Chapter Twenty
Celine dreamt she was drinking broth—huge, drowning mouthfuls. But she couldn’t keep it down. Every mouthful came up again, and she gasped her apologies between retches. It was like an ocean pouring from her mouth, covering the floor of the garret.
Louise didn’t seem to notice. “You’re doing it wrong,” she said, annoyed now. Louise favoured satin dresses with a low bodice, though she had no bosom to speak of. Her dishwater hair was scraped back off her face.
Celine tried to say, “Mathilde’s lying on the floor. She’s going to drown.” More urgent, though, was finishing the soup. Ravenous, hopeful of success, she drank down another mouthful.
“Don’t!” Marie cried out, and Celine woke, the word as clear as if it had been spoken aloud in her room. As if it, from outside the dream, had been what woke her.
She lay still and wide-eyed until the last echoes of Marie’s voice faded.
She cringed away from opening the bed curtains, deathly certain Marie stood directly on the other side.
She made herself breathe slowly, visualising what she knew in reality she would see: an empty room, the fire burned low. She was in London. She was safe.
She and the duke had dined at the Peckes’ on Friday evening in celebration of Lord Pecke’s bill passing. They’d attended the opera in Lady Pecke’s box, gone to church, and eaten Sunday dinner together. Lord Burnley had begun to treat her with a marked attention.
The nightmare had receded a little and with it, the certainty that Marie was in her room, but it still took some courage to fling the bed curtain open. A huge figure loomed on the other side of it.
She leapt across the room so fast she knocked over the chair by the fire. It was pure instinct. Her heart—or was it her breath?—was making such a racket she couldn’t hear anything, though every sense was straining.
Someone was in her room.
Someone was in her room.
Someone had come in here while she was asleep and waited patiently, quietly in the dark. Her heart kept speeding up, it wouldn’t stop, it only got faster, it was going to burst.
She hadn’t imagined it: She could still make out the dark, hulking figure by the bed.
It took a step towards her, and she skittered back, though there was nowhere else to run.
She turned and snatched the fire poker. She brandished it, but the towering figure strolled towards her, unconcerned, laughing in a voice as hoarse and ephemeral as smoke.
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Genet.”
“I would say it’s entirely necessary,” she said, her voice distorted by the rushing in her ears.
Then the figure came into the circle of firelight, and Celine’s fingers went nerveless around the poker. It dropped with a clatter to the hearth.
The firelight revealed a brute of a woman. Easily an inch taller than the duke, with a broad, rough-hewn physique that brought to mind a boxer laying larger men flat in the ring with elemental violence.
She wore a mix of plain leather and gold.
Her breeches and short jacket were made of soft, worn suede.
The collars of her shirt gaped open, making visible a long gold chain that hung from her thick neck and disappeared somewhere beneath her waistcoat.
Her hair was shaved to the head at the back and sides, the brown hair on top short and unkempt.
Multiple small gold hoops pierced her earlobes.
Her left eye was covered by a brown leather eyepatch, and around it, the skin was darker, twisted. Her mouth had a muscularity to it somehow, the cheeks firm and imposing.
She had never encountered a woman like her, but was reminded of men who sometimes came to the pleasure houses. When those men appeared, everyone went very quiet, and sometimes afterwards, one of the girls turned up dead.
The intruder righted the seat Celine had knocked over and sat in it. She gestured Celine to the other. “Sit with me. Let’s talk.”
She considered simply saying no. She considered what those powerful, gold-ringed hands would feel like around her neck. She sat.
“You’re going to keep the poker?” The voice was amused.
“Yes.” She had fumbled it off the floor and held the end tucked in her elbow, the point facing forward like a lance.
The woman was as relaxed as though she were by her own hearth fire. Her hooded eye watched Celine, disregarding the poker entirely. “Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I am Markham,” the woman said in her hoarse, whispering voice, “the Wroth bastard.”
Celine gasped like she’d just jumped into freezing water. She had helped the duke deal Lord Wroth a significant blow this Friday past. She wondered, briefly, whether she was going to make it through the night alive, then didn’t let herself consider it again.
She was shaking, shivering throughout her whole body and unable to stop.
Words surged up in her, weapons she wanted to throw.
Does Lord Wroth send you to do all his dirty work, like a dog let off the chain?
Is that all a bastard’s good for? But she sensed instinctively that Markham would only laugh.
That she did far worse deeds on Lord Wroth’s behalf than menace helpless young women in their bedrooms. Like setting explosives in a mine, for example.
Perhaps if Celine made a run for it, she could reach the door and wake the house, screaming bloody murder. The duke’s rooms were all the way down the other end of the hall, but it was a straight run. The duke wouldn’t be frightened of a mad bastard.
“I wouldn’t,” Markham said, all trace of amusement gone. “If you are very lucky, and exceptionally fast, you will make it maybe three paces before I catch you and have you under me. You do not want that.”
Her stomach clenched anxiously. “You would rape me?”
“I would fillet you.” Markham produced a small, wicked knife and turned it so that its fine edge caught the firelight. “Unless you could be very still and quiet.”
Fresh alarm prickled over her scalp and down her back.
Markham turned her head, her one eye catching the light just like the knife. “But then, do you really want to call for the duke? She is worse than I am.”
The duke was worse. Markham was threatening to hurt her, but the duke had taken her all night, making her feel such things, then left her for dead in the morning. Why would she run to the duke for safety?
And yet she realised with desperate surprise that she would. She wanted the duke.
“You see, I have a theory, Miss Genet. I believe you do know how bad the duke is. And more than that, I believe you have some proof of it. Kate Howard”—the name was awful spoken in that voice, like it scraped painfully up Markham’s throat—“doesn’t give a fuck about some French gentleman she knew a long time ago, and she certainly does not give a fuck about that gentleman’s daughter.
That is not who she is. Which makes me think it is not who you are. Am I getting warm?”
It frightened her how warm.
“You needn’t look so alarmed. Whoever you are is not relevant. The Duke of Howard has done something very naughty, and my father is angry with her. I only need your help to punish her.”
Markham didn’t know the part Celine had played in taking the mines from Lord Wroth. Of course she didn’t. Why would anyone think of the French ingenue who had been in London a little less than a week?
The adrenaline that had been flooding through her began to abate at last. The tide went out of her head and didn’t wash back in. In the quiet it left, she could hear they had been speaking French all this time. Markham spoke the French of docks and commerce.
Markham wasn’t here for her.
“How could I possibly punish a duke?” Celine said, somewhat disingenuously.
“Whatever it is you hold over her,” Markham said, “I want it.”
She let confusion cross her face and said, flustered, “Can the ties of loyalty and love be given over? I have no more hold over the duke than that.”
Markham smirked, like she understood the performance for what it was, and said, “I’ll give you thirty thousand pounds for it. That’s half your dowry again.”
She was starting to understand, really understand, that Markham wasn’t here for her, but for the duke.
That if all Celine wanted was to see the duke ruined, she couldn’t ask for a better instrument than the brute before her who had sniffed out something wrong, something that didn’t make sense, and run it to ground.
A mad bastard who would take the letter from Celine and use it to deal the duke as devastating a blow as possible.
All those nights Celine had dreamed of it, hatred writhing in her stomach, keeping her warm …
Last week, it might have swayed her. But she had other dreams now. Other hearths.
She thought of Lady Pecke calling for tea because she had seen something peaky in Celine’s face. She thought of Lord Burnley asking the footman to move a screen in order to make her more comfortable.
These were good things, and she wanted them. More than she wanted revenge.
“Thirty thousand pounds?” she said, letting herself sound as frightened as she was. “Is that what a maidenhead goes for in London?”
Markham smirked again, though this time the expression wasn’t without irritation. “I can be patient,” she said in her cinders-and-ashes voice. “And when you are ready to be a rich woman, all you need to do is cross the street. It’s as simple as that.”
Celine had seen Wroth House on the other side of the Strand, grey and forbidding.
Markham stood, and despite herself, Celine flinched away from the immense height and size of the Wroth bastard.
Markham looked around the room and snorted. “You really are living like a Howard, aren’t you? So pampered and prissy, you’d dissolve at the first drop of rain.” The singular, dark eye fixed on her. “Don’t grow too used to it, Miss Genet. It wouldn’t be good for you.”
Then she opened the sash window, and without a farewell, she dropped herself out of it. Celine never heard her land.