“You’re well?” That was Dalrymple’s dubious comment.
“I’ll feel substantially more at ease once I’m off this vessel.”
“Amen,” said a voice. It took Smite a few seconds to place it. Jeremy Blasseur. Miranda’s friend; the grandson of the Patron. He didn’t want to think what it meant, that her friend had been able to find them. He heard the sound of metal clinking.
Mr. Blasseur, apparently, had the keys to Patten’s chains.
“George,” he was saying, “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t know what to do.”
Patten made an indistinct answer. In the dim light, Smite could barely see the man struggle to his feet. Mr. Blasseur reached out to help him up, and when Patten stumbled, took his arm to steady him.
As they made their way to the staircase, Miranda appeared by Smite’s side. She didn’t reach out and touch him. She just stood—near enough to comfort him with her presence, but not so close as to overwhelm him.
“Miranda,” he said.
“Yes?”
He reached out at the foot of the ladder and took her hand. Her fingers were cold. His own were trembling. It was this secret he entrusted to her—the shameful prize of his weakness.
“I suppose,” he heard himself say, “I should tell you it’s not safe to be here.”
Her fingers curled in his. “You never make it safe to be by your side,” she answered. “This one might be a little extreme even for you.” The low teasing lilt of her voice robbed her words of any sting they might otherwise have carried.
“But then,” she continued, “I always did fancy dangerous men.”
“Get on up.” He watched her ascend, then started up the ladder behind her. Everyone was quiet above him. He reached the top. The rain he’d heard had turned to snow, flakes melting into grayness as they struck the deck. Just as he reached the top, though, Miranda let out a short, pained burst of air. She stepped protectively in front of him. Strangely, Mr. Blasseur did the same thing—moving in front of George Patten, who was still limping from the chains they’d unlocked.
Men were scrambling onto the deck. Two. Three. Four. Five. The count hit seven, and then the last man reached down his hand and pulled up one more person.
It was a woman. Smite hadn’t been expecting a woman.
Beside him, Miranda stiffened. “There’s no time to explain,” she said hastily. “She’s the Patron—Jeremy’s mother, Mrs. Blasseur. She wanted him to take her place. That’s what it has all been about.”
The Patron didn’t look like the sort of person who ran a criminal enterprise. Her face was pleasant, if gaunt and sallow. She walked slowly: not shakily, as if she were elderly, but each step was a heavy trudge. Smite could hear her breathing. She heaved as if she’d been running for hours.
“Jeremy,” she said in tones of motherly exasperation. “Why do you always have to make things so difficult?”
“It’s too late,” Jeremy said. “It’s all too late. The Duke of Parford is raising the militia as we speak. You have only a matter of hours until he comes after you.”
The woman sat down heavily. “Really, Jeremy. I have only a matter of days. It’s not the militia I fear.” She gave him a sad smile. But her gaze shifted beyond Jeremy, and she caught sight of Smite.
“Ah. Your Worship.” She graced him with a disconcertingly friendly smile. “I have so wanted to speak with you. I feel that we could have been very great friends. It’s a shame that only one of us will come out of this encounter alive. That seems professionally discourteous, after all. We’re in the same business.”
“We are?”
“Of course we are. We both deal justice. Only this time, it’s your life in my hands. What is it that you’ll offer me for it, I wonder?”
“Nothing,” Smite said.
Beside him, Dalrymple twitched.
Mrs. Blasseur took a handkerchief and coughed into it delicately. “You value yourself highly.” She cast her gaze about. “And your compatriots.”
“You misunderstand. If you have to purchase it, you cannot call it justice.”
Mrs. Blasseur curled her lip. But what would have been a cold, cutting silence was broken up by her ragged cough. Her frame bent over; Jeremy, standing next to George Patten, took one step forward.
She held up a hand. “Lord Justice, do you know why I began doing this? It was because your court paid little heed to crimes committed in Temple Parish. Rob a merchant, and you’ll hang; but let a man beat his poor neighbor half to death, and the constables are nowhere to be found. Ask Miranda where she went when she needed help. What would your constables have done with a seventeen-year-old girl who was threatened by an older man? I do good things for the people you scorn. If your justice isn’t paid for, why is nobody in Temple Parish rich enough to avail themselves of it?”
She coughed again.
Smite bit his lip. “I admit to some imperfections with my model. I’ve been doing my best to alleviate that.”
“Ah,” she said. “I know what you’ll say next. You’re going to remind me that I killed people. You might mention a few threats I’ve made. But I’ve seen men hanged in the name of the Queen. I saw you on the bench, once, issuing threats to others should they not stay honest. So tell me again, how are you different?”
Smite glanced back toward George Patten, still unsteady on his feet.
She caught the direction of his thoughts. “Yes. I imprisoned an innocent man. Are you so certain you’ve never done that?” She gave him a tight smile.
“This is sophistry,” Smite responded. “Let us be clear. I want you not to kill me—or anyone here. You know that your time has come. You’ve been discovered, and it’s only a matter of time until you and your organization are brought down. If I don’t do it personally, someone else will complete the task. You’re not here to mete out justice to me. You’ve come to beg for mercy.”
“I have not.” She had a sad smile on her face.
“No use denying it. And there’s no use pretending I can give it. There will be none for you. I have some discretion in the performance of my duties; I have none where murder has been committed. You have, by your own admission, killed.”
Mrs. Blasseur shook her head. “Oh, dearie me. You are serious, aren’t you? I’m not here to beg for my life.” She gave him another tight, sad smile. “I could scarcely walk here. In a few days, I doubt I’ll be able to stand. Even speaking winds me. The doctor says I simply can’t take in enough air to survive. You don’t have to hang me. My body is suffocating of its own accord.”
The Patron with nothing to lose… It didn’t bear thinking about. “What do you want, then?”
“I want you to let Jeremy take charge.” There was a low ferocity in her voice. “I’ve made my peace with death, but I want what I have built to live on. I want a legacy.”
“Mama,” Jeremy said.
“No, listen. He’s trained for this. He’s a good boy—he listens to people, and they like talking to him. He won’t do anything lightly. Agree not to interfere with him and I’ll let you go. After all we’ve suffered through, Temple Parish deserves justice. Don’t let it die with me.”
A few months ago, Smite would have suppressed the flash of unwilling compassion he felt at those words. There was only one answer to be made: there could be no other justice. His duty required him to eradicate the whole scheme, root and branch.
“Mother,” Jeremy said, his voice low. “I can’t do this. Don’t ask it of me. Please.”
“You can. I believe in you.” She smiled at her son, as if she were encouraging him to persevere in a difficult set of lessons. It was morbidly touching. “Everything’s already in place. If someone needs help, they know who to go to. All you need to do is respond.”
“What you do is not justice,” Smite heard himself say. “When I step down, my replacement will be chosen openly by Queen Victoria. I may have, by mistake, sentenced an innocent man to prison in the past. But I’ve never purposefully held a man who has d
one no wrong in an attempt to coerce my chosen replacement.”
Jeremy bit his lip and glanced at Patten.
“When I order you to be held, it will be because I have a reasonable suspicion that you have committed a crime. A grand jury will hear the evidence against you and charge you. Should you live long enough, you’ll have the opportunity to rebut that evidence at an open trial. This system is funded by the open and equal administration of taxes and duties, rather than robbery and blackmail. I cannot claim that the rule of law is perfect. But it is not hidden. Its flaws can be examined by all, and changes made. Justice that shrinks from the light of examination is nothing more than vengeance. I cannot let your organization persist.”
Mrs. Blasseur shook her head sadly. “Then our conversation is over.” She raised her hand, and the men she’d brought with her started forward.
Smite met her eyes. “It doesn’t need to be. If I am not found, my brother will tear apart Temple Parish looking for me. What you have accomplished will be destroyed. There will be nothing to pass on at all. I have a better idea.”
Mrs. Blasseur cocked her head and slowly lowered her hand.
“Jeremy,” Smite said. “You were unwilling to serve as your mother’s replacement. I have another position in mind.”
“What?”
Smite rubbed his hand along his chin and found unruly stubble. “I became a magistrate because I wanted to help those who most needed it. Over the years, I’ve needed to remind myself of the cost of justice. I have used the…memory of my own experiences.”
He’d held onto them with both hands.
“But my own experiences are limited. There is much that I haven’t seen or understood. And that is where you will come in. People, I am told, talk to you. Tell me what they say. Bring the good in your mother’s organization out into the open. Rid yourself of the need for threats and false imprisonments.”
Mrs. Blasseur frowned at that. “How?”
“Start by choosing a new set of constables, intended for Temple Parish alone. Find new men, who can serve as magistrates—men who really will listen. Take what is good from what the Patron offers. Do you think you could help with that?”
Jeremy gave a short, jerky nod.
“There we are, then.” Smite raised his eyes to Mrs. Blasseur. “There has been some good in what you’ve done. I shouldn’t want to see it discarded entirely. But the days of justice funded through burglary and enforced by murder are over.”
His hands were growing cold. If he was beginning to go numb, Mrs. Blasseur, frail as she was, must be freezing. But she made no sign that she felt the cold. Her eyes simply bored into his, knowing what he had not yet said.
“Can it be that easy?” Jeremy asked, his voice shaking.
That hint of compassion touched Smite again, fleeting as butterfly wings. He shut his eyes. “No,” he said softly. “It won’t be easy.”
“What do you mean?”
That was Jeremy’s question, but it wasn’t Jeremy that Smite faced. It was Mrs. Blasseur. “You are hereby placed under arrest.” He spoke softly, but his words seemed to expand to fill the vast open space of the Floating Harbour. The snow was beginning to stick on the ground, and it blanketed everything he said with chill. “You will be held in custody until such time as the numerous charges are laid against you. If charged—and you will be charged—you will be held in a cell alone, isolated from those you care for.” He paused. “It is consumption that afflicts you, is it not?”
She nodded.
“Then I doubt you’ll live to see the Quarter Sessions. In all probability, you’ll die alone in a cold cell. That is the price you must pay. Your organization will survive in some form; you cannot.”
“Can there not be the smallest bit of mercy for her, then?” Jeremy asked.
“No dear,” his mother answered. “There is no room for mercy. That is what it means to take charge. You can show no weakness, no compassion. I know what it means to fill your shoes, Lord Justice. If you have any sense at all, you’ll bind my wrists and march me to the station at this moment.”
“March you?” Jeremy said, anguished. “You can scarcely walk!”
Mrs. Blasseur was taken by another fit of coughing. When she finished, she looked up with a resigned smile. “Don’t you see? He can’t show any mercy for me, or nobody will believe me defeated. He needs to drive me before him in the snow to prove I’m no longer a threat. That his…his regime will replace mine.”
Jeremy shook his head.
“He’s right.” There was a bitterness to her voice. “Only one of us will survive this night. And if I try to make it me…”
Jeremy choked. “There has to be a better answer.”
“There cannot be. There is no escape for me. If this is the way I get what I’ve built to survive in some manner… I haven’t long to live, in any event. Promise me that you won’t make a fuss. Whatever he has to do—promise you won’t interfere. Don’t help me if I fall. Don’t—”
He felt a curious kinship with the woman. She didn’t deal justice—not truly. But like him, she’d tinkered with the machineries of death. She saw the people she helped as human and real. Maybe, without the benefit of the law behind her, she had gone just a little mad.
“Mrs. Blasseur,” Smite said. “I had not thought to drive you to the station like cattle.”
She stopped and frowned at him. “No? Well, I suppose it might turn ugly if I couldn’t make it.”
Smite didn’t push aside that moment of sympathy now. He embraced it, let himself feel the sorrow that Jeremy did. And then—because it had to be done, because there truly was no other choice…he let that moment of wistful regret dissipate and he met Mrs. Blasseur’s eyes. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I had rather thought I would carry you.”
“Carry me?”
“It turns out,” he said, “that my duty dictates only what I must do. There is no mercy in the what. But there is room for it in the how.”
THEY MADE A SOLEMN, silent procession as they made their way to the city center in a column. The men Mrs. Blasseur had brought with her had vanished into the night. Ghost trailed the remaining folk almost somberly. Mrs. Blasseur weighed almost nothing in Smite’s arms. She didn’t tremble. She didn’t fight. She scarcely even breathed.
Halfway through the walk, the snow turned back to slush, and from there to a hard, cold rain that drummed against him relentlessly. The streets were deserted.
But when they arrived at the station, it was lit brightly. Smite pushed open the door to see a throng of blue-uniformed police officers standing near the front. A corporal was giving out orders; to his side stood Ash, watching the proceedings with a grim determination.
“We have reason to believe,” the corporal was saying, “there is a large group of armed men there. Do not hesitate to use force if it should prove warranted. Assume that nobody means you well—not women, not even children.”
Smite gently let Mrs. Blasseur down on her feet. Ash hadn’t seen them enter yet; he was watching the corporal with a hard, fierce look in his eyes.
“This is an insult to the city of Bristol that must be answered with force,” the corporal said.
“On the contrary,” Smite called out. “Force will not be necessary.”
As he spoke, Ash turned to him. A spectrum of emotions played across his brother’s face—fear changed to surprise, followed by a heart-stopping emotion that Smite could put no words to.
It took a few minutes to calm the crowd and to allay their worries. It took another few moments for Mrs. Blasseur to vanish into the holding cells. Ash slowly drifted across the room to him.
“Smite.” Ash reached out and clasped his hand. His brother’s fingers were warm against Smite’s chilled flesh.
“Yes?”
“I had this notion for years that I would need to be the Duke of Parford to make things right for you. I thought—” he choked, then stopped. “Damn you, Smite. I must have aged ten years tonight.”
&nbs
p; He grabbed Smite’s shoulder with his free arm and then pulled him into a fierce hug. Smite only stiffened for a second before he hugged him back.
“You know, Ash,” he said, before he could lose his nerve, “I love you.”
Ash pulled back and looked at him quizzically.
“And you will need to be the duke for me,” he said. “I made some rather egregious promises tonight. We’re going to need more constables—and you’re just the man to fund their salaries. Not to mention that we’ll need more magistrates; I’m weary of being the only one here who listens.” Smite gave his brother a tired smile. “Parliament will have to handle that. I’m hoping you’ll help me out.”
Someone else might have blinked an eye at that. But Ash simply shrugged his shoulders. “There,” he said. “You see? I was just saying that I needed to consider more charity.”
IT WAS ALMOST DAWN by the time Smite brought Miranda home—home to the house he’d bought for her. The rooms seemed too quiet to her; the servants, not expecting her to return, were in bed for the evening.
He brought her up to her bedchamber, helped her strip off clothing made sodden and cold. They rubbed each other dry with towels, then slipped into wrappers that should have been warm.
They weren’t.
A fire in the bedchamber upstairs didn’t help. Huddling under the covers brought no warmth. The rain beat against the roof, hard at first, and then more softly. It was only when he drew her to him that Miranda stopped shaking. He pressed his body full-length against hers, and Miranda began to warm.
But even though he stroked her skin, he did not attempt anything so tame as a kiss. It was just warmth they shared: nothing more. He’d not tried anything more since…since that night in the inn. It seemed so long in the past. It was the only time he’d actually spent the night with her.
Through her window, the gray sky tinted first pink, then orange. The rain stopped and the clouds drifted apart, letting through ragged strains of early morning sunlight.
Smite sat up beside her. His gaze focused on some far vista. Just beyond the flotilla of masts on the Floating Harbour she saw a rainbow. It glimmered ephemerally, and then disappeared.