Wicked Gentlemen (9 page)

"You sound like you hated her," I commented.

Sariel frowned a little, thinking about it.

"No," he decided, "I'm just bitter; perhaps, jealous. She had so much that the rest of us didn't. She was in a position to help many of us, but she was never willing to risk her own comfort. It's easy to get angry at her for that. But if I had been in her situation, I don't know that I would have done more. She did try to take part in a demonstration once."

"What happened?" I asked

"We broke into the Taylor Shirt workhouse and released twenty Prodigal children who were being rented out from a reformatory and forced to work. One of the shift foremen pulled the fire siren and the Inquisition rushed in on us. Joan was grabbed along with about ten others of us, but when we reached the Inquisition House, she was gone."

Sariel lifted his cigarette, then realized that it had burned down almost to his fingers. He flicked it to the street below.

So, the woman had disappeared more than once. I found that interesting.

"Do you think that Harper got her out?" I asked. It struck me as something he'd do.

"He could have." Sariel shrugged. "In any case, she didn't come back down to Hells Below. About three weeks later we found out that she had gotten married to Dr. Edward Talbott. They'd been engaged for a few months, but none of us had known. That was the last we heard from her."

"Peter Roffcale wrote to her," I said.

"I suppose he would have." Sariel looked down at his hands. "He never blamed her for leaving, but anyone could see that it tore him up to know she'd married another man."

"He mentioned that Rose and Lily had been murdered in one of his letters. Were there others?" I asked.

"Dozens. Members of Good Commons have been going missing or turning up in pieces for nearly a decade. One or two a year." Sariel flipped out another cigarette. He lit it and took a deep drag. "Recently, it's gotten worse. We used to make reports of missing persons. But since Peter was killed in custody, I think it's obvious that the Inquisition abbots don't give a damn."

Sariel's voice almost trembled with anger, then he stopped speaking. He simply stared up into the sky and drew in breath after breath of cigarette smoke. He had probably known all of the Prodigals who had been murdered. They would have been his friends and companions in Good Commons.

"I'm sorry," I said.

The words were embarrassingly worthless. My sympathy was as little good to Sariel as his forgiveness was to me.

"It happens," Sariel replied.

"Are you safe?" I couldn't help but ask. There was nothing I could offer him if he wasn't.

"No." Sariel smiled and shook his head. "None of us are ever safe, really. I've heard there's a sorcerer who sells potions made from Prodigal's bodies. He lures children away with candy and then chops them up and cooks them. There's also supposed to be a lord's club that requires every new member to kill a Prodigal as proof of his valor. Then there's always the Inquisition, over-zealous nuns, and simple, sick bastards. A lot of people seem to want Prodigals dead. The only protection we really have is each other." Sariel glanced over to me. "So, I'm safer than you, aren't I?"

"Maybe." I realized that I had made a mistake in asking after Sariel's safety. I shouldn't have left the impersonal inquiries about Joan Talbott.

"You never had any sense about how to look after yourself," Sariel went on. "You've gotten yourself into the company of an Inquisition captain. You're living alone, above ground—"

"Sariel, I've been living like this for six years. I've learned how to take care of myself."

"You can't always do it alone, Belimai. Sooner or later you're going to need someone else to help you." Sariel pulled himself a little closer to me. "Come back to Hells Below. There's room for you at Good Commons."

"You want me to join Good Commons?" I couldn't quite believe that Sariel was serious. Hadn't he understood what I had said to him, how deeply I had changed?

"You'd have friends there. You'd be involved in important work. We could help you come clean." Sariel placed his hand on mine.

A cold, almost nauseous sweat broke out across my skin. It wasn't just the thought of being with Sariel, constantly knowing that I had failed him. As a member of Good Commons, I would doubtless be brought into an Inquisition House again.

The well-oiled whir of the prayer engines hummed through my mind. The slashes across my back began to pulse with pain. The scars that covered my body ached. I pulled my hand from Sariel's.

"No, I think I'm a little too settled in my present life," I answered quickly.

I didn't care if he thought that my choice was a sign of the depths of my addiction. It was better than having him know the truth. Once, I had loved him enough to destroy myself for him. But I was no longer the same man. I was no longer that strong.

"It's nearly morning. I should go." I stood and walked to the edge of the roof.

"So, it's goodbye again?" Sariel asked.

"It has to be said sooner or later." I stepped off the roof and let myself drop lightly to the ground.

I heard Sariel's quiet goodbye from high above me, and I whispered my own in return. It was all that I had left to say to him.

Chapter Nine

Gloves

Morning light streamed into Harper's sitting room and
 
reflected across his clean white walls. I flinched from the brightness, even behind the smoked lenses of my spectacles. Harper handed me a cup of coffee and sat down in a straight-backed chair across from me.

His hair was damp and clean. His clothes looked crisp. The freshness of his surroundings only exaggerated his exhaustion. Deep blue shadows stained the skin under his eyes. His lips were pale. Oddly, exhaustion seemed to suit him. I was growing used to seeing him looking worn out. It gave me a sense of knowing him to realize that I had expected to see him this way.

"How's your back this morning?" he asked.

"Not too bad." The cuts still hurt, but there was no point in dwelling on them. I drank a little of the coffee. It was bitter and too strong.

Harper poured cream into his coffee and then added three spoonfuls of sugar. He picked up the small, silver sugar spoon easily despite the black gloves that encased his hands. Sunlight glowed at his back, cutting a hard white line around his dark form.

"There was a fire at Edward's house last night," Harper said. "He was lucky that there were a dozen or more Inquisitors in the area when it broke out."

"It wasn't luck."

"What do you mean?" Harper asked

"I was there. I saw the girl who did it. She told me she wanted to make sure Edward got out of the house alive."

"What?" Harper stared at me in shock. It was pleasant to see such a strong reaction on his features. A moment later, and the expression was gone.

 
"Who was she?" Harper asked.

"She didn't tell me her name." I drank a little more of the hot, black coffee. "She was small. At first I thought she was a child, but when I got a good look at her, I realized she was full-grown. I think she might have been a member of Good Commons. She mentioned Lily and Rose, the same names that were in Peter Roffcale's letter to your sister."

"Lily Abaddon, Rose Hesper." Harper closed his eyes and rubbed his gloved hands across his forehead as if he were attempting to soothe a headache. "She probably was a member of Good Commons. What else did she say?"

"Not much. She wasn't in the best shape—"

"She was hurt?"

"Not physically, but she didn't seem too far from crazed." I poured several heaps of sugar into my coffee. "She said she tried to stop another murder but got there too late. A boy named Tom. Do you know anything about that?"

"Thomas Mills." Harper frowned. "We found his body last night, about an hour before the fire at Edward's house. The body had only been partially gutted. The girl must have interrupted the murderer before he could finish up."

"Murderers," I said. "She said they killed Tom. So that's more than one murderer."

"But she didn't mention any names?" Harper asked.

"No. She seemed to have other things on her mind."

I stirred my coffee while I thought about the Prodigal girl. Edward was blameless. If she did not want to harm Edward Talbott, then what had been the object of the fire? I wondered if she had known of Joan Talbott's disappearance.

"Was anyone harmed in the fire?" I asked Harper.

"Mercifully, no." Harper frowned just slightly. "In a way, I suppose that it's good that Joan is missing. The fire started in her empty room. If she had been there, I don't know how she would have survived."

"Do you think that could have been a coincidence?" It seemed unlikely to me.

"The fire starting in Joan's room?" Harper took another drink of his coffee. "I don't know. I've been too tired to think about it."

I didn't believe him. I hadn't noticed exhaustion keeping him from thinking about anything else. Still, if Harper wanted to keep his thoughts to himself, that was his right.

I had my own suspicion as to why the Prodigal girl had burned Edward Talbott's house. She wanted to punish Joan, to make the woman pay for abandoning the members of Good Commons. I wondered if the girl had believed, as Peter Roffcale seemed to, that Joan Talbott had some protection she could offer them.

"So, were you up all night?" I asked.

"Yes," Harper sighed. "After finding Thomas Mills and the fire, I couldn't sleep. I just spent the rest of the night going through old records."

"Perhaps you should try to get some sleep now." I set my cup of coffee down.

"No." Harper shook his head. "I managed to find one thing last night while I was looking through the records on Thomas Mills."

"He was in Good Commons?" I guessed.

"Yes, he was," Harper said. "But he also had a legal counselor by the name of Albert Scott-Beck."

The name meant nothing to me. I let Harper go on.

"Scott-Beck counseled Roffcale also. In fact, he visited him in his cell just an hour before you and I arrived."

"Do you think he murdered Roffcale?" I couldn't keep from leaning a little closer to Harper. The prospect of a solution drew me.

"Perhaps. I couldn't find any direct connection between Scott-Beck and Lily or Rose, however both women received legal counsel from his firm. Scott-Beck's partner, Lewis Brown, defended Lily when she was brought up on charges last spring. Brown also advised Rose a few months before that."

Harper drank a little more of his coffee.

"The firm takes on a good number of charity cases, mostly Prodigals who have no other means of legal defense at their trials. Almost every Prodigal in Good Commons has been defended or given counsel by Scott-Beck or Brown."

 
"Did either of them know your sister?" I asked.

"Joan?" Harper shook his head. His light hair was beginning to dry into loose curls. "She was never involved in any demonstrations or public readings. No charges could ever have been brought against her."

"So she had no connection to this Scott-Beck or his partner?"

"None," Harper replied. "To be honest, I don't even know that we're following the right trail to find Joan. But I can't just let these killings go on."

"It all seems too interlaced for your sister not to be somewhere in it," I commented.

"Perhaps."

There was something in the way Harper said the word that caught my attention. I wasn't sure if it was his tone or the word itself, but it reminded me of the night when we had first met and I had thought that Harper knew more than he was saying. I tried to study him, but the brilliant morning light burned at the fine details of his expression as well as the subtle scents that might have drifted off his lips. Some nights, if I concentrated, I could taste lies in the cool air.

This morning, all I had was a feeling of unease. I knew little about Harper, less about his abducted sister. The fact that she was abducted, while other members of Good Commons had been out-rightly murdered, should have meant something. Yet I couldn't figure it out. There was something, a simple word, a small fact, that kept the matter from making sense.

I wondered if that word had been on Harper's lips when he held it back and offered me an oblique "perhaps."

I doubted that Harper was the only person who knew. I re-called the Prodigal girl's cracked eyes, her bleeding tears, and the smell of her. It was a horrific scent in comparison to the perfumes that had lingered on Joan Talbott's letters. Her hair had looked like it had been hacked off in a blind fury. Her clothes had been filthy ruins. I knew she hadn't burned Edward's house for nothing. She had known something about the murders and about Joan Talbott.

"So, will you go?" Harper asked, and I realized that I had not been listening to him.

"Where?" I asked, though it annoyed me to be caught so obviously adrift in my own thoughts.

"To Scott-Beck's office." Harper scowled at me. "You weren't listening at all, were you?"