16

SIC TRANSIT

IT WASN’T THAT HARD to disappear. The O’Higgins brothers were masters of the art, as they assured her.

“Leave it to us, sweetheart,” Rafe said, taking the purse she handed him. “To a Londoner, the world beyond the end of his street is as furrin as the pope. All ye need do is keep away from the places folk are used to seein’ ye.”

She hadn’t had much choice. She wasn’t going anywhere near the Duke of Pardloe or his friend Quarry or the Twelvetrees brothers. But there was still business to be done before she could go back to Paris—books to be both sold and bought, shipments made and received—and a few bits of more-private business, as well.

So Minnie had written a note paying off Lady Buford and announcing her return to France and then stayed in Parson’s Green with Aunt Simpson and her family for a month. She allowed the O’Higginses to do the more straightforward things and—with some reluctance—entrusted the more delicate acquisitions to Mr. Simpson and her cousin Joshua. There’d been two or three clients who had declined to meet with anyone save her, and though the temptation was considerable, the risk was too great, and she had simply not replied to those.

She had gone once with Aunt Simpson to the farm, to take leave of her mother. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go into Soeur Emmanuelle’s chamber, though, and had only laid her head and hands against the cool wood of the door and wept silently.

But now it was all done. And she stood alone in the rain on the deck of the Thunderbolt, bobbing like a cork over the waves of the channel toward France. And her father.

THE LAST THING she would ever do, she vowed to herself, was to tell her father who it had been.

He knew who Pardloe was, what his family background had been, just how fragile his family’s present grip on respectability. And thus Pardloe’s vulnerability to blackmail.

Perhaps not outright blackmail…at least, she didn’t want to believe her father engaged in that. He’d always told her to avoid it. Not on moral grounds—he had principles, her father, but not morals—but on the purely pragmatic grounds that it was dangerous.

“Most blackmailers are amateurs,” he’d told her, handing her a small stack of letters to read—an educational exchange between a blackmailer and his victim, written in the late fifteenth century. “They don’t know what it’s decent to ask for, and they don’t know how to quit, even if they wanted to. It doesn’t take a victim long to realize that, and then…it’s often death. For one or the other.

“In this instance”—he’d nodded at the crumbling brown-stained papers in her hand—“it was both of them. The woman being blackmailed invited the blackmailer to her home for dinner and poisoned him. But she used the wrong drug; it didn’t kill him outright, but it worked fast enough for him to realize what she’d done, and he strangled her over the dessert.”

No, he probably hadn’t had any intent of blackmailing Pardloe himself.

At the same time, she was certainly intelligent enough to realize that the letters and documents her father dealt in were very often commissioned by or sold to persons who intended to use them for blackmail. She thought of Edward Twelvetrees and his brother and felt colder than the icy blast of the wind off the English Channel.

Were her father to realize that it was Pardloe who had debauched his daughter…What on earth would he do? she wondered.

He wouldn’t scruple to kill Pardloe, if he could do it undetected, she was pretty sure of that. Though he was very pragmatic: he might just demand satisfaction of a financial nature as compensation for the loss of his daughter’s virginity. That was a salable commodity, after all.

Or—the worst possibility of all—he might try to force the Duke of Pardloe to marry her.

That’s what he’d wanted: to find her a rich English husband, preferably one well-placed in society.

“Over my dead body!” she said out loud, causing a passing deckhand to look at her strangely.

SHE’D REHEARSED IT on the journey back. How she’d tell her father—what she wouldn’t tell him—what he might say, think, do…She had a speech composed—firm, calm, definite. She was prepared for him to shout, to rebuke, disown her, show her the door. She wasn’t at all prepared for him to look at her standing in the doorway of the shop, gulp air, and burst into tears.

Flabbergasted, she said nothing and an instant later was being crushed in his arms.

“Are you all right?” He held her away from him, so he could look into her face, and swiped a sleeve across his own wet, anxious, gray-stubbled face. “Did the swine hurt you?”

She couldn’t decide whether to say “What swine?” or “What are you talking about?” and instead settled on a dubious-sounding “No…”

He let go then and stepped back, reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief, which he handed her. She realized belatedly that she was sniffling and her own eyes were welling.

“I’m sorry,” she said, all her speeches forgotten. “I didn’t mean to….to…” But you did, her heart reminded her. You did mean it. She swallowed that down with her tears and said instead, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Papa.”

She hadn’t called him that in years, and he made a sound as though someone had punched him in the belly.

“It’s me that’s sorry, girl,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I let you go by yourself. I should never…I knew…Christ, I’ll kill him!” Blood flooded his pale cheeks, and he slammed a fist on the counter.

“No, don’t,” she said, alarmed. “It was my fault. I—” I what?

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, though not hard.

“Don’t ever say that. It—whatever—however it happened, it wasn’t your fault.” His hands dropped away from her shoulders and he drew breath, panting as though he’d been running. “I—I—” He stopped and ran a trembling hand down his face, closing his eyes.

He took two more deep breaths, opened his eyes, and said, with some semblance of his normal calm, “Come and sit down, ma chère. I’ll make us some tea.”

She nodded and followed him, leaving her bag where it had fallen. The back room seemed at once completely familiar and quite strange, as though she had left it years ago rather than months. It smelled wrong, and she felt uneasy.

She sat down, though, and put her hands on the worn wooden tabletop. There was a spinning sensation in her head, and when she took a deep breath to try to stop it, the sense of seasickness came back, the smell of dust and ancient silk, stewed tea and the nervous sweat of many visitors curling into a greasy ball in her stomach.

“How…how did you find out?” she asked her father, in an effort to distract herself from the sense of clammy apprehension.

His back was to her, as he chiseled a chunk from the battered brick of tea and dropped it into the chipped Chinese pot with its blue peonies. He didn’t turn around.

“How do you think?” he said evenly, and she thought suddenly of the spiders, the thousands of eyes, hanging motionless, watching…

“Pardonnez-moi,” she said, breathless, and, stumbling to her feet, blundered out into the corridor and to the alley door, where she threw up over the cobblestones outside.

She stayed outside for perhaps a quarter of an hour, letting the cold air in the shadows cool her face, letting the sounds of the city come back to her, the noise of the street a faint echo of normality. Then the bell of Sainte-Chapelle struck the hour, and all the others followed, the distant bong of Notre Dame de Paris telling Paris in a deep bronze voice that the hour was three o’clock.

“It’s almost time for None,” her aunt had said. “When she hears the bells, she won’t do anything until the prayer is done, and often she’s silent afterward.”

“None?”

“The hours,” Mrs. Simpson had said, pushing the door open. “Hurry, if you want her to speak with you.”

She wiped her mouth on the hem of her skirt and went inside. Her father had finished making the tea; a fresh-poured cup sat by her place. She picked it up, took a mouthful of the steaming brew, swished it round her mouth, and spat it into the aspidistra.

“I saw my mother,” she blurted.

He stared at her, so shocked that he didn’t seem to breathe. After a long moment, he carefully unclenched his fists and laid his hands on the table, one atop the other.

“Where?” he said very quietly. His gaze was still fixed, intent on her face.

“In London,” she said. “Did you know where she was—is?”

He’d started to think; she saw the thoughts flying behind his eyes. What did she know? Could he get away with lying? Then he blinked, took a breath, and let it out through his nose in a sigh of…decision, she thought.

“Yes,” he said. “I…keep in touch with her sister. If you’ve met Emmanuelle, I imagine you’ve met Miriam, as well?” One of his unruly eyebrows went up, and she nodded.

“She said—said that you paid for her care. Have you seen her, though? Seen where they keep her, seen how she…is?” Emotion was rumbling through her like an approaching thunderstorm, and she had trouble keeping her voice steady.

“No,” he said, and she saw he’d gone white to the lips, whether with anger or some other emotion, she couldn’t tell. “I never saw her again, after she told me that she was with child.” He swallowed, and his eyes went to his folded hands.

“I tried,” he said, looking up as though she’d challenged him, even though she’d said nothing. “I went to the convent, spoke with the mother superior. She had me arrested.” He laughed, shortly but not with humor. “Did you know that debauching a nun is a crime punishable by exposure in the pillory?”

“I imagine you bought your way out of it,” she said, as nastily as she could.

“So would anyone capable of doing so, ma chère,” he said, keeping his temper. “But I had to leave Paris. I hadn’t met Miriam then, but I knew about her. I sent her word, and money, imploring her to find what they had done with Emmanuelle—to save her.”

“She did.”

“I know.” He’d got hold of himself now and gave her a sharp look. “And if you’ve seen Emmanuelle, you know what her state is. She went mad when the child—”

“When I was born!” She slapped a hand on the table, and the cups chimed in their saucers. “Yes, I know. Do you bloody blame me for her—for what happened to her?”

“No,” he said, with an obvious effort. “I don’t.”

“Good.” She took a breath and blurted, “I’m pregnant.”

He went dead white and she thought he might faint. She thought she might faint, too.

“No,” he whispered. His eyes dropped to her middle, and a deep qualm there made her feel she might be sick again.

“No. I won’t…I won’t let such a thing happen to you!”

“You—” She wanted to strike him, might have done so had he not been on the other side of the table.

“Don’t you dare tell me how I can get rid of it!” She swept the cup and saucer off the table, smashing them against the wall in a spray of Bohea. “I’d never do that—never, never, never!”

Her father took a deep breath and very consciously relaxed his posture. He was still white, and his eyes creased with emotion, but he had himself under control.

“That,” he said softly, “is the last thing I would ever do. Ma chère. Ma fille.”

She saw that his eyes were full of tears and felt the blow in her heart. He’d come for her when she was born. Come for his child, cherished and kept her.

He saw her fists unclench and he took a step toward her, tentative, as though walking on ice. But she didn’t recoil and didn’t shout, and one more step and they were in each other’s arms, both weeping. She’d so missed the smell of him, tobacco and black tea, ink and sweet wine.

“Papa…” she said, and then cried harder, because she’d never been able to say “Mama” and never would, and this tiny, helpless thing she carried would never know a father. She’d never felt so sad—but at the same time comforted.

He’d cared. He’d come for her after she was born. He’d loved her. He always would—that was what he was saying now, murmuring into her hair, sniffing back the tears. He’d never let her be persecuted and abused as her mother was, never let harm come to her or to her child.

“I know,” she said. Worn out, she rested her head on his chest, holding him as he held her. “I know.”