Suzanne Robinson (4 page)

Whatever it was, it would have been discreet. Lady Freshwell had a horror of scandal, especially now that Newton was being considered for a place in the queen’s household. To become a member of such an exalted community was the lodestar of Newton’s existence. It was the primary reason he and his mother entertained so much—currying favor took a great deal of effort. And it was expensive. Prim wished him success, for Newton was an irritating, pompous little whiner whose presence she wouldn’t miss if he were to spend months at court.

Prim brought her mending closer to see it more clearly. Then she realized the light was fading. Setting the garment aside, she said, “It’s time I was off if we’re to have fish pie for our supper.”

She went to the corner of the room near the window. There, a patched curtain had been suspended from an old rope to form a partition. Behind it slept Betty Kettle in the only bed the family possessed. Betty wasn’t much older than Prim, but the births of so many children, combined with backbreaking labor as a charwoman, had taken her health.

Having ascertained that Betty’s childbirth fever hadn’t returned, Prim donned her cloak. Before she picked up her basket, she assured herself that her treasure was still safe in its secret pocket in the lining of the cloak. She felt for the shape of the book. It wasn’t much bigger than her hand, but it was worth more than the sum of all her other possessions, at least, to
Prim. Satisfied that the book was safe, she set out for Billingsgate fish market.

She could have purchased fish pies from a vendor in Whitechapel, but the street hawkers were known to use inferior, sometimes spoiled ingredients. It was safer to go to the huge dock market where a friend of Betty’s gave the family an excellent price. As darkness fell, she joined the teeming crowds that moved ceaselessly along London’s streets. The city had spewed the human contents of workhouses, banks, parks, squares, taverns, and shops. The din of countless horses, wagons, carts, omnibuses, and trains rose up to meet her along with the noise of street vendors and urchins.

When she reached Billingsgate, the crowds thinned a bit, but the smell of mountains of fish pervaded everything. She could hear the cries of the sellers: “Five brill and one turbot. Have the lot for a pound! Look here, look here! Here’s your fine Yarmouth bloaters! Who’s the buyer? Who’s the buyer?”

A vast shed rose up before her, and as she entered it, she beheld long tables piled with shining carcasses: pale-bellied turbot on strings, lobsters, baskets full of herring with glittering scales. She was jostled by men bearing heavy hampers and women with cod strung from their aprons.

Prim looked for Betty’s friend, who sold cod and wore a green apron. She threaded her way among the stalls, baskets, and hampers, nearly running into a man with ginger hair who suddenly appeared in her path. He dodged aside quickly, and Prim glimpsed a green apron beyond a table crawling with lobsters. She was rounding the table when a thin, cold hand clamped
on her wrist and spun her around. The ginger-haired man stood there grinning at her.

“Hallo, missy, now you just come with old Badger.”

Prim froze and stared at Badger, whose pale complexion resembled the belly of a turbot. He tugged at her wrist. Prim dropped her basket.

“Release me, sir.” Surreptitiously she stretched out her free hand while glaring at Badger.

“Not a chance, missy. You’re worth too much. Now come along.”

To her horror, Badger looked over his shoulder and raised his voice over the cries of the market. “Got her, Nightshade, neat as a new candle.”

A man emerged from a crowd at a nearby stall, his clean black suit a contrast to the rough wool-and-leather-clad fish hawkers. Prim’s eyes grew rounder than the fish staring up at her as she recognized the black-haired ruffian.

“Oh, heaven!” She picked up a lobster and smacked Badger on the head with it.

Badger cried out as the creature locked a claw onto his nose. He let Prim go, grabbed the lobster, and stumbled backward into Nightshade, who in turn fell against a man bearing a hamper. The three tangled together and fell beneath the hamper, which spilled turbot onto the floor. Prim was already scampering between aisles offish. She didn’t dare look behind her as she cleared the market. Her heart pounded, and she dodged customers and groups of people huddled together to divide their purchases.

Breaking free of a knot of women carrying pails of fish, she began to run. This wasn’t Whitechapel,
where she knew some of the streets. They would catch her and throw her in the river! Prim had always feared drowning. The feel of water in her nose, her throat and lungs, suffocating. They would tie her up so that she couldn’t swim, so that she would be unable to save herself.

Horror gave her speed. Prim raced through the streets, taking back alleys, crossing through mews and abandoned warehouses, always heading north toward Whitechapel. Finally she ran out of breath and was forced to stop. She ducked into a doorway situated well away from any streetlight.

While she fled, the night had grown black. Clouds obscured the moon with a yellow-green haze, and their cousin, the dirty mist, returned to the streets of London. Prim’s chest heaved. She wiped her damp face with a kerchief, and it came away begrimed with the soot that seemed always suspended in the air. She was parched; her hair was limp and damp, and she shivered, although more from fear than the cold. Someone was coming!

Prim shrank back until she pressed against the door. A carriage came down the street, and she didn’t breathe until it had gone by. Then a man stumbled around the corner. He took a swig from a bottle in his hand and wove his way across the street. Prim watched him, ready to bolt should he suddenly come at her. The man steadied himself by placing his free hand against the walls of the buildings he passed.

She was still watching him when the door at her back opened and she fell. Arms grabbed her, lifted her off her feet, and she was trapped in a relentless grip as
frightening as being bound by ropes and drowned. A hand covered her mouth before she could scream. She kicked hard, hitting a leg and provoking a curse, and she kept kicking. She heard a light, amused voice over her head.

“You’re a precious sly and deceitful creature, and if you kick me again I’ll give you a tap worse than you gave poor old Badger.”

Prim stopped kicking. She could feel his hand rubbing her ribs.

“That’s better. Choke me dead if you’re not the damnedest old maid that ever was.”

He hadn’t expected this at all. Nightshade tightened his hold on Miss Dane while he waited for Badger and Prigg to bring the hansom cab they’d borrowed. He’d been asked to find a gently reared spinster lost in the East End of London, and he’d been put to more trouble than if he’d crossed his old enemy Mortimer Fleet. She squirmed in his grasp, and he hissed a curse under his breath. Plain she might be, but feeling her against him scraped across his desire like a file against glass.

“Rot Badger and Prigg,” he whispered to himself. “They’re late.”

There was no response from his captive. Not that she could speak with his hand over her mouth—her warm, soft, pink mouth. What was he thinking? Old maids didn’t have warm, soft mouths. For certain they
didn’t have pink ones with gently rounded lower lips and a habit of allowing the tip of a rosy tongue to peek out from it when thinking.

Rot her! She was the cause of him coming back to a place he wanted to forget. And she’d got away from him. Nobody got away from Nightshade. Big Maudie and her crew would laugh if they knew this little creature had led him a dance over the roofs of Whitechapel.

They’d enjoy his defeasance. That was a new word of his. Defeasance; it meant defeat. He’d got himself one of them dictionary books. Interesting things, dictionary books. They had great lists of complicated words that meant something simple like defeat.

The old maid started squirming. Her hips rubbed against him, and Nightshade felt a spike of sensation shoot through his body.

“Defeasance!”

She tried to turn her head, as if to question him. Nightshade lowered his voice. “You get one more warning, Miss Primrose blighted Dane. You quit rubbing your arse against me privates, or you’ll end up on this floor. It’s wonderful what a man will do when his blood is up.”

From that moment she became as rigid as a tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey. Luckily the hansom cab clattered up to the door, and Prigg jumped out. Nightshade swept his captive into the carriage before she could protest. He threatened her with grievous consequences if she even tried to speak, and lapsed into an ill-humored reverie that lasted until they reached the Black Fleece Tavern.

He had Badger and Prigg bundle the lady into a room and lock the door. Then, remembering her talents, he ordered the room’s window barred from the outside. Maudie grumbled at the trouble, but sent the boy who did the washing-up to nail a board over the shutters. Badger went to the kitchen where Prigg attempted to repair the damage done to his friend by the lobster.

Out front, while Larder Lily sat on his lap and ate the meat pie he’d ordered, Nightshade spent an hour mastering himself. It had been many years since he’d suffered the torments of a boy’s ungovernable urges. How this plain and troublesome spinster could have turned him fruity in the brief time he’d been near her mystified him. She irritated him; no, she made him furious, causing all this trouble for him. He hated coming to Houndsditch, and he hated her for being the cause of his return. He would get rid of her.

Maudie appeared, hands on hips, and glared at him. “I don’t want no trouble here. You brung that woman to my place, and I don’t want no trouble.”

“Don’t get your petticoats twisted,” Nightshade snapped as he shoved Lily off his lap. “She’s going to disappear sprightly.”

Turning his back on Maudie, Nightshade swept upstairs and let himself into the room where his captive waited. As he shut the door a chair sailed at him, knocking his shoulder as he ducked to avoid it. The chair slammed into the door. A candle stand nearly hit him in the face as he rose. He leaped aside and raced across the room as the young woman hurled a pitcher at him. It hit the floor and shattered as he sprang the
last few feet and tackled her. She cried out, and they fell to the bed, which collapsed under their weight.

Nightshade heard running steps, but he was too busy trying to avoid scratching nails and kicks from small, booted feet. She landed a slashing blow on his neck.

“God rot you!”

“Nightshade?”

He grabbed both her hands and looked over his shoulder at Badger and Maudie while his captive tried to kick him senseless. “Get out, damn you. Badger, lock the door and wait for me.”

When the door was shut, he closed his eyes. The old maid was rocking back and forth, thrusting her body against his in an attempt to shove him off her. Setting his jaw, he hissed at her.

“Stop it! Just bleeding stop it! You must be perfectly blithering mad, or desperate to get tupped.”

The struggling ceased, but he counted to twenty before he opened his eyes. She was staring up at him, her eyes wide. That tight little bun she wore had come loose, and her hair had fallen about her shoulders and across her cheeks and temples. Some of the strands were pale gold, others a darker, old-wheat color, some light amber, and some the color of bleached almonds. He’d never seen so many colors in a person’s hair. When he found himself trying to count them, his anger returned. It didn’t help that she was breathing so hard that her chest kept pushing his. It was like being teased by an experienced and talented harlot. Nightshade kept his grip on the old maid’s wrists, but he shoved himself up on his elbows
so that there was enough distance between them for him to keep his sanity.

This measure gave him a chance to really look at her for the first time. Primrose Victoria Dane hardly resembled the sketch he’d been given. The sketch must have been taken from a portrait done about ten years ago, for her cheeks no long puffed out from childish plumpness. No, the sketch had been bad. Beneath him lay a young woman who would never be called beautiful, but who with age had acquired a neatness of feature that pleased him. He liked her eyes, the rings of teal surrounding a burst of gray-green. He liked the way, if one looked closely, her nose seemed just a tiny bit off center. He especially liked her generous breasts. Too bad he didn’t like her.

He growled at the cause of all his grievances. “Are you going to behave yourself, or shall I throw up your skirts and paddle your bottom till it’s red?”

“Infamous creature!”

“That’s not a promise,” he said lightly as she began to fight him again. He let her struggle until she wore herself out and lay beneath him panting and defeated. “Now, do you admit defeasance?”

She frowned at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“D’you admit defeat, defeasance?”

“I shan’t throw anything at you if you will release me.”

Nightshade got up, discovered that he wasn’t presentable, and turned away from her while he got himself under control. When he faced her again, she had put the collapsed bed between them and was gathering hairpins from the floor and blankets. She
stopped when he moved. Her hand clenched around the pins as if she might use them as a missile should he threaten her again.