Written on Your Skin (34 page)

The next morning, a new silence sat between them. She put on her mother’s diamond ring, and as they boarded the train and the guard called out their destination of London, she gave him an indecipherable look. Not yet in port, he thought ruefully. They sat side by side in an empty compartment, but he did not buy a newspaper, and she did not pretend to take an interest in the scenery out the window. London was coming up on them like darkness, clouding their horizon.

He was not going to indulge her at her own expense. As they entered the outlying suburbs of the city, the crouching houses hunched in rows, he touched her hand briefly. “Let me book you passage.”

She glanced from his hand to his face. “I’m the one who has what he wants. I can lure him out. Let me help you.”

He thought of her face in the window so many years ago, and the cost of stifling memories and guilt. He had stifled himself in the process; he was not willing to abdicate his responsibility to her again. “What will help me is knowing that you’re safe.”

Her mouth hardened. “I am not one of your pens,” she said. “Don’t try to order me.”

For a long minute he sat there, meditating on the violent force with which the train wheels passed over the ties by watching the small, rhythmic jerk of her shoulders. In retrospect, of course, it made perfect sense that Bonham had been a spy, and a traitor. As the self-made son of impoverished colonists, a man who dreamed of making his name in England, he’d been perfectly positioned to catch Ridland’s attention. What had Ridland offered him? A chance for advancement in the motherland? No matter the lure, he had fallen in line; he had courted Collins’s favor and trust.

But Ridland rarely delivered on his promises, and Bonham must have quickly realized that Collins offered a better chance for his continued advancement. Somewhere along the line, he’d switched his loyalties. Phin could almost understand the temptation. How sweet it must have felt to take Ridland’s orders with a smile, only to skewer him promptly in the back.

Certainly Bonham had seemed a cheerful man that last night in Hong Kong. Standing beside Phin, his idle conversation laced with amusing anecdotes, he’d very casually proposed a drink. And when he’d relayed the order for brandy with a presumption that rightly belonged only to the master of the house, Phin had found it unremarkable. He had assumed—carelessly, in retrospect—that with the gesture, Bonham only wanted to mark his own closer affiliation with Collins’s household.

A single drink was all it had taken; belladonna worked quickly. But before moving off to let him die, Bonham had commented on Mina. The man who catches her will have to cage her. It seemed irrelevant whether that insight had been based on a clear view of her or on a subscription to her routine. What mattered was that the insight was correct, and that Bonham had reached it before Phin had even begun to perceive her ingenuity.

The man was not to be underestimated.

“I don’t want to lock you in,” he said. “But I will do it for your sake.”

She sighed and looked at her hands. “I don’t wish to break your windows. But I will do it for our sake.”

He did not miss the adjustment of pronoun, but that small encouragement could not make up for the larger implications of her statement. If she would not cooperate, he was going to be forced to do things that would drive her away more effectively than hatred. “Don’t.”

“I have no choice,” she said softly. “My mother—”

“I have rooms without windows.”

When she looked at him now, her face was naked of any pretense, and the fear in it knocked the breath from his lungs. “Not if you love me,” she said. “You will never put me into a room without windows.”

He held his tongue, wrestling down dangerous whims. If they were going to speak of love, it would not be in service of this debate. “Don’t trust a desperate man.” It occurred to him that he might as well be speaking of himself. He forced his thoughts to focus. “He may well try to kill you.”

“And I won’t sit in a room waiting for him to try.”

He took her chin and forced her face up to his. “How do you think Bonham found you? Ridland is publicizing your whereabouts to save himself some work. He has made you into bait.”

“Then let him use me,” she said sharply. “Parade me about. I’ll play cheese in the mousetrap, willingly.”

“How noble of you,” he said through his teeth. “But there’s no need. If the documents are indeed what he wants, then I can deliver them just as easily.”

“It’s not a question of ease, Phin. It’s—” She drew a long breath. “I need to act. I can’t be shut up again, to wait helplessly while my mother’s life is at stake. Not again.” Very softly she added, “I’m only helpless, I’m only chased, so long as I’m not the one chasing.”

He realized from her tone that she was making some sort of confession. But, God above, he could not let the intimacy of her offering make any difference to his opinion. This was her life they were arguing over.

He dropped his hand, lest his irritation vent itself on her flesh. “An illusion of control is still only an illusion.” As her expression tightened, he said more sharply, “One of us is going to have to yield.”

She looked away. “Then we are both doomed to disappointment, for I don’t think either of us is the yielding sort.”

“If you can’t trust me to find her—”

“Ask me how I got my scars.”

His throat closed. Of all times to decide to tell him, of all the reasons to tell him, this was the least fair. “Mina. You are the one at stake here.”

“Ask.”

He spoke through his teeth. “It makes no difference to this moment.”

“Yes, it does.” Her blue eyes turned on him, unveiled, challenging him openly. “I saved you in Hong Kong. There’s no reason for you to think I don’t understand the possible consequences, the dangers of helping you now.”

He exhaled. “Can you shoot a man between the eyes from fifty paces?”

“No. But I can think clearly through terrible fear.” She paused, and her face went whiter. “I can sit in a windowless room and listen to my mother be tortured for hours on end.”

His next protest dried up in his throat. He knew it grew worse. He had seen the scars on her back. He had felt them. They were jagged, not methodical; they spoke of unrestrained rage, with no design to it at all.

She was waiting. She wanted to see his reaction. He drew a hard breath, and for her sake, he let his impassivity fracture. “Go on,” he said hoarsely, and took her hand.

Her voice was the barest thread of sound over the clattering of the train. “I can bide my time and keep my sanity when the darkness seems as though it’s going to smother me. I don’t like darkness. I need light now. I needed you to lie next to me last night.”

And he had done that, he thought. That was a small comfort: he had given her that, at least.

“I can listen to her scream,” she said more slowly, “knowing it is for my sake that she does not apologize. Just this once, she won’t apologize, because she knows that if she does, his anger will turn away from her. It will turn on me.”

He felt a wave of dizziness. Blood draining from his head. “For me,” he said. “For helping me.”

Her fingers closed hard on his. “No,” she said. “It really had nothing to do with you. Believe me, Phin. I was only trying to win our freedom, and you were the way I saw.”

And he had left her behind. And refused to let himself think on her. That next day, recuperating in a shack in Aberdeen, he had slept dreamlessly. He had boarded that damned ship without looking back. “Not again,” he said. His anger was not for her, but she flinched; he cursed himself and said more evenly, “Bonham and Collins won’t touch you this time. I won’t let—”

“You won’t let them,” she interrupted. “Yes, that’s how I know you’re not listening. Let me finish. A day of that. And then, for whatever reason—a visitor, someone who couldn’t be turned away, I never knew—Collins had to move me from that room. And he made the mistake of moving me into a room with a window.” A weird smile quirked her lips. “Did he think I would sit there and entertain myself with the view? I suppose. It was on the second floor, after all. But he thought wrongly. I threw myself through it. That is how I got my scars. I went for help, and I met it coming through the gates, a day too late for my mother’s comfort. A few minutes too late for my own.” She paused, and touched his jaw very lightly. “I would throw myself through glass again for her. She has earned that from me. And I would do it for you, too, even if the window was yours. But I hope you won’t make me do it.”

He was starting to feel panicked. He had forgotten the sensation in her presence, but the drumming of his pulse made him wonder how he had ever sat quietly beside her, the whole of this morning. They had to resolve this. She had to bend. “I won’t lock you in, then. The run of the house is yours.”

Her face shuttered. “Like a dog in a kennel.”

“Like a woman being preyed upon by a criminal,” he retorted.

“Like a woman, yes.”

Air and his patience were growing short. “Christ, Mina, it does not come down to that!”

“Don’t make me want to run,” she said.

This was ridiculous. He fought for a clear breath. “Don’t try. It would only embarrass you.”

“Oh, I think we would both regret it.”

He forced himself to turn away. Not in front of her. Not now. But the tattoo of his heart filled his head, sharper and faster than the wheels over the tracks. His fingers dug into the soft upholstery of the armrests. His knuckles were white, but he could barely feel his flesh.

“Phin.” Her voice came to him dimly. One second he was trapped in his pounding head, constricted by his clothes, stiflingly hot. The next he was outside himself, so light he felt nauseated. “Are you all right?”

He realized her fingers had covered his only when she squeezed hard enough to drive her mother’s diamond into his flesh. The pain focused him. He looked down at her hand, and then forced his eyes up to hers.

She was watching him with a deepening frown. Perhaps, finally, she realized her foolishness. One did not make oneself bait unless one was very confident in the skill of the trap. If his grip on the armrests had loosened, she would have seen that his hands were shaking. She would have thought better of her faith in him.

“Go home,” he said hoarsely.

She shook her head.

It was not a truce that commenced between them that day, but a curious and largely silent form of warfare, which Mina waged with every wit in her head. He was as good as his word, and she expected no less of him: her door remained unlocked, and she was free to move about the house as she wished. But while it was a large house, and his presence in it made it more interesting than it ought to be, she could not forget that the exits stood closed to her. Over the next week, whenever she ventured too near them, her constant shadow, the brawny footman Gompers, would make it known, at first with a strongly cleared throat and then with an explicit plea (“It would be awkward for me, miss”), that she must not attempt to leave. He slept in her anteroom, like a dog guarding a bone.

For a time, at least, she found patience. Jane spent a fortune wiring transcriptions of the documents Mina had stolen. Amongst the gibberish was a list of names, some of which, Phin determined during a conference with Ridland, matched those of known associates of the bombmakers recently arrested at Birkenhead. Ridland tasked a force to crack the code.

Meanwhile, Phin spent most evenings making public appearances, hoping to draw Bonham from the woodwork. When home, he did his best to keep Mina entertained, and his ministrations were inventive and largely successful. They took their meals in her rooms or in his, making conversation that rarely touched on the issue between them but that seemed designed to lay him bare to her with increasing clarity. He talked of his childhood, and she of hers; she learned that what she’d mistaken for arrogance was, in fact, a shield that a child had developed to protect himself from the scorn of his peers. She could not imagine any schoolboy so stupid as to look at him and mistake him for an object of pity, but she quite liked his stories about thrashing Mr. Tilney, and applauded him for being sent down in style.

He also talked a great deal about maps, about the philosophies of knowledge that had shaped how men fixed the curves of the earth onto paper. She had never given it much thought, but it made sense to her that premonitions of danger, or convictions of superiority, would yield a different view of the world than would hopes for profit or miracles. She tried, wandering the house, to ignore the closed doors, and when she managed to do so, she found herself enamored of what it told her about him. He was a collector of objects, with an eye for unusual beauty; every nook and niche delighted her.

But when her impatience was heavy upon her—waiting and wondering were so much worse than pursuing a solution—she also saw how every room could have predicted her dilemma. The slew of antique maps pointed to a man determined to hold the world in his palm, to master every knowable order that had been imposed on it. In the morning room, where she went to read, a glass cabinet held a display of striped and curiously colored rocks, all the earth’s secrets disgorged, a chronicle of the birth and death of mountains and the violent expulsion of ocean floors into sunlight. Even the bedrooms served as a catalog: decorated by period and place, one was filled with Georgian furniture and scrollwork silken chairs, the next with Turkey carpets and ebony wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, exotic paintings done in miniature framed along the wall.