Since the Surrender (2 page)

Chase fixed the urchin with his best truth-extracting stare. Urchin blinked as though he’d had scalding water flicked into his eyes.

“Why should this woman send you?”

“I were there, weren’t I?” Urchin sounded matter-of-fact. “In the courtyard of the museum. I ’olds the carriage horses heads when carriages pull up, and down she come from the hack. Some gives me blunt when I do it; others naught.”

It was a time-honored scheme: performing a useless service and then expecting someone to feel guilty enough to pay for it.

“Those that pay you pay you to leave, most likely.”

Urchin’s grin was a quick and brilliant surprise. “Dinna care why they pay me. So into the daft big museum she went, then out she come right quick, looks about fer the ’ack, but ’tis gone, right? And I’ve no blunt to show fer it. But she sees me, asks if I want to earn a shillin’

—a shillin’!—and went in again and came out with this message and sent me to find ye.”

“She came in a hackney?” he repeated sharply.

“Aye. No coat of arms. She’d ’ired it.”

An interestingly intuitive response: it was precisely what he had wanted to know. He searched those clear eyes looking for evidence of lies or knavery.

The boy twitched like an insect caught by one wing. His gaze slipped sideways.

A liedy. He had been foolish for a woman only once in his entire life. It was both the truest and least honorable thing he’d ever done. And the most carnal, as fate would have it.

Ironic, given that honor had at one time been the thing that defined him. It had of course been quietly catastrophic. In that moment, he hadn’t felt he had a choice in the matter.

But now he did. He narrowed his eyes at the message, and at the messenger.

Was she pretty? Was she alone? Did she seem afraid? Is this a trick? What kind of trick? Is this a trap? What kind of trap?

What the hell.

He would discover the truth of all of this for himself. Against his better judgment, Chase produced a shilling and held it out in two fingers just as he released his grip on the boy’s shoulder.

“Now get out of my sight.”

Urchin snapped the shilling away like a fish taking bait as Chase released him.

“Fare thee well, guv!” he bellowed cheekily over his shoulder, and went skipping off on bare feet through the fetid London puddles.

He felt surprisingly little guilt as he turned his back on his cousin’s boardinghouse. He wished now he’d arranged to have a horse saddled for him before he’d set out from the Eversea town house this morning rather than dividing the trip between hack and foot. But he walked as often as he could, as far as he could. At night he suffered for it, or drank.

He would need a hackney to get to the Montmorency, however, and decided he would take it all the way there, a concession to the leg. The district he stood in now wasn’t precisely Seven Dials, but from the looks of things, it took Seven Dials as an inspiration. Only a few businesses hung their signs on the street. Shirts and drawers festooned lines slung between window ledges of adjacent sagging boardinghouses. Soaked and heavy from the cloudburst, they would dry to stiffness in the heat. He hadn’t yet seen a hackney. Likely because no one wanted to come here and no one could afford to leave via hackney even if they wanted to. He walked a bit. Past a cheese shop, a milliner, a cobbler, a pub. Another pub. Another pub. Like most parts of London, alleys tributaried from the street he walked. Deep at the end of one he saw the flash of white buttocks busily pumping between a dress furled up in a pair of fists. A man being serviced by a prostitute. Lovely.

About then he realized he was being watched.

Or, rather…hunted. The feeling was singularly different. He knew in a blinding instant why: he’d given a coin to a street rat who had taken note of his slightly uneven gait and his clothes and thought, A charitable gentleman with a limp, a walking stick, and a pocketful of shillings? Easy prey.

There were two of them, Chase sussed out. Flanking him. A man on one side of the street, a man on the other. Moving toward each other in his peripheral vision, closing in on their objective. Fat leftover rain clouds aimed precise celestial sun shafts down on him; the ground steamed from the short cloudburst. With it came the smell of London street soup: piss and manure and mud and food and somewhere, in the distance, something fresh and green. Grass, trees. Just not anywhere near where he currently stood. The celestial light was ironically quite helpful: it showed him that both had knives. Palmed; having been slid down into them from their coat sleeves. The sun nicked light flashes from the blades. Spendid.

Chase calculated he couldn’t reach his boot pistol in time. He cursed the fact that he’d only brought the one with him on this outing, when force of habit and sheer love of weaponry usually meant he had another loaded and tucked into his coat. His blood was an exhilarating tsunami through his veins. Time, as it always had in moments at the precipice of danger, slowed for him: seconds stretched out luxuriously, like a tightly woven blanket pulled wide, revealing to him every minuscule move his stalkers made.

his stalkers made.

Only two of you?

If they had seen his smile then, they might have had grave second thoughts regarding what they were about to do.

They did not. He was diabolically glad.

They were even with him now, parallel to each other, close enough for him to see the color of one’s eyes: brown as manure. The first one lunged.

Chase brutally whipped his walking stick across his torso. The man folded double, allowing Chase to drive his elbow down between his shoulder blades, once, twice, again, piling him into the ground. And when the man toppled, Chase drove his foot into his groin, then spun to crack his walking stick across the plunging forearm of the other man. He held him fast; inches away from his face, aimed at a point between his eyes; the knife point trembled. Strong brute.

But Chase only needed to hold him just long enough. He slackened his hold a split second, long enough to surprise the man into thinking he was winning, to relax almost imperceptibly. Which is when Chase seized the wrist holding the knife and bent it back and back and back until the man rasped a hoarse scream, his fingers splayed, and the knife tipped from it.

Ugly-beautiful thing went winking in the sun to the damp ground. Thunk.

Very good knife, that.

He kicked the man hard in the knees and down he went, hard. With a bit of a splash. Gazed up at him, stunned, from the ground. Chase slid his pistol out of his boot, cocked it without ceremony and pointed it into the man’s face.

“Optionally,” he said, as though they’d been in the midst of a negotiation, “I can crush your windpipe with the heel of my boot, and you can die slowly rather than quickly.” He was scarcely breathing heavily.

The brown eyes, flat and soulless in a pitted face, reflected more astonishment than terror. “S-S-Sorry, guv!”

Chase’s laugh was mad and incredulous; it scalded his throat. Sorry I attacked you with a knife, guv! Sorry! ’Twas all just a misunderstanding!

Terror officially replaced astonishment on the man flattened below him.

Chase explained patiently, “I think I see your error. Did you think I was a ‘gentleman’? You’d be amazed at how many gentlemen were made savages by war. I’ve killed better men than you without blinking. I’d think twice the next time you to come for one of us. Some of us might have even developed a taste for it.”

The other man was spared a soliloquy and a gun in his face because he was rolling about on the wet ground, tucked up like a hedgehog and gasping something about his baubles. Chase assessed him curiously for a moment, the way one might regard an animal needing to be put out of misery. And then he locked his pistol, knelt awkwardly—his leg was nearly ready to buckle beneath him, and somewhere beneath his fury pain sang its relentless, familiar tune—and collected that devil’s knife, too. Quite good, they were. He’d been an artillery captain; he was still able to admire a decent weapon regardless of context. Who knew when he might need them?

He fished about in the man’s pocket and found a sheath and managed to tuck both knives into it.

When he pushed himself upright with the stick, and righted his hat, which had tipped down over one brow, with one hand, Chase looked more like the urchin’s cocky imitation of a gentleman than he would ever know. He nodded curtly and nonspecifically to the cluster of people who’d stopped to gawk, and hailed the hackney clip-clopping by, oblivious to the seconds-long ruckus that had just taken place and unaware that a gent armed with knives and a pistol was about to board it.

Chase pulled the door open. The hackney was empty, but a great cloud comprised of the smells of all its previous passengers rushed out.

He was suddenly aware that his body was sticky with sweat and rain dampened. He settled into the seat, produced from his pocket a soft handkerchief embroidered by his sister Olivia with his initials and three tiny flowers, of all things. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her he didn’t want them on his handkerchiefs, since Olivia felt she’d needed practice with flowers, when what she really needed was to stop charmingly rebuffing every man who’d attempted to court her since that bastard Lyon Redmond had disappeared. He dragged the handkerchief over his face, slid it behind his neck, stuffed it back into his pocket.

Well, then.

He was shaking a little: from nerves, from exhilaration, from all the ways that life had changed in the past five years. Rolling along in that carriage, he suddenly felt restless and strangely disembodied, separate from everyone and everything else in the world, a member of no country or family.

A humorless smile stretched his lips. Then faded. He supposed he did resemble prey now.

He sighed, stretched his leg out and propped his heel on the seat across from him. Then drove his knuckles hard into it, kneading it, to stop the twist of pain. He did it again. And closed his eyes. And waited.

And breathed.

And breathed.

The third breath was more of a sigh.

“You ought to marry, Chase!” his brother Colin had taken to urging with an intolerably enigmatic air, as one initiated into a sacred secret order, when he wasn’t talking about cows. As if marriage were the Rosetta stone, the thing that finally gave meaning to the merry chaos of Colin’s life.

“I ought to throw this pint at you,” he told his brother. “Ha ha.”

Thanks to Colin, Chase had learned that one really could speak through clenched teeth. He would be damned if anyone would tell him what he ought to do.

But that’s not what had gotten him banished. Colin and Madeleine had just laughed and laughed. That time.

Unbeknownst to his family, Chase had written to inquire about a position with the East India Company in India, requesting that his reply be directed to him in London.

Now, he left his quieter leg where it was, lifted off his hat and tapped it against his hand to dash the remaining water from its brim, slid his arms out of his greatcoat and gave it a shake. Pinhead bright droplets flew everywhere. He smoothed his hair with his hands and jammed the hat back down.

Thus concluded whatever grooming he would do for his assignation at the Montmorency.

He pulled the grubby message from his pocket and read it again. He hesitated then, half-whimsically, gave it a sniff. He could have sworn he detected the faintest scent of…roses?

The Montmorency Museum reminded Chase of an abandoned mistress, perhaps a French one: elegant but aging resentfully, reluctant to receive visitors. The French architectural influence was there in the mansard roof, in the small, fanciful dome arcing over the center door, in the curving bay windows flanking it. The courtyard the urchin had described was surrounded by an uninviting spike-topped iron fence. It wasn’t precisely swarming with eager visitors, either.

Chase got up the wide marble steps with the help of his temper and walking stick and pushed the enormous doors open. He paused, nonplussed. The place was vast and marbled and as hushed as a sickroom, and lit with a certain amount of drama: daylight must have once poured into the half-circle windows built daylight must have once poured into the half-circle windows built high into the walls, but buildings had mushroomed up around it in the intervening century since it was built, and good wax candles burned in a brigade of small, elegant sconces stretching back and back through a warren of halls and rooms. And when he inhaled, he discovered that the place smelled like the tiny, ancient church in Pennyroyal Green, with all those ancient wood pews polished by linseed oil and centuries of Sunday best-clad Sussex arses and candle smoke soaked into its walls.

Which of course reminded him of the duty he’d shirked in favor of this misadventure.

He shrugged off his conscience much more easily than he’d fought off his attackers and stepped forward.

A clerk of some sort, his posture buckled with boredom, was stationed behind an exquisitely simple desk. He’d propped his cheek in one hand and was disconsolately fingering the pages of a book with the other, reading without seeing. Another, much larger, book lay open next to him, quill and inkwell nearby. A guest book. Its sheer size and volume was a trifle optimistic, Chase thought. As though the Montmorency expected legions of visitors. He leaned forward nosily: only four names were written on the page in front of him, three male, none he recognized. The fourth was a woman’s name: Mrs. Smithson. He did recognize the handwriting and the color of ink. She’d written her message to him here at the Montmorency. He nearly rolled his eyes: Mrs. Smithson. Very cunning, indeed. Quite the subterfuge.

“Where might I find Italian paintings?” he said to the clerk. The man shot upright as though a puppeteer had jerked strings from above. His book went tumbling to the floor. He blinked at from above. His book went tumbling to the floor. He blinked at Chase. He had a pink handprint on his face.

Chase realized then that he’d inadvertently barked a command rather than a question. Habit of intonation. He immediately forgave himself.