A Season to Be Sinful Read online

  Straightening as Pinch scrambled down from the stool, the proprietor wiped his hands on the towel and pitched it aside. “Pub’s closed,” he announced. “Out! The lot of ye! Go on. Don’t like it? Take it up with the owner.” He laughed heartily. “Oh, that would be me. Don’t like it?” Still laughing he raised two meaty fists. “Take it up with these.”

  Harris was already in full retreat toward the street when the man bellowed, “Not you! Them!”

  Seven tankards thumped to the tabletops. Benches scraped hard against the roughly hewn floor as five men and two women got to their feet. There were varying degrees of inebriation present, noticeable as soon as they started for the door. There was some bobbing and weaving, a few staggered footfalls, lurching, and help for a friend who could not manage his exit alone. The women took their leave more gracefully, adding a provocative sway to their hips as they brushed past Sherry.

  “Shut the door, Midge, and bolt it.”

  Midge hurried off to do just that.

  “Name’s Rutland. Blue Rutland. Born that way. Blue, that is. Don’t know why, just know it was so.” He bobbed his head. As a sign of deference to quality it lacked genuine appreciation. “Pinch says you’re a surgeon.”

  “Physician,” Harris said weakly. He remained half a step behind Sherry.

  “No sawbones, then. Well, we’ll see what you know, won’t we.” Rutland’s discriminating glance went to Sherry. “You’re Lord Sheridan?”

  “I am.”

  “The one that gutted her.”

  Sherry didn’t deny it. “Is she here? Show us to her. There is always time later to assign blame.”

  Blue Rutland considered this. It struck him as true. He nodded once. “This way,” he said. “Have a care. The stairs are steep.”

  Sherry saw their host’s shoulders filled the narrow stairwell. The steps made a tight curve as they climbed. Unused to the exertion, Harris’s breath was labored. Sherry tried to ignore the puffing but knew that apoplexy was not outside the question.

  Abovestairs, Pinch and Dash squeezed ahead of Rutland, then raced to the last door on the right and threw it open.

  “Have a care,” Rutland called after them. “It won’t bother me to put you out, and she’s in no condition to object.”

  Pinch caught the door before it banged against the far wall. He and Dash posted themselves with stiff, military bearing on either side of the threshold.

  Sherry smelled the infection before he had fully entered the room. He heard Harris’s steps falter and the man curse softly under his breath. To his credit, he did not hesitate. He brushed right past Sherry and went straight to the bed where his patient lay and the smell of putrefaction was the strongest.

  Rutland hung back now. Sherry questioned the wisdom of approaching himself, then the matter was taken out of his hands because Harris asked for assistance.

  “Remove these blankets,” he ordered. “They’re as dirty and infested as she is.” He shot an angry, impatient glance at Rutland. “Was nothing at all done for her?”

  The big man’s broad face turned ruddy. “Got the knife out,” he said. “Sewed the wound myself. Stitches are good, you can see that. I served on one of His Majesty’s ships. I know a thing or two about stitchery.”

  Harris grunted as he lifted his patient’s shirt. Blood stained the garment where it was rent. “This is the same thing she was wearing the night she was injured,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t want me to ruin another.”

  The physician muttered something unintelligible under his breath. The stitches had been neat enough when applied, but they were stretched fair to bursting by the swollen discolored flesh. “My bag, Sheridan. I will require the scalpel.” To Rutland, he said, “Whisky or something like it. Unopened if you have it. Nothing cut with water.” When the barkeep hesitated, Harris snapped, “Now, man!”

  Sherry almost felt sorry for Rutland. “What would you have me do?” He had already pitched the blankets in a corner.

  “Take her wrists.” He gave Sherry a short strap of leather. “If she tries to bite, put this bit in her mouth. Otherwise, keep her as still as you can. It will be a mercy if she doesn’t wake.” His tone made it clear he was not confident.

  Sherry knelt at the side of the narrow bed near the head. The angle was awkward but he managed to secure her wrists. They were thin, fragile really. He was afraid that if she struggled he would snap them. The leather strap that he might require for a bit was tucked in his trousers where he could quickly reach it. He did not think he could be more prepared than that.

  Shuffling at the door caught his attention, and he looked up. Pinch and Dash were no longer outside the room but in it. Midge was craning his neck between them. Their faces were grave, frightened. Sherry had not properly appreciated how important this young woman was to them until now. It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell them to leave. He did not. They had much more right to be here than he did.

  He loosed a wrist long enough to remove his hat. When he bent his head again, a lock of dark hair tumbled forward over his brow. He let it lie there.

  Even now she did not look like a female, but more like a child of indeterminate sex. He imagined in the last few days that she had lost at least a stone and nearly all of her strength. As slight of build as she was, it was hard to believe she had been able to knock him down. It was like a butterfly felling an oak.

  Her hair was unnaturally dark, cropped short, and thickly matted to her head. Bootblacking, he suspected, though he wondered why she’d used it. Days ago, perhaps before she had taken to the streets, she’d covered her hair with the stuff. She’d been cautious enough to make swipes across her eyebrows, too, but close to her scalp where the sweat of her fever had diluted the black paste, and along the curve of her lashes, he glimpsed a hint of the penny copper color she had meant to conceal.

  He watched her face as Harris worked. She didn’t stir when the physician split the stitches with his scalpel. The odor from the pus was so intense that Sherry pressed his face into the sleeve of his coat until the urge to vomit passed. Her perfectly pared nose did not twitch.

  Her skin was pale to the point of translucency and pulled taut over the high arch of her cheekbones. A faint blue web of veins was visible at her temples. Her mouth was full, a sweeping curve that lacked resiliency, animation, and virtually all color now. There was a deep hollow at the base of her throat caused in part by the prominent collarbones. Her breath came shallowly, and beneath his fingers he felt her rapid pulse. It thrummed against him with the lightness of a hummingbird’s wing.

  He could not guess at her age. She might have been as young as twelve or as old as five-and-twenty. The bubbies that Dash and Midge had outlined to indicate womanhood were bound tightly beneath a strip of linen wound several times around her. Her erstwhile caretakers had respect for her modesty, if not for her comfort.

  No sound emerged from her parted lips as Harris cleaned the wound. Rutland arrived with a small, unopened cask of French brandy. No one raised any questions. Napoleon had escaped Elba earlier in the year—Wellington and Blücher were preparing to defend the Continent against the rise of a second empire—but Blue Rutland’s smuggling was not the subject of recriminations.

  Harris directed Rutland to unplug the cask. The physician plunged his hands into the golden liquid, rubbed them together, then poured a good handful into his patient’s wound.

  The keening cry arrested them all for a moment, but it did not come from the girl on the bed. Blue Rutland looked as if he might weep like a babe for the waste of his fine brandy.

  “That’s enough,” Harris snapped. “Put it down.” He went back to work, debriding the lacerated and devitalized tissue around the wound. His fingers were thick but deft, and he cut away her damaged flesh with ruthless efficiency. “It’s deep,” he told Sherry. “But not so deep as I feared from your description. She was struck at an angle, and the blade missed the vital organs.”

  “How do you know?”


  “She’s still alive,” he said dryly. He dropped bits of putrid flesh into a basin. The first blood flowing from the wound was thick with the yellow-white fluids of the infection. Harris cut and pressed and cut and pressed until the only blood she gave up was bright red. “A cloth, Sheridan. A clean one. I’ve none left in my bag.”

  Sherry looked around. The room had little in the way of furnishings. There was no trunk or cupboard that might be a repository for linens. The sheet that had been removed as well as the one under her was stained. The blankets were filthy. “May I release her?”

  The physician nodded. “It is unlikely she will wake now.”

  Sherry’s fingers uncurled around her wrists. He stood and removed his frock coat, then his waistcoat. At his beckoning, young Midge came forward to hold them. Sherry unknotted the cravat that his valet had creased and arranged so carefully and added it to the pile in Midge’s outstretched arms. He loosened the tails of his shirt, then pulled it over his head. Starting a tear with his teeth, he rent the linen until he had four neat strips.

  Harris used the material as it was handed to him to staunch the flow of blood and finally bind the wound.

  “You are not going to stitch it?” asked Sherry.

  “Not now; not when the opportunity for infection is so great. This air is of the foulest sort, my lord. She will require poultices to keep it out of the wound, and they will have to be changed often. If she is to have improved odds for recovery, she cannot remain here.”

  Sherry did not hesitate, though it surprised him that he did not. “Then we will take her to my home.”

  Harris shook his head. “A charity bed in one of the surgeries will suit. The sisters at St. Luke’s are admirably tolerant of all God’s creatures.”

  “That arrangement will not suit me.” For Sherry it was the end of the argument.

  The physician realized it also. “Very well. Then we must apply ourselves to the problem of how to move her.”

  “Can she survive it now?”

  Harris’s regard of the room revealed his distaste. Littered as it was with the discarded blankets and revealing impoverishment in its singular lack of amenities, there was nothing to recommend it as a place of healing. Still, moving her too soon would no doubt kill her quicker.

  Sherry had no difficulty reading his physician’s thoughts. “Another day here, perhaps?” he asked.

  “Yes.” The response was reluctantly given. “If she survives the next twenty-four hours, I will judge she can be moved.”

  The matter of her care until then was Sherry’s gravest concern. “You will take the hack and return to my home. Apply to my housekeeper for clean bedclothes, bandages, and whatever else you think is needed for your patient’s comfort. Kearns will pack a valise for me. Direct the driver to unload the carriage as my departure to Granville will be delayed. I want brooms and scrubbing brushes. Lye would not come amiss. Combs also. As many as it will take to remove the nits from her hair.” He looked significantly at the boys. “And theirs.” To Rutland, he said, “There is someone nearby who will clean for hire?”

  “Aye. The Widow Meeder could use the coin. Her daughter will help.”

  “Then I trust you will see to their employment.” When Rutland did not move, Sherry added, “Now.”

  Blue Rutland picked up the valuable cask of brandy and secured it under his arm. “What about my customers? I can’t keep them away all evening, not even for Miss Rose. More talk if I tried.”

  “I agree. Open your establishment. Do you let out the rooms up here?”

  Rutland nodded. “There’s some trade, if you take my meaning.”

  “I do.” He calculated quickly what it would cost him to keep peace abovestairs. “I’ll take all your rooms for the night. Seven pounds?”

  “Nine.”

  Sherry did not haggle. “Seven,” he said.

  Rutland gauged his opponent’s resolve. “Seven it is.”

  “Good.” He raised one dark eyebrow. “Widow Meeder and her daughter?”

  “Right away, m’lord.” Turning sharply on his heel, he hurried out of the room. The bargain he struck with Lord Sheridan would net him a profit of five pounds on the rooms. Miss Rose, bless her, was still earning her keep.

  “You paid him twice what he would have gotten for letting the rooms,” Harris told Sherry.

  Shrugging, Sherry said, “I shouldn’t be surprised if it were three times that. Worth all of it, I think, for the peace it will afford. Which boy will you want to take back with you?”

  “What?” Harris looked up from winding the bandage. “You’re truly not going?”

  “One of us should stay behind. I believe you would prefer to go.”

  For the sake of good form and honoring his profession, Harris considered mounting an argument. Then he remembered the rough trade that would be returning to their tankards, the smuggled brandy, and the three young pickpockets hovering nearby, and decided he possessed insufficient resolve to make a convincing protest. “I’d prefer we both go,” he said at last, “but since you are determined to stay, I suppose the one called Pinch will do well enough as an escort.”

  “Master Pinch?” Sherry asked. The boy stepped front and center. “Did you hear?”

  He nodded. His eyes darted to the bed where Harris was dressing the wound. A touch of color came into his cheeks, but the color was green.

  Sherry waved him away from the bed. “You will see that Dr. Harris is not accosted. I am depending on you to secure another hack. I am in no expectation that our driver still remains on the street.”

  Dash went to the window, threw it open, and leaned so far out he was in danger of tumbling. “Right you are, guvnor,” he said, craning his neck for a view of the front street. “I mean yer lordship. The bloke’s gone. I suppose it weren’t worth the extra shillin’ ye give ’im to twiddle ’is thumbs waiting for us. There’s people here’d just as soon slit ’is throat for it.”

  “Present company excluded, I’m sure,” Harris muttered with heavy irony.

  Sherry’s slight smile was appreciative. “Come back in here, Master Dash, before you fall on your head and the doctor has two patients to attend.”

  It was hours after nightfall that the room, the patient, and all of her protectors were finally settled. After returning with Pinch and all the items on Sherry’s list, Harris stayed long enough to examine his patient and enumerate the reasons Lord Sheridan should not spend the night. One of the things Sherry had not requested was the services of his valet, but that stalwart had arrived with an underfootman, two valises, a trunk, and enough fresh bedding to open an inn.

  As the entourage grew, so did the need for more clean rooms. The widow and her daughter earned three months’ wages in the course of the evening, sweeping, scrubbing, and scraping the dirt from the floors, beating the bugs from the mattresses, and finally snapping clean white sheets over the beds.

  Rutland did not warm to Sherry’s permitting Pinch, Dash, and Midge to take one of the rooms, and Sherry did not favor the three urchins going to bed dirty, but by midnight there was little argument left in anyone.

  Sherry’s room adjoined Rose’s. He’d had his bed moved to the wall that separated them. Now that he lay atop the unevenly filled mattress, he realized the noise rising from belowstairs would never permit him to hear her if she required help. It seemed rather far-fetched that she would. Harris had said it was unlikely that she would wake soon. Sherry suspected the physician meant to say that it was unlikely that she would wake ever, but at the last moment reconsidered this pronouncement.

  What had he brought down upon his own head? he wondered. Although it was not his way to blame others, on this occasion he had not even the luxury of contemplating it.

  It had begun simply enough with the desire to return to his country estate. A rather quaint longing, he thought. Would he be here this evening if he’d had desires of a different sort? What if it had been his inclination to spend more time in the gaming hells or if he had decided against en
ding his arrangement with Fanny? More to the point, what if he had chosen a different entertainment for their last evening together? An intimate dinner in her home to set the stage for the break. A private musical performance. Vauxhall Gardens instead of Covent.

  What if he had . . . what if . . . what . . . if . . .

  The cry made him bolt upright. He was unsteady at first and shook his head to clear it. Had he been sleeping? Dreaming? He had no memory of falling asleep but knew he must have. The tavern was markedly quieter now, the patrons having imbibed enough liquor to gradually pass from rowdy to stuporous. The crescent moon was no longer framed in his window, and there was a hint of starshine to replace it—more evidence that time had passed.

  The cry, then. What was it?

  Sherry cursed under his breath. In a single motion he pushed himself out of bed and grabbed the robe at its foot. He shrugged into it as he headed for the door. The windowless corridor was dark as pitch, but it was only a short distance to the next room, and he found his way with a minimum of groping along the wall.

  He carefully let himself into her room. His crossing to the bed was not soundless. The floor creaked as his weight further depressed the sagging boards. Candlelight flickered when the wobbly bedside table shuddered.

  Sherry lifted the candlestick and held it over her. She was quiet again; indeed, he was uncertain now that what he’d heard had come from this room. “Was it you?” he asked quietly. Her translucent skin seemed to reflect the flame’s pale yellow glow rather than absorb it. He moved the candlelight over her face and down the length of her unnaturally still form.

  She looked only marginally less feverish than she had earlier. Sherry thought any improvement was more illusion than real and credited the comb that was run through her matted hair and the change of her bed linens for bringing it about. Kearns had removed her stained shirt and soiled trousers, but it had been Sherry who cut away the strip of linen binding her breasts and who dressed her in his own nightshirt.