Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Can see why you’d want to be hiding out. Belle D’Or, postcoital, tracing one of the barely healed gashes across his ribs with a restless, pointed little tongue. It sent little electric sparks through his nerve ends as she did it. You have been in the wars. Who did this to you?
A dead man.
She made an approving sound deep in her throat, like a contented cat. So you killed him for it. How did you go about that?
With a knife.
And will I be reading about this dead man in tomorrow’s Gazette?
Shouldn’t think so. Curbing his impatience with an effort. Trying to work out exactly how long he needed to hang around in this silk-draped four-poster to properly cement his status as her impromptu guest. It’s been taken care of.
Good, and so have I. Eyes rising slyly to meet his. At least for a little while.
The sex was hard work—an uncomfortable, episodic, barely satisfying business, flurries of frenetic thrashing punctuated with high-pitched, grunting cries from her and the odd, painful clash of bones padded by far too little flesh for Duncan’s liking.
He supposed it was down to the cocaine. Between bouts, Belle plied him with gin cocktails she mixed at her dressing table and slopped over him in the carrying with what seemed like deliberate clumsiness, then immediately stooped to lick off him as a prelude to the next encounter.
Third time around, he retired limp and unresponsive despite her best efforts, and she let him go.
He clutched up his clothes from the floor, let himself quietly out.
Left her sprawled prone across the bed, propped on her elbows, eyes closed, coiffed head and narrow arse twitching idly back and forth to some coked-up jazz rhythm evidently still playing for her somewhere he couldn’t hear.
He got off at the closest stop to Umber cottages, retraced his steps from memory through the concrete tangle of walkways and tenement facades.
There was more light in the sky than last time he was here, but it didn’t seem to help.
Without the gloom and shadows, the charcoal-daubed runes and sacrifice fire remnants looked, if anything, more desperate than ever.
Thankfully, he saw no bottle toughs. Too early in the day, he supposed.
Number 16 Umber Cottages was easy enough to pick out—someone had kicked in the door, left the jamb splintered and torn loose.
Later, someone else had done their best to jam the door shut, but it was a poor fit at best. Duncan went up the concrete steps, knocked.
Got no reply. After a moment, he prodded the door back on its hinges and eased inside.
He stood in dank hallway gloom and listened.
Someone in the back room.
No noise to give it away, but he knew it nonetheless, with an odd immediacy, a flash flare in the corner of his vision, something like the eerie hallucinations he’d suffered in the Forest. He put his hand to his back for the sgian dubh in its sideways-slanting sheath on his belt.
At almost the same moment, another shivery flash swept through him, and he knew he would not need the knife.
His fingers, aware of the truth before he was, had already relinquished their hold.
He stepped through the open doorway.
A black-and-white-clad figure sprawled in skirts on the floor at the foot of the armchair by the window, where less than a week ago Irene Rush had sat.
For a split second, he thought it was her.
Then, as he blocked the doorway and his shadow fell across her, the face lifted and he saw it was Susan, Irene Rush’s middle-aged watchdog and maid.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said dully.
Hair a plundered bird’s nest, apron streaked with dirt.
She’d been crying, and for some time. Her face was ribboned, streaked with grime where she’d wiped at the tears only to have fresh ones cut tracks down through the dirt her fingers left.
She glared at him out of reddened eyes, like some small woodland animal caught in a trap.
Her voice was choked, scratchy in her throat.
“If yer after more money, you can fuck off. There ent no more.”
Duncan took station against the wall beside the doorway, lowered himself carefully to the floor. He sat with his back to the wall, knees up.
“Where is she?” he asked gently.
“Whereja fink?” Susan scrabbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief, tried to wipe some order into her tear-grimed face. Hard, impatient strokes. “Gone, ent she.”
“They took her?”
Susan blew her nose loudly on the cloth, tucked it away again. “Course they bloody did. Big bloody bullies, buncha grown men draggin’ ’er aht like that. Was it you—told ’em where we was?”
“No.”
She seemed to look properly at him for the first time, where he sat at her level on the floor. She sniffed and levered herself to her feet. “Lot of bloody use you was anyway.”
“When did they come?”
“Day after you. In the evenin’, when it was dark. Bloody cowards.”
After he’d rejected Hardy’s offer. It fit. Allow a few hours to put together the swoop. And yes, darkness to cloak the abduction.
“You recognize them?”
She shook her head, turned to stare blindly out of the window, down into the backyards. “Didn’t ’ave to. Bloody well know who sent ’em, dun I.”
“Who sent them?”
“What’s it to you, anyhow?” Her voice came drab, wrung out as an old scrubbing cloth. “Why’d you care?”
“I found Mimi. I brought her out of the Forest.”
This, at least, got her attention. She tipped her head away from the window, stared down at him where he sat. “You wot?”
“Aye. And then they fucking shot me.” He pushed up the woolen cap, tapped at the scoring in his scalp. “Took the girl. Left me for dead.”
Susan goggled at him as if he’d just risen from the grave.
Which, he supposed, he pretty much had.
Once again.
Some might say you’re making a habit of this, Duncan.
“I am very interested to know who came and took your mistress, Susan, because I am going to make them pay. And maybe get her back along the way. You want to help me?”
She hesitated, seated herself finally in the chair, leaning tensely forward.
“You really found ’er?” She wanted to believe.
“Aye.”
“How was she?”
Duncan reflected. “Strong,” he said finally. “She was scared, but she stayed strong. We walked out, some fucking distance, I can tell you, and she never complained once, she never cried. When the time came, she was brave. She made it out because she was brave.”
Susan nodded, tearing up all over again. She sniffed, hard. Knuckled at her eyes.
“It’s ’im,” she said. “That bloody Sir Michael.”
Duncan blinked. “Sir Michael…?”
“Sir Michael bloody Endershall. ’er bloody ’usband! That’s who dun it.”
—
They’d been on the run for years.
The story came tumbling out of Susan, like unwashed laundry from a cupboard it’s been stuffed away in for far too long.
Irene Rush, in fact Lady Ada Endershall-Ulver—of the penniless but well-regarded Berkshire Ulvers, apparently—ensconced in the bosom of the Endershall estate, walks the summer lawns at dusk behind a determinedly tottering Mimi and slowly begins to feel the creeping sensation of unseen eyes on them both from the tree line at the edge of the gardens.
At first she thinks she’s being ridiculous, overprotective, tugged at by the primal tides of early motherhood, and she tells Susan as much.
But the feelings persist. She wakes in the night to feed Mimi, feels the same cold creeping fingers of dread right there in the nursery.
In the end, she broaches it with her husband.
Sir Michael tells her she’s being ridiculous, overprotective, giving in to the primal tides of early motherhood.
But there’s something in his tone…
And her dread redoubles.
Like she jest shrank in on ’erself, Susan told him in the same drab and dusty voice. Poor mite. Like she was meltin’ away wiv the fear.
Already sleeping poorly and at irregular hours, Irene takes to haunting the corridors of her own home with Mimi gathered to her breast. One night, she chances to pass the door to the library gallery and hears voices, Sir Michael’s and others. She creeps in to listen…
An’ they was talkin’ about takin’ ’er baby away.
Sayin’ it’s time, the contract’s due, and hell to pay if we don’t—I couldn’t make no sense of it when she told me.
But I knew that old bastard was up to somefink.
You’d see it in ’is eyes, the way ’e moped about the place, lost ’is temper with ’er, wouldn’t even bloody look at the baby! After that, we didn’t ’ave no choice.
Midnight flit.
Whatever state Ada Endershall-Ulver was in, prone to primal motherhood or not, she seemed to have a cool head under fire, once her mind was made up.
Duncan nodding at this—he’d seen the same thing in the trenches often enough, men eaten up with nerves and confinement until the crunch finally came, and then a grim-faced sufficiency seemed to descend.
The two women and the baby, spirited away by night on the wings of money Irene had squirreled away out of her husband’s view, some meager inheritance from an aunt, some pawned jewelry, so forth.
They feinted south, toward the coast and Southampton, laid tracks that seemed to end at a White Star liner shipping migrants to New York.
The ship sailed; they were not on it. Instead, they zigzagged across the home counties by train, went to ground in Bristol, where Irene found work.
Out of wartime fervor, she’d studied for the newly instituted civil service official clerical qualifications, took the exams, and passed with flying colors, only for the war to end before she could apply her skills. Now, though, she—
“Wait a minute,” Duncan objected. “Those papers would have had her real name on them. How did she pass as Irene Rush?”
“Dunno. She jest did. You wanna hear this story or wot?”
He did.