Chapter 9
“You look terrible.” Quentin dropped into the leather chair opposite Evander and signaled to the footman for two brandies.
The club was quiet for a Thursday evening. A handful of members occupied the card tables at the far end, and a pair of elderly viscounts argued about horse racing near the fire, but the smoking room where Evander had positioned himself was empty save for the two of them.
Three weeks had passed since the basket, the bride, and the scandal that welded them together. Twenty-one days of solicitors, Bow Street reports that led nowhere, and a house that shrank a little more every evening.
Mary had stopped asking questions. That was the worst of it.
No more updates about Tommy at his study door.
No more invitations to visit the nursery.
She managed the household, sat across from him at dinner, discussed candle prices and garden plans, and treated him with the polished courtesy of a hostess entertaining a guest she expected to leave soon.
She never asked where he went at night.
Evander told himself this was what he wanted.
“Evander.” Quentin snapped his fingers. “You have been staring at that glass for a full minute without drinking it. That is either a crisis of conscience or a digestive complaint, and I am not qualified to treat either.”
Evander picked up the brandy. He did not drink it. He turned the glass in his fingers and watched the amber catch the lamplight.
“How is the bride?” Quentin asked.
“I did not come here to discuss my marriage.”
“Of course not. You came here to brood in a leather chair and ignore expensive brandy. Far more productive.” Quentin leaned back and crossed his legs. “Have you spoken to her today?”
“We spoke at dinner.”
“About what?”
“The household accounts.”
Quentin winced. “The household accounts. Evander, you married a beautiful woman three weeks ago, and you are discussing household accounts. This is why I worry about you.”
“Don’t.”
“Someone must. You will not.” Quentin sipped his brandy. “How is the child?”
Evander’s grip on the glass tightened. “Growing. Mary says he’s gained nearly a pound. The physician is satisfied.”
“Mary says.” Quentin tilted his head. “You have not seen for yourself?”
“I see him.”
“From the corridor.”
Evander’s eyes flicked to his friend. “Who told you that?”
“No one told me. I know you.” Quentin set his glass down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
The charming ease he carried like a costume fell away, and beneath it was the man Evander had known since they were boys.
The one who saw too much. “You have a wife and a child in your house, and you are treating both of them the way you treat your tenants. From a distance, through intermediaries, with quarterly reviews.”
“Tommy is not my child.”
“He might as well be. Richard is gone, Evander. Four months gone. And until he comes back, that baby has you, and you are standing in hallways.”
Evander said nothing. The fire crackled. The viscounts argued about a filly in the third race at Ascot.
Quentin sat back. “You mentioned Mary three times in as many minutes. The physician’s report came through her.
The baby’s weight came through her. The household accounts came through her.
” He picked up his glass. “For a man who did not come here to discuss his marriage, you seem unable to discuss anything else.”
“You are reading too much into it.”
“I am reading exactly enough.” Quentin finished his brandy and stood. “Go home, Evander. Sit in the nursery. Hold the baby. Talk to your wife about something other than candle prices.” He clapped Evander on the shoulder. “Before she stops waiting for you to.”
Quentin left. Evander sat with the untouched brandy and stared at the fire and thought about a woman who had stopped asking him to visit the nursery, and how the absence of that question had left a gap he had not expected to feel.
He set the glass on the table, collected his coat, and walked out into the night.
He did not go home.
The boxing ring occupied the cellar of a warehouse in Southwark, down a flight of stone steps that smelled of mildew and sweat and old blood.
Evander had found the place two weeks ago through one of the Bow Street runner’s contacts, and he had returned three times since, each visit peeling back another layer of the life Richard had been living before he disappeared.
It was not a life their mother would have recognized.
The cellar was low-ceilinged and lamp-lit, the air thick with tobacco smoke and the sound of fists meeting flesh.
A ring had been roped off in the center, where two men stripped to the waist circled each other while a crowd pressed against the ropes and shouted odds.
Money changed hands in the shadows. A man with a broken nose collected bets at a table near the door.
Evander crossed to the far wall, where a narrow corridor led to a back room. A heavy-set man with a ledger open on his lap sat behind a desk cluttered with coins and scrawled receipts.
Goss. The bookkeeper who ran the money behind the fights.
Goss looked up. His eyes moved from Evander’s face to his coat to his boots, performing the calculation men in his profession performed out of habit. Quality of fabric. Cost of leather. Worth.
“You again.” Goss closed the ledger. “I told you last time, I don’t know nothing about your brother.”
Evander pulled a chair from the wall and sat without invitation.
“You know what he owed. You know who he bet with. You know every man who walked through that door with money in his pocket, because that ledger on your lap is the reason you are still breathing.” He leaned forward. “Where is Richard Brightshaw?”
Goss ran his tongue over his teeth. “I’m a bookkeeper, not a nursemaid. Men come, they bet, they leave. I don’t follow them home.”
Evander reached into his coat and withdrew a leather wallet. He opened it on the desk, revealing a stack of banknotes thick enough to make Goss’s eyes widen before the man could stop them.
“Two hundred pounds,” Evander said. “For the name of every establishment my brother frequented and the last place anyone saw him.”
Goss stared at the money. His fingers twitched on the ledger.
Then he shook his head. “Can’t help you.
Even if I wanted to, and I don’t. There are men who come through here that don’t appreciate being talked about.
Men who are worse than your brother.” He met Evander’s eyes. “Men who are worse than you.”
Evander stood. The chair scraped. He placed both hands flat on the desk and leaned over the ledger until his face was inches from the bookkeeper’s. Goss pressed himself back into his chair.
“You misunderstand the nature of this conversation,” Evander said.
His voice did not rise. It dropped. “I am not asking. I am telling you that my brother walked through that door, and you watched him lose money he did not have, and you let him sink, because men like you profit from men like him. And now he is gone, and a child is sleeping in a crib in my house because of decisions made in rooms like this one.” He picked up the ledger and held it over the lamp flame.
“So, you will tell me what you know, or I will start with this book and work my way through everything else in this room that burns.”
Goss’s eyes locked on the ledger. His jaw worked. The noise from the ring outside swelled and ebbed.
“All right.” The word came out strangled.
“All right. Your brother came. He bet. Lost more than he won, same as most. Favored the bare-knuckle fights, liked to bet heavy on the underdog.” Goss held up his hands.
“But I haven’t seen him in months. He stopped coming, and I didn’t ask why, because I don’t ask why. ”
Evander set the ledger back on the desk. “Where else did he go?”
Goss rubbed his face. “There’s a house. Out past Hampstead.
Used to be a gentleman’s estate, now it’s—” He glanced at the door.
“It’s a pleasure house. High-end. Discreet.
Your brother went there regularly. Madame Fontaine’s, they call it.
Past the Heath, off the Finchley Road. Big iron gate. You can’t miss it.”
Evander straightened. He picked up the wallet and tossed it onto the desk. “Two hundred. As promised.”
Goss took the money with the speed of a man who expected it to be taken back. Evander turned and walked out of the back room, through the corridor, past the ring where the crowd roared as one fighter dropped, and up the stone steps into the night air.
The alley behind the warehouse was narrow and unlit. Evander’s carriage waited at the far end, the driver hunched on the box, the horses shifting in the cold. His boots splashed through something he chose not to identify. The night smelled of the river and rotting wood.
He heard them before he saw them. Three sets of footsteps falling into rhythm behind him.
Heavy boots. No attempt at stealth.
They wanted him to know they were there.
Evander stopped. He turned.
Three men stood at the alley’s mouth. Broad, blunt-featured men with shoulders that came from loading cargo or hitting people for a living. The one in the middle cracked his knuckles.
“Goss says you need a lesson in manners,” the middle one said. “Something about threatening his livelihood.”
Evander removed his gloves. He folded them and placed them in his coat pocket. “You should have asked for more money.”
The first man rushed him. He was fast for his size, but he led with his right, telegraphing the punch from three feet away.
Evander sidestepped, caught the man’s wrist, and used his momentum to drive him face-first into the warehouse wall.
The crack of bone against brick echoed down the alley.
The man slid to the ground and did not get up.
The second came from the left. Evander pivoted, drove his fist into the man’s stomach, and followed with an elbow to the jaw when the man doubled over. The sound was sharp and wet. The second man hit the cobblestones and stayed there, his mouth working, his eyes glazed.
The third man held back. He was smaller than the other two, with narrow eyes and quick hands, and he reached into his coat and drew a blade. Short. Thin. The type of knife men carried when they expected to use it.
He lunged. Evander twisted, but the alley was narrow, and the wall caught his shoulder, and the blade caught his arm. A hot, slicing burn ripped across his left triceps, and Evander felt the fabric of his coat and shirt part in a single line.
He seized the man’s knife hand, twisted the wrist until the blade dropped, and drove his forehead into the man’s nose. The man crumpled. The knife clattered against the cobblestones and spun into the dark.
Evander stood over three unconscious men in a Southwark alley and breathed.
His pulse hammered. The burn in his arm sharpened into a throb, and he looked down and saw the tear in his coat, the dark stain spreading beneath it.
He pressed his hand against the wound and felt the wet heat soak through his fingers.
He pulled his neckcloth free and wound it around his upper arm, using his teeth to cinch the knot.
The linen turned red before he finished tying it.
The cut ran the length of his triceps, long and open and bleeding with the steady persistence of a wound that would not kill him but would not let him forget it.
Evander retrieved his gloves from his pocket. He stepped over the man with the broken nose, walked to the end of the alley, and climbed into the carriage.
“Home,” he told the driver.
The carriage lurched forward. Evander leaned his head against the seat and pressed the soaked neckcloth tighter against his arm and watched the streetlamps of Southwark blur past the window.
He thought of Goss’s words. Madame Fontaine’s. Past the Heath.
Another thread. Another place Richard had gone to ruin himself while Evander stayed behind and held everything together.
The carriage crossed the river. The bleeding had not stopped. The neckcloth was soaked through and warm against his skin, and the throb in his arm kept time with his heartbeat.
He closed his eyes and saw Mary’s face at dinner that evening, composed and distant, discussing the price of beeswax as though he were a stranger she had been seated beside at a party.
He had wanted her to ask where he was going. He had wanted her to look at him with that sharp, searching expression she had worn the first week, the one that demanded answers he would not give.
She had not asked. She had not looked.
He was bleeding in a carriage at one in the morning, and the thing that troubled him most was that his wife had stopped caring enough to argue.
The carriage turned onto the Mayfair streets. Evander pressed the neckcloth tighter and watched the familiar houses slide past, and he did not think about the blood soaked through the linen and ran down his arm and dripped onto the seat.