Mick passed the half-dozen guards he’d stationed at the front door and went out into the new morning. He glanced up at the grayish-pink sky and then studied his palace. It was a peacock cleverly disguised as a crow. There was no indication of what lay behind the deceptively simple plain wood door. One would never know from looking at it that the door was reinforced from behind with iron.
There was one other entry to the palace—a door leading to the small courtyard behind—and that was guarded, as well. From the outside, his palace appeared to be a dozen or more narrow row houses, built right next to each other. In reality, it was all one building inside and the doors to the house façades had been boarded up from inside long ago.
Mick grunted and turned to walk up the street. He might seem overprotected against attack, but then he had an unrelenting enemy.
A shadow moved in a narrow alley as he passed it and Mick whirled, a knife held ready in his hand. Lad emerged into the weak light, his ears laid back, his head down in submission.
“Jaysus,” Mickey breathed in disgust and shoved the knife back in the sheath strapped to his forearm.
He started down the street again and the dog trotted out happily and fell into step behind him.
The daylight people of St. Giles were already on the streets. The ones he passed now did honest work—more or less—porters, hawkers, chair men, night soil men, and beggars. They gave him a wide berth, careful not to meet his eyes. They knew him of course. He was their king and they were properly respectful. The river and the boats he lived on were to the east and he’d be nearer his work if he lived in Wapping or some other place in the East End of London. But Mick had been born and grown up in St. Giles. Had run the streets like a feral young wolf cub as a boy, had fucked his first woman here. Killed his first man. This was his home and when he’d made his fortune he’d built his palace in St. Giles.
And now there was one more thing that held him here.
He crossed a street and looked up. The spire of the new St. Giles-in-the-Fields loomed ahead. Mildew had destroyed the old church. Rumor had it that the mildew had fed upon the damp from the rotting plague corpses buried beneath the church flagstones. Certainly the air in the old church had held an evil stink. But no more. The modern church was clean and elegant, a far cry from the old building. Mick grunted. The new church had been built by nobles living outside of London City proper. He wondered what the locals—the ones who actually lived by the church—thought of the new building.
Mick skirted the church, coming upon the graveyard wall. A little way farther and the gate came into sight. He pushed it open. The graveyard was old, of course, the monuments moss-covered, some leaning as if the underground inhabitants had tried to push their way free from the earth. Mick made his way through the crooked rows, Lad padding silently behind him, and even though St. Giles lay just beyond a small wall, the clatter and hustle without was muffled. The graveyard held its own insulated atmosphere.
Mick watched carefully as he neared the grave he’d come to see, for he wasn’t alone in the graveyard.
The Vicar of Whitechapel stood looking down at her headstone and the freshly mounded earth. For a man who had terrorized the East End of London for the better part of a decade he didn’t look that intimidating. He was of average height, wiry rather than heavily muscled, his shoulder-length hair graying, and his features pleasant.
“She called your name,” Charlie said as Mick halted on the far side of the new grave. “As she was dying. Pity you didn’t see fit to visit her on her deathbed.”
Mick smiled widely, easily, as if the news that she’d called for him wasn’t a white-hot poker thrust through his chest. “Busy, wasn’t I?”
Charlie turned then, looking at Mickey full on, and revealing the horror that was the left side of his face. His skin had melted or burned off his face. The eye socket was merely a hardened gouge, his nostril destroyed, his lips pulled down into his chin. The ear was a melted rim and the hair on the left side of his head was in tufts as if most of it had been pulled out by the very roots.
Mick’s smile widened. “Yer gettin’ handsomer by the hour, Charlie.”
The Vicar’s expression didn’t change—but then many of his facial muscles had been destroyed. His remaining brown eye glittered with mad hatred, though. A wise man would step away from such vicious anger.
Mick leaned forward. “I’ll not let ye drive me from me home, old man.”
Charlie’s eyelid drooped. “What makes you think you have any say-so in the matter, boy?”
Mick’s smile hardened. “What makes ye think I don’t?”
Charlie shrugged one shoulder—the other had scarring. “Might be because I know you’ve got your babe hid in that palace of yours—along with a woman called Silence Hollingbrook. I find that interesting, I do. Seems to me that it’d be a fair trade: your woman for my own.”
Mick shrugged himself as if Silence didn’t matter to him, but his heart had begun to beat in triple time. Of course the Vicar had found out about Silence. Of course he’d know that she was different simply because she’d stayed when none of his other women had.
“I never took yer woman,” Mick said.
“Aye, but you tried to.”
Mick raised an eyebrow. Charlie wasn’t making sense, but then he’d long known the man was mad.
“And that babe?” The Vicar tutted. “I hear she’s a sickly thing. Like to die soon. That must weigh upon your heart most sadly.”
Mick looked at the Vicar. He was such a small man for all the malice he held inside of him. Long ago Mick had wondered why Charlie was made the way he was. What had carved away all sympathy, all respect for other men. What had made him the vicious, violent bastard he was.
But he’d learned to stop wondering. It made no never mind why the Vicar was the way he was. As well to ask why a viper struck and killed for no reason. It was simply the way of nature.
“Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago,” Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. “If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I’ll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still fuck women and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I’ll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.”
He walked away then, carefully not looking at the new headstone with the tiny angel carved at the top. Lad glanced up from sniffing a weed and fell into step with Mick as he passed. The temptation to attack now was almost overwhelming. His hands, balled into fists by his side, shook with the urge to strike the older man and put an end to this once and for all.
But Charlie never went anywhere without a half dozen guards. One lounged behind a tree, another two stood by the wall, and the remaining three were out of sight, but Mick had no doubt that they were nearby. Strange. Only a year ago, he might’ve damned the guards and attacked Charlie anyway. Now, Mick had the knowledge at the back of his mind that if he failed, he’d not be there to protect Silence—Charlie was mad enough to revenge himself on Silence even if Mick were dead. The realization was not a pleasant one—that only he stood between Charlie and Silence.
He nodded ironically to one of the Vicar’s men stationed at the churchyard gate as he passed by. Six men could overwhelm him, he supposed, if the Vicar chose to attack now, but that wasn’t the man’s way. Charlie preferred the indirect hit, the slow poison that systematically destroyed a person before they were even dead.
Mick halted in the middle of the street and threw back his head to gaze at the blue sky overhead. It was going to be a rare clear day in London, the sun shining so brightly one could almost believe in a God and all his angels, of a mother’s love and a boy’s innocent dreams. He closed his eyes and saw her brown eyes, sad and defeated and filled with tears as she’d sung to him.
Take me in your arms, my love
And blow the candle out.
A shouted curse made Mick open his eyes and spin to glare at a drover with a heard of sheep.
The man’s eyes widened and he was stuttering apologies even as Mick turned away. Mick walked the rest of the way home without conscious thought. When he got to his own door Lad trotted up the steps behind him. Mick shot him a look and for a moment the dog froze, one paw still lifted, and rolled his eyes sheepishly at him.
Mick sighed. “In with ye, then.”
Lad’s jaw dropped open in a grin and he happily capered into the palace.
“How were ye ever a bull-baitin’ dog?” Mick muttered to the animal as they tromped through the house. “The bulls must’ve laughed themselves silly when ye were thrown in the pit.”
Lad panted beside him happily, not a thought in his boneheaded brain.
They reached the upper floors and Mick strode down the hallway quietly. Bert was dozing outside Silence’s room, but straightened hastily as Mick neared.
“Are they awake?” Mick asked softly.
Bert blinked sleepily. “Fionnula left jus’ a minute ago to fetch some tea. I ’aven’t ’eard a peep.”
Mick nodded and entered his room, shrugging out of his coat and waistcoat. He preferred the freedom of just his shirt in his own home. He crossed to the connecting door and cracked it carefully, peering in. Silence lay on the bed, her form still, save for the slow rise and fall of her chest. He was about to shut the door again when a squeak came from the cot on the far side of the bed.
Mick was across the room in a second.
The child lay on her back, her eyes open, yawning sleepily. She saw him and her tiny pink lips trembled, her mouth turning down.
Mick frowned at her. “Hush.”
His admonishment had the opposite effect from what he intended. Her mouth opened and she let out a fretful wail.
Mick glanced at the bed. Silence hadn’t moved at the sound. She was exhausted from hours of nursing the brat. Fionnula had left the room and might not be back for some time, and Bert would be very little help.
Mick scowled at the toddler. “What d’ye want?”
She sobbed and lifted her arms to him.
He blinked, taken aback. Surely she didn’t want him. But another wail gave him very little choice.
He lifted the little girl from the cot, bringing her close to his chest as he’d seen Silence do. She was as light as feather down from one of his fine pillows. His chest wasn’t as soft as Silence’s, but the baby didn’t seem to mind. The fretful sounds stopped as she stuck a finger in her mouth and regarded him with wide brown eyes. Her eyelashes were spiked with tears, making them dark and long.
She’d be a beauty someday, he thought dispassionately, someone would have to guard her against the men who would be drawn to her. They’d swarm around her like bees to honey, wanting to lift her skirts, wanting to dishonor her, little caring of her feelings or who she was as a person. She’d be a piece of flesh to them, not a girl. Not someone’s beloved daughter.
He scowled again at the thought.
The child whimpered, her face crumpling, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.
“Hush now,” Mick whispered.
Silence was still asleep. He crossed to his own room and entered, holding the baby. He bent to set her on the bed, but she clung to his fine lawn shirt, rumpling it, and sobbed.
“Hush away, sweetin’,” he whispered. What did she want? He picked up a jeweled snuffbox lying on his dressing table and showed it to her.
She batted it away irritably and smashed her little head into his chest, still sobbing. He stared down at her, perplexed. She was so loud, so stubborn, and yet he could feel the delicate bones of her little ribs through her chemise. She was so small, so fragile, so easily hurt.
He walked to the fireplace and showed her in turn the items on the mantelpiece: an alabaster vase, a pink and white shepherdess, and a curved golden dagger that had once belonged to some Ottoman lord. She didn’t seem very interested in his treasures, but she quieted a bit, still rubbing her face against his shirt. She’d ruin it soon if he didn’t take it off. Her mouth opened suddenly in a wide yawn.