Chapter Four
The up-and-coming neighborhood ofBelgraviasits atop colorful Mayfair like the stiff white hat. Uniform stucco crescents surround a verdant private garden. Shiny black ironwork cordons walkways and steps. The result is regal and important, not unlike the well-heeled Londoners and foreign dignitaries who have made Belgravia their home.
But don’t be fooled; these pristine terrace mansions only appear to be cut from ivory or marble; they’re actually made of painted bricks fired from the mud that formerly moldered beneath the area’s original landscape, which for centuries was Middlesex marshland and bog.
—fromA Noble Guide to Londonby Sabine Noble
Sabine deposited Bridget on the floor and rose, taking up a stack of clean towels from Stoker’s bedside. She peered down at him, curious at what had set the dog off. After four days Bridget should be accustomed to a semiconscious man lying in their bedro—
Sabine let out a little yelp and dropped the towels.
“Good God!” she gasped, staring at the man in her bed. Bridget resumed barking, jumping, and spinning at her feet. “Bridget, quiet!”
The now-awake Jon Stoker stared straight up at the ceiling, ignoring her, ignoring the dog, and Sabine had the panicked thought that he had, at long last, died.
She took a tentative step closer, extending her neck for the best view from the greatest distance. He lay motionless, eyes unblinking.
He is dead,she thought, taking another step.
His eyes slid left, the alert gaze of a decidedly living man, and locked on her face. Sabine drew back. He looked back to the ceiling.
“Stoker?” she whispered.
Jon Stoker had opened his eyes several times in the four days, but his expression had been vague and cloudy. He looked but did not see; he’d been alert enough to take food and water, but he had not been sentient.
Today his gaze was sharp. His eyes stared at the ceiling with full consciousness. His body, previously limp beneath the sheet, was rigid; his jaw was clenched. Even his beard looked wilder.
Sabine hopped a step back. She’d taken to breezing in and out of this room at all hours; it was alarming, really, how comfortable she’d become with his inert form taking up silent space in her suite of rooms in the cellar of Arthur and Mary Boyd’s Belgravia townhome. But of course he posed no risk if he was out of his head, too feeble to roll over. And if his friends turned up soon to reclaim him. If he simply remained mostly asleep.
But now...
Not taking her eyes from him, Sabine stooped and retrieved her dog, hugging Bridget to her chest.
“Stoker?” she asked again, more pointedly this time. Caution translated to timidity in her brain, and timidity felt like fear. When she left her uncle’s purview, she vowed to never be afraid again.“Stoker?”
“Where am I?” he asked. His voice was raspy, hoarse—but his tone? Not vague, not even weak.
And not particularly friendly.
“It’s me, Sabine,” she said. “I’ve brought you home—er, to my home. This is the house where I reside in London. In Belgravia.”
“Brought mefrom where?”He wouldn’t look at her.
Had he gone blind?she wondered.
“From the morgue on the hospital shipDreadnought. In Greenwich. You’d been left for dead, I’m afraid. You’ve a wound in your side—the doctors say you were likely stabbed. Infection has set in.”
She saw him grimace and endeavored to shift beneath the covers. Bridget growled and Sabine fastened a hand around her snout.
“Careful,” she said. “Perhaps it’s best not to make unnecessary movements. I’ve hired a footman to care for your personal needs, and you suffer considerable pain when he, er, tends to you, I believe. From the sound of it, that is. I wait in the, er, corridor.”
“I’m beingtended to?”He gritted out the words.
Sabine frowned at this. “Well, you are hardly in the condition to tend to yourself. You were left for dead, as I’ve said. You are well enough to have this conversation, which is an improvement, but I’d wager that is the extent of what you can accomplish at the moment. You are rather sick, I’m afraid.”
Stoker squeezed his eyes shut. “If I was left for dead,” he ground out, “why did they summon you? What connection was made between a dead man and his estranged wife?”
“There was no connection,” she said. “I came upon you quite by accident. I had other business on theDreadnought. By sheer happenstance, a steward led me by the morgue and I noticed your—” She felt herself redden, thinking of the jolt she’d felt when she’d seen the serpent tattoo winding up his muscled forearm.
