Rook (8 page)

“Where did you get the bandage?”

“My shirt, it is not as long as it once was,” he said. “It is very sad.”

She glanced at his face, but it was inscrutable in shadow. Then the air hit her cut and she hissed. She tried to raise her head up to see, but that was painful as well. She dropped it back onto her arm, and remembered to use the tremble. “How … badly am I hurt?”

René didn’t answer, and still she could discern nothing from his face. He began probing the wound, cool air and warm fingers gently moving across her skin. His palms were calloused. She tried not to shiver. The fingers left her, and when she looked up, there, all at once, was the René she knew, the one from her Banns. If not in dress, exactly, at least in expression.

“Well, my love,” he said brightly. “I am guessing that you would like to keep this little accident to yourself, with no one the wiser, yes? Do tell me if you disagree.”

Warning bells went off in Sophia’s head. “Yes, it would be better,” she replied, casting her eyes down in a way that she hoped was demure. “My father would worry so.”

“And your brother?”

“Yes. He would worry.” What she really wanted was for Tom to come banging down those steps with his stick and tell her what to do with this enormous package of enigmatic trouble that was René Hasard.

“And what about my cousin? He comes to dine with us tonight, does he not?”

The warning bells were at full tilt now, and Sophia’s head throbbed. She had completely forgotten LeBlanc’s intended presence at their dinner table. Perhaps he would be caught up in his cross-country pursuit and not make an appearance. But that, she knew, was too much to hope for. She lifted her eyes to René. The blue was almost hidden by heavy lids.

“I do not see why this cannot be our little secret, my love.” He leaned close and gave the end of her nose a tap with his finger. “When we are married you will keep all my secrets, yes?”

Then he was on his feet. Sophia bit her lip, watching him move to one of Tom’s cabinets near the workbench. It was amazing that he could look so different, so different she was having a hard time looking elsewhere, and yet still manage to be so incredibly irritating. And dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

René was bent down now, rummaging inside the cabinets. He seemed to have already explored the place fairly well because he straightened almost immediately, emerging with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. He bit the cork, pulled it out with his teeth, and spat it onto the floor. Sophia felt her eyebrows rise.

“I do not share your brother’s taste in drink, I fear,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But this should ‘do the trick.’ That is what they say in the Commonwealth, is it not?”

It certainly would “do the trick.” The bottle was one of Mr. Lostchild’s homebrews, used for cleaning the artifacts Tom dug up on the estate. Sophia had never known anyone to drink it but Mr. Lostchild, and he was no longer living.

She shook her head, meaning to refuse, and was immediately sorry. The pain in her skull quadrupled. She put a hand over her eyes. Her side burned like a hot poker had been applied, vomiting was not entirely out of the question, and her recently turned rogue fiancé was trying to get her drunk, or possibly decapitated, she wasn’t sure which. She wanted her bed.

When the wave of pain eased, she found a glass of clear golden liquid on the table beside her head, and René with his untamed hair behind an ear, hunched over the candle. He was running one end of a needle back and forth through the flame. It took a moment for the significance of the needle to set in.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No.”

“You are in no position to refuse me.”

“What do you know about stitches?”

“Enough.”

“And what do you mean by enough?”

“I mean that my
maman
always let me help with the mending. You should drink what’s in that glass, my love.”

“You are not giving me stitches.” Sophia had forgotten all about coy and moved straight on to temper.

René took the needle from the candle fire and considered her. “Should I bring your father, then? Call the nearest doctor? That Sophia Bellamy runs about the countryside in breeches falling on knives in the dark will make for excellent conversation, especially at dinner tonight. Tell me I am wrong.”

There was that other voice again. Who was this man? René began threading the needle with a thin silk.

“I am an only child,” he said, holding the needle close to the light. “Perhaps you did not know that, Mademoiselle. But I have many uncles. Six of them, and they are always in need of repairing, I assure you. The cut is not deep, and the muscle will not need my attention. You will have only the smallest scar to mar all that beautiful skin.”

She opened her mouth, and found nothing to say. She’d forgotten how much of her skin was on display at the moment. René was smiling at her again, something slightly devilish. No, this René Hasard wouldn’t be stealing a woman’s purse, Sophia decided; it was the daughters that needed locking up. His smile widened, and now she was going to flush, and that made her angry.

She picked up the glass and drained it. It wasn’t much, but the whiskey went gliding down her throat like soft, hot coals. She set down the glass, won a mighty struggle not to cough, and, still on her side, raised her arms carefully to get a good grip on the iron bed frame.

René folded her shirt up one more time, to keep it clear of the wound. The rough palm of one hand was pressed against her ribs, fingers bringing the edges of the cut together, and somehow she could feel the heat of this burning in her face.

“So you carry needle and thread about in your pockets, do you?” Sophia asked.

“My tailor insists. You can be still, yes?”

She nodded, head swimming even more after Mr. Lostchild’s poisonous concoction.

“Relax,” he said. “It will hurt some less if you do.” He paused, waiting to feel the tension leave her body. She wasn’t sure that was going to work, since he was the one creating it by having his hands on her skin. “Tell me about this room,” he said. “Do you know what it was used for?”

“No, not what it was used for Before,” she replied. “But the Bellamys used it for contraband, a long time ago. Tom calls it his sanctuary.”

“Because of Kings Cross and St. Pancras, the words on the wall?”

“Yes.” She sucked in a breath at the first jab and pull of the needle.

“Who was St. Pancras?”

“No idea … Mostly Tom calls it … that because he … likes to spend time … here.”

“And the shelves?”

“He digs …” She breathed. René was going very fast. He had already tied off two stitches and was starting another.

“And what does he find?”

“He has buckets … of bits and pieces. Plastic, but sometimes cast metal and … carved stone …” The pain was doubling with each fresh prick and pull. “He thinks we must be on top of a town … or a city. You can’t dig a well … or plow a field without hitting … something. Especially at the beach.”

“And the tunnels that are blocked?”

“They go out to the sea, drop right away in … the middle … of the cliff face. You have … to climb down. The cliffs … must not have been … there … Before.”

“Did Tom block them up?”

“Yes, there was too … much wind to use the room. But he was careful. The stones can come … back out … without hurting anything.” Unlike René, who was killing her.

“And your brother keeps his finds? He does not give them over for study? Or sell them?”

Sophia took a moment to grip the bed frame. “Tom thinks it’s a … crime to … melt such things. He’ll donate … give them to the Commonwealth, all at once …”

“And they will either put them in a box or lose them.”

“That’s why he … wants to study them first. He writes down what he … learns.”

“And what of all those powders on the far wall? In the kegs. What are they for?”

She held the cold iron harder. Those kegs contained Bellamy fire, her father’s discovery once upon a time, most recently used to panic the mob in the Sunken City. It was Tom who had learned to give them sparks and colors, to make the explosions small in order to frighten, not kill. But Sophia was beyond thinking of a lie to tell about Bellamy fire. For the moment, she was beyond speaking.

“There!” René said, running a sleeve across his brow. “Twenty-two. That is not so bad. I am a marvel, am I not? My uncle Émile says I am the fastest in the city.”

Sophia didn’t answer. She was sure her face must be white.

He dabbed at the newly bleeding wound with the bandage she’d been wearing, and then leapt up, wiping his hands on the front of his shirt. Her eyes followed as he retrieved Mr. Lostchild’s bottle, then widened as he got right on the bed and straddled her, one knee to her back and one to her stomach, pinning her legs down with his weight. Sophia realized what he was about, allowed herself a sigh, and got a tighter hold on the bed frame.

“Apologies, my love,” he said, right before he tipped the bottle over the wound. Her body jerked of its own accord, but he had her held tight beneath him. She squeezed her eyes shut. He poured once more, liquid running down her stomach and back, not unlike the tears she could feel leaking down each side of her face.

She stayed still, panting as the weight of him left her and she heard the bottle being set back on the table. When she opened her eyes again he had taken off his shirt, ripping methodically, tearing away another strip from the bottom. His back was a little tanned, muscled, like the men of the Lower City. Not what she would expect from the Upper. And equally unexpected was the sharp glance of fire-blue curiosity she intercepted when his eyes darted toward hers. But the expression was gone almost before she’d known it was there, and he came back to the bed, standing over her with no shirt and a smile that came straight from the Bellamy ballroom.

“May I?”

She watched as he knelt down, lifting her body just enough to slide the strip of cloth beneath her, almost formal as he wrapped the wound again, and again, tight. While he was tying, Sophia reached cautiously, respecting the pain in her side, and grabbed the bottle from the table beside the cot. She emptied the rest of its contents into the glass, turned her face to brush the wet streaks from her cheeks, took a small sip, and then silently held out the glass to René. He laughed once before he took it, and by the time she’d gotten herself painfully upright, the last of Mr. Lostchild’s whiskey was gone.

René sat next to her on the bed. “And how is your head, my love?”

It was awful. He reached over and ran a finger very delicately over the bump at her hairline, and when he put his arm back down again, it was behind her on the mattress. Sophia only just kept one of her eyebrows from rising.

“You never told me of the kegs,” he said, voice much closer. “What does the powder do?”

Tom had said those kegs could blow Bellamy House right out of the ground, and now Sophia was thinking it was a good thing René hadn’t gotten a candle too near. But either way, there was no one, she feared, who would be coming out of the sanctuary unscathed. She remembered to be coy and peeked up at René from the corner of her eye. “I’m sure I don’t know. Tom is the scholar.”

“Do you curl it on purpose?”

She drew her brows together in question and René again lifted a finger to one of the little spirals behind her ear. She was fairly sure it had dried mud on it. “Sometimes,” she replied.

“But not when you ride?”

“No, not when I ride. You are so full of questions, Monsieur.”

She was on high alert now. René had a look about him, something about the slightly parted lips. It was dangerous. And fascinating. She forgot her pain for the moment and waited, curious to see what he would do. What he did was lean in closer, loose hair brushing her shoulder, his eyes half-closed. He smelled like wood and resin; she’d thought it would have been perfume.

“You have such pretty skin, Sophia Bellamy. Like sugar on the fire. What do you call it?”

“Caramel?”

“Yes, caramel.”

A draft moved across the flickering room, but Sophia didn’t.

“And now that we have been so intimate,” he whispered, voice low in her ear, “do you not think we should discuss that wedding, my love? Or …” He still had fingers on the other side of her face, playing with her hair. “Or do you need a statement from my banker first?”

Sophia didn’t breathe. He was going to kiss her. She ought to say something, back away, tell him to stop. But she didn’t. Instead she wondered what it might feel like to be kissed by a daughter stealer. Turn her head just a little, and she would find out. The air hummed, full of static, stubble just brushing along her jaw. Her eyes closed on their own. And then René’s cheek slipped to her shoulder, leaning there for just a moment before falling straight down onto the bed like a stone.

She opened her eyes and waited, drawing a shaky breath, and when she was sure he was not going to move she lifted his arm from her lap and scooted off the bed, wincing as she stood. She looked at René as he lay facedown on the mattress, running a hand through the curls behind her ear, brushing away a few small grains of white powder that had stuck to her fingers. The same white powder that had been hidden beneath the pale stone of the ring that was hanging around her neck. The same white powder she had poured from the ring into René’s whiskey glass.

Then she walked slowly to Tom’s worktable, dizzy and a little sick, found the glass vial, refilled the cavity in her ring, clicked it shut, and one by one blew out the lamp and the candles. It took a long time. When the only light left was the fire, she looked again at the bed and sighed. With difficulty and not a small amount of pain, she got onto her knees and managed to put René’s booted feet on the mattress, pushing one of his shoulders around so that he turned onto his back. No, definitely not Upper City. He had the body of a man who’d been working a ship. She threw the damp and bloody blanket over his chest. The sanctuary was going to get cold, especially for as long as he was about to sleep.

She banked up the fire, retrieved her vest and knife, breathing hard, and then paused again. For someone who had made it a point not to look at René Hasard’s face, she certainly had stared at it enough today. He was still something wild, dark red hair everywhere, wrapped in a blanket smelling distinctly of homemade bevvy. But the daughter stealer had been replaced by someone different. A bit like Tom when they were little. Almost innocent, but not quite. And he was beautiful.