The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(13)

When they reached the drawbridge, the man held out his hand. For a moment she thought that he was offering comfort or understanding or something equally impertinent and irrelevant. But he only wanted the bundle of bloody clothing she carried under her cloak. When she handed it to him, he did something with the brick, swiftly knotting the remains of her petticoat around it, then dropped the parcel into the churning river below. She resisted the urge to watch the bundle fall. Somehow, she trusted that it would reach the water, rather than landing on one of the great island-like starlings that supported the bridge’s many arches. She had the distinct sense that this was not the first time this man had dropped something off this bridge, and also that he could be relied upon to dispose of incriminating evidence.

Despite the roadway being closed in by houses and shielded from the worst of the wind, it was colder on the bridge than it had been on solid ground. The cold distracted her from the thoughts that had begun to pound at her mind like a bill collector at the door. She had killed a man, or near enough to it so as not to matter. And it hadn’t been in self-defense. It hadn’t even been in Percy’s defense, at least not in any kind of sense that would matter to a judge. She didn’t even know if it mattered in a moral sense, or an ethical sense, or whatever standard she was supposed to apply to her conscience.

Whatever it was, she probably ought to feel something about it. Remorse would seem to be the bare minimum, and some sorrow or anger wouldn’t go amiss. But all of her emotions had deserted her, leaving her brain a scrubbed-out husk. On the one hand, this was tremendously convenient, as she doubted that any emotion her mind might see fit to generate presently would be one she enjoyed very much. On the other hand, the sensation was rather like standing up only to discover that her feet had gone numb.

On the south side of the river, they passed one church and then another. So many churches. She tried to remember the song Eliza’s nursery maid sang to her, cheerfully listing out churches and ending, improbably, with a beheading. Or perhaps not so improbably—the main thrust of childrearing seemed to be to keep children from the gallows, and with good reason; she had a doting and indulgent parent and easily hoodwinked governesses and look what had become of her. The path to sin and ruination was much shorter than she might have guessed.

The man looked back at her and she realized she had been humming the song about church bells. She stopped.

“There’s no use dwelling on it,” he said, turning a corner. “It’s never an easy feeling, when you know you’ve sent a man out of the world. I’d tell you that it gets easier, but it doesn’t.”

“That’s not—you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She supposed she ought to be more alarmed by the fact that he had just confessed to killing more than one person, but she no longer felt capable of alarm.

“I wish I didn’t, sweetheart, but I’m a storehouse of information on the topic.”

She sniffed and carried on following him through a neighborhood that seemed to consist entirely of taverns, graveyards, and still more churches.

“I don’t know your name,” she said. “If we mean to travel together, I need to know what to call you.”

For the first time since the drawbridge, he halted. “You know my name,” he said, turning toward her. “You’ve tailed me for how long now?”

“A few weeks,” she admitted.

“And obviously you figured out that I’m friends with Kit.”

“I think you have a very high opinion of yourself to imagine that news of your celebrity precedes you,” she said, even though of course he was correct. She had seen him come and go from Mr. Webb’s coffeehouse at all hours. From that fact and Dinah’s gossip and the contents of his letters, she had identified him as the confederate of Mr. Webb who had evidently returned from the dead, a man everyone simply referred to as Rob.

She knew those facts and a good many besides, but she still didn’t know his surname. “We haven’t been introduced. I don’t know what to call you.”

“In my circles, being an accessory to a murder counts as a proper introduction.” And then he shook his head and carried on walking. “Rob,” he said, not looking back at her.

“Rob,” she repeated. It was an unwanted intimacy, and she felt guilty shaping her mouth around the syllable. She would prefer to call him sir, as she had addressed him in her letters, but she couldn’t think about those letters, because then she’d have to think about what had happened when the duke had found them, and then—

Besides, she could hardly call him sir while he—of all the vulgarity—called her darling and sweetheart. “Surely you have a surname.”

“Brooks,” he said with a faint frown, as if answering a question so personal that Marian ought to be ashamed of herself.

She would call him Mr. Brooks, then, however little he liked it. But when she tried to think of him as Mr. Brooks, it felt absurd. It didn’t fit him in the least. It was like when people referred to Eliza as Lady Elizabeth, even though she wore nappies and spent most of the day with her thumb in her mouth. It was no good. In her mind, she would have to think of him as Rob, and she held him fully responsible for not being a person one could think of in a sensible way.

Rob stopped before a collection of buildings that looked and smelled like stables and rapped on the door, even though it had to be well past midnight. The door was answered by a boy who was still rubbing sleep from his eyes.