Chapter 12
12
1 2 February, 1827
No.’s 25-27, Mercer Street
Edge of Seven Dials
The toes of Marianne's boots cut marks across Con Dyer's expensive Aubusson carpet whilst Wu and one of his guards dragged her toward the stairway leading to the "dungeon" below. She'd refused to go quietly, so Con had ordered the embarrassing ordeal of being forced to do penance for not only having run away with the mysterious malachite box, but causing such an uproar in Buckinghamshire which could have spread to London and made Con, as well as his brothers, the laughingstock of the British underworld.
"You'll rue the day you forced me to submit to this indignity," she shouted over her shoulder.
Con ignored her complaints, because he was too busy eyeing the soft curve of her calves and arse as she was whisked away. Even though they'd had only one night together, he'd never forget the lush curves of the body beneath the ugly gray uniform of the sisters of the poor.
The guards he'd had Wu schedule outside her cell around the clock, with Mrs. Bonham on call as her relief for visits to the water closet, were the only way he could ensure she wouldn't pick her way out of her cell using something as exotic as hairpins, shoe leather, or perhaps even her teeth. He was determined the little thief was not taking off for parts unknown again. He was equally determined that the cell guards would keep him away from the little thief. After a lengthy, heated discussion with his brothers, he'd vowed to avoid all further physical contact with the woman till the day he died.
Fam's warning had been especially biting: "If, God forbid, the two of you were to have a child, the poor little thing would be a divil spawn. Ye'd have to give it to our sister Nell to raise, away from the family business.
Even now, though, his cock was regularly chastising him for having agreed to such a stupid arrangement: avoiding carnal contact with that fine little thief's body with the scent that drove both of them crazy. He'd have to find a way to distract his cock, and he knew just the thing. But first, he was going to make Marianne Oxley writhe in a sauce of her own making.
* * *
Marianne was so bored, she'd begged and pleaded with Mrs. Bonham to retrieve her charcoal and sketch pad from her bag she'd had with her on the fateful coach trip. When the housekeeper had given her a suspicious look, shed laughed. "Even I can't pick locks with strips of paper or chunks of charcoal."
When she finally grudgingly assented, and returned with her art tools, Marianne was over the moon. "You won't be sorry," she promised. "Let me do a sketch of you."
The housekeeper involuntarily touched the ravaged side of her face. "No," she said. "Perhaps you could sketch Lugh and Aengus."
Marianne, ever reckless and blunt in her dealings with people, suddenly asked, "Did he do that to you?"
Mrs. Bonham sucked in a sharp breath. "Who?"
"Mr. Dyer."
She was not prepared for the housekeeper's reaction. The woman's eyes filled with tears, and she whirled away from the cell door. Marianne called after her, "If it was him, I swear I'll escape from here and make the bastard pay."
Mrs. Bonham stalked back to the cell, swiping at the tears rolling down her cheeks. She stopped at the bars where Marianne stood, wide-eyed. "Con Dyer is the kindest man I've ever known. My husband did this to me." She pointed to the scars covering half of her face. "He beat me and then threw me into the coal embers in our fireplace. One of Con's guards found me and took me to the Rose Street Dispensary."
"Where is your husband now?"
"No one knows."
"Did Con make him go away?"
"No one knows."
"Where do you think he is?"
"All I know is that the Four Horsemen visited him one night in our rooms in the tenement building where we lived while I was still at the dispensary. And he's not been heard of since."
"Surely your neighbors knew where your husband went."
"No one was at home in the building that night."
"Isn't that an odd occurrence?"
"Not really. An unknown benefactor provided free food and ale at the inn on the corner that evening."
With all of the housekeeper's scars, she had difficulty smiling, but Marianne could not mistake the light of humor in her eyes. A chill crept down her back when she realized she'd just had a glimpse into the souls of Con and his brothers. She also realized she'd finally stopped thinking of him as "Mister Dyer." One should be able to think of a man by his first name once one had had said man inside one's body.
After Mrs. Bonham left to attend to the day's menus, Marianne sank to the single, uncomfortable stool in her cell and picked up her sketch pad. Lugh and Aengus, whenever they weren't off on a run with Con or Wu, or begging treats from Wu's brother, the cook, in the kitchen, they lay close to her cell door, keeping watch. They weren't allowed to come inside any more. Marianne grinned. Their master feared she'd charm them away from him. The two beasts would periodically sidle up to the bars of her cell so that she could press her fingers through the bar openings and rub their shaggy coats.
* * *
Con crept toward Marianne's cell, knowing full well he should stay away until she discovered on her own what he and his guards were about to do. But he, and his stubborn cock, could not pass up the opportunity to cause those dark eyes to snap in anger.
His stomach did an odd flip when he realized both of his beloved dogs were staring through the bars, looks of adoration on their shaggy faces. Just the day before, he himself had gifted the two ungrateful whelps with fine steaks from his butcher shop. And what did she offer? A scent like a siren's call...and, what? Nothing more than back rubs? And then he saw the sketches littering the floor of her cell. She'd captured their likenesses so well, they seemed to come to life on the pages of her sketch pad. And then he saw the single page scattered to a far corner of her cell: a likeness...of him.
Suddenly, the idea of him and his guards teasing her with a display of manly boxing skills in nothing but bare chests, bare knuckles, and breeches on his gambling hell's ring across from her cell didn't seem as clever as when he'd thought of the plan the day before. But now that the guards were gathering around the ring, he had no choice but to follow through.
She swiveled around at the sound of his approach, a question in her eyes. "We're going to practice our defensive skills this morning, but when we've done, I'm going to finish the business between us."
Her eyes widened. "Right here? In the open?"
He immediately regretted his tight breeches when his cock leapt to attention as if to say, "Yes, please."
"Of course not. Not that business." He spoke low in the hope no one overheard their conversation. "I expect to hear a full accounting of who you were going to meet in Birmingham, what he has to do with the jewel casket you stole from me, and what you know about someone pushing their way into our counterfeit business."
"Is that all?" She gave him a taunting, droll look.
"You...will...tell me...everything before I'm finished with you, Miss Oxley."
"Don't you think you should call me Marianne since we've, um, gotten to know each other much better?"
Instead of trusting himself to answer, he smacked his fist hard against the bars and then tried to hide the pain from his guards. Both dogs looked up at him in alarm.
He turned and walked toward the ring, refusing to look back.
* * *
Marianne grabbed the stub of charcoal she been working with and picked up her sketch pad again. The look on Con's face just before he'd tried to destroy his own dungeon cell...she had to capture that look before it tumbled out of her mind's eye. It was the look of the small boy inside the man who'd been hurt over and over again. He'd shown her a vulnerability she was certain he'd never shared with his brothers or, heaven forbid, his employees. She rocked back on her heels and watched one of the guards circling Con in the ring. The king of the Four Horsemen needed her. He just didn't know it yet.
And then, the more matches the men went through in the ring, the more her fingers itched to draw them. She kicked off her slippers and sat cross-legged on the floor of the cell until Mrs. Bonham came to check on her. She followed the once-beautiful woman to the water closet at the far corner of the lower level and marveled at how serene Con's housekeeper always seemed to be. But then she probably knew she would have been dead from her missing husband's beatings if the Dyer brothers had not intervened.
On the way back to the cell later, she asked a question she'd been burning to ask ever since she'd gotten to know the frightening brothers. "Do they always help the helpless when they can?"
Mrs. Bonham gave her a wry smile. "They help out wherever possible, they support the free dispensary on Rose Street, and yes, they intervene some times when innocent people are caught in the crossfire of a bad situation."
"That must be an endless job in the rookeries."
"You can't save everyone and sometimes people don't want to help save themselves." She paused a moment and a faraway look settled onto her face. "There's a fine line between doing good things because it's the right thing to do, and doing good things to keep worse things from happening on your patch."
She leaned toward Marianne just before she locked her back into her cell. "That fine line is the path of the Four Horsemen."
* * *
Con was wet with the sheen of sweat from two hours of taking on all of his guards, one at a time. His breeches were soaked through and leaving nothing to the imagination. Even the leather thong stretched across his knuckles was wet. He didn't care. At least his cock seemed cowed into submission for the moment, which would make interrogating his prisoner much easier. A casual onlooker might assume he was trying to impress his captive thief. The truth was he was afraid of what he might do to the little thief if he didn't work all of the animosity, and lust, he felt toward her out of his body. He snatched a linen cloth from a bench near the ring and blotted the moisture from his face and hair as he stalked toward the cell.
Before he'd even had a chance to open the cell door, he noticed the piles of charcoal drawings she been turning out all the time he and his men had been hard at trying to beat each other to a pulp in the ring.
When he unlocked the cell, he suddenly felt awkward and out of place, the damp linen still wrapped around his neck. He immediately noticed she was now drawing with a tiny stub of charcoal, and only a few sheets remained in her sketch pad.
He called out to Crisp, who was lurking nearby, no doubt waiting to tell him everything that had happened that morning while he was in the ring. "Crisp--come over here, please."
"Yes, Mister Dyer?"
"Do you know of any shops that sell supplies for artists?"
"No, but I'm sure there are some over in Covent Garden."
He pointed to the cell floor now covered with Marianne's drawings. "She'll need plenty more of that, uh, what do you call it?"
"A sketch pad?" Marianne had a puzzled look on her face.
"Yes, and a couple boxes of those." He pointed toward the stub of charcoal pinched between her left thumb and index finger, both of which were as black as a chimney sweep's hands.
"Yes, sir, Mister Dyer. Anything else?"
Con looked toward Marianne expectantly.
"Oh, no. That's plenty. That's the only kind of artwork I do. I'm terrible at watercolors."
Once all the guards and Crisp had left for the upper levels, Con turned toward Marianne and pointed a long finger at her. "Don't think I'm getting soft where you're concerned. I just want you to be comfortable, because you could be here for a long while if you don't tell me what I want to know."
In a move so fast, he was caught unaware, she moved forward and pulled his long index finger into her mouth, sucking on his digit as if she were trying to pipe down nectar from the gods. So much for keeping his cock under control.
He jerked away from her touch just as quickly as she'd lunged. "What are you trying to do? Seduce me out of finding out what I want to know?"
She gave him a pouting look. "Is it working?"