Written on Your Skin (31 page)

A shot rang out, startling him back. She wheeled and spied Ashmore racing down the lane, his pistol lowering from its skyward aim. He had not wanted to risk shooting her, but now Bonham was fleeing; now he would have a clear shot. “No!” she screamed, but it was too late; Bonham was ducking down a side street, and Ashmore sprinted past her in pursuit. “Don’t shoot him!” she screamed, but he was gone.

She sagged against the side of the coach, panting, dizzy, numb, the stupid gun still in her hand, how useless it was—if she had shot him in the leg, he couldn’t have gotten away. A little crowd flocked in around her, all the vultures who had tagged along earlier hoping for a glimpse of tragedy. Bonham, of course. Take Monroe to the hospital, he’d said, he may be infectious; she’d been right to think he was looking for a bad opportunity.

You stole the information. Did he mean the bundle of shipping receipts she had taken from Collins’s study in Hong Kong? They had chronicled his traffic in guns, but Bonham’s name had not been mentioned in them; she would have taken note of that. What else could he mean, though?

Someone touched her arm, making her jump: a woman with kind brown eyes, nervously glancing now at the gun. They wanted to take her somewhere. They thought tea and a blanket would help her. She laughed, and they stepped away from her. Her eyes fixed on the street into which Ashmore had disappeared. Do not kill him, she thought.

After some amount of time—a day, a half hour, immeasurable—Ashmore reappeared. She saw no blood on his shirt as he jogged toward her. “Caves down by the cove,” he said, sounding winded.

“Did you shoot him?”

He set his hands on his knees and breathed deeply. “No.” He made a low, sharp, frustrated sound. “There was a goddamned pack of children on their way home from school. I couldn’t get a clear shot.”

“Thank God.”

One of the villagers started to speak to him—more tea maybe, how ridiculous—but his dark, cutting glance silenced the offer. When he straightened, he pinned her with a sharp regard. “Thank God?”

“He says Mama isn’t dead. He says he knows where she is.”

“And you believe him.”

Anger rose out of nowhere. “I’m sure it’s very easy for you to doubt!”

He shoved a hand through his hair, considering her, obviously making calculations. “He knows the area,” he said finally. “We need to get you away from here.”

A couple of the onlookers muttered agreement. “We need to find him,” Mina said. “We know he’s here.” More desperately she added, “Whether or not you believe him—he’s the traitor!”

“So it seems.” A grim smile curved his mouth. “Pretty little Bonham, working for Ridland. Of course.” He looked down the empty road. “He pressed that brandy on me, didn’t he? He must have thought that I’d uncovered his double-dealing.”

They had no time for nostalgia. “So find him, then! All your worries will be over!”

As his attention returned to her, his expression flattened. “There’s no need to try to find him. You’re the one he wants, Mina. He will follow us.” He looked back toward their audience, now muttering speculations, and sighed. “Better that he finds us in a place where we have the advantage.”

The ruined cottage sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Little remained: blackened bits of timber, chunks of melted glass that glittered in the light. But the little white fence that bound the perimeter had survived unscathed, and the fuchsia and myrtle at its borders blew in the breeze, grotesquely picturesque. The ocean wind carried the smell of soot, a dark, sour weight that still sat in her lungs three hours later, as they waited in a private compartment for the train to depart for Plymouth. She could not rid herself of the smell, although she felt more certain now that Bonham hadn’t been lying. “The ring would not have survived that,” she said again.

Ashmore had purchased their privacy with a few coins to the guard; now he took the seat next to her. “It does seem unlikely.”

He had said it before, but his delivery still failed to satisfy her. “He has no cause to lie.”

“He has plenty of cause. Thanks to Ridland, he believes you have proof that he betrayed the service.”

“And maybe I do,” she said sharply. “We can still make a trade. I can wire New York for the documents. Jane can send a transcription.”

He did not speak.

“It’s the only thing he could have meant,” she said.

His hand touched her cheek, and she blinked at how hot his fingers felt as he turned her face toward his. “We’ll send a telegram,” he said softly. “And we’ll assume he is telling the truth. But don’t fool yourself, Mina. He has cause to lie.”

She jerked away. “But she was here. That much is true. The magistrate said as much.”

“So it seems.”

“And you didn’t believe she would be, did you?”

A moment of silence. “No,” he said finally. “Otherwise…”

Otherwise. She drew a shaky breath as she turned to look out the window. It was not a word she ever allowed herself to use. For those who depended on themselves, doubt was the most intimate enemy. She would not doubt herself. Bonham had been telling the truth.

She slipped a glance toward Ashmore. His face was dark with old possibilities, useless to everyone now. But he was not the only one to blame here. Two nights ago. Two nights ago, that cottage had still been standing. “I should have told you earlier.” Words that burned. “I should have told you in Whitechapel. We could have been here and gone already.”

He shook his head. “No. I gave you no cause to trust me. Taking you to Ridland’s…you had no cause.”

It was generous of him. He always seemed generous where his pride was concerned. It made him utterly singular, in her experience of men.

She wanted to repay him with truth, to confess that it would not have mattered. Had he fallen to his knees that night in Whitechapel and told her he’d been roaming the world in search of her, that every night for the last four years he’d lain awake worrying about what had become of her, she still would have suspected him. The world is not your enemy, Mama always told her, though she never listened.

But there was no room in her for charity at present, only this flat black expanding anger. Her eyes felt hot and swollen from the pressure of it. She drew a breath. Not your fault, she thought. I should have trusted you. This close, she could smell the scent of him, so much better than ash and soot. No bayberry soap to disguise him now; nothing but musk and sweat, a man who had sweated in pursuit of a villain. He had tried. So had she.

She put her forehead to his shoulder. The train shuddered around them as his hand settled against her hair. His palm was large; she felt cradled by it, oddly protected.

The train whistle screamed. Why did they make the whistle sound so much like a shriek? It was as if the train were crying out in anticipation of agony, dreading the moment it would be forced to scrape its belly down the rails. Perhaps she, too, should be anticipating pain. All it had taken was a liar’s quick words to make her cast off her grief.

A noise broke from her. She pressed her lips shut around it. There were so many horrors in the world, and now this journey might become another one.

He said nothing. His fingers stroked down her hair. He had liked to lecture her in Hong Kong. But he had never lectured her when she was being honest.

She drew a hard breath through her nose. “You’re right,” she muttered. “I have no cause to believe Bonham.”

“But you are right about the ring,” he said. “In such a blaze, it should have melted.”

Tears welled in her eyes. Her hand crept up his torso, slipping under his jacket to fist in his shirtfront. He was warm and alive and his arm came around her, holding her tightly to him. The train lurched forward, groaning, creaking. She had thought this nightmare would be over by now, that she would be waltzing away from Providence with Mama. She was naïve. She opened her mouth to admit it, and her lungs seized so powerfully she choked with the effort to hold in the sob. Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside.

“Cry,” he murmured. “It’s all right.”

“They—” Her voice broke; she swallowed and tried again. “They’ll hear. And y-you said not to—draw notice.”

“It’s all right.”

“Why?” She choked it out. “There’s—no need to cry. If the ring didn’t melt, he was telling the truth. There’s a chance.”

“Even if he was. There are still reasons.”

She opened her mouth again and the retching sound dimly startled her. She tried to inhale deeply, to calm herself, but she could not breathe without this ugly sound reaching into her lungs and retrieving the breaths she drew. She was capable of ugliness, and he knew it now.

The thought relaxed her. He had heard her; she was not so adept at containing herself at all.

His hands moved to her waist. He pulled her out of her seat and onto his lap, cradling her against his chest. Cry, she told herself, and tears welled from her eyes, hot and as salty as seawater. To see so much water below, as one burned above…it could not be true; Bonham must be right. She wondered if she would faint. She could not draw a breath and the whole world seemed to be shaking around her; only the darkness behind her eyes seemed stable.

His voice came to her dimly as his fingers threaded through her hair, his low, golden murmur like the sun on her temple: In London, all would be well. In London, they would sort this out. Incantations for a child—she knew these words. So many times she had tried to soothe her mother’s tears this way. She had soothed Mama in every way she knew how, but she had not possessed such a voice, or a lap large enough for Mama to curl up on. She had never been enough for Mama, and maybe now she understood what her mother longed for. It was not so bad to be held, to be small enough to be held. His arms closed around her, and something in her, something she had thought unreachable and incurable, began to calm.

I can comfort myself, she’d told Mama. And so she could, if she had to. But why should she have to? He had never made any promises that he did not keep. He had told the truth, that night he’d retrieved her from Whitechapel: he had never promised they would come for Collins by sunset. Perhaps she had resented his hairsplitting because she had so little practice with what the truth sounded like. The truth was not always pleasant; sometimes it made you hate a person, until you learned better and knew to be grateful for it. I wish Mama had someone like you.

Words wanted out, but when she spoke, they were not what she’d anticipated, because the thought that powered them was foreign and startling. I want someone like you. “You didn’t want to touch me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “I did.”

She swallowed hard. “No. In Hong Kong.”

His lips touched her temple. “Yes,” he murmured. “Mina, I did.”

He was lying. Or he had wanted to entertain himself, but his profession had not allowed it. “You thought I was an idiot.” Her voice jerked with the force of her hitching breath. “You thought I was a trollop. A forward, empty-headed flirt.”

She could feel the hard beat of his heart beneath her hand. When one always felt the need for wariness, it became easy to forget that other people were made of flesh and not stone. Even cruelties were fueled by warm blood—Collins had wept for his brother’s passing, and Bonham had made her laugh, once or twice. Even the greatest villain still sighed in the night, and ached now and then with affection. Mama was right; she’d grown too cold, to have to remind herself of such things.

She pressed harder against the warm, strong frame of his ribs, and felt his pulse quicken in reply. His dark eyes were opaque by habit; when she pulled away now and he let her see everything, his regret and his hesitance to be honest with her, it was because he willed her to see them. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. That’s what I thought.” His hand cupped her cheek; his thumb stroked the corner of her mouth.

Her relief at this candor made her boneless. She felt almost like kissing him. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her free hand groped at his arm, pulling it down so she could feel for the scar at the base of his thumb. “You know that I have scars, too.”

“Yes,” he said simply.

It did not surprise her at all that he had noticed and decided not to remark on them. He had a talent for waiting, and for subtlety of all kinds; he let her go at her own pace. But sometimes she could startle him. “You were so amazed, when I woke you with the coca.”

She reached up to trace the curve of his faint, answering smile. He spoke around her finger. “If I was surprised, it was by your design. You didn’t want me to see you.”

“Yes.” How clever she had felt. She’d thought she was doing Mama a great favor by saving Ashmore, that her daring would mean their escape from Collins. And for a time, it had meant such. Four years. Only four. She put her face back against his chest, the tears starting again. Had it been worth it? She would not know until she knew the truth about her mother.

But had she acted differently, the body that held hers so fiercely now might be dead, rotted, brittle bones. One could never know which small decisions would spin out like webs, creating new worlds, unimagined possibilities.

The lifting sensation inside her didn’t seem right. What if Mama was dead? Then these thoughts, this conversation, would be appallingly self-indulgent. That she should sit here talking of herself and him, of moments long forgotten, as if such trivia even mattered when her mother might be gone—“Perhaps you were right,” she said, and let go of his wrist. “You saw me clearly. I am still a featherbrained trollop. Look what I did with you.”