"The number of gallons remaining. There are pipes embedded into the walls, leading over to the bar. The tapsters need only depress the right lever to fill a tankard."

At the bar, she meant to watch this process, but was distracted by the smooth gray countertop, which bore hundreds of tiny holes that formed a decorative pattern of flowers and vines. "To catch the spilled liquid," Sanburne said, tapping on one. "They sell it very cheaply— 'all sorts,' it's called. Care to try it?"

She grimaced. "No, thank you."

"What'll it be?" This from a giant man in a fur cap, who glanced casually toward them from his position behind a spigot. He was chewing on a piece of straw and had a paper flower tucked behind his ear.

"Sixpence of Old Tom for me," said Sanburne, "and a Cream of the Valley for the lady."

"I won't drink it," she muttered to him, but thought it best not to protest more publicly. When the tapster returned with their drinks—giving a bite to Sanburnes coin before handing the tankards over—she said, "We're looking for someone. Miss Polly Marshall."

The man shrugged. "I don't ask their names before I serve 'em. Good luck to you."

They passed down the bar, through an arched passage that bore the sign To the Wholesale Department. The next room held an equally dense crowd (in the middle of the day! she could not comprehend it), but there was no sign of the woman from the drawing. The final room was smaller, the bar lined with plush red benches, the walls covered in vibrant murals drawn from Greek mythology. The quality of the artistry surprised her. How many-people came here not only for gin, but also for respite from the bleak surroundings in which they lived? She felt quite overturned.

After they had taken a seat, Sanburne lifted his glass for a long swallow. She waited for him to speak, but he seemed content to look moodily about. The silence that opened between them was not comfortable. She realized, with faint embarrassment, what bothered her: in all their interactions to date, he had watched her very closely, and with keen interest—as though nothing else existed. She'd rather grown to like it.

He caught her looking at him. She cast about for some remark, but he spoke first.

"I owe you an apology."

Did he refer to the scene on the roof, or in the hallway? The ambiguity left her balancing between chagrin and an equally discomfiting curiosity. "Please, let's don't speak of it."

"No. You were right, earlier. When you asked about my sister." She glanced up in time to see his mouth curve briefly. She would not have called it a smile. "I'm sure you've heard the story."

She hesitated. "Some of it," she said.

"The papers left out the most important part. Namely, that Boland was a goddamned pig."

She flushed. The language was shocking.

"He beat her, and I couldn't do a damned thing about it," he continued, running a finger around the rim of his mug. "Prying her out of that house was impossible. Until the end, of course. At the end, she wanted to run. But I had nothing to offer. No factories yet, no inheritance. My allowance from Moreland would have gotten her to the continent, but it would not have kept her in style. And she could not face poverty, though I offered to share it with her." The surface of his gin rippled beneath his soft laugh. "Stella was always a great hand for spending money."