The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway (The St. Croix Chronicles) (5 page)

Chapter Seven

For a gentleman, Mr. Strangeway had a rather keen ability to fade into crowds. I’d lost him twice, all in the space of a few minutes, and only found him again by chance.

The third time he gave me the slip, I found myself across the narrow tracks from his friend, the striking man called Smoot.

Frustrated beyond measure, I stayed where I was, even after the ear-shattering whistle and rush of steam announced the train’s arrival. I knew they both would board, so why fluster myself any farther?

The folk jostled aboard, finding standing room amid the cars, clutching baskets, cases, other such tools and remains of the day. I had no troubles getting on, for many of London’s working class rode the daily trains to get from borough to borough, and I fit in.

I was nervous, gripped with an anticipation for the strange and mysterious. So it was with great disappointment that I walked the car I had insinuated myself into and found sign of neither Mr. Smoot nor Mr. Strangeway.

Two boys pushed past, clad in a school uniform I did not recognize—although I would be more shocked if I had. One carried a box as if it were the proudest possession he owned, the other devoured the remains of a pasty. Neither seemed inclined to give me an eye, for which I was grateful. Although most adults wouldn’t bother looking at me too hard, children could be bleeding clever when it came to their own kind. I remained still until their boyish laughter faded.

When I attempted to continue my search, hands closed over my shoulders.

I stiffened, prepared to strike back, but I was dragged behind a partition of boxes and crates, warm fingers folded over my mouth to steal my cry of surprise. Tucked into a narrow corner, I found myself staring into earnest dark eyes set in a now-familiar face. The fine-crafted goggles he’d worn now occupied a place about the band of his jaunty bowler, winking in the dim light of the train’s interior. “And who are you, little sparrow?” the man called Smoot demanded, his voice low and pitched as though I were a cat to be won over.

I could not strike him; he held my wrists crossed at my waist. I could kick him, but to what purpose? I had no room with which to gain solid momentum, and was sure I would only irritate him were I to try.

This was not the position to find one’s self in, under any circumstances. Such events often landed Monsieur Marceaux’s kinchins in the nick, not ever to be seen again.

I bared my teeth. “Let me go!”

“And why?” asked the man, who revealed his own teeth in an even smile. “Was it a purse you wanted, or are you following my friend and I for more nefarious purposes?”

I tried for innocent, matching his smile with a hopeful one. “I wouldn’t dare try me ‘and at your pocket, m’lord.” I deliberately called him such, hoping it would soothe an ego obviously enormous by dint of his clothing alone.

“Clever.” His smile faded, leaving his features wreathed in shadow. “You may fool them, girl, but you can’t me.”

I froze in his grip, my smile like brittle glass.

His fingers eased from my wrists. “Don’t look so cracked,” he said with a sigh. “I like my calico rounder and softer.” Before I could decide if I were mortally offended by this or not, he added, “And older, at that. Come on, then, tell Captain Smoot the truth. Why are you following me?”

Heaven save me from the charmers of this world. His softening of tone and cajoling smile would not work with me.

“I’m not following you,” I said, honest for it.

Honest to the letter, perhaps, but my declarations was still dodgy enough to catch an eyeful of skepticism, however, as his brow drew down. “Complete bosh. You stay out of the way. No time to handle whatever it is you’re after, so one wrong move, Bessie, and I’ll toss you from this train, you hear me?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” I assured him, but most was eaten by the shrill whistle of the very train moving beneath us.

His glower suggested he would, and so I shut my mouth as he left me in the corner, a wary eye on my placement, and carefully upended boxes. Looking for something, obviously.

“Can I help?”

“Quiet.”

I shrugged, seizing my knees and utilizing the opportunity to watch him instead.

He moved quickly, like a man accustomed to rifling through goods.

“You aren’t from London,” I observed.

“Oh, really.” His tone could not have been any more sardonic, I think, than if he’d been made of Arabian sand. “What gave me away, love? Was it the lack of mustache?”

“No,” I said mildly. “’Tis your clothing, your black skin and your cavalier demeanor. London low does not often see all three wrapped as one.”

“It’s one of those three London doesn’t like,” he muttered. “And quicker from a guttersnipe than I’d expect. Shut up, Bessie, I’m working.”

I lifted my chin. “I could help, you know.”

“Unless you know the whereabouts of a few Irish girls,” he began, only to pause as I snorted a sound not at all ladylike in nature. Fanny would have been horrified.

“I see your tastes vary far from your colonial home,” I drawled.

“You’ve no idea,” Mr. Smoot returned. “Now hobble your lip, there’s a good sparrow.”

That lasted for all of thirty seconds, give or take the amount of time it took me to narrow down my conversational gambits. “If you’re looking to nick something,” I started to say, only to raise my hands in surrender when he tucked his coat back behind a holster I hadn’t seen affixed to his hip. The ornate handle was not like anything I’d ever seen on a Colt Navy, securely held by a thick leather belt, and what appeared to be bullets along the band.

The message could not be any clearer.

The American captain, whatever he was captain of, was not inclined to field my questions.

This complicated my collection even farther. One man was enough. Two, and at least one armed, was beyond my measure.

Yet I could not fathom losing so soon.

So I bided my time, and awaited my chance to make good my escape—or to incapacitate my erstwhile watcher.

I was not made to wait long.

The train chugged and strained beneath us, rocking gently as it followed the railway. The conversation at the front was mundane and good-natured, with many a tired yawn to punctuate the rise and fall. My strange captor’s movements grew increasingly erratic, his manner tense and strained.

Somehow, the both of us missed the initial entry of a body at the far end of the carriage. The rush of air as the door slid open went unmarked, and the eerie echoes of spinning wheels and whistling air filled the car. That we heard more clearly. Mr. Smoot—
Captain
, my foot; I’d believe it when I saw the ship he claimed—turned, one hand making for the filigreed grip of the revolver at his side.

Too late. The figure was gone, rushing out again, and the door closed. Whatever it is he saw that I didn’t, Mr. Smoot cursed what I assumed was some uniquely American colloquialism, allowing me another to store in my growing list of uncivilities to repeat. He was quicker than I, and darted after him.

“Wait!” I called after them both, but to no avail. I made to follow over the stacked crates.

Behind me, a report boomed, muffled as if I were under water as it happened. I heard popping, a strange kind of snapping reminiscent of fire but not quite the same, and another sound—a harsh one, comprised of varying octaves.

I began to turn, to see what had gone so awry, when something slammed into me, a force I could not see. It stole my breath, swept me off my feet and against the crates, which toppled over me. Sharp edges and splintered corners cracked to the shuddering floor as I curled up in meager defense. A cloud of black tore through the carriage, choked the air, and as I collided with things both jagged and unyielding—as fiery streaks of pain flitted like crimson veins across my vision—I realized what it was that sounded like music.

Voices. Strangers. The commotion of those passengers, like me, that screamed.

My body felt weak, too heavy for my thoughts to direct. Mad chaos filled the carriage, and as I blinked the grit from my eyes, I only vaguely understood that I lay sprawled in the back of the car, a sea of splintered crates and glass and blood-tinged debris about me.

My side hurt, in the way of a stitch when one runs for too long, and my head ached fiercely.

A hand curled around my arm. “Up, you are,” said a familiar voice, but whose sound came muffled. My ears felt stuffed full with cotton. Tears turned to soot-congealed grime on my cheeks, and as another arm banded beneath my knees, I found myself nearly eye to eye with flinty dark green.

Whatever laissez-faire outlook Mr. Strangeway had carried only minutes ago, it did not survive the wreckage of the train car.

“What,” I managed, somehow between gritted teeth. Not the questioning note I’d intended. “I...” What had I intended to say? That I was hurt, perhaps, or afraid. Or, more like, that I was perfectly capable of standing on my own, despite the sticky feeling of warmth along my side.

“Shush, there’s a lass.” I don’t know how, I think I must have faded in and out of awareness, but somehow, my own quarry carried me from the halted train. I tried to see what went on, but it was as if my head would not obey, and my whirling imagination made up what I could not see.

“Come,” I muttered, and must have repeated it several times, for it seemed to me that it took too much effort to finish the statement. “Come...with me...fiend.”

Strangeway shook me gently. “The devil are you on about?” I nodded, not of my own volition, and my lashes turned heavy as lead. “Here, lass! Stay awake. Smoot says you’re a sight sharper than you ought to be. What were you after? What did you see?”

I bared my teeth. I think they were stained bloody; I remember a distinct metallic smell, and the taste of copper.

My head lolled, until it hit his shoulder.

“Bollocks.” He shook me again, jarring me awake. Or at least a little farther out of my stupor. “Who are you working for? Tell me what you were doing on that train! Why are you dressed as a boy?”

That was easy, I could do all of that without baring any secrets. “Hunting,” I murmured. It took so much energy. “Was....hunting...” My eyes closed. “’M a collector.”

There was a pause, and then, as he shifted my weight in his grasp, he sighed. “So you are,” I think he said quietly.

I couldn’t be sure, for I was already fading.

Chapter Eight

I was shaking as I once more bobbed to the surface of my consciousness, dimly aware that voices spoke quietly, urgently over my head.

Warm arms still banded about my back, beneath my knees, cradling me like I were no more than an infant, but a fierce chill had taken root inside me. Pain and fear had conspired to dip me in cold sweat, which forced my teeth to chatter beneath the strident demand of it.

“If there were any other place,” I heard Strangeway say over my head, “I’d go there, but you know as well as I there’s none.”

“Blame it, you know I’m not welcome here. You expect me to just leave you?”

Here?
Where?
I shifted my weight, groaning what I’d meant to be a question, yet came out on a painful sound of denial. I hurt; as if I’d been rolled across a canvas-top tent and bounced on hard ground.

“Bloody tinkers,” rumbled in my ear.

“She’s waking,” Smoot said, his flat accent easy to remember. “If you go in there, you know I’ll have to clip.”

“I’m well aware.” Strangeway sighed. “You and your thrice-damned debts.”

“Where...” I clutched at the fabric just by my cheek. It smelled of smoke. “Hurts.”

“Easy, lass,” Strangeway murmured, but did not spare for me any greater attention. One large hand came to press my face against his shoulder, even as he lowered his voice. “Hawke will help me at least patch up, and take this bird off my hands.”

I struggled, but even bending an inch set my side afire. “Don’t you dare,” I gasped.

“Quiet, guttersnipe, the adults are talking.”

I clenched my teeth, a fresh bloom of sweat peppering my skin. “You’re...a right bastard, Smoot.”

“That’s Captain Smoot to you, Bessie. What makes you think the Veil will let her go again?” he continued, his frown apparent in his voice.

I peeled open my eyes, blinking hard as fresh tears of pain pricked at my lashes, yet all I saw was the pale arm of a coat and the edge of a bloody stain speckled with black. Even that swam.

“I will make sure of it,” Strangeway said. “Stop struggling, lass, you’ll bleed again.” He jostled me some, the better to gain a grip on me, and I sucked in a harsh breath. It hurt like the very blazes of hell had come to rest upon me.

I could not let it matter. I planted an elbow upon his chest, the better to struggle upright in his grasp, and succeeded only in forcing a grunt from him and causing his arm to shift too far. I yelped as he let go of my legs to steady us both, then locked back worse as my feet swung to the ground and stretched my side.

The world went spotty. Smoot’s hands grasped my shoulders for balance and Strangeway cursed.

An awkward set of dancers, we three.

“All right,” Smoot said, but not happily. “The piece of calico has made your point. But if you value your skin, don’t tell Hawke that I’m in London. It’s going to be damned difficult enough shaking whatever spies the Veil’s got near the docks so we can leave.”

“If you’d paid your debt—”

“If I’d paid my debt,” Smooth said curtly, “my ship would be at the bottom of the ocean with a hold full of tar and bones. I’ll be at the Nunnery. The quicker you hightail it out of the Veil’s sight, the better.”

Strangeway grunted again, but this one a sound of impatience. I swayed against his chest, the blood leaching from my head.

Another hand touched my forehead. “Mind yourself, Bessie. This is hot blazing water you’re in.”

I smiled faintly. “I like baths,” I murmured, closing my eyes against the world that would not stop blurring.

“Bosh,” Smoot snorted. Then, lower, “Your word, Strangeway.”

“I’ll make sure she leaves,” Strangeway said, just as quietly. “You’ve my word.”

“Find me when you’re ready to get back to it.” Footsteps vanished into quiet. I opened my eyes to find Strangeway looking down at me with concern, his arm firm against my back and supporting my flagging weight.

We stood in front of great gates, heavily wrought and strangely clear of fog, closed this early in the evening. The smell of rotting fish and the acrid pong of the lime kilns in the district named for them was fainter here, yet noticeable even injured.

I recognized the location: the Midnight Menagerie. A haven of flesh and favors, entertainments the likes of which could be as posh as the opera or as unseemly as the auction tables in the stews. I had never been.

I had wanted to visit since first hearing of it, but the mere thought of such a place was enough to give my governess a fit of the vapors.

Why in heaven’s name had Strangeway come here? I grasped his coat, intent to ask.

He looked down at me with weary regard. “Save me from stubborn captains and bloody-minded girls.”
Too late
, I thought. “Lass, take it from me. Never leave your debts unpaid.”

“Been...” My skin felt prickly, hot and cold flashes rippling up my body. “Been trying to...tell you,” I mumbled. “Debt...collection...”

“Collector, you said. Of course.” I did not hear belief in his dry acknowledgment. “Up you go.”

This time, when he swung me into his arms, the strain proved too much. The black spots I battled overwhelmed my vision, and the pain took what was left of my vigilance. I fainted, cradled in my bounty’s arms.

These were the circumstances under which I first visited London’s fashionably unfashionable pleasure gardens. Not my finest hour, nor the position of confidence I’d hoped to provoke when I first strode through those gates.

As chance would have it, I would not be striding at all.

* * *

I came to under the ministrations of a calm, plain Chinese girl clad in drab cotton trousers and long tunic, who understood only a little English and spoke less. A hasty inventory of my aching body and associated limbs revealed that I had been bandaged around the middle, where something sharp had scraped a ragged tear through Booth’s coat. Though it hurt when I moved a certain way, I had been given opium direct to ease the pain—I did not need to ask to know the flavor of it on my tongue.

They had not bathed me, which was a fortuitous chance, and one I gratefully accepted, as the black residue from the train’s fire hid my telltale red hair and masked my features enough. This would become the seed of a disguise I would use for years to hide my identity.

As the girl chattered at me in her foreign tongue, I struggled from the settee I’d been left on. I was in a beautifully arranged parlor of some kind, its walls draped in silks and furniture boasting embroidered print, with folding screens arranged just so.

The door was polished to a wicked gleam, carved in designs I had no patience to pick out. Through it, I heard two voices, both masculine, each too quiet to make out more than the impression of gravity.

I threw open the panel, my erstwhile nurse’s pleading tones shrill in my aching head, to find one man hunched over a lacquered table. Reminiscent of the Chinese table piece in my own home, it sported mother-of-pearl inlay and something that glinted like gold. Atop it, a map.

The second man, Strangeway, lay sprawled upon a chaise lounge, its heavily embroidered pattern starkly opulent against the dirt and coal smeared simplicity of his fine clothing. His greatcoat was discarded, a bandage obvious around one forearm, bared by his rolled sleeve. In his hand, a glass of something that gleamed like warmed amber.

I wouldn’t mind for a drop of the stuff, myself.

Two sets of eyes lifted to stare at me. The chatter behind me ceased.

“What is going on here?” I demanded.

Had I been in a better frame of mind—which is to say, uninjured and not made to feel quite invincible by dint of the opium administered for pain—I might have better thought out my first introduction to Micajah Hawke, ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie and whose guest I had unwittingly become.

For all I feared Oliver Ashmore—in my nightmares likening him to a demon intent on devouring my girlish soul—it was the Menagerie’s ringmaster that worried me most upon first glance, and this even before I knew his name. With his lean build, broad shoulders and narrow waist displayed in a crisp white dress shirt the likes I had seen only in the galas above, and his swarthy skin at such odds to the pristine white of the cotton, he seemed both out of place in this bizarrely foreign study and immorally comfortable in it.

His black hair was longer then, plaited into a braid as thick as my wrist and left to hang nearly to his waist—an affectation for the exotic, I presumed. The unforgiving fashion drew attention to the sharp curvature of his cheekbones, the arrogant slant to his mouth and the bold slashed black lines of his eyebrows as one arched. His eyes were that unique shade of shadowed brown, as if one had lit a candle behind a tawny screen and then muted it until it was no more than an ember.

An ember that turned the blue swath bisecting his left eye into a river of unholy light, an azure gleam as wicked as the heart of a flame.

Whatever Garden of Eden I had been brought to, with its lamplight thrown back in reflected sheens of crimson, gold and ebony black, this man was obviously the Devil that tended it.

Though Strangeway made no effort to rise from his indolence, swirling his glass absently, my quarry’s existence seemed to pale in comparison to Hawke’s very presence. The Menagerie’s ringmaster has always been like that; a creature crafted to dominate every room, every conversation, all things. Time has only refined the effect.

“So, the little sparrow is awake,” came my quarry’s greeting, one whose dry-as-toast tones did little to pry my wide-eyed stare from the black glower of his companion.

Strangeway noticed, for he ran a bare hand through his mussed, close-cropped brown hair and turned his aggrieved exasperation to the side. “Hawke, for God’s sake, do refrain from frightening this one into a stupor.”

“Her, you say.” Hawke’s derision as palpable. “How can you be sure, under the grime?” He gave me no chance to mount a defense, for his gaze slid somewhere past my shoulder, and he clipped off a few short, sharp syllables.

The girl under whose gaze I awoke answered back, but whatever it was they discussed, I could not decipher its intent. If Strangeway knew the foreign gibberish they spoke, he did not share, his heavy-lidded gaze studying me with mild interest over the rim of the spirits he imbibed.

Awkward, I stood in my too-big clothing, aware that I resembled a chimney sweep from crown to boots. Yet I could not resist the lure of the fireplace stoked in the open study, or the glint of gold beneath the map.

Or the map itself, with its London streets outlined in stark black ink.

Part of this fascination stemmed from the opium I had been given. It paints a trilling symphony along the brain, gilding much of one’s senses in delight—or allowing the insidious thrill of imminent danger to turn to something guiltily provoked.

I seized upon their communal disinterest. “I demand to know what has happened,” I declared, striding fully into the warmed study.

Hawke’s gaze once more shifted, this time to pin mine.

I cupped a hand around the wound in my side, feeling suddenly defensive. Yet I raised my chin. “I’m on collector’s business, you know.”

Strangeway’s sigh stung no less than Hawke’s derisive laughter. “That again,” the former muttered, his lilting accent doing little to ease the hurt. He stretched out his long legs, utterly unconcerned by the trace remnants of station dust and dirt clinging to them. His booted feet crossed at the ankle, without a care in the world.

“Don’t be a fool,” Hawke added, earning my ire with an immediacy that bit deep. “You’ve lost whatever little game you attempted to play.”

My teeth set as I matched glower for glower—though that I matched wills with two grown men, and one much more forceful than the other, caused sweat to sweep across my already filthy skin. “I am playing no game,” I retorted, “and if I were, I would win.”

“Not even should you bring help,” Hawke replied. The cutting edge of his arrogance, less polished than it would become, was no less sharp. “Which you should have, obviously.”

I scowled. “You would not say that if I weren’t female.”

“I would say it even if I had not been assured of your sex,” he replied in glib dismissal of my apparent deficiency of notable curvature, “for you obviously lack all sense.”

Allowing the byplay, Strangeway used the opportunity to drain his glass. Then, as if he had not borne witness to the jibes between his companion and I, he asked lazily, “What’s your name, lass?”

My attention turned abruptly to him. It had been a very long time since I had been forced to think so quickly at a push, and this time, I stumbled. “I—That is...” Names, garbled and unfamiliar, cluttered in my opium-riddled thoughts.

Hawke’s arms folded over his chest.

“Naturally,” Strangeway drawled in his languid lilt, as if he’d come to a conclusion amid my stuttering. “You said that you were hunting on that train. What is your notice, then?”

My gaze narrowed. Did I tell him that he was it? “Why?” A hedged demand, seeking time to think.

Hawke’s gaze did not leave my face, his eyebrows now knotted in thinned patience.

“Momentary interest,” Strangeway assured me, his smile slow and ultimately bored. The man could barely be buggered to sit upright, much less give me the time of day.

The rules of this kind of gathering eluded me. Was I to be intimidating? Polite? Should I evoke deference or fear?

I could take no cues from the abrasive man called Hawke, for he said nothing, shared nothing, his posture that of an iron wall which would not give.

“You
are
Mr. J. F. Strangeway, are you not?” I asked, closing the distance between myself and my quarry.

“And you are no guttersnipe,” Strangeway replied in the same disinterested tones.

A chill knotted in my belly. “What is it to you?”

Was it then that I imagined the first bit of interest? A flicker of something sharp and cunning in the popinjay’s dark hazel eyes.

I planted my hands on my waist. “I
am
a collector and
you
are on my notice, sir. For debts owed,” I added, as if this would allow me legitimacy.