Murder in a mill town (13 page)

He sauntered toward her, swirling the remaining absinthe in its glass. In lieu of boots or shoes, he wore gold-embroidered slippers made out of the same amethyst velvet as his smoking jacket. “I must confess, thas’ one thing I would’ve missed if Father’d managed to sack you—those red-hot blushes of yours. They give you away, you know. Every passion that inflames you—loathing, frustration...desire—it’s all seared onto your cheeks like a brand.”

Desire?
“You’re imagining things.”

“Am I?” Harry paused a few feet away from her and bowed with mock gravity. “My apologies, dear lady, if your sensibilities have been offended.” He straightened up, his gaze refocusing, with apparent difficulty, behind her. “Yes, Speck.”

That obsequious little valet was standing in the wide doorway, one hand on each of a pair of ornately carved pocket doors, which he was in the process of pulling together. That Nell hadn’t heard him doing so was a testament to well-oiled runners, a talent for stealth, or both.

“Shall I lay out your evening clothes, sir?” Speck asked.

“No, not tonight. But you can go down to the corner and get me another bottle of Pernod.” Harry tossed back the rest of his absinthe and thunked the glass on the table. “It looks as if I’ll be staying in tonight, seeing as I have such diverting company.”

Nell said, “I’m leaving, actually,” but Speck resumed pulling the doors closed as if he hadn’t heard her. She said, “Excuse me, but I said I’m—”

“He’ll only respond if he hears it from me,” Harry said.

The doors met with a muted click. Nell took a step toward them, only to have Harry grab her arm. “Are you sure you want to leave so soon? What about burying the hatchet?”

Trying ineffectually to pull away from him, she said, “You’ve no intention of letting that happen.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He raked his gaze the length of her and back up again in audaciously frank appraisal. “We might be able to work something out.”

“Let me go.” She pried at his fingers, heart tripping, but he merely seized her other arm, his grip painfully tight, and backed her up against the table.
“Mr. Speck!”
she screamed, while straining to break free.
“Help me!”

“You’re turning quite red. Does it feel as hot as it looks?” Harry cleaned close, his licorice-sweet breath gusting on her face, forcing her to bend backward.

“Mr. Speck! Anyone!”
Nell tried to writhe out of his grasp, but he was a good deal bigger than she, and surprisingly strong for a man who’d never done a day of honest work in his life. She thought about Duncan, how effortlessly he’d overpowered her, how brutally he’d used her, and felt a paralyzing certainty that it was about to happen all over again.

Don’t panic, or you’re done for,
Nell told herself.
Keep your head. Use your wits.

“How I do love seeing the blood rise in your cheeks,” Harry said, “seeing your own body betray you so cruelly...and all because I’ve managed to get you in a bit of a pucker—not all that hard to do. Your passions run close to the surface, don’t they?—and hot as lava.” He pressed closer, gripped her tighter, his fingers biting into her arms. “But you keep it all locked up tight, ‘cause that’s the way your man in Rome likes it, isn’t that right?”

“You don’t want to do this,” she said, wishing to God her voice weren’t so tremulous. “It’s the absinthe...”

“Oh, I’ve wanted this since well before the absinthe.” Gripping both her wrists with one hand, he unhooked her jacket and closed a hand over her snugly corseted bosom through her shirtwaist. “I’ve wanted it ever since Mamá first brought you back from the Cape.”

“Well,
I
haven’t wanted it. And I don’t, so—”

“Come now, do you really want to go your grave without knowing a man’s touch, like some ugly little chit who never had a choice?” He flicked open the little buttons securing her shirt’s high, starched collar. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear, and then afterward, we can consider the hatchet well and truly buried, just as you wanted.” Lowering his voice suggestively, he said, “Relax—I know how to take a maidenhead. And it’ll be so much more pleasant if you cooperate.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then it will
un
pleasant. But then—” he showed his teeth “—I sometimes like it that way.” He yanked at the shirt, scratching her chest; fabric ripped, buttons popped.

“Somebody!”
she cried out as she struggled against him. She tried to kick, but her spring steel crinoline made that futile.

“You’re wearing out your voice for naught,” Harry said. “Speck is out buying me more absinthe, and even if he weren’t, he’s remarkably well-trained, as lapdogs go—hears only his master’s voice. That leaves my cook, and she’s deaf as a stump. Not that you shouldn’t scream your heart out, if it pleases you. I know it pleases
me
.”

He tried to tug her right hand toward that part of him that would presumably attest to this. Nell strained against him; he laughed.

She slammed her foot down on his, her boot’s spool heel encountering little resistance from the velvet slipper. She felt a soft, stomach-turning crunch.

He bellowed.

She pushed him away.

He stumbled backward, swearing.

She ran to the door, reached for the pulls.

“Bitch!”
Harry seized her from behind and wrestled her, thrashing and punching, back to the table. He bent her over it, facedown, kicked her feet apart. Tearing off her hat and the silk net that had secured her chignon, he fisted a hand in her hair, crushing her face against the slickly polished mahogany. She flailed at him with her fists, but because of her awkward position, the few punches that connected were too weak to even slow him down.

“This is your fault, damn you,” he growled as he untied the sash of his lounging jacket. “You had to make this difficult. You couldn’t just admit that you want this as much as I do.”

“No!”
Nell screamed when she felt him start to gather up her skirts.

Don’t panic, don’t panic. There must be something you can do, something you can use...

The absinthe glass. He’d set it down on the table, but she couldn’t see it, so it must be behind her. Unable to turn her head, she groped blindly with her right hand.

“You’ll thank me afterward,” Harry rasped as he fumbled, one-handed, with the drawstring of her drawers.

Her fingertips brushed glass. She strained, reached... Luckily, he was too preoccupied—and too sotted—to notice.

“You’ll beg me to do it again,” he said. “I know your kind. I know what you need.”

Nell hooked the stem of the glass with a finger, edged it toward her as she craned her neck to look at Harry—no easy task with him pushing her face into the table, and her crinoline bunched up around her hips. His expression was a study in frustration; he was having trouble with the drawstring.

Now.
With her left hand, she seized his tie just below the signet ring, wrapping it once around her fist; with her right, she smashed the glass against the table. It shattered, leaving the stem in her hand intact.

Harry looked more bewildered than anything; the absinthe had slowed his reactions. She yanked his head down until it was mere inches from her own and twisted toward him, pressing the makeshift weapon to his left eye—just firmly enough to get his attention without breaking the skin. The upper part of the bowl had splintered off, leaving the remnants of the narrow reservoir still clinging to the stem—a ring of jagged glass with a handle. Harry looked as if he were gaping through some sort of grotesque, nightmarish monocle.

She said, “I wouldn’t move if I were you, except to let go of my hair.”

He tried to pull away.

She jerked him back by his tie. The glass pierced his eyelid, not deeply—Nell eased up just in time—but blood ran from the little nick.

“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed as crimson rivulets trickled down the stem of the glass and over Nell’s hand.
“Jesus Christ!”

“It’s not quite as bad as all that,” she said, relishing the sense of calm that came with knowing she could do some real damage if she needed to, or even if she just wanted to; no wonder men loved their weapons so. “Lacerations of the eyelid tend to bleed very liberally.”

Harry raved like a bedlamite, hoarse and wild-eyed, at one point calling her a truly repulsive name, something she’d never thought to hear uttered by a man of breeding. He concluded the rant with, “You goddamned lunatic, are you trying to blind me?”

“You’ll only be partially blind if I gouge out the one eye, but you’ll also be disfigured.” She’d managed to turn and regain her feet—and the modesty of her skirts—without losing her grip on his tie or the broken glass. “My guess is that vanity actually trumps semi-blindness in your scheme of things.”

His looked from her to the bloodied instrument in her hand, his visible eye narrowing, his own hands tensed.

“It’s only fair to warn you,” she said, tugging on his tie until he winced, “that if you make any move at all without my leave—be it to grab my hand, pull away from me, kick me, anything—I will scoop out your eye like a peach pit and make you eat it.”

He gaped at her. “By Jove, you
are
mad.”

“No, just Irish. You were right about one thing. We
are
rather readily excited to anger. Or at least, I am. And when I get angry, I’m capable of just about anything. So I wouldn’t call my bluff if I were you. Now, you’re going to pull out the chair at the end of the table, slowly. If you make a sudden move, even a small one, you lose the eye. Understand? Don’t nod—just say yes.”

His throat bobbed. “Yes.”

After he’d pulled out the chair, Nell ordered him to give her the sash to his jacket, then sit with his hands clasped behind him. “Don’t move a muscle.” She released her hold on his tie, but exerted enough pressure with the gouger to force his head back slightly. The shield-shaped chair back had openwork carvings to which it was relatively easy, even one-handed, to lash his wrists. She double-knotted the sash and stepped back.

“That’s scabbing over already,” she said, indicating the little cut on his eyelid. “It’ll leave a little scar. You can tell people you got it saving a lady from being ravished by an absinthe fiend.”

“Suppose I tell them that you attacked me without provocation?” He grinned smugly. “Suppose I tell my father?”

“Suppose I tell him that I was the lady being ravished and that you were the absinthe fiend?” Nell countered as she opened the pocket doors. “Suppose I tell all of Boston?”

“It would be your word against mine.”

“Given your reputation, do you have any doubt as to whom they’d believe?” She smiled. “I can’t wait to see the look on people’s faces when they find out you were bested by a woman.”

Now it was his face that reddened. She savored the sight as she turned and left.

“You never told anyone,” Will said. It wasn’t a question.

They were standing together at the edge of Boston Common beneath Nell’s umbrella, the rain rinsing off it in sheets. Across Tremont Street, the mansions of Colonnade Row blurred together until they looked like one great, sprawling castle in some European city. A few yards away, Gracie—thrilled to permitted to frolic so freely in such weather—was practicing her newly acquired waltz pivots with her umbrella beneath the sheltering canopy of a giant pin oak.

Will had grown, during the course of Nell’s account, even paler than before, his face leaching color until it resembled bleached bone in the silvery shade of the umbrella. He’d regarded her in grave silence as she spoke, except to press her, from time to time, to clarify something, usually one of the more indelicate details that she would have preferred to gloss over.

“No, no one knows,” Nell said. “Whom would I have told?” Her threats to Harry notwithstanding, it had never been an option.

“The police? Not that I’m particularly eager to see my brother in prison—I do believe it was the absinthe that made him do what he did that day—but if I’d been you, I think I might have reported him.”

Nell couldn’t help laughing. “Your father would never have let that get very far, Will, you know that. Remember, this happened before his resolve to let Harry sink or swim. Leo Thorpe would have given the Chief of Police a nice, fat envelope, and that would have been that.”

“What about that constable from Williams Court you’re so friendly with? Big Irishman, giant head...”

“Colin Cook? He’s not at the Williams Court station anymore. I ran into him at the Public Library right after I got back from Falconwood. He’s been promoted to the Detective Bureau at City Hall. He thinks Chief Kurtz did it to ingratiate himself with the Irish.” Cupping her hands to her mouth, Nell called out, “Stay where I can see you, Gracie.”

“You might have gone to him,” Will said. “It’s possible he could have...I don’t know...”

“Kept Alderman Thorpe from burying the truth beneath a pile of greenbacks? Let’s say he managed to do that. What then?”

“Well, then I suppose Harry would have had to face the music for once.”

“As would your mother. She would have been forced to acknowledge the fact that one of her sons—one of the two who still occupied her world—was capable of such brutality.”