The Price of Hannah Blake (23 page)

Hannah said, “My mother is a midwife. When women are in distress because they aren’t married they come to her. She knows everything. She says medicines in bottles don’t work, the women are cheated.”

“She sounds like an intelligent woman,” said Dr. MacLeod, “and I am not surprised, seeing you. But Hannah, I am a doctor, and a surgeon; I trained at a very fine hospital in London. I know new things—ways to keep my instruments clean, so there will be no infection. And here,” he gestured at the room, “there are no other patients with diseases that might infect you, as in a hospital.”

She had been watching him, frowning. She said, uncertainly: “Other girls here must have had abortions. Many.”

“Yes, and when it was I who performed them, none died and none is left unable to have babies.”

“All right.” She slid to the floor, picked up her clothes, and put them on. Dr. MacLeod opened the door. Cara was there. “She’s a virgin. She was telling the truth. You don’t need to punish her, do you?”

Hannah came out past MacLeod. She turned to look at him. “Thank you.”

“You are a remarkable young woman, Hannah.”

Cara reached out and took her arm. “Come, now.”

“The duke will come for August Bank Holiday and has said I should be made ready for him. He told them, ‘The young woman in the Devon market with insolent eyes.’ He was angry that it has been so long and I haven’t been brought to him. Now I shall be brought.”

Although they were not near the others, David lowered his voice. “And Maria told you this?”

Hannah nodded. “That’s why they were so worried that I had been in your room. Brought me to Dr. MacLeod in a panic that I would not be virgin for the duke.”

Hannah had spoken evenly, lying close to him on the sand, looking into his eyes, but now her lips began to tremble. It was one of the midsummer afternoons, sun still high, when three bells released them to take the path through the woods, walking in groups of two or three, to throw off their clothes at the edge of the beach, and race into the waves. Now, Lilly and Rachael were swimming a few yards out, sometimes stopping to wrap their arms around each other, bare breasts together, and sink beneath the waves for a few moments, bobbing to the surface laughing. Charles and a few other boys sat apart in the shade playing cards.

Hannah and David spent few afternoons together and seldom spoke in class; they wanted no gossip of a special relationship. But as he had walked out of the dining room that morning, David passed her table. He stopped, smiling, but his voice was serious when he bent and murmured, “We must talk—today. Go to the beach with the others and see if we get our chance.” He straightened up, laughed easily, and walked away.

They found their chance in the fortuitous mix of students who chose the beach that day. Charles had little to do with David, since the fight, and the boys clustered around Charles. Lilly and Rachael seemed to be building up to a seduction, later, in some private place. Hannah and David were left over.

Hannah lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, breasts just brushing the sand. A fine coat of sand coated her calves, like socks, and in the warm sun most drops of water had dried from her buttocks. The hair down her back and around her face was stringy from her swim. David was lighter than she, although, by now, he had had several sunburns and his whitest skin, where a bathing suit might have been, was reddening.

Now, he tilted his head toward her, shock of black hair unruly as it dried, and said grimly, “August Bank Holiday? That makes sense. And it is in just over a week.”

Hannah nodded, looking into his eyes as though awaiting his solution.

‘Be damned!” he murmured. “A week!”

Hannah waited. He was looking down, as though staring at the sand between them. Finally, she said, “Well, I suppose that he will have me and it hardly can be worse than what the girls have done. But then I will not be virgin for my husband.”

He said, “When I choose a wife it will not matter if she is virgin. Must you marry a man who is a virgin?”

“But men are not virgins, I don’t think.”

“I mean a man who never has come in a woman.”

“In her pussy?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know. I had thought I would be my husband’s only woman. But now I have done every kind of thing. And you watched it all, that night.”

“And
that
does not matter, either. What matters is how you behaved—toward Miranda. The choices you made. Your courage.” He was looking into her eyes, frowning, watching her reaction. “Hannah, most people merely believe such things, about virgins, and they speak of ‘fallen women,’ but there are others who think about these matters—think their own thoughts—and have other beliefs. They are the people who have new ideas and look how they are changing the world. I am such a person—at least, I want to be such a person.”

“Then perhaps it will not matter,” she said, tonelessly. “I will discover what it feels like inside me, a prick. The doctor says it can feel quite as wonderful as rubbing my clit.”

“MacLeod said that?”

“I asked.”

“Oh.” He started to rise. He said, “We should not be here too long in whispered conversation. Let’s bathe and then come back.”

She got up, brushing sand from her breasts, her stomach. When she stood straight, facing him like this, David always seemed to gaze at her breasts, shaking his head, and then grin. She liked it when he did that.

Always, now, Hannah spent at least half-an-hour swimming without pause, doing a slow breast stroke a few yards off shore. The high walls on either side that continued out into the sea were some 300 yards apart. She swam toward one, then the other, but on one side the long wharf, running out a 100 yards, stopped her before she reached the wall. On the other, she did not approach the wall for fear of bringing out the guards. When she swam, David swam, too, but with a different stroke, his head low in the water, his body moving very fast.

When they had finished swimming and walked side by side toward the beach, he said, “I wish I could swim out to the net.”

“No! The guards would come!”

“That is why I would like to do it.”

She turned to him. He halted in less than six inches of water, where small waves gently broke above their ankles, and turned to look back. She turned, too. He said, “I want to see how they respond. In what boats, with how many men, and how quickly. And exactly where they come from.”

“Why must you escape? Why can’t your people come for you—the others? Why are you left to yourself?”

He said in the same low voice, “Nothing will be done, nothing, until there is evidence of what occurs in this place—evidence beyond dispute.”

“And how shall they get that evidence, with you a prisoner here? Why can no one help you?”

“It is for me to bring the evidence to them. They will not challenge the duke or the duke’s guards, or all this”—he waved at the walls, the wharf—”until I bring the evidence to them.”

She said bitterly, “So all live in fear of the duke, just as does a peasant girl from Devon.”

“The duke is brother to the queen and one of the most powerful men in England. Known for his temper and his revenge on his enemies.”

“The queen would not like what he does here.”

David gave a low bark of laughter. “She will not!”

“Well, you cannot get over the net. And if they catch you, they will deal with you, and that will be the end of it.” Her voice was tense with frustration.

“It is not only at this spot. I must understand how we are guarded.” He nodded toward the sea. “All of this, you know, is to guard this place against any who would enter, deliberately or not. And only after that comes preventing escape, though that they will do at all costs.”

“But why let us come here at all? Why let us out of the mansion? And then—” she waved her arm—”the net, the guards…?”

“I wondered, too, at first,” said David. “Until I saw how serious they are about those performances.” He turned to her. “Hannah, nothing could ever make the plays, the dancing, come alive if Myra and Charles and Darlene and the others had no passion, no excitement, none of the glow of youth. Someone here is smart enough to know you can’t get that from prisoners in cells. They take all the risks of letting you live because they must: The duke feeds on the living energy and spirit of youth.”

Hannah nodded and said slowly: “Not just the bodies.”

“And someone here understands that.” He looked up at the sun. “We don’t have a lot more time. One more thing, Hannah. Do you know where we are in England?”

“No one does.”

“We are on the south coast of England, the English Channel. You have heard of Portsmouth?”

“My father often would sail from there!”

“We are between Portsmouth and Brighton. I could show you, if we had a map. I know the coordinates. That means I can describe our location exactly in numbers, as can a sailor with his compass and sextant.”

“Portsmouth is not so very distant from Devon.”

“It is not. But perhaps that makes you still more sad?”

When she did not reply, he said, “Come, we have little time and I have not told you what I must.” At the edge of the trees, they sat side by side, arms holding their knees drawn to their chests, seeming to look not at each other but the ocean. David said, “Your father is a sailor, though now become a first mate…”

“Oh!”

“But a sailor may make high friends, at times. Your father’s ships fought sea battles in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. He chanced, as sometimes happens, to save the life of a very senior officer—and in doing so may well have prevented defeat of the entire attack. The man had not forgotten this when your father arrived in London, full of sorrow but also fury that you should disappear as into nowhere.”

“Yes, it must have seemed so and where in all the world could they look for me?”

“There is one thing you did not know, Hannah, but every day since you disappeared your mother has bitterly remembered it.”

Now, Hannah raised her head and turned to him, her eyes open with excitement. “What could it be?”

“That two men, dressed like gentlemen, with fine horses, came to her with a pocketful of gold. They proposed to pay enough for the family’s keep for years—on condition they take you off to London. They spoke of your beauty and spun stories of great opportunities, but your mother is no fool. She felt certain you would be taken to a London brothel. She showed them the door and thought no more—until but four days later you disappeared as though by magic.”

“If she had told me of it…”

“And she thinks that every day. But would you never then have walked to the market or on the high road?”

She shook her head. “No, to walk out by myself was my great diversion. And the need of the family, since who would go?”

“Well, it is this story, above all, that put your father in a rage, so that he rode to Exmouth that evening and sailed for London at dawn. There, in London, where women disappear daily, and police protest that most choose to do so, your father knew he would need a powerful friend. This he had in the Admiralty. I must one day tell you of the search for you.”

“And you have come.” She seemed to take in his whole body as she gazed. “And you have found me, but I have found you, as well. Now all depends on you and I would help, but cannot think how.”

“May I ask the progress of your investigation into this business of the duke, First Lord? It has been three weeks since we spoke at Hawardian.”

The prime minister preferred to have conversations of this kind on walks—at Dollis Hill, perhaps—but business today had run late, and he had proposed meeting at the first lord’s club, where they might dine. Now, he fixed the first lord, seated in an ample red-leather chair opposite his own, a glass of port in his right hand, with that eye that seemed to count the seconds before a reply.

The first lord was prepared. Three weeks! The duke’s scarcely imaginable scheme had gone forward for a decade at least! It was a record of secrecy to rival the Foreign Office! He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I expect a report within days—as soon as Tuesday.” That was two days away. The first lord continued, “Our man is there, now.”

The sunspots in the dark eyes flared with interest: “In the duke’s compound in the south, now? As a guest?”

“As a prisoner, prime minister, one of the young men and women at the mercy of the duke’s perverse preoccupations—and he is alone.”

The prime minister reclined. He gave a brief jerk of his head, the equivalent a ‘hmmpff!’ and gazed across the room. “Well,” he said, not leaning forward, so the first lord must do so to hear him, “that could not be more discreet, could it?”

“No, sir, it could not. And he is a volunteer! A man who quite nearly insisted on the assignment. He is not yet 25 years of age and, to my mind, a rising star in the Royal Navy’s intelligence services and Scotland Yard.”

“You say…”

“Both! Sometime ago, I plucked him from the Yard when Her Majesty’s naval intelligence confronted what seemed…a mystery, a conundrum…and so valuable were his services that I have commissioned him.”