Scandalous Desires (Maiden Lane #3)(43)

Mick watched carefully as he neared the grave he’d come to see, for he wasn’t alone in the graveyard.

The Vicar of Whitechapel stood looking down at her headstone and the freshly mounded earth. For a man who had terrorized the East End of London for the better part of a decade he didn’t look that intimidating. He was of average height, wiry rather than heavily muscled, his shoulder-length hair graying, and his features pleasant.

“She called your name,” Charlie said as Mick halted on the far side of the new grave. “As she was dying. Pity you didn’t see fit to visit her on her deathbed.”

Mick smiled widely, easily, as if the news that she’d called for him wasn’t a white-hot poker thrust through his chest. “Busy, wasn’t I?”

Charlie turned then, looking at Mickey full on, and revealing the horror that was the left side of his face. His skin had melted or burned off his face. The eye socket was merely a hardened gouge, his nostril destroyed, his lips pulled down into his chin. The ear was a melted rim and the hair on the left side of his head was in tufts as if most of it had been pulled out by the very roots.

Mick’s smile widened. “Yer gettin’ handsomer by the hour, Charlie.”

The Vicar’s expression didn’t change—but then many of his facial muscles had been destroyed. His remaining brown eye glittered with mad hatred, though. A wise man would step away from such vicious anger.

Mick leaned forward. “I’ll not let ye drive me from me home, old man.”

Charlie’s eyelid drooped. “What makes you think you have any say-so in the matter, boy?”

Mick’s smile hardened. “What makes ye think I don’t?”

Charlie shrugged one shoulder—the other had scarring. “Might be because I know you’ve got your babe hid in that palace of yours—along with a woman called Silence Hollingbrook. I find that interesting, I do. Seems to me that it’d be a fair trade: your woman for my own.”

Mick shrugged himself as if Silence didn’t matter to him, but his heart had begun to beat in triple time. Of course the Vicar had found out about Silence. Of course he’d know that she was different simply because she’d stayed when none of his other women had.

“I never took yer woman,” Mick said.

“Aye, but you tried to.”

Mick raised an eyebrow. Charlie wasn’t making sense, but then he’d long known the man was mad.

“And that babe?” The Vicar tutted. “I hear she’s a sickly thing. Like to die soon. That must weigh upon your heart most sadly.”

Mick looked at the Vicar. He was such a small man for all the malice he held inside of him. Long ago Mick had wondered why Charlie was made the way he was. What had carved away all sympathy, all respect for other men. What had made him the vicious, violent bastard he was.

But he’d learned to stop wondering. It made no never mind why the Vicar was the way he was. As well to ask why a viper struck and killed for no reason. It was simply the way of nature.

“Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago,” Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. “If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I’ll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still f*ck women and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I’ll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.”

He walked away then, carefully not looking at the new headstone with the tiny angel carved at the top. Lad glanced up from sniffing a weed and fell into step with Mick as he passed. The temptation to attack now was almost overwhelming. His hands, balled into fists by his side, shook with the urge to strike the older man and put an end to this once and for all.

But Charlie never went anywhere without a half dozen guards. One lounged behind a tree, another two stood by the wall, and the remaining three were out of sight, but Mick had no doubt that they were nearby. Strange. Only a year ago, he might’ve damned the guards and attacked Charlie anyway. Now, Mick had the knowledge at the back of his mind that if he failed, he’d not be there to protect Silence—Charlie was mad enough to revenge himself on Silence even if Mick were dead. The realization was not a pleasant one—that only he stood between Charlie and Silence.

He nodded ironically to one of the Vicar’s men stationed at the churchyard gate as he passed by. Six men could overwhelm him, he supposed, if the Vicar chose to attack now, but that wasn’t the man’s way. Charlie preferred the indirect hit, the slow poison that systematically destroyed a person before they were even dead.

Mick halted in the middle of the street and threw back his head to gaze at the blue sky overhead. It was going to be a rare clear day in London, the sun shining so brightly one could almost believe in a God and all his angels, of a mother’s love and a boy’s innocent dreams. He closed his eyes and saw her brown eyes, sad and defeated and filled with tears as she’d sung to him.

Take me in your arms, my love
And blow the candle out.
A shouted curse made Mick open his eyes and spin to glare at a drover with a heard of sheep.

The man’s eyes widened and he was stuttering apologies even as Mick turned away. Mick walked the rest of the way home without conscious thought. When he got to his own door Lad trotted up the steps behind him. Mick shot him a look and for a moment the dog froze, one paw still lifted, and rolled his eyes sheepishly at him.