Chapter 4
Aday was not nearly enough time.
Tod knew that.
Vix knew that.
Roland sure as hell knew it.
He had spent the entire day deploying his kits to every blasted corner of London while he attempted to hit all the angles they couldn’t reach. He didn’t intend to report to the Vixen that night, and he assumed Tod was well aware of that.
Even so, it hadn’t been enough time.
He’d barely slept, and what sleep he had gotten had been shallow and simmering with half-done tasks in dreamscape, dotted with tangled blankets and agonizing thoughts about the ultimate task that awaited him.
About her.
Mae bloody Casper.
More than once in the night, he’d groaned in frustration and thrown his pillow across the room, only to then have to push himself off the mattress and plod after it like an errant little boy.
But that was the perfect summation of what that woman did to him, wasn’t it? It was the crux of the damned thing.
He slept what little he could, and when he awoke, the scar on his arm, the white pucker in the shape of a kiss where a man had sunk his teeth in as deep as they’d go, suddenly was itching again.
It hadn’t itched since he’d gotten the stitches taken out two cursed years ago.
But this morning, it was itching persistently. This morning, he could not stop fussing with it.
He rolled his sleeve down over it. He pressed the linen of his coat down on the itch. He grimaced and wondered if it had been bothering him yesterday. He’d been thinking of her then too, hadn’t he? And wasn’t that what this itch was? Mae tickling up under his skin?
He couldn’t articulate what it was about her that vexed him so.
It wasn’t the wanting her. Roland was no stranger to lust. And it certainly had never turned him into a stumbling, tongue-tied idiot in the past.
No, he had always been the one in control with his lovers, no matter how beautiful, no matter how powerful, no matter if they were men or women. Attraction was not the issue here. Though it certainly was a factor.
She had simply taken him off guard from the very first moment he’d seen her in that brothel room, young and beautiful and competent instead of old and doddering and pedantic, and he’d never managed to regain his footing.
Maybe he would have if the soon-to-be amputee hadn’t bitten a chunk out of his arm a few moments later. Who was to say?
The damage was done now, anyhow.
For whatever reason, now, any time he was in her presence, he seemed to revert back to that blood-tinged room and forget himself entirely.
It was intolerable. And evidently permanent.
If he had learned anything at all in his life, it was that problems without solutions were best avoided entirely. He had managed to stay alive an unseemly long time, given his origins and circumstances, by adhering to that.
Hadn’t he?
Speaking of reverting to a state of stupidity, he had evidently decided to spend last night with his father, rather than returning to his small flat in Soho. Exhaustion, much like disorientation, could make fools of anyone.
“Where are you off to so suddenly?” his father whined the instant Roland passed through the breakfast room. “I thought you’d wish to spend the day together. I was going to send my suitors away.”
Roland sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and turned to regard his own visage, some twenty-five years older and wearing significantly more rouge, and powdered and wigged, even at this early hour and in a dressing gown. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I have business in the city.”
“You always have business,” his father sniffed, waving his spoon over the bowl of fruit compote and curds with a frown. “It’s so tiresome, Roland. When will you learn to take in leisure?”
“If I took in leisure, I couldn’t pay for yours,” he said pointedly, which made his father frown.
“Now, that is unkind,” the other man replied. “I still have generous admirers, you know. I am not an old man yet. I retained my charms, not like that mother of yours.”
“I have to go,” Roland said again. “Don’t cancel your callers.”
“Well, I shan’t!” his father called after him. “And I’d better not hear you went up to Hackney to visit your mother in her rustic sheepfold. I shall be terribly offended!”
Roland sighed as he swung the door shut behind him.
His parents did not actually dislike one another. In fact, he would call them friends, of a sort. His father just had some particular feelings about her choice to leave their mutual profession for a simple life north of the city.
Roland suspected he saw her decision as an implicit judgement on anyone who made another, and his father would never leave the life of a courtesan.
Never.
Not so long as there were clients willing to make him believe he was still desired.
At least Roland’s moderate success at building stable coffers had gotten them both out of the common bawd houses. Well, it had gotten all three of them out of the bawd houses, he supposed, even if he had never participated in his parents’ particular vocation.
He had been raised amongst it.
While his father very obviously and openly preferred the company of other men, some patrons paid well to watch staged shows of intimacy.
Roland suspected that is how he came to exist. For obvious reasons, he had never explicitly asked. The stark resemblance between himself and his sire simply clarified the matter, though paternity was always more of a matter of assumption and willingness in a brothel, anyhow.
His mother had found a husband to the north of the city after he’d bought her the little house and its sheep pen.
The husband Roland liked perfectly fine, and he clearly considered himself unseemly lucky to have a wife that rich men once paid to enjoy.
She did not require as much filial care as his father.
And, truth be told, Roland enjoyed being fussed over now and then, especially after a spot of bad luck or after his friends had gotten up to their mischief. So perhaps staying here last night had not been stupid so much as it had been desperate.
He hadn’t told his father about any of the chaos, but he had enjoyed a lovely filet of fish and a platter of crispy leeks instead of having to cook for himself, so that was something.
He knew he had been luckier than many of the other brothel-born children to even have a father, especially one who doted so very much.
One of those fellow children, one of his many ill-gotten siblings, had been on his list of people to visit yesterday and hadn’t made the cut when the hours had started to run low.
He’d either have to write to her or find another time to visit, or she was going to be furious. Sybil was cobbling together her own living outside of her mother’s profession, too, and Roland’s absence was going to cost her some pay.
He’d have to make it up to her.
He sighed again and scratched at his forearm as he set off toward Clerkenwell.
There was a light mist in the air this morning, strangely cool against his face in the warm, hovering air of late spring.
It clung to his hair in tiny, glistening beads and moistened his lips as he picked up speed, cutting through several back alleys and through market halls and service lanes he had known and been known in since he was a small lad.
He made good time.
Roland always made good time.
He hadn’t been to the clinic in some time.
Not truly since it was still a construction site, back when it had been the grounds of a tenement-collapse disaster some years ago.
Tod had gotten pulled into the rescue efforts through Hannah, who then suggested buying the lot and tearing down the tenement to build a more permanent place for the patients to recover.
It had been a manic, delightful time, truth be told. Everything had changed that summer and continued to change into the autumn and winter as little Hannah Lazarus wore down every defense Thaddeus Beck had built in his rough-and-tumble life.
Roland had enjoyed it immensely. Even in light of that day with the amputation.
Maybe even especially in light of it.
He didn’t know.
The entire thing gave him a headache if he thought about it too much.
He arrived from the back end of the building deliberately, wanting to get a scope of the place before he made himself known.
He pulled his jacket tighter around his ribs and licked the dew from his lips, squinting at the squat little clinic surrounded by the taller tenements on its corner block, visible through the milling of folk headed to their vocations, donkeys, hackneys, and so on that crowded the street.
Immediately, he caught sight of a flash of bright red hair, and next to it, the looming figure of a very large man.
He had not expected the Becks to be here this morning. He almost frowned before he shook himself and wondered if this did not, in fact, make the entire endeavor a little less ominous.
He grimaced instead. Because this was exactly the effect that Mae Casper was always having on him. He hadn’t even had breakfast yet and he wasn’t sure whether a basic, less-than-shocking sight of people who had every reason to be present was an annoyance or a relief.
He gave himself firm, sharp instructions to pull it together and crossed the street, smoothing his face back into unaffected, casual order, and waited until Hannah looked up and caught his eye to break into a grin.
“Good morning, Little Fox,” he said, hopping over a delivery of empty bottles to cross the approach and greet her. “Tod.”
Beck turned to regard him, his dark eyes flicking once quickly over his person. “Reed,” he said, in that soft, disaffected voice of his. “You weren’t at work last night.”
“Oh, strange thing, that,” Roland answered, his grin sliding into a smirk. “My employer told me this was my workplace now, and I took him at his word.”
Tod grunted, running an absent hand over his wife’s back as Hannah shook her head in impatience at their bickering.
“Just there is where I meant,” she said, drawing her husband’s eye to the corner of the building.
“We could install a small staircase that provides direct access to the upper level. It will give the students for Rosalind’s tally classes and Mr. Barnett’s literacy lessons a direct entry so they aren’t crowding the triage, and a way for the children and maternity patients to go in and out without walking through the infirmary.
Besides, the windows are already broken; it would be an easy thing to take them out and replace them with a door. ”
“An easy thing, is it?” Tod replied with a soft little smile as he gazed down at her. “Are you going to build those stairs yourself, Hannah?”
“No, my love,” she replied with a grin. “I’m going to watch you do it, and enjoy every haul of lumber. Besides, Mae already approved the idea.”
“Did she?” he answered. “Where is Miss Casper?”
Almost as though she’d heard the query, Mae emerged from the front of the clinic, her hands dusted with white powder and her eyes scanning the ground for that shipment of empty bottles.
Roland’s body immediately tensed, his eyes falling on the way her skin glowed in the early-morning light and on the little springs of dark curls that were escaping from the band around her hairline.
When her face brightened with relief upon finding the shipment, just a few steps from where he stood, he felt his insides jolt.
“Mae!” called Hannah. “Good morning!”
She raised those big, dark doe eyes of hers and blinked twice at her friend, her cheeks dimpling as she grinned in return. “Good morning yourself,” she returned, taking two steps forward before she realized Hannah was in company.
She paused, her eyes meeting Roland’s for a brief, flashing moment where those dimples faltered before she straightened and turned to Tod instead. “And Mr. Beck as well! To what do I owe the surprise?”
“We’ve brought you a lackey,” Tod said with a shrug, gesturing to Roland. “Surprise.”
“A what?” Roland said softly, winning a sidelong smirk from his old friend.
Mae was pushing the white powder on her hands off onto the apron she wore as she walked toward them, the mist settling on the puffed yellow sleeves of her dress and down the red-brown glow of her bare arms.
“Ah, yes,” she said, giving a polite and cursory glance at him before turning back to the Becks. “Hannah mentioned your concern for our security here during the day, but Mr. Beck, surely you do not think the attacks will start before luncheon?”
“I do not,” Tod answered, chuckling. “What I think is that finding the routine that makes the most sense often takes a few days of trial and error, and so starting early at the beginning is the practical approach. Besides, while you’re not being attacked, Mr. Reed may offer his hands and any other bits you find useful in service of the running of operations. ”
“Indeed?” she said, blinking a few times before glancing back at Roland. “Are you amenable to that, Mr. Reed?”
He felt the words clog up right in his sternum, cold and thick.
This was the first time she had spoken to him since she’d had a needle in his skin so long ago. And all he could muster was “Yes.”
She stared for a moment, her expression a little incredulous. “All right,” she said, nodding down to the shipment of bottles. “If you wouldn’t mind bringing those inside?”
He watched her mouth as she spoke. Watched the flick of her little pink tongue against her teeth. And then, after a moment, he remembered that he was meant to hear the words she’d said as well.
He shook himself and nodded, turning and grabbing the bottles with both hands before making a hasty retreat into the clinic itself.
As though entering the belly of the beast had ever been any sort of reprieve at all.