Part 6: A Blade in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Back

The sight of home failed to fill Reese with the joy she expected after months away. The grounds had run wild. Panes were missing from an upstairs window. A corner of the roof sagged. How quickly neglect transformed a proud manse into a derelict ruin.

Postponing additional disappointment and the confrontation awaiting her inside, she rode her rented horse to the stable. There were no hands about, and the reason for their absence became apparent inside. The horse she sat astride was the only one in residence. Judging by the smell—more dust and mold than manure and hay—the others had been evicted some time ago.

She dismounted and checked each stall for signs of recent occupancy. There were none. Floors were bare, troughs empty. Even the tack was gone.

She lacked the sentimental attachment to animals many of her gender seemed to develop. Horses were transportation, dogs were hunting gear, cats were rat catchers, all serving a more important purpose than being cuddled and cooed at by some silly chit who served no purpose at all. Lack of sentiment, however, did not exempt her from upset at the loss. They were useful and valuable and hers, dammit. “Curse that boil of a man to an eternity festering on the devil’s ass!”

“Too good for him, if you ask me.”

She tipped her head back, seeking the source of the voice. The stableboy, Luke, sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the loft. “I somehow doubt my father’s charitable heart elected to keep you on after eliminating your duties.”

The boy shrugged. “Ain’t been paid since you left, miss, but got nowhere else to go and no coin to get there.”

Her father was also unlikely to extend room and board to a penniless, jobless orphan, so the fact that the boy didn’t look any more starved than usual after all this time was a testament to his own resourcefulness. Because it was his custom to dodge personal questions as if they were harmful as bullets, she didn’t ask how he’d managed. She patted the horse’s neck and tried a neutral enquiry instead. “Is there anything left to feed this fellow?”

Luke shimmied down a beam, agile as a monkey. “I’ll see to him.”

“Not until you’ve received the wages you’re due.”

“Ain’t due nothing for work I ain’t done.” He took the dangling reins. “Pay me when I earn it.”

“I’ll pay you whenever I damn well choose, and if you don’t like it, you can throw the money in the river like a stubborn lackwit.” He turned away, but not quickly enough to hide the childish poke of his tongue, which she suspected was no accident. “By the by, cheeky boy, you’ve fallen out of practice at whatever game you’re playing. Three sentences without ‘ain’t'? You’re in danger of sounding as if you’re distantly familiar with proper use of the English language.”

“Ain’t got no idea what you mean, miss.”

Reese had learned early on to be wary of all but judge others on their treatment of her, not their past deeds. The most outwardly proper people tended to be the vilest excuses for human beings, while society’s outcasts and throwaways had proven to be her most reliable friends. She had no clue what dark past had delivered Luke to her, alone and secretive, cloaked in lies. He might have murdered a hundred men. He certainly had the ability to take care of himself, but as long as the runt showed no inclination to go elsewhere, she felt responsible for him. “This is no place to let your guard down, even for an instant.”

“For you, either.” Their eyes met, his a thousand times more world-weary than a boy his age had any right to be. “If I were you, I’d blink one eye at a time.”

She dismissed that advice as redundant and made her way to the house. This menace wasn’t something she’d stumbled into recently, like Luke. It was her whole life, one she had adapted to survive. Not only did she ration her blinking, she’d positioned mirrors in every room and stood or sat only where they enabled her to view threats behind her. She’d been more at ease on a ship crawling with mercenaries than she had ever been in her own home. She’d been more at ease with her pirate.

The pirate, she corrected herself. The likely fuming, cursing, and teeth-gnashing pirate after she’d adroitly avoided becoming his. She had gained another formidable enemy to watch for over her shoulder. As she had an adequate supply of those already, it was a good thing her recent high seas adventure had been her last. She would be staying well away from the ocean and the scoundrels it sustained henceforth. Surely they could live their lives—hers on land, his on water—without ever suffering another meeting.

No one greeted her at the door. The foyer was barren, the marble floor dull, the woodwork caked with dust. Her heart lifted at the thought that the thieving bastard might have sold everything of value and abandoned the gutted carcass of his victim, but even that dreary shadow of hope was too much to ask.

Foley, her father’s manservant and partner in crime, sauntered out of the sitting room, though what he could find to occupy him in a room stripped of its furnishings was a mystery.

She didn’t waste her breath on a civil greeting. “Where is he?”

Foley smirked. “Doing better things than talking to you.”

“Oh, I think he’ll rearrange his busy schedule to speak with me.” She patted the holster at her hip. “Although if you intend to obstruct my path, it may delay our warm reunion a moment or two.”

In deference to her clear willingness to put a bullet between his reptilian eyes, he stepped aside with a flick of his hand in the general direction of the study.

She opened the door without knocking. The house was hers, as were the factory and the money—or what little was left of it after her father’s stewardship between her mother’s death and the day of her twenty-first birthday, when her inheritance would come to her.

Soon. With any luck, soon enough to prevent him from ruining her completely.

Calvin Hershey sat behind a desk littered with mounds of disorganized papers. Rather than toiling over tedious business affairs, he faced the window, engrossed in the strenuous enterprise of watching the weeds overtake the lawn. “What is it, Foley?” When there was no response from his servant, he turned in his seat to face her. His face blanched. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.” She hadn’t expected him to be happy to see her, but he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “The cargo has been delivered to the warehouse. I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain. Now you—”

“We will discuss the matter following supper, at which you will present yourself groomed and clothed in a manner befitting a female and not some sweaty dockhand.”

She was coated top to toe with a layer of road grime, sweat glued her shirt to her spine, and she’d been too busy making arrangements for the shipment to bother feeding herself. A bath, a change of clothes, and a hot meal weren’t worth arguing about. “I’m happy to comply.” On her way out, she added, “Provided you haven’t yet gotten around to selling my clothing.”

Foley lurked in the hall, no doubt eavesdropping. Since he clearly had too much time on his hands, she gave him an errand. “Send Alice to my room.”

His smirk stretched to bare his yellow teeth. “Your maid is no longer employed here.”

Alice had been her mother’s maid and devoted herself to Reese after Gabrielle Hershey’s death. She had no need of a handmaiden, but finding the closest thing she had to a mother tossed out like the contents of a chamber pot made Reese—what was the pirate’s term?—incandescent with rage. “I want her back. Immediately.”

“You don’t give the orders around here.”

She drew her pistol. “As long as my trust is being drained to pay your wages, you will either follow my orders or become the dead weight you behave as.”

He tipped his head in the barest nod, his gaze steady on the barrel pointed at his chest. “Then I suppose I’ll go find the old bitch, miss.”

Her aim didn’t waver until he was out the door. When she was alone, her arm dropped, shoulders slumped under the weight of failure.

Leaving had been a mistake. Her father could have replaced the entire staff in her absence, giving himself a clean slate on which to establish the authority that had eluded him for the past two decades.

The scrawny adolescent hiding in the stable might be her only remaining ally.

She trudged to her room, where she sent the dusty water bucket down to the kitchen via the dumbwaiter before taking stock of the losses from this room. The rug was gone and the walls divested of art, but the furniture remained. The wardrobe contained her few day dresses, but there were vacancies where her finer wear had resided. She left secret panel in the back untouched. She knew that compartment to be empty. When her father’s intention to rob her of all her worldly possessions became obvious, so did the folly of hiding any of those possessions within others. The few baubles she hadn’t gotten around to secreting elsewhere were stashed in concealed compartments in the floor. He would have to burn the house to the ground to expose them.

Arson wasn’t beneath him, but as long as he required a roof over his head, her mother’s jewelry was secure.

The dumbwaiter had yet to return. She hammered the side of the shaft with her fist, blows reverberating through the walls and floor. A minute later, the platform creaked back up, weighted with a bucket of cold water.

She calculated odds of getting a proper bath before next Tuesday as slim at the present pace. Good thing she had recently become adept at using inadequate bathing facilities.

She lugged the bucket to the vanity. Rather than pour water into the bowl and splash herself like a dainty little bird, she plunged her head in the bucket and scrubbed her face and hair with both hands. After wringing the dingy water from her hair, she disrobed and sponged herself free of visible grime. She continued to stink faintly of sweat and horse and sea, but until her father’s choice of domestic help could be bothered to supply more than a dram of water, it was as near as she was likely to get to his hygiene demands.

The feel of fresh underthings against her skin was an unexpected pleasure after growing accustomed to wearing the same thing for days on end. The dress gave her less of a thrill, cumbersome and restricting physically and mentally, as if her family strife had been translated into fabric. She squirmed under the weight of both, then buried her discomfort. No hint of weakness would accompany her downstairs.

She made her way to the dining room, where her father had seated himself at head of table. A place was set for her at the foot, and not in deference to her position as lady of the house. For some reason, her father had always been hesitant to be near her while she wielded cutlery.

She sat and studied the dish before her—some sort of gray dumpling in a shallow puddle of cream gravy. She’d have thought it some sort of snub, except her father appeared to have the same fare on his plate. “I see you’ve either invoked Sadie’s wrath in some fashion or hired a new cook.”

Her father slammed his hand down on the table, making the silver jump. “Ungrateful child! How dare you?”

She tested a dumpling with her fork. It had the texture of gum rubber and resumed its original form when the tines were removed. The thin liquid in which it sat rippled more like plain milk than gravy. “It is neither ungrateful nor particularly daring to observe that more appetizing fare emerged from the ship’s galley, prepared by a fellow with more experience as a cutpurse than a chef.” Appetite lost but hunger still strong, she picked up her knife for another attempt. “This is the art of making of conversation, Father. I have little else to discuss with you, aside from the date of your departure now that my end of the bargain is satisfied.”

He hunched over his plate. “You will not spoil my meal with talk of business.”

She refused to accept any responsibility for spoiling a dish she could not penetrate with a knife and fork. It wasn’t decorum that prevented her from stuffing it whole in her mouth but fear even chewing would not reduce it to pieces small enough to swallow. She hadn’t come this far only to choke to death at the dinner table.

She pushed her plate away and settled back in her chair, content to sip her wine in silence until a marginally more edible course was served. The wine was overly sweet in her mouth but left an unpleasant, bitter note in its wake. The greedy bastard had sold the good bottles in the cellar and replaced them with cheaper vintage.

His food made squelching sounds between his teeth as he spoke. “Did you encounter any difficulty in the islands?”

She had endured inclement weather, sexist merchants who thought to cheat her because she lacked the correct genitalia to join their club, a string of street thugs who underestimated both her willingness to decisively defend herself and the variety of weapons she carried on her person to that end, and one amorous pirate who had been as difficult to resist as mislead—all problems she had overcome. All her real difficulties had been left behind at home. “On the contrary, I had a marvelous holiday. I recommend you go on a cruise. As your bags will be packed soon, the timing couldn’t be better.”

He glowered at her. “Have more wine.”

She wondered, not for the first time, what her mother had once seen in him. Reese had few memories of his face when it wasn’t either twisted with resentment or apoplectic with rage. Nonetheless, she preferred his hostility to the alternative. His false smile, consisting of a display of far too many teeth coupled with a dead-eyed stare, heralded the approach of his most despicable maneuvers. She’d had nightmares of that smile as a child.

She was a grown woman now and far less easily intimidated. “Only if there’s a bottle that hasn’t been diluted with vinegar.”

He drained his glass in one gulp, as if to assert its palatability. After three decades of feigning gentrification, one would think he’d develop an appreciation for finer fare, but like a pig, he was content to consume slop and swill. He had deceived her mother not to see the swine. Having spent her entire life in his company, Reese was not cursed with such naivety. She practically smelled the bacon.

An unfamiliar woman took away their plates and served another unidentifiable dish. To give the wine something to attack other than the lining of her stomach, Reese nibbled on something that might once have been veal but now bore more of a resemblance to the sole of a boot.

Gastric discomfort wasn’t the only effect of the wine. By the removal of the second plate, her head was heavy and filled with buzzing, as if it had been shoved into a beehive. Wine never affected her this way. Certainly not after two glasses. Not even on an empty stomach.

She tipped glass and looked inside. The sediment coating the bottom was not consistent with mere inadequate decanting. “Son of a syphilitic goat. You drugged me.”

Eschewing the napkin folded on the table inches away, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You should be thanking me for not killing you, bitch.”

Loath to appear ungrateful yet again, she said, “Thank you for being too stupid to devise a way to make my death look accidental so you don’t hang for murder.”

His mouth stretched with that hated smile. “I’m smarter than you. Do you really believe all your misfortune is a twenty-year run of bad luck? On the contrary, your continued existence is attributable to your maddeningly good luck and uncanny ability to recruit unsavory characters into your service.”

All human beings were motivated by their own self-interests. The unsavory ones didn’t pretend to possess some nobler purpose. As such, most tended to change sides when made a more interesting offer. That typically meant more money, but sometimes working for someone less likely to stab them in the back provided sufficient impetus to switch employers. It took one unsavory character to know another, and most recognized her father as less than trustworthy. Many were easily persuaded to do her dirty work rather than his with little or no increase in compensation.

Those who couldn’t be persuaded had a less rewarding experience with her and her retinue of miscreants.

Her father raised his glass as if preparing to make a toast. “I’ve finally come to the realization that if I want you out of the way, I must take matters into my own hands rather than relying on others to carry out what they’ve been paid to do. Likewise, I realize your longevity is my curse, and I too will be thwarted somehow if I attempt to kill you. Therefore, I have devised a means to be rid of you and profit handsomely at the same time.”

He’d profited quite enough at her expense already. She enfolded her butter knife in a numb fist and lurched to her feet. Her feet felt mired, as if she were wading through surf, but she would make it to the other end of the table, and she would end him. A butter knife wasn’t much of a weapon, but her dedication to the task was such that she would decapitate him with a spoon if need be.

A shoe scraped the floor behind her. She spun around. The room continued spinning long after she stopped. On one of its rotations, she saw Foley holding aloft a wooden bat.

“Have a care,” her father said close behind her. “We mustn’t bruise her anywhere that will depreciate her value.”

Something shattered against the back of her skull. She held onto consciousness as she fell to the floor, but her only thought was of mirrors.

He’d sold all the goddamn mirrors.

Part 7: The Hellion Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

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