“You think of her so.” Her uncle ambled across the narrow entry hall, his shadow long and stark behind him. “One wonders what she has ever done for you. Has she devoted herself to your welfare? Has she instructed you in the womanly arts? Has she actively sought you a good match? No, she has done nothing for you—other than making you a slave to her invalidity, that is. Yet you come running when she leaves you for a few hours.
“I, on the other hand, have supplied you with a beautiful home and a fortunate life. But you did not bestir yourself to visit me once the entire time I was in custody.”
“I have been on my honeymoon,” she said. “I would have come to your trial, though.”
He gave her a smile that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “I hope you have brought proper jewels.”
“I want to see my aunt first.”
“But I need a token of good faith first.”
She handed over the diamond-and-emerald necklace her husband had given her. It was the most extravagant thing she’d ever seen in her life, the emeralds bigger than sovereigns, the diamonds as numerous as stars in the sky.
Douglas, accustomed to gems, merely took the necklace from her and slipped it into his pocket.
She was on a heart-ripping state of alert. But still she did not react in time. Her uncle’s punch sent her reeling backward. Had he broken her jaw? She could not tell. The entire left side of her face was on fire.
“Get up, you treacherous bitch.”
She rose unsteadily to her feet. His next punch made her see black. She crumpled again.
“Get up, you worthless chit. You thought you could leave me rotting in jail, didn’t you? You thought you could repay my kindness by turning your back on me. And you thought I wouldn’t notice? Get up!”
She remained on the grubby floor, limp as a piece of waterlogged paper.
Her uncle bent down and gripped the front of her dress. “You don’t learn, do you? A lifetime and you still haven’t learned the kind of love and respect you owe me.”
This was as good a chance as she was going to get. She swung her reticule at his head with all her strength. He screamed—for they had prepared well, she and her husband, and the seemingly delicate reticule held nothing less than a one-pound disk of iron from her husband’s dumbbell set. She had spent her entire train journey reinforcing the reticule’s seams and straps.
He stumbled, bleeding from his temple. But she did not stop: She swung again, hitting him squarely on the other side of his face.
He grunted. Her third swing he blocked with his arm. She hoped she’d broken a bone in his forearm, but he came at her, his face contorted with anger.
“How dare you? You stupid girl!”
Suddenly she too boiled with rage. Of course she dared—did he not know, stupid man who thought himself so clever, that she dared almost anything, when it was her freedom and her aunt’s well-being that were at stake?
She swung her reticule at him hard and fast, at an angle, so that it caught him on the chin. He staggered backward. Now she swung it high, with all her revulsion and loathing behind it. For everything he had done to Aunt Rachel and herself, robbing them of the best years of their lives, keeping them confined and suffocated, and feasting on their fear and anguish like a vampire at an open vein.
Never again.
Never again.
Vere walked toward the house. In a window on the opposite side of the street, a curtain lifted, and a woman looked out from a grubby, dimly lit parlor. He swayed drunkenly, banging into a lamppost, laying his head down on a postbox, and finally, before the house into which his wife and her uncle had disappeared, he turned his back to the street, and made as if to urinate—judging by the smell in the air, he wouldn’t have been the first man to do so.
Thirty seconds later, the woman had not only closed her curtain but pulled her shutters tight.
He crept up to the door of the house and listened. Elissande and Douglas were talking, their voices too faint for him to make out their words.
His heart pounded in a way it never did during his normal investigations: with fear. That nothing seemed to have erupted yet only rubbed his nerves rawer. Inside his coarse driving mittens, his palms perspired: something else that never happened to him.
He tugged off the mittens, wiped his hands on his trousers, and pulled out his lock picks. Douglas would not place his wife by the door. For Elissande to see her, they must move deeper into the house. And when they did, he would get to work.
He glanced behind him. Damn it, someone else was looking out of her window. The light of the street lamp was hazy, almost brown, but still enough for any unlawful action on his part to be seen. He took two steps, gripped the post that supported the shoddy-looking portico before the house, and proceeded to rub himself against it. The curtain shut quickly.
As he turned back toward the door, there came a cry of pain. A man’s cry of pain. Good girclass="underline" She’d listened with unwavering attention as he’d demonstrated the best way to wield a weighted reticule.
Douglas shrieked again. Excellent.
And then she screamed.
He fumbled for the lock picks. It wasn’t until the third time he attempted to insert the pick that he realized his hand was shaking.
His hands never shook.
She screamed again.
Sod it.
He pulled back the pick and kicked the door. It didn’t give immediately. He kicked again. The hinges splintered. His shin felt as if it had splintered too. He couldn’t care less.
One more kick and the door swung open.
Her uncle went down as the straps of her reticule broke. The weight thudded heavily against the floor and rolled a little distance away. A dent marked where it had fallen.
She panted, still seeing red, hardly able to get enough breath into her lungs.
Behind her the door burst open in a thunderous crash. A big, burly stranger with unruly black hair and a handlebar mustache rushed toward her.
Who was this man? Some ruffian hired by her uncle? No, wait. He was the driver of the hansom cab that had brought them to this house.
“Elissande, my God, are you all right?”
She barely recognized her husband’s voice before he enfolded her in a painfully tight hug. She buried her face in his rough woolen jacket that smelled of horse and some sort of strong, foul drink.
He had been here, as he’d promised. And she had not been alone.
He pulled away and checked her uncle’s pulse. “He’s plenty alive. I’ll stand guard over him. There are rope and lanterns in the boot of the cab. Turn left when you get out of the house.”
She picked up her skirts and ran. Outside she experienced a moment of confusion, as there were not one, but two hansom cabs on the street. But one of them still had the driver perched behind, so she went to the empty one, retrieved the rope and two lanterns, and rushed back. Vere took the rope from her, checked her still-unconscious uncle for weapons—pocketing a derringer and the necklace—and bound him hand and foot.
Now he hugged her much longer. “My God, you scared me. All I could hear from the door was this awful ruckus, your uncle howling and you screaming. I feared the worst.”
“Was I screaming? I had no idea.” Perhaps the refrains of Never again! had not been only in her mind.
He cradled her face in his hands. “You will look awful tomorrow morning. We need to get you an ice compress as soon as we can.”
“My aunt!” she suddenly remembered. “We must find her.”
The house had a spiral staircase. Vere dragged her uncle near the foot of it, so that they could keep an eye on him from any part of the stairs. They searched through the largely empty house, each giving a brief recitation of what they had done since arriving in Exeter. He had visited a gin house and made a lonesome independent cabbie very happy by overpaying for his horse and his carriage. The cabbie was so delighted he hadn’t even asked for more when Vere wanted his jacket too.