Bound by Your Touch (30 page)

"One can only hope." He dragged a hand across his mouth. Outside, the sun emerged from behind a cloud, and the light coming through the window warmed his face, illuminating the fine-grained contours of his skin. Stubble showed on his jaw; he had not shaved this morning. The liquor left his lips wet. She found herself staring at them. His lips did amazing and dreadful things. His tongue—

She looked away. But a glitter at the corner of her eye drew her attention back. He had raised the flask again. "You are a lush," she snapped.

He lowered the flask and looked at her. "Of course. A remarkably devoted lush. Also a useless butterfly. Had you not heard? You should ask my sister; she'll tell you all about it."

She felt like slamming her fist into the seat. "You want my honesty? Very well: I cannot trust a man who does not respect himself. What chance he would respect
me!"

Sanburne laughed. "Oh, excellent. That's the best temperance speech I've ever heard."

The floor beneath her feet shuddered as the train began to brake. They were pulling into the concourse. A cloud of steam billowed up past the window, blotting out the view. "End of line," called the porter.

"May I offer you a ride home?" asked Sanburne.

"I think not. No doubt you'd drive us into the Thames." She grabbed her umbrella, shot to her feet, and strode down the carriage. This was ridiculous. She did not understand her anger. He was right about himself. He could not disappoint her; it was her own description that he had used to explain himself. He was only behaving to type.

She stepped down from train into chaos. At this hour, every track in the Brighton concourse was occupied with bright yellow passenger carriages. A tide of bankers in sober black suits moved in lockstep toward the terminal, each with his chin tucked into his muffler, a morning paper crammed beneath his arm. She fell in behind one such man, trusting him to forge a quick path through the various vendors (hot cross buns; potatoes; tea, piping hot), newspaper boys, and mothers who balanced crying children and picnic baskets.

Near the end of the train, a gentleman lounging in the doorway to a second-class compartment tipped his bowler hat to her. The rogue, making advances at a stranger! She threw a look over her shoulder as she passed, and spied Sanburne a few paces behind her. The man with the bowler hat leaped down to walk behind him, and as her eyes brushed his once again, she recognized his face. Where had she seen him before? She had been thinking of Sanburne at the time—

The library. He was one of the lovebirds who had been sitting near her, that day she'd received Polly Marshall's note. Perhaps he'd recognized her. It was still very wrong of him to acknowledge her, of course.

As she passed under the great clock, she reached into her reticule to hunt for cab fare. She would go straightaway to Carnelly s; it was her responsibility to do so, and she did not trust herself to put it off", not when she'd felt a moment of temptation at Sanburne's suggestion that the matter be left to Papa.
Assassination attempt,
she thought tartly. If it really had seemed so serious, he would have mentioned it last night. No doubt he'd been drunk as a fox, and stumbled into someone who'd taken offense. At worst, these notes came from Overton's man. What better way to ruin Papa than to have a prominent figure accuse him of dispatching thugs?

A hand brushed her arm. She glanced back, a sharp word on her lips. But all that met her eyes were dozens of retreating backs—and the man in the bowler hat. He was direcdy behind her, now. A tremor shot down the backs of her knees. Silly. Still, she adopted a brisker pace. Where had Sanburne gone, then? The sudden, high-pitched shriek of a train had her flinching. She forced out a small laugh. This panic was irrational. But she looked back anyway. The bowler hat was gaining ground. In another few steps he'd be able to touch her. But he was not following her; he was only heading toward the southern exit.

Her body did not accept this logic. Her heart hammered a warning. She peered around and ahead, searching the crowd for the viscount's bright head.

A stranger stepped into her path. "Miss Boyce," he said. He was tall and thin, with a bony nose and deep-set eyes that fastened upon her confidently. "We must talk." His
eyes
flicked beyond her and she knew, knew instinctively, that he was looking to the man in the bowler hat. They were together.

His hand reached into his jacket. It would not produce anything good for her. She looked into his face. In nightmares, too, events sometimes transpired thus— very slowly, so that her thoughts outstripped her actions. "Leave me alone," she said, and on a great heave, tossed her umbrella at his face and broke into a run.

A hand closed over her elbow. Her voice came blasting out of her, loud as any suffragist s.
"James!"
But her voice could not cut through the din. Yanked around, now. The bowler hat had pockmarked cheeks and a tiny mouth. His hand came up, only it was not his fist that he slapped against her mouth. The cloth held a cloying, sickly sweet perfume. It spread up her nose and cast tendrils into her lungs.

Her nails clawed into his knuckles.
Don't breathe; don't.
A cough seized her; she tasted fumes. She tried to back away but collided with a body that pinned her in place. She was choking. The sounds around her began to slow. She thrust back an elbow but her muscles were loosening, unraveling into strings. Falling now. The ground met her. For a moment it hurt; and then all at once it felt like sponge beneath her cheek. Feet passed by in a long blur. She shut her eyes. There was fear here but she felt too tired to manage it.

Now the world shook around her. It dissolved into violent streaks of color that lengthened like melting rubber as she was lifted. Her limbs dangled, annoying, heavy and numb, nothing to do with her torso. Sanburne's face rippled, a reflection in wind-tossed water. He was speaking, but she could make no sense of it. His voice jumped and narrowed like a poor phonograph recording.

She was in his arms: the realization made its way through her brain. He was carrying her. She put her cheek to his shoulder and let the darkness bloom like a night-dark rose. One could not read much into flowers, anyway...

Lydia felt as light as a child in his arms. He had no patience with the bobbies' questions; he wanted to get her home. For once, being a paper lord suited him: he dropped his title and borrowed his fathers sneer, and within ten minutes, the police were bowing and scraping. They agreed to interview him later, at his house.

In the hack, she barely stirred. Occasionally she would whimper something. Once, he caught his name.
James,
she whispered. He did not think he was imagining it.

He stroked her cheek until he was assured that it was not growing colder. And then, on a long, steadying breath, he looked out the window. The day had dawned wet but now the sun had broken through the clouds. Its light reflected off the slanting rain, which streamed like a shower of diamonds onto black branches studded with pink blossoms. Finally, spring had remembered London.

He'd said that liquor did not affect him but he lied. He'd not been steady on his feet as he walked down the platform. Or was it the early hour, and the exhaustion he felt, deep in his bones? Either way, he could not excuse himself. The disgust burning in his chest made his breath come short. If he'd had one more swallow, it was possible he would not have been able to subdue those men.

She stirred in his arms. His fingers tightened in her hair.
This cannot happen again.
A better man would drop her at Wilton Crescent, knowing the scandal he courted by taking her elsewhere. He was not a good man. But by God, he was also not going to be the sort of useless goddamned swine that sat by and watched another woman stumble merrily toward her doom on some blind and misplaced faith.

And he was not going to be sitting there drunk again when he received news of her fate.

Her eyes fluttered open. She stared at him, her pupils abnormally small. He wondered what she saw. He did not know if he would recognize his own face, in this moment. He felt strange to himself. "I'm here," he murmured. "You re all right."

It was a simple enough equation. He thought he could make it work.

Her lashes fluttered shut again, and she sighed.

Chapter Fourteen

She woke slowly, to a sound that at first seemed like distant thunder, and then, as awareness sharpened her senses, like a piano. Someone was attacking the lowest keys. It made her head hurt. On a deep breath, she discovered that her stomach was sore. Her
eyes
opened to a view of an old-fashioned bed canopy that did not look familiar. She pushed herself upright.

The room was spacious and well-appointed. Curtains striped in cherry and white stood open to the late afternoon sun. Paintings of country scenes covered the walls. She had no idea where she was. She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the frantic trip of her heart. Her wool bodice felt faindy damp. She lowered her head and sniffed lilac water and the faintest trace of vomit. Had she gotten sick on herself? Was that why her stomach—

Stop. Don't think about it.

She slipped to her feet. Her bonnet rested on a nearby chair; her boots sat waiting on the carpet. As she laced them up, she surveyed the room. Surely ruffians would not provide their prisoners with silk wallpaper and French linen sheets. But something about the room made her uneasy all the same. The enameled French toilet table was very fine, and unerly bare. The walnut writing desk sat empty of paper and pen. The mantel held candles that had never been lit, and in the fireplace, no ash had ever touched the gleaming blue tiles. A more generic and sterile room, she could not imagine. It might have been anywhere in Mayfair. She very much doubted it was Sanburne's.

With her tongue lying like a slab of dust in her mouth, thirst proved stronger than fear. A silver pitcher stood atop the toilet table. The cold water tasted more delicious than ambrosia, and she drank it all, sip by eager sip, as the distant piano thundered onward. Once satisfied, she set down the pitcher to consider the door. It stood ajar. A ruffian would have locked her in. She retrieved her bonnet and followed the music out through an anteroom, into a dark hallway that smelled disconcertingly like Alexandria. Incense, she belatedly realized: in the Arab quarter, they had burned it continually.

She found the piano after a short walk down the hall, in a high-ceilinged salon whose curtains stood open to the light. This furious music was being produced by a child— a young girl in a white lace dress, with a blue sash tied at her waist and a matching ribbon in her long blond braid. Lydias step across the threshold was met by a discordant crash: the pianist planted her elbow on the lowest keys for leverage and spun herself around on the stool. "Finally awake!" she cried. "Was it the music that did it?"

It took Lydia a moment to recover her manners. "No indeed," she said. "I—" And then the girl bounced off the stool, and she was surprised once more into silence. Why, the girl was startlingly beautiful—and her dress was not from the schoolroom, after all. It was one of those new Aesthetic gowns, the loose folds of which revealed a figure more womanly than childish. How old was she, then? Her face was heart-shaped, her hair that impossible platinum that tended to darken with age, her eyes as huge and blue as a newborn's. Sixteen, perhaps? "Forgive me," she said. "Is ... is your father about?"

The girl laughed. "Wouldn't that be nice?" As she stepped forward, the irony in that laugh still rode her face, causing Lydia, quite abruptly, to revise her estimate upward. The woman was twenty at the least.

She cleared her throat. "My apologies. My head is still muddied, I fear."

"I don't doubt it." The woman had a peculiar accent—one moment flat and American, and the next, purely English. "Chloroform can knock you out for hours. Or was it ether? We couldn't decide."

"Ah ... I have no idea."

"Well, were the dreams delicious? Or terrifying?"

"Terrifying."

The woman made a face. "Chloroform, then. Poor you. Had to breathe that stuff once in Hong Kong." She shuddered. "Made me dream of Phin, in fact."

Waking up from an attempted kidnapping, one could want for more balanced company than this woman. "Do you know where I might find the Viscount Sanburne?"

"Depends. Phin's had two visitors today. Is he tall and pretty, or short and fearsome?"

"Tall," Lydia managed.

"The library." The woman brushed past her, trailing a curious, foreign-smelling perfume. As they turned down the corridor toward the stairs, she added, "I would advise you not to ask him for help. It gets sticky very quickly."

"I beg your pardon?"

She flicked a measuring look over Lydia's figure. Her eyes paused on the bonnet, which seemed to amuse her. "Or perhaps you wouldn't mind it," she said obscurely. "What a
lovely
stuffed bird. Phin will adore it."

The lady seemed to think she had a connection to this Phin. Lydia cast her thoughts about, until she recollected a tidbit she'd heard about Sanburne's circle. "Do you mean the Earl of Ashmore?"

The woman's voice veered again toward American. "Yes, whatever he told you to call him. Monroe serves, too.

Her brain felt too muzzy for such nonsensical talk. She took a good grip on the railing as they descended the staircase. "Is this the earl's residence, then?"

"Residence, prison, boarding house, you name it. Also, occasionally"—the woman's voice dropped, and her spectacular eyes widened—
"pleasure palace."
At normal volume, she continued, "I take it you're not friends, then."