Written on Your Skin (6 page)

He blinked. He was not asleep. “Christ.”

“Really, Mr. Monroe! And I thought you were a gentleman.”

Why was he not dead already? He looked past her, expecting to see Collins holding a gun.

“He’s not here,” she said. “I didn’t tell him about it. About—whatever you mean to do. What is that, if I may ask?”

He looked back to her. She gave him another pretty smile. Was this her technique of interrogation? If so, she needed to work on it. Her dancing eyes promised things far too sweet to frighten him.

The thought echoed in his brain, sounding more ludicrous and unfamiliar with every repetition. His brain was well wrecked, all right.

She sat back, her smile dimming. “Of course. You must have some sort of code that forbids you to tell me such things. Simply say yes or no, then. Yes, if you plan to do it soon, and no for—for maybe soon. I can’t bear to have my hopes wholly dashed, you see.”

“Soon.” Good God. Had that just come out of his mouth? He could not blame the poison; the girl was a toxin all her own.

“Oh, good.” She rose, going to the washstand; when she turned, she had a long, wicked blade in her hand. “Don’t move,” she said, and went to work on the rope at his ankle. “I’m fine with fever, but blood doesn’t agree with me.” As she sawed at the rope, she rambled on. “Now, you must go quickly, because he will be coming to see if you’re dead yet. And I say this because I believe you are not ill so much as poisoned. Otherwise, the morphine would not have worked so well.”

He considered her as she moved to his other foot. He had no idea what she was about. She considered herself to be aiding a man she thought to be her stepfather’s enemy. It was not the act of a brainless coquette, but he could not imagine another role for her. She’s a fast piece, Bonham had said to him earlier tonight, with ribald good humor. The man who catches her will have to cage her.

As she freed his left wrist, he muttered, “You’re even faster than he realizes.”

“Stop that. There will be no more delirium for you, sir.” She cut the final binding, then grasped his forearms and pulled. He sat up slowly, feeling his limbs warm to his command. But when he swung his legs off the bed, his head swam, and scarlet blotches swarmed his vision.

A hand threaded through his hair, pressing his head down to his knees. The girl’s voice came from above, damnably cheerful. “Take this, please.”

Something was pressed into his hand. A little vial; more of the coca, he assumed. He slowly straightened, wondering what new surprise she might offer him. She was waiting, face composed, although the foot tapping beneath her skirts and the quick glance she threw to the door suggested she was not so calm as she liked to appear. “The doctor will be coming,” she said. “He sent a note a half hour ago. You will want to be gone before he arrives.” Her mouth curved, wry. “He is Collins’s particular friend.”

He found himself staring at her. He should be on his feet. This lack of urgency did not bode well. Sicker than he’d realized, with the dizziness coming in waves; cocaine did not combine well with morphine, no. How many grains had she given him? How far apart? The white curtains were glowing with the blue light of dawn. His heart felt as though it were battling through quicksand. In another quarter hour, he would be flat on his back again. Dead or very near it. All her efforts in vain.

She was looking back at him steadily. She was startlingly beautiful. He had not allowed himself to acknowledge the full extent of her beauty until now; her effect on him had been his greater concern. But she was small. He did not like how small she was. Collins could break her with his fist.

She cleared her throat. “You’re gawking, sir. It’s unoriginal.”

“Forgive me. I am…not at my best, half dead.” He realized that he no longer knew how to speak to her, for he had no bloody idea what she was about. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Why not?”

“Collins won’t like it.”

She retrieved the knife from the ground. “Probably not. Try to stand.”

Yes, he should be on his feet. He felt curiously remote from his own concerns. “What say you? Will I be dead in an hour?”

She put a hand to her mouth, considering him clinically. “Do you know, Mr. Monroe—I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well,” he said, for want of any other reply; and this time, when she began to laugh, he surprised himself by laughing with her—a slow, rusty noise that hurt his chest and left him slightly breathless.

She cupped his elbow and helped him to his feet. Slowly they walked toward the window. He could not make his mind grasp it: he was nearly dead, and his savior was a half-wit with a vice for giggling. But clearly, she was something more than that. He had not been the only one pretending here. How well she had fooled him.

The answer came to him with sudden clarity. She would not risk herself so flagrantly for a stranger. She must be part of the game. That knife sat in her hand as though she were accustomed to wielding one.

As she unlocked the bottom shutters, using the blade to break off the latches, he touched her shoulder. “Whose are you?”

She looked up. “My own, of course.” Straightening, she looked deeply into his eyes, and then startled the hell out of him by pressing a kiss to his mouth. When she drew back, her lips held an odd smile and his own had awakened; they felt full and sensitive from the lingering sensation of hers. “Remember that,” she said. “Remember whom you owe.”

He forced himself to look away, to the tree outside. It was not an impossible escape route, although most of the branches looked unlikely to hold his weight. But the doctor was coming, Collins’s special friend. If she was telling the truth, if she had no experience in this business, then he couldn’t leave her here undefended.

“And what else would you do, Mr. Monroe? You’re trembling on your feet.”

Sloppy. To have spoken that aloud—he was very bad off. “You’ll be alone.”

“Is there any choice?” She sounded genuinely curious.

There was never a choice. But the repercussions of his helplessness had rarely tasted so bitter. Running with his tail tucked between his legs might count as a far milder offense than murder, but he had never been so slapdash that someone else was left to face the consequences of his mess. Much less a slip of a girl. “I’m indebted to you,” he said roughly. Such empty words. God help her if she thought it would serve her to have the favor of a man who was not even allowed to make his own decisions.

“Yes, you are,” she said. She gently urged him onto the windowsill. He paused there to locate his balance; his legs shook, and the dizziness was gaining on him again. She touched his arm as though to aid him—her skin was softer than silk, and he had shoved her away earlier, thinking her useless, a nuisance, an inconvenience he did not need—and then, as if recognizing the futility, she let her hand fall. It occurred to him to wonder what she had meant when she asked if there was a choice. Perhaps she had not been speaking of his choices. You’ll be alone. That was the remark she’d been responding to.

“You cannot go with me,” he said.

She laughed, as if he’d said something very foolish. Perhaps he had. He felt off balance, wanting—something, he was not sure what. He set his foot on the nearest tree limb and cleared his throat. “Today.” He could give her this. “By sunset, I think.”

She understood at once. Her whole face lit. “So soon? I should kiss you again.”

The doorknob rattled. “Mina,” came Collins’s voice from the hallway, and her smile stiffened. “Are you in there? Why is the door locked? The doctor is here.”

She did not look at the door. “Just a moment,” she called. Her voice sounded strong and calm. “Go,” she whispered to him.

The door shuddered beneath a blow. Collins was not waiting. He was going to break in.

The disgust climbing Phin’s throat made him feel sicker. He released the tree and stepped back into the room. “Give me the knife.” The floor was swaying beneath him; he had to put a hand to the window frame for support.

“Don’t be a fool.” Finally she remembered fear; it drew lines around her eyes and made her voice shake. “I’m safe. He won’t hurt me.”

Another voice sounded from the hallway—deeper, unfamiliar to him.

“They will have guns,” she said more sharply. “Blast you, I want him arrested!”

To hell with this. He reached for the blade, intending to wrest it from her—he could manage that, at least—but she tossed it away and shoved him, two solid palms straight into his chest.

Ordinarily, it would not have budged him. But in the split second that followed, as she fell into him and continued to push, he counted on reflexes, strength, a sense of balance that the poison had burned away. His fingers scraped past the window frame—his head smashed into tree branches—branches crashing up around him, limbs thumping his back like mallets, leaves scraping his cheeks, lashing at his eyes as he fell—

His hand closed over a tree limb. He hung there for a moment, a few feet off the ground, dazed by his fortune.

An explosion came from above—the shattering of a lock, the splintering of wood. He looked up and saw her silhouetted in the light. She was watching him, her bright hair lit like a corona, the most unlikely angel of salvation he could imagine. If in her terror she abruptly regretted her decision, if she realized she was risking her life for a man who did not deserve it, then her wisdom came too late; he could do nothing to help her but return her regard, and search her face for some reason not to remember her.

An arm came around her and yanked her from sight. Another head popped out, male; he peered toward the ground and, as his eyes met Phin’s, lifted a pistol.

Phin’s fingers opened. The ground thudded into his feet. Time seemed to slow, the moment stretching interminably: the cool night breeze swept over him, scented with roses, and the lawn stretched before him, another gauntlet among too many to remember, and his thoughts piled one on top of another. He did not want to run. He was tired in his bones. Sinking into the earth would be so easy. He would die smiling, here, for it would spite Ridland beyond any imaginable thing.

But his body had never heeded his brain. Its dumb cunning knew no other choice than survival. The first shot rang out, but as his mind lingered on the room above, on the girl and her laughter and everything about her that made no sense, his feet were already moving.

Chapter Four

LONDON, 1884

It was lovely, so far as prisons went. Mina’s hotel suite at Claridge’s had not been so resplendent. The three rooms were spacious, furnished in Chippendale and Axminster, with Boucher tapestries on the walls and gas jets fringed with crystal. They might have been junk-bottle glass, for all it mattered. So long as the windows would not open and the door locked from the outside, she could not breathe easily.

Mr. Ridland was apologetic. He did not like to inconvenience her. The first night, he reminded her that the British authorities were making every effort to find her mother. The second night, he assured her that the American ambassador had been made aware of her detainment, and considered it an unfortunate, temporary necessity. “And lest you have forgotten,” he reminded her on the third, “I am not a stranger to you. We met in Hong Kong once, four or five years ago.”

He spoke as though that should reassure her. But for the first time since Mama had disappeared, panic threatened to break her composure. If Ridland had been in Hong Kong, she couldn’t trust him to shine her shoes, much less find her mother. The effort to charm him suddenly seemed futile.

After he left, she realized she’d been clutching the locket at her throat. Mama’s locket. Mama had taken it off on the morning of her disappearance; it had clashed, she’d announced, with her new pewter gown.

Irritated to be so transparent, Mina stalked over to the window, snapping apart the curtains. On the eave opposite, a gray cat lay across the gutter. She tapped at the glass, but he showed no interest in her. After a minute, he bounded out of sight.

She stared out at the huddled rooftops. The clouds pressed so close atop the buildings that it seemed even the air lacked room to wander. Only a week ago, dancing through mirrored ballrooms and flirting with handsome men, she’d professed herself enamored of London, and Mama had laughed in happy astonishment. Why, Mina! I never thought I would see the day when you had a kind word for anything English.

In fact, it was her mother’s joy that made Mina feel so generous toward the city. After Hong Kong, it had taken Mama two years to find the courage to reenter New York society. Months more to recover her old confidence. Thus to watch her move so boldly through her oldest Waterloo, as fearless and self-assured as though Collins had never existed, seemed like a miracle. You are completely healed now, Mina had thought. For the triumphant thrill that revelation had afforded her, she would have endured those last days in Hong Kong a hundred times—much less agreed to love London.

Now, though, the sight of the city seemed to smother her. So many people in this dark sprawl, but only two who would care if she never emerged from these rooms. And if Mama was no longer in the city—well, then, that left only Tarbury. And Mina paid for his devotion; she would not delude herself.

She sighed. Really, from one perspective, it didn’t matter where in the world she was—apart from Jane, Mama was all she had. Such were the consequences of her independence; they had never troubled her before.