Hello Stranger (The Ravenels #4)(40)

“She’s a curiosity, is all.”

“Oh come,” Jenkyn said with amused chiding, “she’s a good deal more than that. Even Dr. Gibson’s sharpest detractors won’t deny that she’s extraordinary.”

Ethan shook his head. “She has a high way with her. Hard as flint.”

“I’m not displeased by your interest in her, my boy. Quite the opposite.”

“You’ve always said women are a distraction.”

“So they are. However, I’ve never asked you to live like a monk. A man’s natural passions are meant to be exercised in moderation. Prolonged celibacy makes the constitution irritable.”

“I’m not irritable,” Ethan snapped. “And I’m no more interested in Dr. Gibson than I am in staring at a bucket of dirt.”

Jenkyn appeared to suppress a smile. “Thou doth protest too much.” Seeing Ethan’s lack of comprehension, he asked, “Haven’t you read the copy of Hamlet I gave to you?”

“I didn’t finish it,” Ethan muttered.

The older man was obviously displeased. “Why not?”

“Hamlet spends all his time talking. He never does anything. It’s a revenge play with no revenge.”

“How do you know, if you haven’t finished it?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care how it ends.”

“The play is about a man who’s forced to face the reality of human depravity. He lives in a fallen world, in which ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is whatever he decides. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ I assumed you would have had enough imagination to put yourself in Hamlet’s place.”

“If I were in his place,” Ethan said sullenly, “I’d do more than stand around making speeches.”

Jenkyn regarded him with a touch of fond paternal exasperation. Something in that interested, caring look pierced down to the place in Ethan’s heart that had always yearned for a father. And it hurt.

“The play is a mirror held up to a man’s soul,” Jenkyn said. “Read the rest of it, and tell me about the reflection you see.”

The last thing Ethan wanted to see was the reflection of his own soul. God help him, it might look far too similar to the man sitting across from him.

But there was his mother’s influence. More and more often of late, Ethan had found himself thinking about her shame at the sins her circumstances had obliged her to commit, and her hopes that he would grow up to be a good man. She’d turned to religion near the end of her life, and had worried constantly about salvation, not only her own, but also her son’s. She had died of cholera not long after Ethan had joined K division.

One of Ethan’s last memories of his mother was how she’d wept with pride upon first seeing him in the blue uniform. She’d thought it would be the saving of him.

Oh, how she would have hated Sir Jasper Jenkyn.

“As for Dr. Gibson,” Jenkyn continued, “my compliments on your taste. A woman with a brain will keep you interested out of bed as well as in it.”

If Jenkyn thought Ethan cared for Garrett, he would use her as a pawn to manipulate him. She might be threatened or harmed. She might simply disappear one day, as if into thin air, never to be seen again unless Ethan did whatever unspeakable thing Jenkyn wanted of him.

“I prefer a woman who’s easy for the taking, and easy to discard,” Ethan said curtly. “Unlike Dr. Gibson.”

“Not at all,” came Jenkyn’s softly chilling reply. “As you and I are both aware, Ransom . . . anyone can be discarded.”



Leaving Whitehall on foot, Ethan headed north and cut across to the Victoria Embankment, a road and river walk along the Thames. The new roadway along the granite-faced embankment had been expected to ease the crush of daytime traffic along Charing Cross, Fleet Street, and the Strand, but it seemed to have made no appreciable difference. At night, however, the embankment was comparatively quiet. Occasional puffs of smoke or steam rising through the iron ventilation grids reminded pedestrians of the subterranean world beneath their feet: tunnels, telegraph wires, underground railways, and pipes for gas and water.

Wandering near a coal and forage wharf, Ethan reached a maze of alleys crowded with excavating equipment and temporary contractors’ workshops. He slipped behind a massive stone-channeling machine and waited.

In less than two minutes, a dark figure entered the alley.

As Ethan had expected, it was Gamble. The lean, wolfish face and sharp brow were distinctive even in the shadows. Like Ethan, he was tall but not so towering that he would stand out in a crowd. With his big arms and bulldog chest, he carried most of his power in his upper torso.

There were many things to admire about William Gamble, but very little to like. He was physically adept and aggressive, able to tolerate brutal punishment and keep coming back for more. His tenacity had driven him to train harder than any of Jenkyn’s men. He never complained or made excuses, never exaggerated or boasted. Those were all qualities Ethan respected.

But Gamble had been born into a coal-mining family in Newcastle, and the desperate poverty of his childhood had engendered a ferocity that had burned out any softer qualities. He had come to revere Jenkyn with an intensity that verged on zealotry. There was no sentiment in him, no trace of empathy, which Ethan had once judged as a strength but had turned out to be a weakness. Gamble tended to miss the fiddly little clues and signals that people unconsciously gave away in conversation. As a result, he didn’t always ask the right questions, and often misinterpreted the answers.