“Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” Laurent mused. “Elspeth, my dear—I release you of the command to stay close to the Ossuary except for feeding.”
Her dizzy rush of relief only lasted a second before he turned to her with a bright, fanged smile. He reached out and smoothed her hair away from her face, tucking it behind what remained of her right ear after he and Bacchus had cut it off. He put his lips directly against her mutilated flesh and murmured, “Listen carefully, now. You will keep an eye on Genevieve for me. You’ll remember what she says, whom she meets, and where she goes, and you’ll report back to me whenever there is aught to relate about the master and his plans for the Ossuary. I command you to do this, Elspeth.”
Her throat closed in dread.
Laurent smiled. “Now run along and listen for any pieces of choice news to bring me. And you’ll tell no one,” he added idly. “No one is to know what you’re doing for me. This is going to beour secret.”
Elspeth hurried down the Ossuary corridor, patting her hair carefully to make sure she had hidden her ears once more. She had always been used as a weapon against Genevieve. In the beginning, Bacchus and Laurent had delighted in “punishing” Genevieve for her infractions, but it was only when they had cut off Elspeth’s ear that Genevieve had stopped rebelling against them so openly. She couldn’t bear to be the cause of Elspeth’s hurt.
Now I fear I will be forced to wound her far worse than anything they did to me, Elspeth thought in despair.
But how could she stop it?
She had barely made it to their shared bolt hole entrance before Robbie found her. “Did you go and feed, lass?” he asked, approaching nimbly on his crutch, even on the uneven surface of the tunnel.
“Yes.” She nodded, the lie heavy on her tongue like a scold’s bridle. “Were you looking for me?”
“Kendrick wants help to clean out Rupert’s house. He has put me in charge, and he’s going to pay, Elspeth! I wanted your opinion—and he’ll pay you, too, if you want to help.” He took her hand. “First step to independence.”
Robbie MacPherson was the best man she knew, good and patient and careful as only a man who had known war and pain could be. He had been steady and constant, never pressing her, always there. But she had always known that she could never love him—not when she was still chained. And especially not now, when she was a knife in the dark, to be wielded against any she considered a friend.
Elspeth bit the inside of her cheek, hard.Which is worse—to wound a lover or betray a friend?
“What is it? Your eyes are glittering,” he asked, leaning closer as his brogue strengthened. “This is the turning point, you’ll see. There are better days ahead for us, lass.”
She smiled even as guilt and Laurent’s hateful mandates threatened to choke her. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said, in a voice she did not recognize. “Lead the way.”
ChapterFifteen
Genevieve blessed the quiet of the London streets as she left Sally Blevins’s home. She had had a full complement of children tonight, and their mothers had come home later than usual, and all the children had been fractious, and one of the babies had been teething. August and June had not appeared, though, and Genevieve had been too busy trying to keep the peace to go knock on their door.
She had also been too busy to pick apart the previous night’s interaction with Kendrick—in theory. It had intruded, unasked for, in between the squabbles and the crying babies and letter quizzing.
“I find myself wanting you, Miss Dryden.”
“I have never been truly civilized.”
“It’s been decades since I’ve found myself wanting anything.”
And then he had called her “Jenny.” No one had called her “Jenny” since…
She shook her head. But it was all foolishness. He, who looked like he stepped from a heroic lay or poem of yore, wanting her? A spinster who flinched at unexpected touch? Ridiculous. The only sensible thing to do was to dismiss it as a passing fancy. An unwary thought. And she should certainly feel nothing at all one way or the other over the fact that he had not appeared out of the shadows this night.
Genevieve sighed as thunder rumbled ominously far off. She’d welcome the rain to wash away some of the street grime if the rain wouldn’t drizzle for days on end, turning the whole world dreary and gray. On her way home, she kept an eye out for Fletcher. He had sounded like he had the sniffles the last time she had seen him. It wasn’t like him to stay away so long. He liked having a routine.
Genevieve stopped at a street corner and bit her lip. Things happened to street children and dossers and the London poor all the time.
She recalled one of her father’s turns of phrase from his spotty translation ofBeowulf:
“All were endangered, both elder and younger,
pursued by a killer, a shadow of death.
He trod every night then the mist-covered moor-fens;
men know not the wanderings of reavers from hell.”
Sometimes thethingsthat happened to people were bloodsuckers like her.
