The Proposition (23 page)

He gave a snort. He wanted to hoot. "I'm not saying
ratherish."

Then he wanted to laugh outright. Here they were, him and Winnie, going at it again. Jesus, the woman was thick. Didn't she feel it? Hell, he wanted to shove her against the wall between bridle straps, pull up her skirts— Or no, maybe in the carriage, flat out on the seat or— Jesus, he couldn't think how to do it or, rather, he could think of a hundred ways he wanted to. He wanted to have her, just have her—maybe the floor would do, if the dogs and ferrets didn't mind.

He made himself ask instead, "What do you want me to say? What was the rest?"

She corrected him again.
"Pardon.
Remember you're supposed to say
pardon
when you want someone to repeat themselves."

He raised his brow with theatrical impatience and said, "Pardon, Miss Bollash? What the bloody foke do you want me to say instead of
right damn fine?"

She stared fixedly.
"Quite fine.
Or
rather fine."

"Rather,"
he repeated. Rahther. Mick could hear himself saying it right. He looked at Winnie. She waited for the whole phrase. Stupid woman. She was happier fixing him than admiring him. It was her way of connecting, her way of shagging him blind. "Rahther fine, Miss Bollash."

He wondered if maybe he still said it wrong though, because she blinked at him, stared. But then she said, "Well. Yes. That's quite good." She laughed. "Right damn fine, in fact." She had a bloody wonderful laugh when she let it out, which wasn't often. Then she murmured, without explanation, "I'm sorry."

Another apology, though he wasn't sure for what. But without a word more of explanation, she turned and bolted.

He watched her run from the carriage house, up her back garden, all the way to her back door and inside her house without stopping.

Bloody wonderful, Mick. You're a prize.

He pushed his hand back through his hair, then held a handful of it, closing his eyes. He breathed, only breathed, for a minute, letting his mind, his blood calm. God bless, the woman made him crazy.

He took it out on the rats.

He rid the place of them in short order—ferrets chasing and diving, dogs jumping, rats screeching and running everywhere. Ten minutes of pandemonium, which suited his mood perfectly.

At the end of it, he sat on the floor in the midst of mayhem. He took an accounting: several dozen dead rats, with a ferret and a dog bit, the dog pretty badly. Right, he thought. Right.

"She could have a point, you know," he told the little dog softly as he cleaned out its wound. "It's awful, isn't it? Look what they did to you."

Another reason to have brought Winnie out here struck him. Yes, he'd wanted to show her how good he was at something, but—maybe more so—he'd come out here to prove in his own mind he was still himself.

Only to succeed in proving he wasn't: The dog didn't agree with him. He hopped right up the moment Mick let him, ready to do it all again. Stupid dog. Something always got ripped up by rat teeth, and though not often, more than he liked, that something on occasion was Mick Tremore. He had a place on his hand where a rat got it, a place on his shin. Ratting might be good sport, but as a line of work it was right disgusting.

Rather disgusting.

He let out a breath, a laugh, down his nose. It was
extremely
disgusting, which had never bothered him before. It was dangerous, but he'd never thought he had a choice. And there was the problem. Choices. New ones could be there for him, if he just looked.

Mick sacked rats with a hook, not touching them, then rallied his whole brood of animals and washed them out back. In cold water at the pump. He washed his dogs and ferrets to protect them from the diseases and vermin rats carried, the same as he'd wash himself.

As he poured cold water on Magic, though, he couldn't help be glad he had a hot tub to look forward to.

Then he heard himself thinking. Bloody hell, was he even liking baths these days? He was. He hated to pull the plug on the tub. He usually lay back and soaked himself wrinkled.

Being here in this house was having a more drastic effect on him than he had expected. He'd begun to like things he couldn't afford. Tubs. Gallons of hot water pumped in at a spigot. Steamy rooms just for bathing.

He'd begun to want a woman he couldn't have.

It was funny how he trusted Winnie. He'd gotten used to her fixing him. He trusted her to look at him, then say, to listen and correct what might give him away in a few weeks. And lately, he'd begun to make notes in his head, things he liked that he was learning and intended to keep, things he would abandon the moment they were finished. He was getting more from her than a way to win a bet. He was getting new ideas. And Winnie was like a kind mirror. He could look into her and adjust himself to suit himself.

When she wasn't being stiff-necked, she was the friend he most wanted to talk to, who he couldn't wait to see each day. She came into his mind with the first ray of consciousness at daybreak. He nodded off, smiling over her with his last, heavy-eyed blink before sleep. Sweet Win. Funny Win. Clever Win. Frightened, brave, careful, meticulous Winnie, trying to avoid the bite of the world by pretending it didn't have teeth.

No, he wasn't his old self. He wasn't sure what he was, except different. And to know it, to see himself a different way, was like looking for the first time at his bare lip again. It rattled him. It ran him off his rails. He felt turned around by the vague, untried choices that lay before him. He wasn't certain what he was beyond a ratcatcher who chummed with Rezzo and the others. He couldn't say for sure where he was going, and it was right unusual—no,
rather
unusual—to feel so directionless. Which made him remember suddenly a swarm of words from his and Winnie's nightly reading, reading he liked so much, on one hand, while, on the other, it made him curse his good memory: disconcerting, confounding, addling, perplexing.

What was a ratcatcher going to do with these words?

* * *

After he was finished, he went to calm Freddie, his ferret who no longer worked but rather stayed in her cage at the rear of the carriage house. She had to have been "disconcerted" herself by what had gone on. Freddie was thirteen year old, when ferrets only lived ten or twelve years. She was feeble and near-blind. When he'd thought she was dying, he'd carried her in his pocket and made up excuses to people to have her with him. In her day, though, she'd been the bravest, craftiest ferret, the best of her kind. She'd fed him and his kin rabbits in Cornwall. She'd given him work when he'd brought her to London: She'd given him self-respect.

These days, she was getting around pretty well again. She was less thin. Her new surroundings agreed with her. So Mick stroked her and cooed and told her of all the rats that had gone under today as he fed her the liver of the healthiest kill. It cheered her, he could tell. While petting her, seeing her look good, certainly cheered him.

Chapter 15

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M
r. Tremore wasn't very genteel about the move. He came in that afternoon, cleaned himself up, then threw his things into his bed's counterpane, yanked it all up by the corners into a knapsack, and hauled it and himself downstairs. He wouldn't take the room next to Milton's. He took the one farthest from the butler's, which happened also to be the smallest, but "more private, more my own." It was a room that would have belonged to the scullery, had there been one, a miserly piece of space with only one high window that looked out onto the sidewalk in front—onto the glow of a street lamp by night; by day, the feet of London passersby.

Fine, Winnie thought. At least they would get along better now. And so they did, in their way. She'd silenced him. It was an eerie silence though, much happening beneath it, invisible, undiscussed. Fine, she thought again. Just as well.

It took another few days for her finally, fully to return to her side of the table, to sit across from Mick and work with him—something, as she began again, she realized, she enjoyed too much to give up.

Mick wasn't educated very well, though not as badly as she'd first thought. The country school he'd been to in Cornwall had done a decent job on basic reading. Heavens, though, had he made the most of a fundamental education. His mind loved wordplay. It made teaching him language a pleasure. He was a classic case of the student, though less knowledgeable, keeping the teacher on her toes. He was always one step ahead of her, always leaping in directions she had never considered.

In particular, he took to the vocabulary exercises she gave him. Of course, he ended up acquiring favorite words, then couldn't be pried away from them.
Diabolical
was a standard he only moved from when he discovered others. Along with his avidity came, also, a mystery. From nowhere, he started using words she hadn't taught or read to him. He brought them like gifts, coming up with them on his own.

"Junoesque," he said one day.

She looked up and across the table. He was staring at her in that thoughtful way he had, contemplative.

He continued. "Callipygian."

She blinked. He couldn't possibly know the word's meaning.

But he did: "Having well-shaped buttocks."

"It has pear-shaped connotations. A large bum."

He smiled. "I know. Large and well-shaped. I wish I knew a word for a large, well-shaped bum that goes into legs yards long and with more curves than an orchestra of violins."

She didn't know where to look for a moment. Boldly, she tried to hold his eyes. Well, she thought. An orchestra of violins. The Venus Callipygus. His references were certainly changing, if not the direction of his mind.

She lost the battle of eye contact when her gaze dropped a degree, to his lip where a mustache had been. It remained clean-shaven, but felt now somehow like a joke. He could shave the mustache, but a big, bristling masculinity remained in him.

There was a kind of virile swagger to everything Mick Tremore said and did, indomitable, in all his teasing and talk, his daily rituals, in his smallest duty or whim. It permeated even his silence. He had a masculine sense of himself that couldn't be tamed or turned into something else. He hadn't lost the animality in his mustache; he was only becoming more polite about it.

The odd thing was—a new perspective on herself that set her teeth on edge—she was fascinated by the very thing she abhorred, that she wished she could tone down: the unchecked, all but unvarnished, potent male energy of him. She half-relished the odd, anxious chagrin it brought. He seemed lately more complicated than anyone had realized, while—never mind the polish he was acquiring—she was more entranced by his raw edge than she liked to admit. And by the directness that went with it. And his good heart.

The mystery of how he learned the words was solved a night later.

Winnie awoke at two in the morning with a start and discovered herself to be crying—a frenzy of soft little sobs. After a few seconds, she was able to get hold of it, though her heart raced as she wiped her face. She lay there, puzzled. She'd been dreaming; she couldn't remember of what. She tried to grasp the content, yet was only able to recapture a sense of fury and deprivation—a wanting, a howling for something someone wouldn't let her have.

Sleep, she told herself irritably as she slid from bed. Something was keeping her from it lately. She hadn't slept decently in a fortnight, though tonight was the worst. Happy at least to be free of the mental debris of her dream, she went downstairs for a glass of milk.

Coming back upstairs from the kitchen, she saw light at the end of the ground-floor hallway. It came from her library. She didn't think about what she was doing any more than would a moth. She padded silently, then pushed open the door.

And there he was. Mick, sitting in an overstuffed chair beside a reading lamp. He jumped when he saw her: caught. He had a book in his lap.

She walked in. They stared at each other. More dense silence, full of matter neither wanted to discuss.

Finally, he shrugged, smiled, and offered an explanation. "I like reading. I thought I should read as much as I could, since I doubt I'll get another chance at so many books." He held out one hand, a gesture of bewilderment. "Twelve days," he said.

That many days till the ball. Yes, where had the time gone? The days, the hours lately seemed to go by in blinks.

He added, "I'll catch up on my sleep after I'm gone."

He'd said it: what Winnie had been avoiding thinking about. In twelve days they would no longer have any excuse to spend day in and day out in each other's company, no matter how strangely they were getting along.

She asked, "Do you have any trouble with your reading?"

"Yes. All the time." He laughed. He was still dressed from the day, though his cravat was loosened and his vest was open. The halo of the reading lamp put a slight golden glow to his white shirt. "I'm getting better though. It's mostly vocabulary."

"How do you manage?" It seemed impossible he could be teaching himself the words he'd been saying.

From the table beside him, from under the bright lamp, he lifted a collection of papers, half a dozen sheets, offering them.