Jane Steele(124)

Flushing beet red, I replied, “Your inheritance was unexpected. I wanted to live there again, thought that it may have been . . . mine.”

“And so it is!” he crowed. “Every brick, every weapon, every bloody blade of grass is as much yours as I am, darling, supposing you’ll give me a pallet in the stables and a crust from time to time. Are you quite mad?”

“I don’t want you to live on a pallet.” My tears spilled, and he painted his fingertips over my jaw. “I want you to live in my bones, but how can you not be angry I lied?”

“I’m a scoundrel, Jane. Born of scoundrels, bred of ’em to boot. Not to mention a whoreson bastard, as you yourself once called me, and I remember the occasion with great fondness save for the part where you toppled off a horse.”

“Oh, but there’s more, there’s—”

“Breathe, darling.” Running his palms down my arms, he cupped my small hands in his large ones as we had once done in his office. “Please, I’m drowning just looking at you. Have a spot of pity and breathe for me. So you’re a scoundrel too, I take it—I’d suggest we make matching uniforms, but that quite sabotages knavery, you see, and should thwart our purposes. What else?”

“I’m a murderess, sir.”

“Does she suppose me deaf and blind?” he cried incredulously. “Does she suppose I simply forgot that she—”

“Five times over.”

Charles Thornfield began to say something. Then, brushing his thumb under my damp eyes once more, he began to say something else. Finally, after puffing a vexed sigh, he muttered something else entirely, by which time I was prepared to die on the spot. I think my heart must have only commenced beating once more when the wry creases around his brows smoothed into softer seams, as he looked when he spoke with Sahjara or picked up a delicate antique volume from his library—as he looked when he wanted to take especial care. He passed me his kerchief, counting on his left hand.

“The first?” he questioned, and his rough voice had gentled.

“When I was a girl, my half brother tried to rape me and I pushed him,” I whispered. “He died. I used to— I no longer think that was entirely my fault; but it was the most important, for it was the first, and made me who I am.”

Mr. Thornfield’s eyes frosted over entirely. “Oh, my darling Jane. Next?”

“My headmaster gave me the choice of watching my friend starve or being sent to a madhouse. I stabbed him with a letter opener.”

He whistled, continuing to count. “Much more impressive. The third?”

“My landlord beat his wife until she lost their unborn child, so I pushed him into the Thames.”

“It’s not many corpses as can foul the Thames, bless ’em. You accomplished a miracle. Go on?”

“A judge wanted to buy my friend’s little girl and turn her into his dollymop. I gave him inheritance powder and he died dreadfully.”

“Not so dreadfully as he should have done. And I know Jack Ghosh personally, my darling, so does that make up the full roster?”

“Yes.”

Reader, I wanted with every cell in my bloodstream to fly from the room and weep for days, but I was prevented; the grim line above his clear-cut nose appeared, and he pursed his lips sternly.

I waited, frozen in terror.

“I don’t think much of your list, y’see,” he declared, and though his eyes were warm they were wet as well. “A more sorry lot of rubbish than you’ve dispatched I’ve not heard tell of. Why, in battle, Karman killed dozens of strapping British and Bengal gents who’d not have pissed on these dregs if they were on fire. We simply must raise your killing standards, my darling, because I’m frankly ashamed at the quality of chaps you’ve—”

We were both laughing through tears by the time I had flung myself the short distance into his lap and was kissing him, so warm and so real underneath me. His shoulders under my questing hands were at first as tense with worry as mine, I think, for I had alarmed him; but soon, they calmed, and he cradled me more softly, and dropped his lips against my neck with a breath like a prayer.

“That was egregiously unfair of you,” he murmured against my skin. “I thought you were about to confess to fatal consumption, or a fellow whose company you prefer, or the fact you’ve been called back to faerie, something bloody important.”

“Do you know that you’re entirely insane?” I had pulled the black ribbon from his head and buried my hands in his hair.

“Yes, actually, but this form of madness is far preferable to that of a fortnight since, don’t y’agree?”

“God, yes.” I calmed myself. “And I never thought that mad, only tragic.”

He set his hands softly at my waist, frowning in thought.

I passed quiet fingers over his hairline and waited, wondering whether his torment had been constant or more like owning a heart which had stopped like a broken watch; I wondered whether he knew himself.

“I hated the hands which couldn’t help her,” he concluded hoarsely. “And all those dead, Jane . . . Even after coming here, when I would walk into a pub or a square, I couldn’t look at humans without seeing them as corpses.” He shook his white head. “Then I saw you. You are so alive, Jane Steele, you make my breath catch, as if a glowing creature from the depths of the forest had lit upon the end of my finger. You had already endeared yourself to me by greeting Sahjara so courteously, as if somehow it were a happy circumstance for you to accidentally enter our madhouse. When I saw you fall from Nalin that night, I knew you were dead, my darling, I knew it with such certainty, because how could anyone I had liked so well from the first survive such an accident? Then you sprang up wielding invective and knives and I adored you. I thought it lunacy that you should take such a frank interest in my history.”