Scandalous Desires (18 page)

Winter shrugged. He didn’t need to tell his brothers what such information would do to the home’s good standing—and the money it needed from its patrons and donors. One whiff of impropriety and the fickle aristocrats would find some other charity to amuse themselves with.

“You should have picked her up and dragged her out bodily,” Concord growled.

Winter arched an eyebrow. “Past O’Connor and a half dozen of his men?”

Concord grimaced.

Asa rolled his eyes. “Trust you to advocate a near-suicidal action based on moral outrage.”

Concord half rose from his chair, bellowing incoherently. Asa rose as well and for the next several minutes the kitchen was filled with loud masculine rage.

Winter sighed and closed his eyes, raising one hand to gently rub his temple. He’d had a lifetime to observe the strained relations between his elder brothers. There were times when they could almost make it through a family meal without resorting to shouts, but those occasions were rare and becoming rarer. Concord dealt with the tension by assuming an unyielding line: He was entirely correct and by contrast everything Asa espoused was entirely incorrect. Winter had once overheard Temperance muttering under her breath that their brother should’ve better been christened
Dis
cord.

Asa’s response to this ceaseless state of friction was to disappear. It was a constant worry for their eldest sister, Verity. She feared—and Winter privately concurred—that someday their brother would go away and simply not come back.

His brothers’ voices died.

Winter opened his eyes to find both Asa and Concord scowling at him.

He raised his eyebrows. “Might we continue this discussion now?”

A smile tugged at the corner of Asa’s wide mouth. “We might.” He sobered. “What I don’t understand is why Silence trusted this pirate to speak the truth about his supposed enemies. Has he seduced her, do you think?”

Concord banged a hard fist on the table. “How dare you question our sister’s virtue?”

Asa looked at Concord coldly. “I find that people are capable of many different things. How do you know Silence wouldn’t fall under Mickey O’Connor’s spell? He’s rumored to be quite pretty.”

Concord opened his mouth, but Winter beat him to it. “We know because we have watched Silence in the last year,” he said quietly, but pointedly.

A ruddy flush lit Asa’s cheekbones.

“Silence might be as susceptible to sin as any other female,” Winter said, “but she would never be seduced by O’Connor. You know her history with him. What you may not know is that after William’s cargo was returned, relations between he and Silence were… strained. He perished on his last journey at sea and Silence blamed her confrontation with O’Connor for the sorrow in her marriage before William left.”

For a moment none of the men spoke. Winter looked at his brothers and wondered if they felt as helpless as he. He’d wanted to break things—to kill O’Connor—when he’d seen Silence after her night with the pirate. He hadn’t of course. Such violence would not have helped their sister.

That hadn’t stopped him dreaming of blood for weeks afterward, though.

“So you see,” Winter said quietly, “Silence must truly think that there is danger for the child. She’d never consent to be in the same building with him otherwise.”

“Then that presents an additional problem,” Asa said.

Winter arched an eyebrow in inquiry.

“Besides the difficulty of getting into the palace and rescuing her,” Asa said, “we will also need to have a place
where we can safely bring both her and the child. A place that neither Mickey nor his enemies can find.”

Winter nodded slowly. “I believe your assessment is correct. She will never leave willingly unless she knows we can keep the child safe.”

Concord leaned forward placing his massive forearms on the table. “In that case it’s obvious who we should bring into this.”

S
ILENCE WAS TEARING
her heart out over the child.

Two mornings later Mick stood over Silence’s bed and watched her sleep. There were smudges of exhaustion and fear under her eyes, her brown hair was coming down from a plait, and she clutched the sheet in one fragile fist like a little girl afraid of night terrors.

She slept as if dead—she’d not moved as he’d entered her room. He brushed a stray lock of hair away from her eyes. Her breath didn’t even hitch.

Mick sighed and straightened. It was not yet dawn—still dark out. She’d spent the last two nights and the day in between nursing the child. He’d stayed away, but he’d had Fionnula report the happenings in the sickroom three or four times a day.

The child was growing thinner, her little body lit from within by a fire that would not die. If the fire consumed her—

Mick clenched his jaw and turned away from the bed. He left without glancing in the direction of the child’s cot, crossing through his own room and out into the hallway.

Harry looked up as Mick closed the door quietly behind him. Mick nodded at the guard and turned to stride down the hall. If the babe died, Silence’s heart would be torn from her chest as surely as if a wild animal had savaged
her. He had no heart himself, but he’d heard they were delicate things and easily broken. Mick growled low under his breath as he made his way to the front of the house. He knew how to protect Silence from knives and fists, from poverty and want, but he had no idea how—or even if—he could protect her from her own soft heart.

Mick passed the half-dozen guards he’d stationed at the front door and went out into the new morning. He glanced up at the grayish-pink sky and then studied his palace. It was a peacock cleverly disguised as a crow. There was no indication of what lay behind the deceptively simple plain wood door. One would never know from looking at it that the door was reinforced from behind with iron.

There was one other entry to the palace—a door leading to the small courtyard behind—and that was guarded, as well. From the outside, his palace appeared to be a dozen or more narrow row houses, built right next to each other. In reality, it was all one building inside and the doors to the house façades had been boarded up from inside long ago.

Mick grunted and turned to walk up the street. He might seem overprotected against attack, but then he had an unrelenting enemy.

A shadow moved in a narrow alley as he passed it and Mick whirled, a knife held ready in his hand. Lad emerged into the weak light, his ears laid back, his head down in submission.

“Jaysus,” Mickey breathed in disgust and shoved the knife back in the sheath strapped to his forearm.

He started down the street again and the dog trotted out happily and fell into step behind him.

The daylight people of St. Giles were already on the streets. The ones he passed now did honest work—more
or less—porters, hawkers, chair men, night soil men, and beggars. They gave him a wide berth, careful not to meet his eyes. They knew him of course. He was their king and they were properly respectful. The river and the boats he lived on were to the east and he’d be nearer his work if he lived in Wapping or some other place in the East End of London. But Mick had been born and grown up in St. Giles. Had run the streets like a feral young wolf cub as a boy, had fucked his first woman here. Killed his first man. This was his home and when he’d made his fortune he’d built his palace in St. Giles.

And now there was one more thing that held him here.

He crossed a street and looked up. The spire of the new St. Giles-in-the-Fields loomed ahead. Mildew had destroyed the old church. Rumor had it that the mildew had fed upon the damp from the rotting plague corpses buried beneath the church flagstones. Certainly the air in the old church had held an evil stink. But no more. The modern church was clean and elegant, a far cry from the old building. Mick grunted. The new church had been built by nobles living outside of London City proper. He wondered what the locals—the ones who actually lived by the church—thought of the new building.

Mick skirted the church, coming upon the graveyard wall. A little way farther and the gate came into sight. He pushed it open. The graveyard was old, of course, the monuments moss-covered, some leaning as if the underground inhabitants had tried to push their way free from the earth. Mick made his way through the crooked rows, Lad padding silently behind him, and even though St. Giles lay just beyond a small wall, the clatter and hustle without was muffled. The graveyard held its own insulated atmosphere.

Mick watched carefully as he neared the grave he’d come to see, for he wasn’t alone in the graveyard.

The Vicar of Whitechapel stood looking down at her headstone and the freshly mounded earth. For a man who had terrorized the East End of London for the better part of a decade he didn’t look that intimidating. He was of average height, wiry rather than heavily muscled, his shoulder-length hair graying, and his features pleasant.

“She called your name,” Charlie said as Mick halted on the far side of the new grave. “As she was dying. Pity you didn’t see fit to visit her on her deathbed.”

Mick smiled widely, easily, as if the news that she’d called for him wasn’t a white-hot poker thrust through his chest. “Busy, wasn’t I?”

Charlie turned then, looking at Mickey full on, and revealing the horror that was the left side of his face. His skin had melted or burned off his face. The eye socket was merely a hardened gouge, his nostril destroyed, his lips pulled down into his chin. The ear was a melted rim and the hair on the left side of his head was in tufts as if most of it had been pulled out by the very roots.

Mick’s smile widened. “Yer gettin’ handsomer by the hour, Charlie.”

The Vicar’s expression didn’t change—but then many of his facial muscles had been destroyed. His remaining brown eye glittered with mad hatred, though. A wise man would step away from such vicious anger.

Mick leaned forward. “I’ll not let ye drive me from me home, old man.”

Charlie’s eyelid drooped. “What makes you think you have any say-so in the matter, boy?”

Mick’s smile hardened. “What makes ye think I don’t?”

Charlie shrugged one shoulder—the other had scarring. “Might be because I know you’ve got your babe hid in that palace of yours—along with a woman called Silence Hollingbrook. I find that interesting, I do. Seems to me that it’d be a fair trade: your woman for my own.”

Mick shrugged himself as if Silence didn’t matter to him, but his heart had begun to beat in triple time. Of course the Vicar had found out about Silence. Of course he’d know that she was different simply because she’d stayed when none of his other women had.

“I never took yer woman,” Mick said.

“Aye, but you tried to.”

Mick raised an eyebrow. Charlie wasn’t making sense, but then he’d long known the man was mad.

“And that babe?” The Vicar tutted. “I hear she’s a sickly thing. Like to die soon. That must weigh upon your heart most sadly.”

Mick looked at the Vicar. He was such a small man for all the malice he held inside of him. Long ago Mick had wondered why Charlie was made the way he was. What had carved away all sympathy, all respect for other men. What had made him the vicious, violent bastard he was.

But he’d learned to stop wondering. It made no never mind why the Vicar was the way he was. As well to ask why a viper struck and killed for no reason. It was simply the way of nature.

“Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago,” Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. “If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I’ll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still fuck women
and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I’ll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.”

He walked away then, carefully not looking at the new headstone with the tiny angel carved at the top. Lad glanced up from sniffing a weed and fell into step with Mick as he passed. The temptation to attack now was almost overwhelming. His hands, balled into fists by his side, shook with the urge to strike the older man and put an end to this once and for all.

But Charlie never went anywhere without a half dozen guards. One lounged behind a tree, another two stood by the wall, and the remaining three were out of sight, but Mick had no doubt that they were nearby. Strange. Only a year ago, he might’ve damned the guards and attacked Charlie anyway. Now, Mick had the knowledge at the back of his mind that if he failed, he’d not be there to protect Silence—Charlie was mad enough to revenge himself on Silence even if Mick were dead. The realization was not a pleasant one—that only he stood between Charlie and Silence.

He nodded ironically to one of the Vicar’s men stationed at the churchyard gate as he passed by. Six men could overwhelm him, he supposed, if the Vicar chose to attack now, but that wasn’t the man’s way. Charlie preferred the indirect hit, the slow poison that systematically destroyed a person before they were even dead.

Mick halted in the middle of the street and threw back his head to gaze at the blue sky overhead. It was going to be a rare clear day in London, the sun shining so brightly one could almost believe in a God and all his angels, of a mother’s love and a boy’s innocent dreams. He closed his
eyes and saw her brown eyes, sad and defeated and filled with tears as she’d sung to him.