The Shadow and the Star (14 page)

"Is there?" she asked, too brightly.

"Two hundred and fifty pounds."

"Yes, I… I suppose I read that."

"You might relocate and live pretty handsomely on that."

Leda straightened her shoulders and gave him a chilly stare. "I'm sure a citizen does not require a reward to know when to do her duty. I would disdain to improve myself on—on
blood
money."

"And you don't think it's your duty to turn me in?"

"I'm very sure it is my duty, sir." She took a deep breath. "I also daresay that if I should leave this room�if you should allow it without flinging one of those monstrous stars at me and taking my eye out—that you wouldn't be here when I returned. Neither could I depend upon Mrs. Dawkins to believe me, nor to fetch the police, not after you've thoroughly convinced her with your twenty-pound note that I'm entertaining gentlemen in my room. And you've got rid of the Japanese sword very neatly; I suppose you threw it in the canal, which is a great shame, and a wicked, thoughtless, barbarous waste of something that no doubt cost some accomplished craftsman a great deal of time and effort, but it is the only evidence I might have had for my assertions, and without it I should only look a fool to go to the police, shouldn't I?"

"I'm afraid that might be true."

Leda sank against the wall. "And it really is too bad," she added glumly. "I had hoped that Sergeant MacDonald might get a promotion on the strength of it."

"A particular friend of yours?"

She gave him Miss Myrtle's most elevated scowl. "My friends, particular or not, are none of your affair, Mr. Gerard."

He smiled. "Sergeant MacDonald is not on duty this morning, I take it?"

"I've no idea," she said stoutly.

"What of the fellow with the fancy seal on his letters?"

"I've no notion what you're speaking about." Leda felt herself turning crimson.

To her relief, he didn't pursue the topic, but only looked at her for a few moments, and then down at his leg. "Bring the toweling over here, please."

Leda twisted the cloth between her fingers, brought abruptly back to the task at hand. Her stomach felt a little queasy.

"Come here," he said gently. "Just hold my foot." She swallowed down a great lump in her throat and went forward. She knelt in front of him. "I'll hurt you," she said plaintively.

"I assure you that I already hurt. Intensely. Only hold my ankle—and when I ask, pull on it. Not a tug, just a slow, strong pull. It will probably require putting your whole weight against it." He looked at her beneath his lashes. "And whatever you do, Miss Etoile—don't let go."

"It will hurt."

"Only if you let go."

"Oh, dear," she said. "I don't think I can do this."

"Put your hands on my ankle, Miss Etoile." She bit her lip, took another deep breath, and put her hands over the black cloth footwear he wore. Very gingerly, she moved her palms upward, under the loose leggings of dark cotton. The covering helped; made what she was doing seem more decorous. She imagined herself a nurse, accustomed to touching men to whom she'd not been introduced. Men to whom she
had
been introduced. Men of any sort, for that matter. The footwear ended just above his ankle, and she could feel his skin beneath her fingertips, hot and swollen. She glanced up at him, for the first time comprehending the extent of the injury and the pain he'd been enduring.

He was no longer looking at her. His lashes were lowered, his face as silent and withdrawn as carved marble. Gradually his breathing changed, grew deeper, slower, something she could feel but not hear. As it altered, he altered: he still seemed powerful and solid, and yet the aesthetic purity of his features gave him an unreal aspect, like something from an artist's dream of absolute and flawless force. In the colored light, his hair was gold and red and a thousand subtler tints; his body in the dark clothing distilled midnight into life.

"Now," he murmured, lifting his lashes. "Pull." Leda clasped his ankle and slowly began to exert a light tension.

"Harder than that." He met her eyes, and she bit her lip, gripping more firmly. His face never changed, and yet she felt his intensity, his active acceptance of the agony that this must cause. She felt him begin to oppose her strength with his, and had to set herself back against him, harder and harder, until her whole weight hung entirely on her hands. She heard a grating sound.

"Don't let go," he said softly, catching her in the instant of revolted surprise before the nerve fled her fingers.

She nodded, feeling faintly sick, puffing her lower lip free, still holding steady and hard as he leaned over. She closed her eyes quickly, before she saw his leg, and kept them squeezed shut.

"All right," he said in a calm voice. "Very slowly, ease your hold. That's enough—keep some traction on it." She heard the sound of the newspaper. She couldn't help herself; she opened her eyes. He moved with methodical assurance, wrapping the stiff splint of newspaper, an inch thick, around his leg, tying it fast with the strips of towel above his knee and twice down his calf. He held the last strip toward her. "Can you tie it at my ankle?"

His peaceful manner gave her confidence. Carefully, without allowing his foot to touch the floor, she bound the splint closed. It took some effort, for the paper stuck out an inch beyond his heel, requiring her binding to hold against the pressure of the thick casing bent over the top of his foot. But she was surprised at the strength and rigidity of the makeshift dressing.

"Are you a doctor?" she asked.

"No."

Something in his voice made her look up. Now, after his leg was immobilized and the punishment over, he sat very still; for a frightening moment his eyes seemed to lose focus and drift, sliding halfway closed. She lunged up and seized his wrist, thinking to catch him before he toppled forward in a faint, but he did not move or slump down onto her push—he seemed to yield and yet check her at the same time, so that she stopped halfway through the motion with the sensation of pressing against a wall, though it was only his forearm beneath her fingers.

She groped for equilibrium and found that instead of steadying him, it was he who braced and balanced her against collapsing over on his shoulder. "Forgive me," she gasped, finding her feet. She let go and stepped back. "Did I hurt you?"

He looked up at her. His subtle smile, so improbably beguiling, seemed to focus all the controlled energy of him into a ray of light on her heart. "You didn't hurt me. You did well. I want to ask you something important."

"What?" she asked warily, recalled to the reality of conversing casually with a commonplace thief.

"Can you write?" he asked.

"Certainly I can write."

"Type?"

She almost hesitated. She almost took an instant too long to answer. He was alert and observant, but her sudden lie came out with the smoothness of utter reckless desperation. "Forty words a minute," she said, repeating what she'd read in an advertisement for expert typists. "With accuracy."

He appeared to accept this lavish exaggeration with complete confidence. "I have a great need of someone like yourself. Will you come to work for me, Miss Etoile?"

"As a robber?" she squeaked.

He gave her a weak grin and shook his head. "I'm finished with stealing. Just being in your public-spirited presence has reformed me of burglary."

Leda gave a little snort of disbelief.

"I find myself in need of a secretary. A man Friday, you might call it. It may be a little surprising to you, but I have rather extensive—and legitimate—business interests." He bent down and began to retie the full black cloth over his calf and the makeshift splint. "It looks as if this leg will be somewhat confining to me for the rest of the time I'm in England. I'm going to want someone to assist me with my concerns. In Hawaii I'd pay a hundred and fifty American dollars a month. With the exchange rate—" He straightened up. "Say—ten pounds a week?"

"Ten… pounds… a week?" Leda repeated.

"Does that sound fair?"

She sank backward against the table. "Fair," she said, weak with astonishment. "Fair!"

"For forty words a minute."

She stood up, her spine stiffening. "I cannot. I couldn't possibly. You're a criminal."

"Am I?" He looked at her steadily. "Truth is something you have to know for yourself. I don't have the words to persuade you."

She put both hands on the sides of her face. He
was
a criminal. How could he not be a criminal, sneaking about with stolen goods and a mask in the middle of the night? Ten pounds a week! Only an outlaw could pay such absurdly high wages for a secretary. He might have killed her in the dark—he almost had; he'd admitted it himself. And stayed with her, and helped her breathe. Hidden up in the ceiling beam, no gentleman, the wretched beast; and then looked guilty for it.

She lowered her hands. "If you're not a criminal, then what are you doing stealing all these swords and things?"

For a moment he was silent. Then he rubbed his chin and said, "There's no name for it in English."

"Oh, is there not? 'Burglary' seems descriptive enough."

"
Kyojitsu. "
He looked levelly into her eyes, not wavering. "False-true."

" 'False-true'?" she repeated with heavy skepticism.

He made his hand into a fist and spread it open, as if a better definition would unfold out of it. "Deceit and honesty. Tact. Subterfuge. Weak and strong. Bad and good. A ruse. It means all of those things."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He looked at her patiently, as if she were a backward child. "My intent. You asked me why I removed things from their conventional place."

No wonder Miss Myrtle had always warned her against men. Provoking creatures.

"Well, I'm afraid I've no talent for Oriental riddles," she said testily. "Perhaps you will tell me what are these 'legitimate' businesses of yours?"

"Shipping, for the most part. I manage the Arcturus Company for Lord and Lady Ashland, and I have my own—Kaiea Shipbuilding and Transport. I have a timber mill on the North American coast. Some holdings in cotton and sugar markets. Several banks. Marine insurance." He smiled. "Do you believe me?"

"I don't know."

"I might be making this up.
Kai ea
means 'rising sea' in Hawaiian.
Arcturus
was the name of the tea clipper Lord Ashland's uncle built in 1849. Lord Ashland rechristened her
Arcanum
. But perhaps none of that is true. I might be a quick thinker and a good liar."

"I believe there are such," she said majestically.

"Then I could answer your questions for a thousand years, and you wouldn't be any nearer judging what I truly am."

"What I do know, Mr. Gerard, is that you're the most singular person I've ever had the ordeal of encountering!"

He watched her, his eyes dark silver, like the moon on a wild and cloudy night. Slowly, he shook his head. "What you know here," he said softly, holding his fist against the center of his body, "that is the truth."

Hawaii, 1872

Dojun never taught him the songs. Dojun never taught
him anything except Japanese, never sang him anything except orders to work, errands to run, heavy wood to chop, and buckets of carp to carry from the fish pond to a distant neighbor who hadn't even asked for them. Often Dojun wanted strange things: a flower from a tree limb far out of Samuel's reach, a stone from the highest cliff at Diamond Head, a feather from a live bird that nested in the eaves of the lanai.