Unraveled (15 page)

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

His chin fell, and he contemplated the top of the adjacent building, scarcely a foot away. But there was nothing there but coal-blackened brick and, far below, brown drifts of paper-dry leaves.

“Very well,” Miranda said, and slid past him.

He let out a second, wearier sigh as she went by. Just a noisy exhalation—not even his usual handful of terse, disapproving syllables. Still, the sigh said it wasn’t nothing, and at this point, Miranda would take any form of communication she could get from him.

She sat on the steps, just behind him.

“So tell me about this nothing.”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

She’d been looking after Robbie in some capacity for seven years. His mother had been an actress—and one of the flightier ones at that. She’d attached herself to Miranda’s father’s troupe just before everything had fallen to pieces. Robbie’s mother had asked Miranda to take care of her son during the day, in exchange for a few pennies. For a few years, Miranda had watched Robbie. She’d not minded; they’d needed all the pennies she could find.

One day, long after the troupe had fallen apart, his mother had disappeared for good, leaving Robbie behind. For months, Miranda had tried to find someone—anyone—to take him. But nobody had wanted an abandoned eight-year-old child.

So Miranda had kept him. At first, she’d entertained hopes that the two of them might form a family of a sort. In books, women reduced to straitened circumstances always surrounded themselves with kind, adoring loved ones through pluck and determination.

The authors of heartwarming books apparently had no contact with actual adolescent boys. They weren’t kind. They didn’t know how to adore. They were just surly.

She’d hoped to mirror the laughing, tempestuous feel of her childhood, where family and friends merged. But instead of warmth and love, Robbie left Miranda in a constant state of near-terror. What was he going to do next? How was she to stop him?

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “What are you still doing here?” he growled. “I thought you’d finally decided to let me be.”

“I’m no good at this, Robbie. If I were your mother, I’d know what to say. I’d make you laugh and feel better, and you’d never have need to complain.”

“Sure,” he agreed bitterly.

“But I’m not. I don’t know how to be a mother. What role do you want me to play instead?”

Another shrug of his scrawny shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

His shoulders stiffened. But he didn’t look at her. After a few moments, he shrugged again. “I suppose,” he said.

Oh, that hurt. To have all her care, all her work, tossed aside in one insouciant shrug of his shoulders. Years of looking after him had culminated in this bored rejection.

“Best to get on with it,” Robbie said. But his voice broke on the last word, and his shoulders quivered. And that was when Miranda realized that he was crying—quietly, but crying nonetheless.

She stared at him, absolutely flummoxed. Surly, sullen, and…sad? What was she supposed to
do?

She stood and walked down the steps to the window. “Hey, now,” she whispered. “It’s not so bad as that.”

He wiped furiously at his eyes. “Sure. Wait ’til you hear.”

“Hear what?”

“I was arrested today.”

“What? Oh, no. But…but you didn’t… Oh.” A knot in her belly tightened. “You
did,
didn’t you?”

“Maybe.” He hunched. “Maybe I just tried. I did it wrong, in any event.”

“And they brought you in.”

“Made me talk to some fellow, who was supposed to determine if…um, something. It wasn’t a trial. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Wasn’t really paying attention
Miranda translated as
too scared to ask questions.

“Was he a constable?” Miranda asked.

“I guess,” Robbie said. “He let me go. But he yelled at me afterward.”

“Yelled?” Miranda said. “What afterward?” Thank God the man he’d talked to had some compassion. It was a rare enough quality in the constables.

“He said, because I didn’t actually manage to
steal
the watch, he couldn’t prove what I meant to do, and he could treat it as…as something. I don’t remember.”

“What
do
you remember?” Miranda tried to ask the question as gently as she could.

“He said he could get me an apprenticeship at a shipwright.”

Miranda held her breath, hardly daring to believe what she was hearing. It was more than she could have given him—a good start at life, a chance for solid work doing something Robbie enjoyed. It also cost more than she could imagine. That kind of favor, held over her head by some unknown person... “And what did you say? Did you accept?”

He shrugged. “I suppose. I didn’t really have much choice. After this, you won’t want anything to do with me, anyway.”

His shoulders hunched even more, and Miranda stared at his back in puzzlement.

“Why wouldn’t I want anything to do with you?”

“You always told me that if I ever risked hanging, you would never speak to me again. I know you never wanted me. You tried to get rid of me.” His matter-of-fact tone broke her heart—as if he were recounting unalterable truths.

Maybe that’s the way it had seemed to him. After his mother had disappeared, Miranda had tried to get someone—anyone—to take the boy. Of course she had. She’d been a child herself.

She hadn’t wanted the responsibility. To Robbie, no doubt it had seemed that she hadn’t wanted
him
.

“Oh,” she breathed. She’d told a boy who’d been abandoned by his mother that she was going to leave him, too, unless he listened to her. He’d thought she’d
meant
it.

Slowly she set her hand on his shoulder.

He leaned away an inch and only gave one solitary half-hearted grunt in protest. It was practically encouragement. So she made a fist and rubbed his hair until it stood up on end.

“Stop that,” he muttered, but he didn’t pull away.

“Do you want to be a shipwright?”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

“It’s a good profession. And you’re good at arithmetic. You were always good working with the carpenter when you were little.” More practically, shipwrights could speak in two-word sentences and still get paid.

He slouched further. “You want me to go.”

“I’d still get to see you sometimes, wouldn’t I? On Sabbaths and holidays. I’d miss you the rest of the time, but I suppose I’d manage.”

“You’d miss me?”

Miranda sighed, and dropped her voice into a gravelly imitation of his. “I guess,” she intoned.

It took him a moment to realize she was mocking him, but he let out an exasperated sigh and punched her, lightly, on the arm. And then, leaving the rest unspoken, he pulled his legs in, slid off the sill, and started up the stairs.

Halfway to their garret, Robbie stopped. “Oh, I had a message for you. From the fellow who talked to me.”

“A message? For me?”

“He said to meet him…um…somewhere. By a castle. Or a church. Something like that. Tomorrow at six in the morning.”

“Why does a constable want to meet me at six in the morning? He doesn’t even know who I am.”

But as soon as she said the words, she knew the answer. Robbie turned to her, his eyes wide and innocent. “Didn’t I say? It was that man—the one I hit over the head.”

Chapter Ten

S
MITE WAS NOT USED
to indecision, but when the next morning dawned, he still had not determined whether he actually wanted to see Miss Darling again. He’d asked Robbie to convey the invitation on impulse—if one could call the product of long nights spent wanting an
impulse.
He crossed over to the green surrounding the old churchyard with Ghost tugging at the lead.

There was no question what he should do. He shouldn’t want her at all. It had been foolish to ask, and even more foolish to pursue the…could he call what he’d planned an
acquaintance?

He came to the stone walls of St. Philip’s Church and slowly turned about. He was alone. She hadn’t come.

Damn. The mist twined about the walls, turning the dawn to grayness. Regret was bitter.

Smite didn’t believe in regret. He didn’t need her. He’d only wanted her.

He stared into the slowly dissipating fog and willed it to show her form. But there was nobody about.

Apparently, he was lacking in all good sense. He slipped the lead from around Ghost’s neck and gave him a pat. The animal darted off through the fog, in search of pigeons to chase.

The city was just coming to life. The brewery across the harbor had begun to belch smoke into the sky. Ghost came barreling back through the mist, a stick in his mouth. He tossed it on the ground before Smite and danced back, eagerly waiting.

“Very well, you wretched animal,” Smite said. He picked it up and hurled it as far as it would go.

He was watching his dog run in great bounding leaps, when he heard a delighted laugh beside him.

“He led me to you, you know.”

He turned.

Miranda Darling was standing behind him, one hand on the ruined stone wall. She was smiling at him.

“By Robbie’s message, I thought you meant us to meet more by the bridge. Whatever you intended to say came somewhat garbled from the messenger.” She gestured. “I was quite put out at having got up so early, only to be snubbed.”

It was too early for sun, but her hair under her bonnet was as brilliant as a summer sunrise. She probably
wasn’t
pretty, at least not in the classical sense of pristine English beauty. Her mouth was too wide; her nose too snub. And there was that profusion of freckles that covered her nose.

Classical English beauty could go hang, for all Smite cared. His mouth dried.

“And then I saw your dog bounding up out of the mist,” she continued.

A ways off, Ghost pounced on the stick and shook it vigorously. “Good dog,” Smite said approvingly.

“Robbie told me what you did for him. Thank—”

He cut her off with a decisive chop of his hand. “Don’t thank me.”

“But I must. It may have meant very little to you, but to me, to Robbie, it means everything.” Her gown was tied with a simple fabric sash. She rubbed the ends between her fingers, not meeting his eyes.

“That was not a selfish attempt to coerce you into singing my praises. I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong for me to act in my capacity as magistrate when I knew my decision could be biased by personal inclination. I will not do it again.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then…I’m sorry?”

He leaned down, retrieved Ghost’s stick, and threw it once more. “Don’t apologize, either. I don’t make a habit of fostering regrets.”

She appeared to be only mildly taken aback, which seemed quite promising. His heart was laboring. His pulse beat heavily. There was no
right
way to proceed, and it seemed suddenly insupportable that this conversation would end any other way than what he’d envisioned last night.

“I surmised, based on our prior conversation, that Robbie might profit from an apprenticeship to a shipwright.”

“I know. But the expense…”

“Is nothing. I’ve taken care of it.”

She didn’t burst into raptures, thank God. Instead, she stared at him suspiciously. “Why would you do that?” she asked. “I’m a little wary of accepting such a favor when I don’t know how it can ever be repaid.”

“This isn’t commerce. I don’t require payment, and I certainly don’t expect it of you.”

But she simply tapped her foot and glowered. “If you didn’t expect anything of me, you’d have done it anonymously. You’d not have asked me to meet you. You expect something. What is it?”

He was a magistrate, and what’s more, he had all the money. No wonder she was nervous.

He met her eyes once more. “If you insist on repaying me, I ask only that you hear my next proposition in its entirety before you slap my face.”

She drew in a breath. “Am I going to
want
to slap your face?”

He rather hoped not. There had to be some way to put her at ease, but he didn’t know it. Instead he shrugged.

“It’s like this: I can’t put you out of my mind.”

She’d not been expecting that. Her eyes widened. To tell the truth, he hadn’t expected to start that way, either.

“I think of you in my free moments,” he said. The words came faster. “I think of you in moments that ought to be taken up by work. It’s affecting my judgment—witness what happened with Robbie yesterday. I keep thinking of what I could do for you. No—I must be perfectly frank—what I want to do
to
you.”

She hadn’t moved. But at that, she wet her lips with her tongue. “To be clear,” she said, “when you talk about what you want to do, you are talking about kissing me. You are not talking about throwing me in gaol.”

“To be clear,” Smite countered, “I am talking about having you as my mistress. About having you in every way possible.”

She didn’t slap his face or shriek in horror. Instead, she shook her head. “Then the answer is no. I’ve already said so. There’s too much risk for me.”

Ghost brought back the stick and dropped it once more. Smite ignored the dog. “I’m not proposing a one-time liaison. You’ll have a house. Servants. New clothing.”