The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (6 page)

“I can get him away,” she said slowly.

“Excellent. Then we’re in agreement.”

She held out a quelling hand. “Not yet. I still don’t trust you, Mr. Clark. For all I know, you’re planning to arrange the particulars of this as soon as you’ve gained my compliance. And since you propose to go alone, there will be nobody to gainsay your word about what you discover. Convenient for you.”

That sense of excitement returned, prickling Edward’s palms. “What do you suggest instead?”

She gave him a brilliant smile. “You may remain as my guest here throughout the day. You’ll be a guest who never leaves, who interacts with no one else. That way, I’ll know you’ve not sent any messages arranging anything.”

“That’s a great deal to ask of a man who is offering to help you.”

She glanced over at him. “But then, you’re not offering to help me. You don’t give a damn about me. You want
me
to help
you
achieve revenge. You’ll surely put up with a little inconvenience for that, won’t you?”

She hadn’t missed a thing. Edward conceded this with a wave of his hand. “Continue on. I stay here all day. And then what will happen?”

“I’ll accompany you to Shaughnessy’s room this night,” she said. “I’ll search it. We’ll see if that item is there together.”

“And if it is, you’ll trust me?”

She tapped the forged reference he’d left on her desk and smiled even more brilliantly. “If it’s there, I won’t turn you over to the authorities. It was good of you to demonstrate your skill with forgery so beautifully in front of me. You’ve even left me evidence. So if you’re telling the truth about this, I suppose I’ll let you go free. For now.”

He absolutely
should
have been annoyed with her. Instead, he wanted to laugh—and to shake her hand and tell her that she played a jolly good game.

Come to think of it, he didn’t precisely want to let go of her hand, once he’d given it a shake.

“Miss Marshall,” he said, “are you blackmailing me with my attempt to blackmail you? Can I now threaten to go to the authorities and turn this convoluted double blackmail plot into triple blackmail?”

She leaned forward, gesturing him to come close with a finger. He set his hands on the desk and leaned in close. They were separated by twelve inches and an expanse of wood. She licked her lips, and he felt his mouth go dry. Oh, no. There was nothing boring about her. He was riveted, in fact.

She smiled at him, and then spoke in a low voice. “You said you’d done your research, Mr. Clark. You said you knew who I was. You obviously didn’t look very hard. A woman doesn’t run a newspaper and perform her own investigations without learning how to deal with scoundrels. You think you can push me around, that you can traipse in here and take charge. You can’t. If you really want your revenge, you’re going to have to work for it.”

He tried to muster up a sense of annoyance. She was complicating everything. She watched with an expression that struck him as halfway between severe and impish. But—alas—he couldn’t come up with even a trace of exasperation.

It was going to be downright
fun
working with her.

So instead of agreeing, he picked up her pen again and pulled the letter he’d forged back from her.

“Postscript,” he narrated aloud as he wrote. “Don’t let Edward Clark’s patent humility fool you. He is maddeningly brilliant. Beware. It will creep up on you over time.” He passed the letter back to her. “There. That makes it rather better, don’t you think?”

She perused the line he’d added with a dubious raising of her eyebrows. “Not particularly, no.”

“Should I have underlined
maddeningly?”
he asked. “Or
brilliant?
I ask because if you’re going to have me up for forgery, I want to make sure you have a perfect specimen to present to the court. A man has his pride.”

“Underline neither,” she said calmly. “I’ll let you know when you’ve earned my italics. For now, you may only lay claim to regular type and full stops.”

He couldn’t outblackmail her, outthink her, or outcharm her. He couldn’t even outbrazen her.

“Tell me, Miss Marshall,” he said. “Do you ever bend to anyone?”

She shook her head. “Only if it will get me what I want. I’m a very determined woman.”

He could believe it now. He’d been misled by her idealism, her smile. A man might see her trim form seated at her desk, her fingers slightly stained with ink, poised above the letter he’d written, and see only a small, lovely woman. He might see that and completely miss the steel in her character.

Edward wouldn’t make that mistake again. A hint of a smile touched her lips as she looked down. She was maddeningly…everything. This entire endeavor had tilted, and now, like a cart on a hill without a driver, it was careening away. He didn’t know when the crash would come, but he wasn’t about to jump off.

This was so terribly bad that it had actually come full circle round to something…enticingly good.

“Well, then.” He stood. “Lead on, Miss Marshall. If you’re to keep me under lock and key, I suppose you must let me know where I will be staying.”

M
ISS
M
ARSHALL PUT
E
DWARD
in something she called the archive room. In actuality, it was little better than a dusty closet. A single high slit of a window allowed barely enough daylight through to illuminate a chair, a spindly desk, and a mass of cabinets.

“Mr. Clark is considering advertising with us,” she told the other women in the main room. “He wants to look through the archives of the paper.”

Which, actually, was not a bad idea. He thought he’d done the necessary research, but he’d had only the vaguest notion of what Miss Marshall was like when he arrived here—and that had been gleaned from five minutes in her company and the combination of notes in his brother’s file. The reality of her had smashed all his dimly held expectations to bits.

He started reading her paper from the first issue.

It took only four issues for Miss Marshall’s thrice-weekly paper to leave him properly terrified. She’d had herself committed to a government-operated lock hospital—one of those dreadful institutions established for the protection of the Royal Navy, where they held prostitutes suspected of carrying venereal diseases. Miss Marshall had stayed for twenty-six days. She’d been examined, mistreated, starved, and frozen. When she’d finally been sprung by her brother, she’d written a scathing report on the conditions inside.

Nobody had been willing to print it, so she’d started her own newspaper.

Her report on the mistreatment of suspected prostitutes gave her material for her first week in operation. In subsequent weeks, she’d taken work in a cotton factory. She’d worked as a maid in the home of a peer rumored to despoil the virtue of his servants. She’d interviewed courtesans and prostitutes on the one hand, and the great dames of society on the other. She wrote about all these things in plain, simple, damning language.

Over the years, she’d added on writers, a second page to her paper. Her newspaper featured pieces from female thinkers like Emily Davies and Josephine Butler. Advertisements had bloomed. The columns covered everything from mundane advice on how to grow a few extra vegetables in a tenement to biting criticism of the newly-established colony on the Gold Coast. And it was all written by—and about—women. Stephen Shaughnessy’s acerbic column on Wednesdays was matched against a woman by the name of Sophronia Speakwell, who gave equally biting advice on Saturday.

No wonder his brother was targeting Miss Marshall.

And no wonder Edward had failed to convince her. He’d huffed internally when she’d called him a womanthrope—but he’d underestimated her so badly that he had to wonder if he
was
the sort of person who couldn’t give a woman her due simply because of her sex.

A mistake he needed to correct instantly, if he was to deal with her at all.

Hell, he’d threatened to ruin her reputation as if she were a fussy, prim little debutante. No wonder she hadn’t blinked. It had been rather like waving a butter knife at an accomplished swordsman.

The door to the little room was open; he could see her flitting about as the day progressed. She and the other women spent much of the afternoon laying out type, sending a few sheets through the machine, and then poring over the resultant copy. He could hear them arguing over antecedents, a friendly little squabble. Miss Marshall left shortly thereafter.

Instead of turning back to the archives, Edward opened his small sketchbook. Other men kept journals; Edward kept drawings. There was something about reducing an experience to a sketch or two that engaged his memory of details.

He tried to recall her office as best as he could. He could envision every last scratch on her desk, could remember the exact stack of papers, the position of the inkwell and pen. These things he penciled with swift, sure lines.

But when he tried to draw Miss Marshall, his memory was not so good. She’d had her auburn hair up in a simple bun; she’d worn a plain gown of dark gray with black cuffs. But none of the lines he put on paper seemed to capture her. He was leaving something out—something vital. He didn’t know what it was.

At three in the afternoon, she returned. He shut his notebook, picked up another newspaper—he was nine months in, now—and pretended to be absorbed in it.

She came to his door. She was carrying a paper sack, which she held up.

“Sandwich, Mr. Clark?”

He set the newspaper down. “And you’re feeding me, too? Why, Miss Marshall. I could almost imagine that you care.”

“I have an older brother.” She came into the room. “He complains bitterly if he misses a meal. I’ve no desire to hear you whine all evening.”

He snorted. “I don’t whine. Ever.”

“Well, we can be sure you won’t now.” She handed him the sack. “There’s water and soap up front, if you care to…” She stopped and frowned. “You never removed your gloves. I should have warned you. It’s easier to wash ink off hands than fabric.”

“Really?” He looked at her. “Miss Marshall, I have seen your hands. Do you ever get all the ink off?”

She smiled proudly at him. “No. I’m marked for life.”

“I thought as much.”

“We have a paper that needs to be on the 4 a.m. mail train. If you’ll excuse me.” She gave him a nod in acknowledgment and then ducked away.

He flipped his notebook open again. The sketch was definitely missing…
something.
There must be some trick of the light or expression that had failed him. His drawing of her seemed pallid and insubstantial in comparison with the reality of Miss Marshall in the flesh. He’d underestimated her once; it would be poor tactics to do it a second time.

He was trying to figure out what was missing, when the main door to the business opened and a man walked in.

Edward’s attention was instantly riveted. He kept his gaze firmly on his notebook, but he could not help but watch out of the periphery of his vision. The man who went up to Miss Marshall was taller now than Edward remembered. Those muscles he’d developed rowing were new. But it was, without a doubt, Stephen Shaughnessy. Edward could hear the tone of his speech from here. His voice had deepened, but it had that same lilting sound to it, that touch of Irish, a hint of his mother’s accent softened by a life lived in England. It brought back a rush of unwelcome emotion.

Little Stephen. Annoying Stephen.
The clod,
he and Patrick had called him, when he was particularly amusing and they’d not wanted to admit it. He hadn’t become any
less
clod-like if his columns proved anything.

Calling the other man names didn’t change a thing. Edward still yearned. He didn’t even know what he was yearning for. He’d told himself a million times after he was thrown out of the consulate that he didn’t have a brother, that he didn’t have a family.

The sight of Stephen put the lie to that. Edward had a little brother after all—maybe not one who was related to him by blood, but a brother nonetheless.

Stephen bent his head to Miss Marshall. They stood close together, Miss Marshall barely coming up to Stephen’s chin. She tilted her head and pointed a finger at him, and slowly, Stephen raised his hands in surrender. He said something; she laughed.

Edward looked down and turned the page in his notebook. Every one of Stephen’s features was burned in his mind—that sharp nose, those mischievous eyes, the tilt of his smile. He could almost see him reduced to pencil marks on the blank page before him.

He wouldn’t sketch him. He sketched to remember, and this was hard enough as it was.

Get on with you,
he thought.
Go away. Be safe. I’m dead, but I won’t let my family hurt you again.

But he didn’t look up at Stephen as he thought that. Instead, Edward shook his head, took out the newspaper, and went back to reading.