"Wicked Gentlemen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hale Ginn)

Chapter Four Old Ink

Roffcale's letters smelled of dried blood and very cheap cologne. I pulled in his scent while my fingertips brushed over the clumsy lines of his reform school script. He was young and passionate. He poured himself into each word with absurd intensity. With every letter he set down, he fell in love and was overwhelmed with rage. His odes to Joan Talbott's beauty were terrible. Roffcale stacked cliche upon cliche until they achieved a staggering tower of artless adoration. Roffcale's miserable poetry acquired poignancy with its absolute conviction. He meant every word.

Roffcale's desperate warnings to Joan were just that: attempts to protect a woman he could not even approach in public. Joan Talbott was from good society and Peter Roffcale was an underage con man with nails as black as any demon's.

I leafed through the pages of his letters, touching the paper where Joan's hands had moved over Roffcale's words.

Roffcale had pressed his palms into the pages to hold them still as he wrote. He had run his fingers under difficult words, checking his spelling. Joan had carefully pulled pages close to hide the contents from anyone else. I felt the faded places where she had run her fingers over his words again and again. Every piece of paper had carried his touch to her. Many of his letters were stained with a pale pink tint where Joan had pressed her lips to his closing signature.

The sweetness of them both made me sick and slightly jealous. I searched ahead to the details that Harper had mentioned. Roffcale was more skilled at writing about murder than he was at love poetry. He was familiar with the sight of beaten corpses of whores and cum beggars. He described the bodies in the same simple way that he might have given directions to a bakery.

Her belly was slashed under the ribs and then down to her crotch. That was a mess. All sliced up and the inside pulled out. Lots of pieces of her were missing. Her guts were all spilled out of her. The bastard who did it rooted through her insides like he was looking for hidden treasure. Rose was the third one and I don't want to see it done again. It was ugly work just looking at it. Come back.

I'm begging now. Please come back.

Roffcale had described the condition in which Harper and I had found his own body quite well. I felt a slight coldness seep up from the page of Roffcale's letter. It had the sharp sting of premonition. Roffcale had feared he would die this way; perhaps he had even known it. I turned back to the first page of the letter.

Roffcale had scrawled a few lines in the margin. I had mistaken them for poetic gibberish at first glance. Now I realized that he had written them in the only empty space there was left after the letter had been finished. The writing was worse than usual.

I had a dream

that I was the fourth one

laying there

with Lily and Rose

all cut apart

Come Now.

It struck me as odd that he would constantly ask her to come to Hells Below. The murders seemed to have been taking place there or close by. Why would he want Joan Talbott to come there for protection when she would have been far safer in her husband's home? If Roffcale knew he could not save his own life, what protection did he think he could offer Joan, I wondered. I frowned and gazed at the lines of old ink.

I'm begging. Please come back.

It hardly sounded like a promise of protection. In fact, it seemed like the opposite. Suddenly, a thought came to me. What if Peter Roffcale had not been offering his protection, but begging for hers? I glanced at the date on the letter. It was quite recent, only a day before Joan Talbott had disappeared. I folded the pages back into a bundle and slid them into their rough pulp envelope. The postmark on the envelope showed that it had gone out the next morning. Joan Talbott would have read it only a few hours before she vanished.

"So?" Harper's voice caught me off guard. I almost jumped, he was so close behind me.

"So, what?" I replied as coldly as I could. I turned back to him slowly.

Harper had located his clothes and dressed. Only his cap was missing. I caught his puzzled glance toward my hat rack. I smiled at that. The night before I had stuffed his cap into one of the spider-infested filing cases under my bed.

Harper's hair tangled around his face like a thorn briar. His eyes were red, rimmed, and bloodshot from the excesses of the evening before. Without a cap shadowing his features, his exhaustion and youth were easy to see. He seemed vulnerable despite the hard black lines of his Inquisitor's coat. That almost made up for him surprising me.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think that we need to go to Roffcale's residence at Good Commons." I stood up, grabbed my coat and smoked-glass spectacles, then glanced back at Harper. "Are you hungry?"

"Not right now," he replied.

"Badly hung-over?" Perhaps I sounded a little too pleased, but Harper didn't seem to care. Perhaps taunting was what he expected of my kind, even after a night spent together.

"No." Harper pushed his fingers through his wild hair. "I just haven't had much of an appetite lately."

Of course not. His sister was missing and quite possibly dead. It was no wonder that I had been able to get him so drunk, so easily. He probably hadn't eaten in days.

"It'll only get worse if you don't eat something." I reluctantly found myself picking up my own black wool cap and tossing it to Harper. "We'll stop in at Mig's. They have decent beef pies there."

Harper turned the cap over in his hands and then put it on. It fit about as well as his old one had, though this cap was more scuffed. It smelled lightly of my hair. I wondered if Harper noticed.

"Before we go..." Harper adjusted the cap so that his eyes were once again shadowed.

"Yes?" I was already at the door with one hand wrapped around the knob.

"About last night..." Harper shifted slightly. "I think it would be best if we got it clear between the two of us—"

"I have no intention of telling anyone, if that's what you're worried about." I smiled so that Harper could see my long teeth. "And I don't think you're likely to be bragging about it, so what's left to say?"

"No, I meant between us.. .We were both pretty drunk. I just wanted you to understand that..." Harper paused, unwilling to go on. Steadily, the pause began to spread into a lingering silence. He seemed unable to make himself speak of the night before. It amused, but didn't surprise me.

"You wanted to make it clear that it was just a drunk fuck?" I filled in for him at last.

"I'm not sure those are the words I would have used," Harper replied.

"It was a good tumble, Captain. But rest assured, I haven't fallen madly in love with you. Just forget about it, and let's get on with our business." I turned the knob experimentally, feeling the latch slide free and then slip back. Discussions after sex always ran the chance of turning ugly. Or worse, sentimental. I pulled the door open just a crack.

"I just wanted to make sure we were of the same mind," Harper said at last.

"Well, I've told you what I think. So, are we agreed?" I asked.

"Yes," Harper said.

"Then that's all there is to say about it," I said.

Harper nodded and I opened the door with a sense of relief.

It was pleasant to find another man as willing to let go as myself. Others had lingered in my bed and concerned themselves with the syringes scattered across my desk. They had clung to me as I descended into ruin. Some had attempted to save me. I had been wept on, slapped, and pulled into a dozen chapels by men who had mistaken me for their true love.

None of them had understood that my moments of sweetness were pure ophorium. Everything that they seemed to love about me came from the needles they detested. The man they desired was an illusion, an ugly stone made briefly beautiful by a trick of the light. In their own ways, each of them had fallen as deeply in love with my addiction as I had. None of them had known how absurd they were, begging me to leave behind the drug that was the source of all they loved most about me. My kindness, my calm, even my careless ease. Ophorium made me their perfect lover because it erased the truth of what I was.

When it coursed through my body, I burned free of thought and memory. That radiant absolution was far more consuming than any number of desperate climaxes against another man's sweating flesh.

I doubted that Harper concerned himself with any of this, but at least he didn't care. We descended into the evening with a comfortable distance between us.