The Iron Duke (16 page)

“ ‘Be ready for me?’ ” Even tight with anger, her voice was husky, with an accent Mina couldn’t place. Lady Corsair flung her arms wide, and her short aviator’s jacket opened to reveal two more knives tucked into a wide crimson belt. “Look around us, Trahaearn. There are plenty of asslickers here, all of them with airships. You go and find one.”

Unfazed, Trahaearn simply said, “I want
Lady Corsair
.”

“And so I’m to take you on, just like that?” Her lips curled into a snarl, exposing teeth that seemed too sharp. “Too late, captain. I’m already under contract to sail out tomorrow, half paid up front. I won’t break it.”

“We’ll return by tonight. We only have to cross the Channel to Calais.”

Curiosity flashed through the woman’s expression. Her gaze flicked to his bandages before she sized up Mina and Newberry. “With a cargo of London coppers? That’s not worth my time. Find another ship, Trahaearn.”

She reached for the rope ladder.

“Twenty-five livre,” the duke said.

Mina’s mouth fell open. The equivalent in English pounds would cover all of her family’s expenses for five years: the servants’ wages, food, taxes—with enough leftover to refurnish the town house.

Lady Corsair turned back to Trahaearn, smiling. “Welcome aboard, captain.”

Mina hadn’t realized how cold the open deck of an airship became after it started moving. Shivering, she buckled her overcoat, trying to remain out of the aviators’ way as they ran forward and aft, hauling on the sail lines. Near the ship’s bow, she finally found a seat on a wooden chest that no one seemed to be using, and high enough that she could look over the side. Below, the Medway ran like a sparkling ribbon through the yellow fields. The sun dazzled her eyes, but she looked up and out, amazed by the blueness of the sky. Even the clouds were a surprise, a faint wisp across the heavens and so incredibly white. She’d never seen anything so white, not even bone.

A vibration started up her legs, beneath her bottom. Glancing back, she saw the propellers begin to pick up momentum, felt the thrust of the engines as the airship gained speed. Lady Corsair stood on the quarterdeck, strapping on her goggles. Mina faced forward again. The icy wind whipped tears from her eyes, its roar almost deafening. She hunkered down in her overcoat, pushing up her collar—but she wouldn’t be able to stay up here long. She’d have to join Newberry in the forecastle below, and be content with the view from the portholes.

A pair of aviator’s goggles suddenly dangled in front of her face. Mina glanced up. Trahaearn stood beside her, carrying a second pair of goggles and a brown woolen scarf. Gratefully, Mina took both, buckling on the goggles and covering her ears with the scarf.

The wooden chest she’d chosen unfortunately proved wide enough for two—though barely. When Trahaearn sat, his hard thigh pressed against hers. He’d removed the bandages and washed away the blood, leaving his dark hair wet and slicked behind his ears, those small gold rings on full display.

They drew her gaze like a magnet almost as strong as the sky. She wished he’d cover them.

Her stomach tightened as he leaned in to speak, his mouth only an inch from her cheek. Though the only alternative was shouting against the wind, a raw throat and ringing ears seemed preferable to his disquieting proximity.

“Baxter sent Haynes to the Gold Coast as a messenger boy.”

Mina pulled back, frowning. “Why?”

He gestured her close again. “Keep still. I’ll tell you all that he said to me.”

His breath heated the air between them, and she wanted to pull away again, but it would be over more quickly if he relayed the admiral’s reasons all at once. She nodded.

“Six months ago, Baxter was asked to meet with a friend—he didn’t give me a name—in Port Fallow. You know of the city?”

Only by reputation. The notorious walled city had been built on Amsterdam’s remains, and provided a safe haven for anyone on the run—including many criminals and pirates. Whoever he’d met with probably had a reason not to come to England, and Baxter probably hadn’t sailed into the port under an admiral’s flag.

She tilted her head so that their cheeks were almost aligned, the better for him to hear her. “So you were not the only unsavory type he’d befriended.”

His startled laugh reverberated against her skin. “No. No, I wasn’t.”

She heard the grief that suddenly deepened the last word, as if his amusement had been a crack that let other emotions spill through. Jaw tightening, Trahaearn turned his head. Cold air rushed between them.

Only a moment later, he angled his head to hers again and continued, “He told Baxter that he’d received an invitation from Jean-Pierre Colbert to attend an auction on the Gold Coast. And the only reason for an exclusive auction in the Ivory Market is so that word doesn’t reach the wrong ears.”

Like the ears of a Royal Navy admiral
, Mina guessed. And the Frenchman’s name sounded familiar. “Colbert?”

“Brimstone Island,” he said.

That
Colbert? Mina shook her head in disbelief. Situated in the Antilles, Brimstone Island had another, official name, but after the French and Liberé war, during which a military camp on the island had been used to hold prisoners of war, the island was only known by the name given to it by the thousands of prisoners who’d suffered there. Colbert, a pipelayer, the camp’s commandant—and an illegitimate relation of the French monarch—had hired mercenaries to oversee the prisoners. The mercenaries had taken the money for food and medicine, and left the men nothing to live on. The accounts of starvation and sickness from the surviving prisoners had been beyond horrifying.

“I thought Colbert had been hanged?”

“No. He was quietly pardoned and shipped over to the Ivory Market. Now, he runs an auction house—and when truly rare items come into his possession, he makes certain that his family knows of them, and holds exclusive auctions like these . . . usually with invitations issued to parties who won’t have the funds to outbid the French Crown.”

Fixing the auctions in favor of his family—probably to regain
their
favor. “Did the invitation indicate what kind of item was up for auction, then?”

“A weapon. One-time use, powerful, but no other details were given. No one would lay out that much money on an untested weapon, though—so Colbert scheduled a demonstration, during which the interested buyers would settle on a date for the auction.”

A demonstration of a weapon that could be used once? Mina frowned, but as if anticipating her question, Trahaearn shook his head. “Baxter didn’t know what they’d planned to use for the demonstration. But his friend intended to view it—and was to pass along a description of the weapon to Haynes, along with the date the auction would take place.”

“So the
Terror
was supposed to have sailed to the Gold Coast and collected this message?”

“Yes.”

“And while there, join the Gold Coast fleet.”

“Yes. The fleet is scheduled to return to England shortly, and would have escorted the
Terror
home.”

“So either Haynes didn’t locate the fleet, or Dame Sawtooth took the ship before the
Terror
reached the Gold Coast.” Another thought struck her. “Or after Haynes received the message, he couldn’t wait for the fleet, and tried to return alone. When was the demonstration supposed to be?”

“Six days ago. But if he received information that demanded immediate response, he’d have gone to the fleet commander.”

Immediate response . . . such as if the weapon posed an imminent threat to England. “Has there been word from the fleet?”

“No. But Baxter doesn’t expect any for another week.”

Something tightened in Mina’s chest. Baxter
didn’t
expect any. Trahaearn seemed to notice his slip, too. He fell silent.

Mina sat back, looked out over the airship’s bow. A hundred questions took their places at the tip of her tongue, like lemmings preparing to leap. But the Iron Duke was at the forefront of them, not a captain dead by unknown means, not a ship lost, not the woman who had taken it.

She chose another instead. Turning back, she glanced at his face and wished she hadn’t. Some men looked ridiculous in goggles. Some were dashing. With his gold hoops and a half-day’s growth of stubble darkening his lean jaw, the Iron Duke simply looked the rogue.

And he watched her, even now. The train, the steamcoach, and the bow of an airship. She couldn’t escape him.

With a sigh, she gestured him closer and leaned in to speak. He dipped his head, his cheek brushing hers. Deliberately, she was certain. Her fingers curled against her thighs and she tilted her face away from him, looking directly at the top of his ear—and was struck by a sudden and powerful need to lick him there, to feel the gold rings against her lips, to learn whether the wind chilled the metal or if his body heated them. To bite him, gently. To draw in the scent of his warmth and to bury her fingers in his hair while she flicked her tongue over the hoops.

Appalled by the strange compulsion, Mina shook herself. What had she meant to ask him?

A moment later, she remembered. “I saw something that looked exactly like the freezing device in the Blacksmith’s office this morning.
Surely
he doesn’t make them?”

Mina could imagine the Blacksmith capable of many things, but not that—and not because devices that emitted radio signals had been outlawed in England. She simply couldn’t believe that any man would build and sell a device that might be used to control him.

“He doesn’t,” Trahaearn confirmed. “That device came from one of my men, Mad Machen, who took it from a slaver ship near Anglesey. He sent it to London, hoping that the Blacksmith might recognize where it came from.”

“It’s obviously a Horde device,” she said.

“Yes, but these men aren’t part of the Horde. On the slaver ship, the man carrying the device called himself a member of the Black Guard.”

Mina drew back to frown at him.
The Black Guard?
Those rumors fell into the same category as the stories of a kraken off the Welsh coast, the fears that a bugger magistrate could be mind-controlled, or a New Worlder’s certainty that every infected person became a zombie after death. Fueled by paranoia, the whispers about the Black Guard had begun in the slums, and flourished whenever someone disappeared unexpectedly. But Mina had seen too many unidentified corpses collected off the streets to put any stock in tales of buggers who were frozen in their beds at night and taken away by the Black Guard.

Frozen
in their beds
. Oh, blue heavens.

Trahaearn must have seen the realization on her face. Nodding, he tugged her forward again. “Mad Machen has run into fourteen Black Guard members on these slaver ships. They always kill themselves rather than be captured—or he has to kill them—and so we still don’t know what they want.”

“Or why they would murder your friend.”

“Yes. That wasn’t like anything we’ve seen them do before. They run, they hide, and they abduct their slaves under cover of night—not assassinate a man in broad daylight.”

“That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before. The murderer just wasn’t caught—or cornered against a garden wall.”

“The rutting coward.” His voice hardened. “There’s no use in the world for men who can’t face the consequences of what they’ve done.”

Mina almost snorted. That, from a pirate turned duke? But since she agreed with him, and because that coward had just murdered his friend, she let it pass without comment.

“What of Dame Sawtooth?” Mina wondered. “Would she be part of the Black Guard?”

He suddenly grinned, shaking his head. “The Dame has never done anything quietly—and she’d never join any organization that expected her to kill herself rather than make a scene.”

“You know her well?”

“From the day I took the
Terror
from Adams until the year after I blew the tower, there wasn’t a moment when the Dame wasn’t trying to kill me. After almost a decade of keeping an eye out for her, I know her well enough.”

A full decade dedicated to chasing after him? Even the Horde hadn’t expended that much effort to catch him, and Mina could only imagine one reason to pursue a man for that long: revenge. “Why does she hate you so much?”

“She was Adams’s woman.”

And Trahaearn had said he’d left Adams bleeding in dung. “Did she witness the mutiny?”

“No. She was on the stage in Port-au-Prince.”

“An actress?”

He nodded. “After she heard what happened, she purchased
Bontemps
and came after me.”

“Just to kill you? Then why take the
Terror
now? Why not drop a firebomb on your house instead of a man?”

“It’s always been about the
Terror
. If she killed me, if she returned the ship to Manhattan City, she thought Adams’s reputation would be restored.”