Kitabı oku: «A Beggar’s Kingdom», sayfa 7

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GRIMY, SWEATY, PANTING, GROSS, JULIAN RETURNS LATE TO the Silver Cross.

The Baroness is ready to send him to Newgate for his day-long absence just when she needs him most. Not only had he vanished, but he’s come back with no flowers! And in his absence, a nasty fight has broken out between the girls, the constable has come by twice, inquiring about a possible death on the premises, Ilbert has been making strange noises about blackmail, and Carling and Ivy did such a poor job disinfecting the room that an early client has just stormed downstairs demanding a refund.

In the corner of the tavern, Father Anselmo stands, loudly pleading to the men present. “My fallen angels, have you already forgotten that pestilence was retribution for your wicked ways?” he cries. “It was punishment for your wrongdoing. I beseech you, good gentlemen and a lady—turn from your stinking and horrible sin of lechery! Which grows daily in this stew by your continual employment of strumpets, all to the one misguided and idle women. How long can this continue—until you’re all dead of syphilis or the plague? A conflagration will not be enough to punish you for your sins. How long do you intend to dwell in your odious wickedness? Until there is more death? Don’t you know that wanton lust, divorced from civilizing forces, leads to errors in judgment, to compromised honor, to blackmail, to murder! All the deadly sins are boiling under your roof, and you call yourselves reputable men. Repent! Repent before it’s too late.”

The Baroness, her face unpainted, perspiring, aggravated, folds her hands together in a frantic plea to Julian. She looks as Julian feels. “I’m going to throw myself into the River Thames if that miserable wretch doesn’t shut his gob this instant!” she exclaims about Anselmo. “Where have you been all day, Julian? Why do you look as if you’ve been swimming in mud? Why aren’t you dressed for the evening? It’s Saturday night. You know how busy we get. We have no flowers, and Room Two still smells of corpse. The girls are ripping each other’s hair out—and I mean that in the most literal sense. Ilbert is more insolent than ever, you’re nowhere to be found, and look like a leper. Please—go change into your evening attire. Blimey, one little death, and everything’s gone to pot!” The woman fans herself wildly, raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Bloody helpers, it’s hot! I’m praying for a little rain and for that beastly man to lose his tongue. Is that really so much to ask, O Lord?”

Julian pats Tilly’s arm. On the outside, he remains composed. “I think some of your prayers may already be answered,” he says. “There was a strong east wind as I was returning. Rain is around the corner. About everything else, Baroness, don’t worry. I’ll take care of the constable and the girls and the smell. Give me an hour. I’ll take care of it all.” Calmly he starts up the stairs. “Which girls are fighting?”

“All of them. But mainly Margrave and Mallory. Tell them to stop hollering or they can leave right now and go work at the Haymarket. They beat their girls there, soundly, like gongs.”

“Mallory is fighting?” Julian hurries.

On the second floor, thirteen girls are yelling in the corridor. Margrave is soaked from head to chest as she and Mallory scream at each other. Julian’s first instinct is to defend Mallory, but a more careful listen tells him that Mallory is the attacker. Apparently, she threw a bucket of putrid water into Margrave’s face. It’s gone into the girl’s eyes and nose and mouth and is burning her. Instead of apologizing, Mallory stands and shouts. Julian has never seen Mallory this red-faced and enraged.

Julian steps between the two women, separating them and pulling Mallory away. She doesn’t want to hear it, not even from him. But he’s had enough. He raises his voice to show the girls he means business. “Stop it, you two. Margrave, go clean yourself up. Mallory, you too, downstairs. You look a fright. You’re scaring off the customers.” He frowns. “What’s the matter with you?” he says to her quietly. “Go.” And louder, “Carling, Ivy, come with me—the rest of you, get back to work. Show’s over.”

The Baroness is right. Fabian’s room still smells awful. Death must have seeped into the floorboards.

“We tried, sire!” Carling and Ivy cry. “We used up all the vinegar you gave us and all the lye.”

Julian sighs. “Let’s declare this room occupied for the rest of the night. Put a sign on the door. We’ll work with nine rooms tonight, nothing we can do.” The Baroness won’t be happy with the loss of earnings. And tomorrow is Sunday, and all the markets will be closed. Nowhere to buy more lye. Exasperated, Julian follows the maids downstairs. He hasn’t gotten himself cleaned up as he had promised the Baroness, but he needs to speak to Mallory. He finds her in the servants’ kitchen, still irate. “Mallory?”

“Go away.”

“Why are you upset? What has Margrave done?”

“She’s a thief.”

“I thought she was your friend?”

“She hates me. She’s always hated me.”

“What could she possibly steal from you? You have nothing. You barely have a change of clothes.”

“Yes, by all means, demean me.”

“I’m not demeaning you,” Julian says, chastised, “I’m trying to understand.”

“Please, sire, can you leave so I can do my job?” She won’t look at him.

As he’s about to head upstairs, he hears the Baroness sharply calling his name from the ground floor of the tavern. She’s still in her pink velvet robe, but now Constable Parker stands by her side. Julian’s mood worsens. He wasn’t expecting to face Parker so soon. He can’t deal with the constable at the moment, not least of all because he is so disheveled.

Usually Parker is delightfully apathetic. He comes every week, Julian gives him a drink, a meal, and a cut of the week’s earnings. For this, Parker looks the other way if a fight breaks out, or if there’s some petty theft. But tonight Parker says he can’t really look the other way because there’s chatter all over Westminster that a well-born man has been found dead in a brothel.

“Who says a man’s been found dead?” Julian asks.

“The one-humped bloke with a shovel.”

“Ilbert?” The Baroness laughs. “No, no, constable. Ilbert was born in an insane asylum. Born to a leper who died at childbirth. He is half-blind because of his mother’s leprosy. It ate away his brain. He once told me,” the Baroness says, “that two men died of spotted fever on Drury Lane!”

“That’s probably correct, madam.”

“He’s never been to Drury Lane. How would he know? The other day he was whispering to Father Anselmo that English aristocrats and Members of Parliament were conducting a sado-masochistic orgy in this very house until daybreak. Don’t you think I’d know if this was happening under my own roof? Orgy! What is this, the Haymarket? Besides, we don’t have rooms big enough for an orgy even if we wanted one. So you see, Ilbert often makes things up, all cock and bull stories from him. Pay him no mind, constable, no mind at all.”

The constable almost buys the Baroness’s own cock and bull story. “Here’s my pickle,” Parker says. “Ilbert keeps muttering that some fat man has died. I wondered if he could’ve meant Lord Fabian, so I took a stroll over to the honorable gentleman’s home in Belgravia, to make sure he was all right. The gentleman is widowed and childless. And wouldn’t you know it, his butler informed me that Lord Fabian is missing! He hasn’t been home since early Friday morning. That’s never happened before, apparently. The household is frantic.”

Julian and the Baroness shrug. “Maybe he’s at work,” the Baroness says.

“Great minds think alike, madam,” Parker says. “That was my thinking. So I took a ride over to the Tower this afternoon, and guess what?”

“I can’t fathom.”

“The Tower?” says Julian. “Like the Tower of London?”

“Yes, sir,” Parker says. “That’s where the honorable gentleman works. Unfortunately, no one was there to answer my queries at the weekend. I was told to come back on Monday.”

Julian and the Baroness both exhale with relief as the constable shakes Julian’s hand and feigns to go. Then, almost as an aside, he asks to speak to the cleaning girl.

“Which cleaning girl? We got three.”

“Ilbert mentioned that one of them was always hanging around the gentleman,” Parker said. “Maybe she can tell us something—like the last time she saw him.”

“I assure you, constable, he hasn’t been here.” The Baroness waves her little book of hours in the air. “No one goes upstairs without me knowing. No orgies. No Lord Fabian.”

“Just a quick word with the girl, Baroness.”

“She’s my niece, constable. She’s the only daughter of my youngest sister, may God rest her soul. I can vouch for Mallory on the Bible.”

Parker raises his hand to assure her. “It’s just routine, Baroness, please don’t worry.” He coughs. “Though one other small thing … Ilbert says that a week ago he saw this Mallory girl in the main kitchen, where she has no business being, crushing something with a mortar into a pestle. When he confronted her, she scraped out the pestle and hurried off.”

“Probably grinding some nuts,” the Baroness says. “Is that also against the law?”

“By also, do you mean grinding some nuts and also murder?” Parker says. “One of them is against the law, madam, yes. And Ilbert may be a more enterprising fellow than he lets on because he ran his finger through the pestle she left behind and tasted the grindings.”

“And?”

“Ilbert says he damn near died. Says he was sick for three days. The bitter thing that touched his tongue burned a hole in it, singed his throat and gave him terrible digestive upset. He started vomiting up blood, which may be the only thing that saved him, since he believes he vomited up whatever was poisoning him.”

“Poisoning?” Julian opens his hands with a chuckle. “Constable Parker, Ilbert touches his mouth and face after handling the filthiest things. Has the man ever had a bath? He could’ve eaten a spoiled pig snout, old fish, bad eggs. In any case, it clearly wasn’t poison since Ilbert’s still walking around, alive as all that.”

“As opposed to who?” Parker says. “As opposed to an esteemed Member of Parliament, a Lord Temporal, who has vanished and can’t be found?”

“Do you always assume the worst when a man can’t be found for a day?”

The constable eyes Julian, then the Baroness. “Not any man. Lord Fabian. Many powerful people are going to notice the lord’s conspicuous absence. Among them His Majesty Charles II, your king.”

Julian and the Baroness stand motionless. Julian’s leg itches with anxiety.

“I don’t need to remind you both,” Parker says, “that murder by poison is a heinous crime. The punishment for it is being boiled in oil. Now will you two let me talk to the girl so we can clear her of any wrongdoing?”

They look for her, but Mallory can’t be found. Night is falling and the tavern is getting busy. The Baroness manages to charm Parker into returning on Monday morning, when he can have all day with Mallory if he likes. “And perhaps the honorable Lord Fabian will turn up by then, and this confusion will be put behind us.”

As soon as Parker leaves, Julian turns to the Baroness. “Ilbert’s not to be trusted.”

“What could Mallory have been grinding up in that pestle? Damn that girl!”

“Nuts, Baroness! But this isn’t about Mallory. It’s about Ilbert. You do remember, don’t you, how just this morning he and I dragged Fabian’s body down the stairs?”

“Shh!”

“On your orders, he helped me bind the man,” Julian says. “He carted him away. Ilbert knows for a fact there’s a body, for an absolute fact. What’s stopping him from leading the constable right to it?”

“Why would he do that?” The madam sounds offended. “We’ve had a death here before, some years ago. Ilbert was exemplary. Took care of everything. He’s been working for me for twelve years. He’s like a loyal son.”

“You’re sure about that? Because if he squeals, we’ll all be boiled in oil for murder and for conspiracy to conceal it. You, me, Mallory, and half your girls.”

“Murder! What are you on about? The lord had a heart attack! You said so yourself.”

“Who will believe you,” Julian says, “when his body is found bound and dumped in a canal?”

That Saturday night, from September 1 to September 2, 1666, is one of the worst Julian has at the Silver Cross. It’s one crisis after another. He barely has enough time to wash and change before Room Two is demanded by a contingent of celebrants who are willing to overlook the smell. They pay handsomely for a flow of wine and meat and girls to be brought up at regular intervals throughout the night. Carling stokes the fire, Mallory lights the candles and Ivy carries the ale and the steins. But the other nine rooms also need tending. At one point, Julian is reduced to changing the enseamed sheets himself. A fight breaks out between Brynhilda and a customer over the difference between services provided and price paid. Brynhilda, twice the size of the weasely john, punches him in the face, sending him tumbling down the stairs. For this Julian must negotiate a peace and restitution. One of the girls is sick in the night, vomiting violently in the middle of working, and the Baroness herself must haggle for a reduced fee instead of a refund. The night refuses to end.

It’s after five in the morning when the business of the house finally dies down, the patrons leave, the Baroness goes to bed, and an exhausted Julian locks up and returns to his room. It’s dark blue outside. Dawn is near. After taking off his jacket and puffy shirt, he gets the quill and dips it in ink. How many dots? Six columns of seven plus one; 43 dots in all. His forearm burns as the quill pierces the skin. He wipes up the drop of blood and wonders how many days he’s missed, four, a week, more?

A voice from a corner says, “Julian.”

He drops the quill, nearly falls himself. He thought he was alone.

Mallory is crammed between the dormered wall and the side of the cupboard, huddled on the floor, her knees drawn up. How did he not see her?

“Don’t scare me like that,” Julian says. “What are you doing?” He scans the room. It looks as if his things have been gone through. The journal is not where he left it, the shirts have been refolded. “Why are you on the floor?”

“Shh,” she says.

“What’s the matter?”

She rocks back and forth.

“Is it about Margrave?”

She won’t say.

He perches on the bed. Seeing her distraught makes him distraught. Outside the sun is not up yet, the air is blue-gray with a tinge of amber. The east wind is strong. On this wind, Julian can smell burning wood. What fools build fires in this crazy hot weather?

“You have to help me,” she says in a low cold voice. “This is all your fault.”

What is she talking about?

“Marg robbed me,” Mallory says from the floor.

“Peanut, don’t get offended again, but what could she take from you?”

She doesn’t answer. “You have to silence Ilbert,” Mallory says at last. “Do you know anyone in this town who can do it? Or can you do it?” She says the last part as if she doesn’t expect Julian can silence a mosquito.

“What do you mean, silence him? Like tell him to shut his trap? I can do it.”

“Well, perhaps before you beg him politely to quiet down, you can ask him what he’s done with the lord’s body.”

So she knows. The Baroness tried to shield her from it, Julian didn’t want to tell her, but she’s found out anyway. There are no secrets in a brothel.

“Mal, I’m really sorry—”

She cuts him off. “I heard you tell the imp to take the body far from here, and instead, Ilbert threw it into a canal a few streets away, a canal with barely six inches of standing water. The body isn’t even submerged. It’s what some might call hiding evidence in plain sight.”

Julian pales. “How do you know this?”

“Ah, it’s a funny story. I know this,” Mallory says, “because Ilbert told me.”

“Why would Ilbert tell you that?”

“Oh, no, dear one. You misunderstand. He didn’t confess to me because he wanted to get it off his skeletal chest. He told me, you see, because he wanted me to pay him to keep quiet.”

“Pay him? Why would you pay him?”

Mallory doesn’t answer. “But I can’t pay him because Margrave has stolen my money.”

“What money? The money we’ve been earning for you on the side? I thought you always keep it on your person? Isn’t that what you told me? Keep your valuables on you?”

“That little game Ilbert was playing with the constable about the mortar and pestle,” Mallory continues, as if Julian hasn’t spoken, “that was just him letting me and the Baroness know that we’ll all hang unless he gets what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“Half,” Mallory says.

Julian fumbles inside his waistcoat pocket for the purse with the guineas in it. “Half of what?” he asks dully.

“Don’t you get it? If Margrave didn’t rob me, then Ilbert must’ve robbed me, in which case, he’s just toying with us. Tormenting us before the slaughter. It wouldn’t surprise me about him, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

She puts her face in her hands.

“Half of what?” Julian repeats in a whisper.

“Half a bag of fucking gold,” says Mallory.

Julian stops being mild or consoling. He gets off the bed, stands in front of her. He doesn’t speak because he can’t speak. He tries to put together his next thought, his next word. The sun drifts up over the gray slate rooftops of Whitehall. The wind is strong and dry. It still smells of burning wood. He crouches in front of her, sinks to the floor next to her. Their feet could touch, but they don’t.

“Lord Fabian hid it in the floorboards in Room Two,” Mallory says. “It’s not there anymore. I didn’t take it. You’re saying Margrave didn’t take it. So if it wasn’t Ilbert, who could’ve taken it, Julian?”

She doesn’t look at him as she speaks, doesn’t see the shock on his face. This can’t be. It simply can’t be. “Why would Fabian hide gold in the floorboards of a brothel?” Julian asks.

“It was ill-gotten gold,” Mallory says. “The lord was Master of the Royal Mint up in the Tower of London. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yes. That’s what he was. These days they use a machine press, but a hundred years ago they hammered the coin in dies. Two years ago, I found one of those hand-made coins on him as I was undressing him. That’s when he told me he was a lifelong coin collector. He said that a few years earlier, in the chaos after Cromwell fell from power, he swiped one of the discarded dies they used to cast the commemorative Elizabethan sovereigns. He said the die had been retired prematurely. It needed a little sharpening on the face side, a little etching. He said the coat of arms side was perfect. After he fixed the die, he started staying late and hammering his own coin. He told his boss, the Warden of the Mint, that he was working overtime on commemorative metal for our new king, Charles II. And he was. But he was also minting coin for himself, using the purloined die.”

His body slumping, Julian waits for the rest.

“It took him over six years to mint just 49 coins! He had to be so careful. He could make barely one every seven weeks, they were so labor-intensive in the hammering and softening. He told me when he got to fifty, he would stop. The risk of getting caught siphoning off drops of liquefied bullion was becoming too great. To make the coins accurately, he had to use drops from the rare 23-carat gold ingots, not the 22-carat they use today. A month or so ago, he got to 49. He needed only one more! And now they’re gone.”

Julian sways. “And he is also gone.”

“Yes,” Mallory says without inflection. “He is also gone.”

“Why would he hide them here?”

“He used to keep them at his house. I was the one who persuaded him that here was safer. And it was—much safer. The floor is nailed down in every room. I made the hiding place for the coins myself. In the lord’s house, the servants were disgustingly nosy. They waited for him to come home, they undressed him, bathed him, they dusted every nook. A locked chest with a key the lord carried on his person had alerted his staff that there was something in the chest worth locking away. He didn’t trust them. But he trusted me.”

“Why would he trust you?” Julian says in a hoarse voice.

“He was lonely. He liked me.”

Julian doesn’t look at her.

“When I found that one coin on him, he was relieved!” Mallory says. “His secret had been choking him. He was dying to tell someone. He was an artist and each coin was his masterpiece. I made a proper show of being impressed. I made a place where he could hide them. Room Two has always been a special, mysterious room. It’s secluded and private, and in it, the candles that fall don’t catch fire, though sometimes you do hear strange noises from the closet under the dormer. Some say the room is haunted. You appeared from the closet in that room.” She half-smiles.

Julian’s face is a mask.

“Every time the lord minted a new coin, we would celebrate. We’d have some wine and admire it. Make a pomp of placing it together with the others. I never took a coin from him, not one. He had to know I could be trusted. That I wouldn’t steal from him or betray him or blackmail him.”

“Why would he trust you?” Julian repeats.

“You’re beheaded for stealing from the king’s Royal Mint. It’s called treason to the realm.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” He takes a breath. “What were you getting out of it?”

“A way out.”

Rigidly Julian waits for her to say more.

“We were going to leave for the South of France. For Nice or Marseilles.”

“Leave as in … leave together?”

“Yes.”

“Lord Fabian was the benefactor who would take you away to the South of France?”

“Yes.”

“But what were you actually planning to do?”

“I told you I’ve been planning my escape, didn’t I?”

Julian sits on the floor and wishes he could stop listening to her air more misdeeds through her bitter lips.

I don’t know if you are safe with him, Julian says.

Oh, sire, she coos. You are so kind-hearted. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about him.

As in, Fabian is not the one Julian needs to worry about. Julian had heard it all wrong.

“Everything was going perfectly,” Mallory continues. “Only one more coin to cast. Seven weeks to go! So close. But then you came into our life and ruined everything. Everything! At first your blind desire for me allowed me to make some extra money, and gave him a little pleasure, but quickly it all went wrong. And I didn’t even know how wrong until it was too late.”

“How is that my fault?”

“Because you ruined it with your love!” she cries. “At first, the lord thought you and I were just for show, another night of staged ribaldry at the Silver Cross. But soon he began to suspect that you weren’t putting on a show, you weren’t acting—like everyone else in this godforsaken place—but that you really loved me! He thought he was using you, and then it dawned on him that it was the other way around, that you were using him! And when he suspected that I might love you back, that’s when everything I’ve been working for since I was eighteen was destroyed.”

“Might love me back?”

“He and I had violent words about it,” says Mallory. “I told him it wasn’t true. I swore to him I didn’t even slightly love you.”

“Ah.”

“He didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that when the time came, I would leave you and travel with him to Marseilles. I vowed to him I would. I begged him, I pleaded. I tried, Julian, oh how I tried to save his pitiable life! But he was so stubborn and jealous. He wouldn’t listen.” She wrings her hands. “The other night he came and said he was taking his coin and leaving for good because he was afraid you would kill him and lure me away.”

“He was afraid I would kill him?”

“Yes. So you could have me all to yourself. I tried to persuade him otherwise, but it was no use. He said when he saw us together, he saw the face of love. He said he knew what it looked like because it was how he himself gazed upon me. He didn’t trust me anymore and could never trust me again.”

It’s Julian’s turn to put his head in his hands. Mallory is right. It is his fault. How badly Julian has misjudged another man. How badly he has misjudged his woman. Again. “Fabian was right not to trust you,” Julian says. “You killed him for fifty pieces of gold.”

“Forty-nine,” she cries, “and do you have any idea how much they’re worth?”

As it turns out, he does. “But you were with me all night. You couldn’t have killed him.” He whispers it. He still refuses to believe it’s true. You’re not going to marry another man, are you, when you promised yourself to me, Josephine.

“I wasn’t with you all night.”

“How did you do it?” Julian doesn’t want to know.

“With your help.” Mallory wipes her face. “A thousand ways to kill a human being. That’s what you taught me. Oleander, wild cherry, rosary pea. You made it so easy. You’re a very good teacher, Julian. You explained it well. I learned so much about all the wonderful plants that grow in London’s parks. I pulled off the rosary pea from a bush while we were walking in the palace garden last week. Right in front of you, I dropped the pea in my apron. All it took was a little grinding and a drink of honeyed wine. He drank around eleven. I begged him not to leave until I came back to say goodbye. Then I was with you. At four in the morning when you were asleep, I checked on him.” She shakes her head. “Poor lord. He became so angry when he realized he had been poisoned. He worked himself up into quite a rage. I must say, I didn’t expect him to go into such violent convulsions. Flailing, foaming, hitting his head, falling down right over the spot in the floor where we kept his gold. I didn’t want him to die alone. I sat with him until the end. I held his hand. I figured as soon as his body was removed, I’d get my money. No one knew it was there but me—or so I thought. But then the Baroness shepherded me out for the day, Carling and Ivy mopped up, and when I came back, the gold was gone.”

Rosary pea! When they strolled through the park on Sundays, arm in arm like lovers, she was scheming to betray a man who loved her, to kill him and rob him and run off—by herself—without the other man who loved her.

She dry heaves.

Wait, no, it’s Julian. He’s the one who’s dry heaving.

She begins to crawl to him but sees his face and stops.

“Julian,” Mallory says from her hiding place, “I’ve never been touched or held by anyone in my whole hard life the way you hold me when you love me, and when we sleep. You gave me something I didn’t know I wanted, that I didn’t know was real. For that, I thank you. But the most important thing to me is not love, not even yours. It’s to save my own life. It’s the only one I’ve got, and it’s what my mother kept saying she wanted for me. I do this partly to honor her.”

“You poisoned a man to honor your mother,” Julian says.

“It was never going to last between me and you,” Mallory says. “Don’t look so upset.”

“I don’t look upset,” he says. “I am upset. Do you know the difference?”

“I do. But don’t be. You are young, passionate, beautiful. The girls swoon over you. Pay me no mind. You’ll find someone else.”

“You don’t love me?”

“I love you,” Mallory says. “But I can’t trust you.”

“You can’t trust me?”

“That’s right. You sold me to the lord. What you wanted came first.”

“I didn’t sell you!” Julian exclaims. “I gave you what you wanted. I would’ve never done it. You begged me to help you. You wanted to make money. I gave that to you.”

“And you wanted to have me—at any cost. Well, this is the price.”

“Mallory! You killed a man who took care of you so you could get to his gold, and you’re talking to me about trust?”

“What did you do for his gold?”

“I didn’t kill him. I didn’t betray my benefactor.” Julian shudders. Little did he know that his girl was in the fourth ring of the ninth circle of hell. And he was right by her side. “Oh, Mallory.” He shrinks and bends like a bow.

“You traded your body and mine,” she says. “You don’t think that’s worse?”

“No.”

“You whored yourself out, and you whored me out.”

“Stop being cruel. I did it for you.”

“You say for me. I say for you. So you could have what you want. Well, I did the things I did to have what I want.” Mallory whispers this, but her words are so deadly she might as well be screaming.

Julian doesn’t know what to do. To tell her or not to tell her? Who’s to say his own fate will be different from the Temporal Lord’s? She’s already disposed of one man. What’s one more?

“I saved some money, Mallory,” Julian says. “You can have it. Let’s go. Let’s run together.”

She shakes her head.

“You said you want to save your life. That’s also what I want. I swear to you.” Julian clenches his fist over his heart. “To save you is all I want. You’re in terrible danger. You don’t even know. Parker suspects you of foul play. And you know the punishment that awaits you. Please, let me protect you. You can’t do it alone,” he adds when he gets no reply from her.

“Is that a threat, Julian? Are you going to give me up to the constable?” There is something merciless and frightening in Mallory’s expression.

Julian becomes certain if he tells her about the treasure, she will kill him. She will poison his wine, too, and form a Satan’s alliance with Ilbert, and like Fabian, Julian will be tossed face down into the shallow canal by Savoy Palace.

“I’m not going to give you up,” he says, struggling to his feet and pulling her up with him. “You are my country. My allegiance is to you.” He fights to avoid placing a confrontational emphasis on my. But also—he can’t form a coherent thought anymore. He will have to deal with this tomorrow. It will be here soon enough.