Secret Admirer

  The Lion had a feeling that when His Lordship said that, just after their escape from the Spanish prison, he was thinking of himself as a murderer. But for the Lion, it meant something else. It meant that he was a hero.

  He saw her glance in his direction and then turn away and her shoulders began to tremble. She was overwhelmed by his courage, he knew, and she did not want the others to see it. Not until it was time. Not until he had proven himself Worthy.

  At the start, he had killed the men just to honor her, honor what they shared. But then he’d seen the signs and come to understand. Window, Worthington, Widow. Winner Worship, Work. Wisdom, Well done—

  Wicked, Worthless, Wretched, Worm.

  NO!

  —Wanted. The Words were all signs, for him. And once he’d seen that, he had known. The other killings were just the beginning.

  Once he’d known how to look, he started to see signs everywhere, urging him on. His quest was to be the greatest, they told him. He, the Lion, was the one chosen to slay the Knight of Knights. To have Our Greatest Hero fall under his sword. He would overcome him and rescue his Lady. But first, the Knight of Knights had to be ensnared.

  Who is the most worthy opponent. Is it the strongest knight?

  No.

  Is it the bravest knight?

  No.

  Is it the wildest knight?

  No. It is the knight in love because in him dwells the strength, courage, and wildness of a dozen.

  When she was again in possession of the Knight of Knight’s heart, that was when he would be hardest to beat. That was when the Lion would slay him.

  The chain bit into his neck.

  He saw how he could do it with exquisite clarity. He could distract the other guards, kill her, then use her body to trap Lawrence Pickering and kill him, too.

  It would be so simple. He would pull her head back and let her look at him. He would kiss her once. And then he would cut out her heart.

  Winner!

  The chain snapped.

  Lawrence lathered his horse getting to Worthington hall, nearly felling the handful of late-night pedestrians he passed. But he need not have bothered. As he discovered when he stormed into the studio, she was gone.

  The only sign of her was a line of blood trailing out the door.

  Part IV: Die

  Chapter 29

  Lawrence followed the track by instinct, almost without seeing it. He did not think to notice the absence of guards. The unnatural quiet of the house. The strange squeaking of floorboards above him.

  The blood went up the stairs, past Sir Dennis’s room, and up again, and so did Lawrence, taking them four at a time. As he approached the door under which it disappeared, it registered in his mind that he had been here before, that this was the nursery. As he approached the door he braced himself for what he might see. As he approached the door he thought he was ready.

  He wasn’t.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the sight of Tuesday propped against the wall, soaked in blood.

  “I felt lucky to be with him,” Tom was in the middle of repeating that afternoon when CeCe had rushed into the studio.

  “They found Albert Marston’s clothes in an alleyway and they want to search the area,” she explained urgently.

  The other guards piled quickly out of the room when they heard, but Tuesday could feel Tom hesitating between following Lawrence’s orders to stay glued to her and wanting to see what they had discovered.

  “I won’t leave the house, Tom,” she had told him. “I promise.”

  “I’m to stay with you, at all times, ma’am,” he said in his intense way. But Grub—thank God for Grub—had come back in then and, perhaps sensing that Tuesday needed to be alone, had literally dragged his colleague out to join the search. Tuesday’s relief had been almost overwhelming.

  As soon as Grub and Tom were gone, Tuesday had taken the first jar of paint she could find, jammed a handful of brushes into her sling and run upstairs. The paint dribbled out of the container, staining the floor and the stairs deep red, but she did not care. For the first time in her life she wanted not to make something, to create something, but to destroy it.

  “Lucky to be with him,” Tom had said. He hadn’t known that the words were like a knife going into her stomach. The simple phrase worked like a mocking incantation in Tuesday’s mind, speeding her back to that morning, back to how she had felt when she woke up, how she’d felt when Lawrence had still loved her. “Lucky,” that one word, reverberated, sending her back farther, back to the dark place she kept locked up.

  “Lucky, get down from there.” She could still hear the timbre of Curtis’s voice so vividly, as if he were again standing behind her in the nursery.

  “Just a moment. I want to—”

  “I said get down from there.”

  She turned to look at him. “What is wrong?”

  “You’re a mess, Lucky.”

  “I’ve been painting all day. But I’m almost done.” She stood back to study her work. “Do you think—”

  “What’s this supposed to be?” he asked, pointing to one of the animals half-visible through the painted ferns.

  “It’s a kind of cat. From Africa. It’s called a leopard.”

  “Is it? You must have painted it wrong. It looks ridiculous.” He sneered at it, trailing a finger through the paint and then wiping it on the gilt wall. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  “Where?”

  “To Jack’s. You are going to tell him you were jesting when you said he should not come out with me anymore.”

  She stiffened. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, Lucky, you were.”

  Curtis took a step closer to her and she saw the malice glittering in his eyes.

  “Curtis, you can’t treat Jack that way. You can’t take him to taverns and make him perform tricks as if he were a trained dog.”

  “Why not? What else is the freak good for?” He tried to pull her from the ladder.

  She resisted, gripping the wall in front of her hard. “No. You are not going to make a fool of Jack.”

  “The freak doesn’t need anyone to make a fool of him.”

  “Stop calling him a freak!”

  “Get down here right now, Lucky, or I will make you sorry.”

  Although his threats were unoriginal, he always made good on them, which was why they worked. But today she had a headache and had been up half the night being sick and could not stand to hear him talk about Jack that way. Today, this one time, she would not be stopped by his threats.

  She looked him in the eye and said, “No. I’m not done with what I was—”

  He jerked her off the ladder so hard that she stumbled and hit the wall. He twisted her arm behind her. “When are you going to learn to do what I say?”

  “When you stop acting like a beast and start acting like a man,” she spit back, trying to ignore the pain in her arm.

  He flipped her around so she was facing him. “I’m not enough of a man for you?” His eyes looked wild now. “Do you have someone else you prefer? Someone like George Lyle?”

  “That is not what I meant, Curtis. I just—”

  “It’s his, isn’t it? This,” he poked a finger into her abdomen. “You’re just a damn whore.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Never call me that again.”

  “Why? What are you going to do that you haven’t already done?”

  His palm rested on her stomach. “Whose is it, Lucky? George’s? Or someone else?”

  That was when her reason snapped. She remembered trying to work her fists up so she could claw his eyes out. “You bastard. How dare you? How dare you accuse me? After everything—”

  He dug the fingers of one hand into her stomach, pushing the air out of her. She looked up at him and the expression in his eyes, a viciousness she had never seen before, terrified her. Quelled her. Told her she had made an enormous m
istake.

  His fingers pressed harder and anger evaporated into fear. Fear of how he could hurt their child. Fear of how he could hurt Jack. Oh god, what had she done? “I’m so sorry, Curtis. I’ll do whatever you say. I will be better, Curtis, I’ll be a perfect—”

  Thwack!

  She heard it, the sound of her head hitting the wall and then felt herself sliding down its surface. She tried to sit up but she couldn’t, couldn’t move. She got her eyes open just in time. In time to see him pull his leg back. In time to watch as his boot with the shiny buckle—don’t rub too hard or the gilt will come off—came tearing toward her. In time to feel the full force of his first kick in her stomach. In time to see him smile and hear him say, “This is your fault, Lucky. I warned you.” And then, for the first time in her life, she fainted.

  When she regained consciousness it was light outside. She was lying by the wall on her side, in a pool of blood. Her body ached everywhere. She sensed somehow that her baby was gone. And all she could hear in her head, over and over again, was Curtis’s voice saying, This is your fault, Lucky.

  It had taken her hours to clean the blood stains off the floor of the nursery that day, she now remembered as she worked to paint over the walls with huge strokes. She paid no attention to technique, just brought her brush down wherever she wanted to, ruining the exquisite painting, the magical garden, covering the walls and herself in dripping blocks of blood-colored paint. It did not matter; nothing mattered now. She had lost Lawrence and while part of it was her fault (she should have told him) another part thought that he should have listened to her, should have believed her, should have trusted her (yes, but she should have told him about writing to Silus). Not that it could have gone any differently, she knew. It was inevitable that he would reject her, too. But his words, his willingness to believe in her betrayal made her feel inexorably sad for both of them.

  How could he not have believed her? How could he not have trusted her? a voice sobbed in her head, but the questions were rhetorical. She knew the answers. It was because he wanted to be rid of her. It made perfect sense. Why would their relationship go any other way? Her paintbrush smacked the wall, leaving splatters shaped like hideous spiders. She painted over the dragonfly, she painted over the butterfly, she painted a huge serpent’s tongue on the leopard.

  She moved from one wall to the next until she came to the place in the gilding where Curtis had cleaned his finger, the place she had never been able to fix—don’t rub too hard or the gilt will come off—the place that had always mocked her, a constant reminder of her failure, her easy rejectability. Just under it the wall was slightly dented from where her head had hit it. As she stared at it, the futility of what she was doing almost choked her. No layers of pigment were going to erase what had happened to her or what she knew to be true. No layers of pigment would cover the fact that she was alone, again, rejected again. She dropped the jar of paint and it shattered, soaking the floor and her dress, and beyond caring she sat down in the puddle to wonder what the hell she was going to do with her life.

  She heard quick footsteps in the corridor. Tom’s she figured, coming to check on me. But when she looked up it was not Tom who filled the doorway. It was Lawrence. Lawrence staring at her as if she were the most hideous creature living.

  She could not meet his eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I will not—”

  “I see,” Lawrence said as if having just found the solution to a puzzle. “You are redecorating.” His gaze took in the ruin of the nursery and it made him want to die inside to see what he had done to her. “It is a nice change, but I am not sure I agree with what you have done on this wall,” he said, gesturing toward one covered in broad cross-hatched strokes. “A bit severe. Over here, however,” he moved toward the one with the spider-like blotches and the forked-tongue leopard, “this really catches the eye. Some of your best work, sweetheart.”

  Tuesday gaped at him.

  “Ah, now this is a place I can help with.” He nodded as he stood in front of the only wall that was untouched. The wall that Curtis had stained. He bent down and dipped his hands into the pool of paint edging along the floor, then planted them firmly over the mark in the gilding. He repeated this a half dozen times until the wall was fairly covered with his hand prints. “I hope you won’t think me immodest, but I feel that this really gives the place a good tone, don’t you?” He slid down the wall and sat, in the puddle of paint, next to her.

  “What are you doing, Lawrence?”

  He looked from her to her paint-colored lap. “Stalling while I work up the courage to apologize to you and ask your forgiveness.”

  Tuesday felt an unfamiliar pricking in her eyes. “You want to apologize?”

  “Yes. I was horrible to you. I should have trusted you and asked you about the ledger and the other evidence, rather than accusing you. Can you forgive me?”

  “Why did you do that? Why did you say those things? Even think them?”

  He stared at her hand, lying next to him. He wanted to take it in his, but he did not dare. “It’s hard for me to explain. It just made so much sense to me that you would betray me, lie to me, that I latched on to it.”

  “Why?”

  He brought his eyes to hers. She had a red spot on her cheekbone and another on her chin and the bottom half of her hair on her left side was clumped with paint. God how he loved her. “Because you are too good to be real, Tuesday. Because I don’t deserve you. Nobody does.”

  A tear streaked through the paint on her cheek. Her fingers reached for his.

  “I mean it, Tuesday.”

  “You deserve so much more,” she said, and was astonished at how tight her throat felt.

  “There is nothing more than you.”

  Tuesday bit her lip and whispered, “Do you mean that?”

  Lawrence wanted to stab himself for the pain and insecurity he had rekindled in her eyes. “Tuesday, I am so sorry. I can’t believe I almost lost you. I can’t believe what a fool I was. Can you ever forgive me.”

  “You had no choice. You had to believe what you saw,” Tuesday told him, and that made Lawrence feel even more wretched. “Besides, I should have told you that I wrote to Silus Ivry.”

  “Silus,” Lawrence repeated. He saw a way to begin to make up to her what he had done. “I had a talk with Silus tonight.”

  “You saw Silus?”

  “Yes. And I know why he broke off your engagement. Why they all did.”

  She flinched and tried to pull her hand from his. “So do I.”

  He held on tight. “I don’t think so.” He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “He is still in love with you.”

  She flicked her head as if trying to get rid of a fly. “He was never in love with me.”

  “He was. They all were. But your brother made it too expensive for them to marry you.”

  “What are you talking about? That Jack was too much of a burden—”

  “Not Jack. Howard. He skimmed money off of them in exchange for your hand.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true. And I hope you won’t mind living in a hovel. Because there is no amount of money I wouldn’t give to be with you.”

  Tuesday was frowning over what he said. She needed to think about that, but later. She shook her head. “Is that what convinced you? That I wasn’t—wasn’t all the things you said?”

  “Yes. And then Grub sent word by Christopher that he had searched your trunk twice, while you were there, and found nothing.” Lawrence hated to admit it. He wished he could tell her that he had just believed in her, but he was not made that way.

  Tuesday understood. Understood that his doubts were even more about himself than they were about her. “I am glad. I want you to know for certain. And I had forgotten about Grub. Although, you know, I could have put those things in after he searched.”

  “The last time Grub searched was last night, while you were at my house.”


  “How do you know I did not sneak over here when you were asleep and do it then.”

  “Because I did not go to sleep. Neither, if I recall correctly, did you.”

  “You did doze off,” Tuesday pointed out. “I could have done it then, then sneaked back into bed, so you wouldn’t know.”

  “You didn’t. You wouldn’t.”

  “Why? How can you be so sure? It would be a nearly perfect cover.”

  “Because I believe you. I believe in you. You would not do that.”

  “Ah. Then do you believe that I love you?”

  There was a pause.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what that means, Lawrence?”

  “That you are daft.”

  “Stop it.” She made him look at her. “I love you Lawrence. That means I would never betray you. I would never do anything willfully to hurt you. Do you understand?”

  Lawrence swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said. She kept meeting his eyes for a long moment, willing him to believe her the way she believed in him. Then her eyes moved and she frowned slightly. “Why did Silus come to London? I specifically told him to stay away.”

  She felt Lawrence stiffen beside her. “He came because he thought you were in trouble. Because, as I said, he still loves you.” He paused. “Did you—ah, were you in love with him, too?”

  “Deeply,” Tuesday said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a muscle in Lawrence’s jaw pulse. “Are you jealous?”

  “No.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “Lawrence, I—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  The hand was not enough to block the muffled sounds of her laughter. “I was jesting, my lord. I was not in love with him.”