What met her gaze made her throat close and her vision blur. Jane, not Arthur, sat in the favorite chair. A book rested in her lap, and in her hand she held a glass of port instead of a pipe. Firelight caressed her hair, bronzing her long braid where it draped over one shoulder. She had changed for bed, her white gown partially concealed by her robe. She wore Arthur’s dressing gown over the robe. Dry-eyed and expressionless, Jane stared into the fire, sipped her port and raised the dressing gown’s cuff to her nose for a long inhalation.
Tears dripped down Lenore’s cheeks, and she eased the door shut before making her way to the stairs. The spinster wept; the widow did not, but more than one woman grieved the loss of a loved one in the Kenward household.
CHAPTER SIX
“Brandy or Black Strap?” Nettie held up one decanter of brandy and another of port.
“Brandy.” Nathaniel rubbed his aching midriff, still sore from the round of shot she’d fired into him.
Nettie’s hands visibly shook as she poured a dram of brandy into each glass. She passed one to him before taking a seat in the chair opposite his. Her ruddy skin was still pale from shock, and she eyed him as if not quite believing he was real much less the man he claimed to be. “After what you just told me, I need something stronger. I’d pour meself chain lightning if I kept it stocked.”
Nathaniel scowled at her. “Stay away from the stuff, Nettie. It’s poison in a glass, and I’ve seen more families bury a poor lad baned by it.”
They clinked glasses in a silent toast, and Nathaniel sipped his brandy under his former captain’s piercing gaze. Her quarters were peaceful now, completely opposite from the riotous chaos a half hour earlier.
Nathaniel had pressed a hand against his riddled midriff, coughed twice and spat a mouthful of bloody shot pellets into his palm before spilling them to the floor. The wounds made by the ammunition closed up, and the silvery blood flow slowed to a trickle before ceasing altogether.
Nettie watched the entire thing with eyes slitted with fury and her hand steady on the Howdah she aimed at his head a second time. Even when half the ship’s crew threatened to pound her door down, her stare never wavered.
“Cut that racket and go about your business!” she’d bellowed over the noise. The pounding abruptly stopped, and Nathaniel recognized the worried voice of her long-time boatswain.
“Are you all right, Captain? We heard the shot.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Sawyer. Just a little mishap with the trigger.” She cocked an eyebrow at Nathaniel and the smooth expanse of his coat, no longer peppered with shot or silvered in his blood.
The silence on the other side of the door stretched for a moment before the boatswain spoke. “Aye, Captain.” A chorus of grumbles and questions followed, and from the sound of it, Mr. Sawyer was having a difficult time herding the crew away from Nettie’s door.
When it grew quiet again, Nettie gestured with the pistol. “How dare you,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “How dare you use my lost lad’s name as a weapon!”
Nathaniel’s already sore gut clenched at the agony in her voice. “Forgive me, Nettie,” he said, contrite. “That was unfair of me.”
“Who are you?Whatare you?”
He dared a slight smile. “Promise you won’t shoot me again if I tell.”
She matched his smile with a hard scowl of her own. “I promise to shoot you if you don’t, and I doubt you can put your skull back together after I put a pair of slugs between your eyes.”
She had a point. He was inhumanly strong and fast, with an uncanny ability to heal wounds that would kill a regular man, but a shot to the head from a pistol used to hunt tigers—well, he was tough, but he wasn’t invincible.
“You once had a lover named Tom Black,” he said. “A coster you ended up killing before he killed you. Widderschynnes is the name you took when you first signed onto the fleet. You sport a tattoo of a swan on your left hip, gotten in Algiers on a helium run.” Her eyes rounded as he recited fact after fact of a life none but a close few knew. His voice softened. “You had a sister named Ruth who died of the cholera in ’33. Your only child, an infant you christened Margaret, is buried in Abney Park. You carry a scrap of her gown in your pocket at all times along with a curl of her hair in a watch locket. They are the most precious things you own.”
The pistol wavered infinitesimally to the right. Nettie blinked, and her voice was hoarse and low. “How do you know all of this?”
The ache in Nathaniel’s chest had nothing to do with Nettie’s shot. “Because you were once my commanding officer, and I am still your devoted friend. It’s me, Nettie,” he said gently. “Nathaniel. Believe it or not, but please don’t shoot me again.”
A weaker woman might have fainted. Nettie Widderschynnes did not. She gazed silently at him for several moments before laying the Howdah on the desk. Nathaniel knew he’d won a small portion of her trust when she handed him a handkerchief to clean his hand and partially turned her back to pour them drinks at the sideboard. Now they sat across from each other, sharing a dram of brandy.
Nettie tapped a finger on her tumbler, her fingernail making a softpink-pink pinksound in the silence. “My eyes are tellin’ me you’re a liar, but you know things only Nathaniel did. You move like him too, even if you’re thinner than a rasher of wind by comparison.”
The part of him wound up tighter than a new spring drive clock loosened. Nathaniel swept a hand from his chest to his knees. “This body once belonged to a knockabout droll named Jack Preston.”
Jack’s soul had departed his body before Harvel played God and rammed Nathaniel’s own dying spirit into it. While the soul was gone, some of Jack’s memories remained. An acrobatic comic who played the stage and entertained the low brow crowds of London, he’d lost his life to a thief with a knife and a fatal aim. The mad doctor had saved the body if not the man and bequeathed it to Nathaniel whose own physical form had been beaten beyond repair by war and the harsh Atlantic waves.
Nettie shook her head. “How is that even possible?”
He shrugged and swallowed half the brandy in his glass. “I don’t know. Galvanism combined withgehennaand whatever strange magic Harvel cooked up in that torture chamber he called a laboratory. All I remember are lights and the burn of liquid hell running through me.”
Liquid hell and lightning. The magic pairing that allowed dead men to live again. They lost most of their humanity in the process, turning the colors of ghosts and shadow. The seven men Harvel turned possessed extraordinary qualities beyond the abilities of normal men. Their blood ran silver instead of red, and like Nathaniel, all were much closer to the dead than to the living.
