To Seduce an Angel (8 page)

“We've got to show her the roof. That's the best part of the house.” Swallow defended his position.

“You boys go out on the roof? You could fall.”

They laughed at her. “We'd never fall, miss. We've walked 'undreds of roofs in town.”

Lark turned away. “The roof is not for her.”

Swallow looked at the others. They hung their heads. They had enjoyed showing her their world. Robin had taken her hand and she'd allowed it, but now he dropped her hold. She said nothing.

“We could vote.” Swallow offered.

Lark shook his head. “The roof is for us and Daventry. No one else.” His flat tone settled the matter.

Emma stepped forward then. “Good work this morning, boys. Afternoon lessons at one.”

DAV spent the morning after he'd hired his new grinder with Henry Norwood, his family's solicitor, the man who had led the court case against Wenlocke.

Norwood brought Dav a full report on his grandfather, the Duke of Wenlocke. For seven years the duke had been trying to destroy him and injure his mother and brothers and their families. Dav had wanted to know the whole of it. Will and Nate Wilde, the young man Will had rescued from thievery, had done the investigative work in town among the low hirelings the duke had employed over the years, and Norwood had followed the duke's legal attacks through the courts.

Norwood assured Dav that other copies of the report existed in safe places to be read should any accident befall Dav himself or any member of his family.

A few gaps remained in the picture, but Dav thought he now mostly understood his grandfather's long campaign to destroy him. It had begun with a man named Archibald March. Once considered a great philanthropist, March had in fact been a notorious blackmailer. March had controlled the banker Samuel Evershot and through him gained access to the private financial and personal dealings of hundreds of the bank's clients.When March uncovered the truth of the secret marriage between Wenlocke's son and a courtesan, he recognized the power he held over the Duke of Wenlocke.

Dav had tried many times to imagine the conversation in which March informed Wenlocke that a boy named Kit Jones, youngest son of an infamous courtesan, was actually Wenlocke's legitimate grandson and heir. He imagined his grandfather in his London club first annoyed at March as an inferior who presumed to disturb his peace, then shaken by this threat to his power from a despised source. Whatever the actual circumstances of that conversation it had led to March's arranging the kidnapping of a thirteen-year-old boy.

The hired brute who kidnapped Kit Jones had been an out-of-work plasterer named Timothy Harris. At least once, Dav knew from acute and painful memory, March and Harris had met. The words of that conversation were fixed in his mind.
The boy disappears—you understand, Harris? Aye, Mr. March.

Dav did not know what March had intended, but in Harris March had chosen an imperfect tool. Harris had not killed Dav but had made him his prisoner in the darkest heart of London, chained to one bed after another for two years. In the last room they came to on Bread Street, an old woman, Mother Greenslade, had been Dav's savior and his tormentor, bringing him cake that made his stomach ache but that sometimes was his only food for days.

When Harris died unexpectedly, Dav had escaped. Mother Greenslade had unlocked his bonds before the death cart arrived, and he had gone up to the roof of the building and found a new world on London's rooftops. There he had begun a new life.

Once he learned to manage on his own, he started collecting other abandoned boys. He taught them his pathways across that airy terrain, and the tricks of navigation from roof to roof across the sooty old city. Soon he had a band capable of gathering everything that dropped from passing wagons or washed up on the banks of the Thames.

In time his old home beckoned, but when he went to look at it, he saw only his brother Xander in an empty house blazing with light. His strongest feeling had been that he no longer belonged there. The family he had known was gone. The boy he had been did not exist. He could not recall that boy.

Still the house drew him when night came, and he had settled his gang in some corner of London. Then one evening a young woman leaning on her balcony above the garden changed everything. He did not know what to make of her until he learned she was Xander's bride and she was in danger.

While his band held aloof, most of the denizens of London's darker neighborhoods allied themselves with one or more of its criminal factions. Boy thieves knew their fences and brought their hard-earned coins back to one high mobsman or another. One of those thieves, a boy named Nate Wilde, was spying on Xander's bride and following her about. Wilde lived in the Reverend Bredsell's school for boys at the top of Bread Street. Dav had known from the first that the place did not train boys for honest positions in the world.

So he'd kept an eye on his new sister-in-law. If he could not bring himself to go home, he could at least help his brother Xander to be happy. He and his band had been watching the day a pair of hired fists dragged Xander's wife, Cleo Jones, into a carriage with March and drove to Bread Street, where they locked her in a cellar to face certain death from an accident arranged by March.

Helping to save Cleo Jones was the first thing Dav had done in years that made him feel any connection to his family. But he was not Kit Jones any longer, and his family of boys needed him more than his first family. So he had stayed in his world that night. It had taken his brother Will's reckless courage to bring him back. Will, who always took the fight right to his enemies, had discovered the secrets of March's brothel and had walked into Bredsell's school, where Dav and Robin and Will's love, Helen, were trapped and held. When Will took a bullet from March, Dav had acted—killing the man who had arranged his nightmare.

But stopping March had not stopped Wenlocke. Stopping Wenlocke was the unfinished business of Dav's life, and Norwood's report would help him find the way to do it.

 

 

AT one the boys were in their places, but their fidgety unsettled air alerted Emma that the good feeling of the morning was forgotten. A trick was coming. A trick on her, she supposed. She touched the pin in her pocket for luck.

They'd rearranged themselves, and she made note of the switch. She could distinguish Jay and Raven from one another now, by Jay's tendency to speak first, and Raven's habit of running his sleeve under his nose. She made a slow circuit of the room, stopping at each boy's desk to point to a letter on his slate and sound it out. As she moved, she became aware of a small regular noise coming from Robin's desk, a creak, like a squeaky hinge opening. Robin leaned forward, his arms around his slate, concealing the source of the noise. Finch hid a grin behind his hand, and Raven gave Jay a hard nudge.

When she stopped at Robin's desk, he lifted his head and released his hands, and a small brown creature sprang up from his slate and collided with Emma's chest. She started and held out her hands to break its fall. A toad dropped into her upturned hands. It pushed away from her palms with cold, dry feet and landed on the floor. The boys were up, laughing and shouting, to follow its lurching walk across the room. When it met the wall, it turned and faced the ring of boys, a small, frightened thing breathing rapidly.

Emma whistled once, and they fell silent and turned to her.

“You can whistle.” Swallow was impressed.

She stepped into the circle. “You're frightening it.”

“What is it?” asked Finch.

“It's Robin's baby
dragon
.” Lark condemned the little creature to absurdity with sarcasm.

“Robin, you nodcock, dragons aren't real.” Jay gave Robin's shoulder a shove.

Robin looked at Emma, his eyes big and pleading. He wanted the homely creature to be something wonderful and magical, and his mates wanted to remind him that the world was an ordinary place and that what you thought miraculous was common and ugly.

“Where did you find him, Robin?” Emma kept her tone light and disinterested, but she knelt down to look at the little creature more closely. He was brown and speckled and as lumpy and ugly as his fellows had always been, but he was a living thing. Robin squatted beside her.

“He was hopping about the long gallery after lunch. I think he was looking for a new cave. I'm going to make him a cave in my room.”

Jay laughed. “Dragons can't live in a house, Robin.”

“Where would a cave be around here?” Robin asked.

“This dragon will like a cave by the river, I suspect. Can you scoop him up gently, Robin?” Emma rose and turned to the others. “Afternoon lessons at the river, meet me at the bottom of the north stairs in ten minutes.”

No one moved.

“Have you got old clothes and boots?” There were nods all round. “Go.”

Still no one moved.

“We don't swim,” Finch said his fingers pressed to his lips as usual.

Emma did not let herself smile. “Well, we won't go in the river, just to the riverbank to find a home for Robin's friend.”

Lark snorted.

Robin had the toad cupped in his hands and offered it to Emma. “Can you hold 'im for me, Miss Portland?”

“Of course.”

They dashed off, and she was left with the toad and Lark.

Lark's frown darkened his expression. “What kind of grinder are you? You going to let him think dragons are real?”

“What kind of friend are you to kill his pleasure in a living thing?”

Lark knocked his chest with his fist. “I'm his best friend. Dragons aren't real, but it's a blinking real world we 'ave to live in, our sort. Not this place.” He flung his arms out to indicate all of Daventry Hall. “This place. Yer reading lessons. They're not for us.”

Emma held the toad, its frantic pulse racing. She thought Lark oddly named for a boy afraid that the simplest joy might be snatched from him any minute.

“The world you speak of may have few delights. It may be hard on boys, but if today Robin has a toad and a river to delight in, I ask you to let him have his delight.”

“
De-light
. Now there's a word that our kind of boy don't hear in London. Is that one of the words on your slates, grinder?”

DAV parted from Henry Norwood at three. He needed the roof. He had been patient with hours of legal talk while thoughts of his new grinder intruded. He would read Norwood's full report in the days ahead, looking for the places in it that would show him how to beat his grandfather. He headed up the north stairs and met Emma Portland coming down them. She had something cupped in her gloved hands that claimed her whole attention so he had a moment to look at her without her notice.

An old black bonnet covered her bright hair, but when she looked up, blue was what he saw. He tried to recall what had made him so suspicious of her the night before.

“What have you got? You're like to break your neck if you don't mind the steps and your cloak.”

“Oh, it's you.”

He blocked her way. “No one else. What's in your hands?

“Robin's baby dragon. Do you want to see it?”

He raised a brow. She lifted her cupped hands and it felt like an invitation, so he fitted his hands around hers. As soon as he touched her, he knew he had been wanting to touch her since yesterday. She tilted her upper hand slightly so that he could see the creature huddled inside.

It was a toad, a common toad, brown and speckled, knobby and squat. Its amber, jewellike eyes stared unblinking. She held it as gently as possible, but the frightened creature's pulse quickened. Dav felt the rapid beat of his own pulse, glad for the concealing linen around his throat.