Why Kings Confess

Chapter 42

Paul Gibson spent the afternoon explaining the functions and structure of the human kidney to a full theater at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Normally, he would good-naturedly rap the knuckles of any dozing audience member with a boiled fibula and patiently field questions that showed a decided lack of attention on the part of confused students. But not today. Today, every sleepy student, every ridiculous question, filled him with an unholy rage. It took a while, but he finally admitted to himself the origins of his uncharacteristic irritation.

He wanted to get back to Tower Hill. To Alexi.

Sure, then, but you’re six kinds of a bloody fool, he told himself in disgust. What are you thinking? That a fine young woman such as her might be interested in you? That she might see you as a man-a real man, with all of a man’s needs and desires and dreams?

Laughing at himself, he determinedly refocused his attention on the task at hand and resolved to think no more about her.

Then he let his audience go half an hour early.

He hurried back across London Bridge to the city, the crutch he used when he had to cover great distances swinging with a rhythmic tap, tap. The fog was so thick it could strangle a man if he made the mistake of breathing too deeply, and Gibson could feel the beads of moisture-encrusted grit reddening his eyes, until between the fog and his own watering vision he was nearly blind.

And still he hurried on.

He’d just passed the Monument when he knew, again, that he was being followed.

He whirled around, stumbling awkwardly as he almost lost his balance. “Who is it?” he called, his voice echoing hollowly back at him from out of the impenetrable murky gloom. “Why are you following me?”

For a long, dreadful moment, he heard only the drip of moisture and the splash of a wherryman’s oars out on the river. But he knew this time that it wasn’t his imagination. Someone was following him. Someone had been following him, off and on, for days. And rather than feel foolish for believing it, he suddenly felt foolish for ever having doubted it. For doubting himself. For having kept his fears and suspicions quiet.

For not having hailed a bloody hackney when he left the hospital.

“What do you want from me?” he cried, his hand tightening around the cross brace of his crutch.

The shape of a man materialized out of the fog. Massive shoulders. Broad barrel chest. Long, heavily muscled arms. At first, the features were indistinct. Then Gibson saw the overly long, curly black hair and knew he was looking at Sampson Bullock.

“What do you want?” asked Gibson again.

Bullock drew up, an insolent smile slitting his beard-stubbled face. “What makes ye think I want anything with ye?”

“I know who you are. You’re Bullock.”

The smile broadened. “Told ye ’bout me, did she? Did she tell ye ’bout how she killed me baby brother?”

“She told me he beat his wife so badly she died.”

The smile was gone. “Never did. The bloody bitch fell down the stairs.”

“Don’t you mean he kicked her down the stairs?”

As soon as the words were said, Gibson wondered what kind of crazy, foolhardy courage had moved him to utter them. Once, he’d been a scrappy fellow, more than able to hold his own in a brawl and not above fighting a bit dirty when the occasion warranted it. But those days were far behind him, whereas Sampson Bullock looked like the kind of man who could wring the neck of an ox with his bare hands.

Gibson watched the big tradesman’s upper lip curl, his nose wrinkling as he gritted his teeth together as if in a snarl. Then a strange light of amusement flooded into his face, and he laughed.

“She’s stayin’ wit’ ye again, ain’t she? Like ye can protect her.” The tradesman’s small black eyes swept him scornfully. “A one-legged Irish surgeon? Think yer up to it, do ye?”

One of his big hands swept out to close around Gibson’s neck, the fingers digging deep into flesh and sinew. Still smiling, Bullock swung Gibson up and around to slam his back against the brick wall of the shop beside them. He was dimly aware of his crutch falling to the pavement with a clatter. All his being was focused on the viselike grip squeezing his throat, choking off his air.

“What’s the matter, Irishman? Can’t breathe?”

Gibson clawed frantically at the massive hand clamped around his throat. He heard a roaring in his ears. His vision dimmed, took on a strange, bloodred hue. He felt rather than saw Bullock thrust his face so close that his rough beard scraped Gibson’s cheek and a foul odor of rotten teeth washed over him.

“Ye tell her. Tell that bitch fer me. Tell her I’m gonna get her when I’m good an’ ready. But I’m gonna make her pay a bit more first.”

Still smiling, Bullock moved his outstretched arm back and forth, grinding the back of Gibson’s head against the rough brick wall behind him.

Then he took a step back and let Gibson go.

Gibson lost his balance, falling to his good knee, his peg leg sprawled out to one side as he struggled to keep from collapsing. He cradled his burning throat in his hands, sought to draw air deep into his lungs. He smelled his own fear in the sweat that slicked his body, felt the fog damp against his face.

When he looked up, the man was gone.

• • •

Gibson was bent over a basin, trying to pour water over the back of his head, when Alexi came to take the pitcher out of his hand.

“Here; let me do that for you.”

She took the cloth from his other hand and worked to gently clean the blood and bits of grit left by the bricks. “What happened to you?”

“Sampson Bullock evidently believes that the best way to ensure that his messages are delivered is to grind the messenger’s head into the nearest wall.”

Her hands stilled at their task. “Bullock did this?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What did he say?”

Gibson straightened slowly. He was painfully conscious of having stripped off his coat, so that he stood before her in shirtsleeves and waistcoat.

“What did he say?” she asked again when he didn’t answer.

He reached for a towel to dry his face and the back of his neck. Water dripped from his hair to run down his cheek, and he swiped at it.

She said, “I take it he threatened me?” She set aside the cloth she still held and turned toward the door. “I think I’ll go tell Mr. Sampson Bullock that if, in the future, he has anything to say to me, he needs to learn to say it to my face.”

“No.”

He snagged her arm, hauling her back around to look at him. Her color was high, her fine brown eyes snapping with anger. He said, “What happened today wasn’t about threatening you. It was about demeaning me, about making me feel his power and emphasizing my own weakness. If you go see him now, you’ll be helping him to shame me. It’d be like saying I can’t even take care of myself, let alone you.”

She drew in a quick breath that parted her lips and jerked her chest. “You saved my life. I never meant to bring you danger. But that’s what I have done.”

He gave her what he hoped came off as a cocky smile. “I’m not as helpless as you and Sampson Bullock seem inclined to believe.”

“I know you’re not helpless.”

Their gazes met, held. She was still so close to him. And somewhere along the line, without him quite noticing it, the conversation had subtly shifted. Perhaps not so much in words, but in focus. He realized he was still holding the towel and awkwardly set it aside, suddenly at a loss for what to do with his hands.

He was painfully attuned to the subtle charge of raw awareness in the room, conscious of each breath he drew, of the rhythm of his blood pumping through every part of his being, of her nearness. He watched her pulse beat at the base of her slim white throat, and the moment was so powerful he found himself wishing it could stretch out and last forever. And then, just when he feared it would, she reached to cup her palm against his cheek. Tipping her head, she brushed her mouth against his, and he felt himself tremble.

He told himself not to be a fool, that it was a kiss of gratitude, that she couldn’t be thinking of him as a man-not the kind of man a woman kissed with passion and took into her own body. Then he saw the saucy smile that lifted her lips, and he forgot to breathe.

She took his hand and led him into the room she had made her own. A single candle had been lit against the drab gloom, casting a warm golden glow over the bed’s simple counterpane.

He started to say something, but she pressed two fingers to his lips.

“Shhh,” she said.

She let go of his hand and took a step back, her gaze locked with his. He watched her arms come up, her fingers working as she loosened the ties of her gown. She let it fall into a puddle on the floor at her feet. Her petticoat followed. She untied her shift, and with exquisite care, clenched her hands in the fine linen. Then she swept her arms up and over her head, stripping it away.

She stood before him naked except for her stockings and garters. She was so finely made, her skin so fair and soft, with a faint sprinkling of cinnamon across the mounds of her small high breasts. Her limbs were long and impossibly slender, her waist and hips narrow, the juncture of her legs a fiery triangle.

“I love you,” he said.

“No, you don’t. You don’t know me.”

“I know you.”

She shook her head. But she was still smiling.

Reaching out, he fisted his hand in the heavy fall of her hair, drawing her to him.

She pressed her naked body hard against the length of him, her mouth opening beneath his as the kiss became a savage, breathless onslaught that went on and on. She tore at his clothes, working to rid him of his waistcoat, his shirt. He felt her fingertips skim his naked back, and the sensation was so raw that he cried out. Then she moved to the buttons of his flap, her hands brushing the exquisitely sensitive flesh of his groin, and he almost lost control.

He said, “I don’t know if I can do this. It’s been so long-”

She laughed and pushed him down on his back, his wounded head cradled by her soft pillow, her flesh glowing golden in the candlelight as she straddled him. “Then let me do it.”

She bent her head to kiss him again, and touched him tenderly. And when the time was right, she put him inside her.

He felt her envelop him with her warmth and her love, and he surrendered himself to her, to his passion and her gift of herself. Only, it came to him, as her head fell back, her mouth open and her eyes closed, as the rhythmic contractions of her inner body pulled him over into the abyss with her, that what she had really given him was the gift of himself.

• • •

Afterward, when they lay cradled in each other’s arms, they spoke of many things, of his childhood in Ireland, of her days with the Grand Army in Spain, of her frustration as a physician unable to practice the full range of medicine in England.

“You could go back to Italy,” he said, even though the very suggestion tore at his gut and tightened his throat, so that he felt as if he were strangling again. “Or Germany. They have a long tradition of female physicians in Germany too, don’t they?”

“They do, yes.”

She was silent for a moment. She lay on her side, her elbow bent, her head propped up on one fist as she traced a delicate pattern across his bare chest with her free hand. After a moment, she said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. Something I believe may help explain what happened to my brother.”

He had been lying lost in a pleasant, half-dreamy state of warmth and quiet contentment. Now he found himself instantly alert.

He listened as she told him. Then he said, “You need to take this to Devlin.”

She pushed up on both hands so she could stare down at him. “Are you mad? Lord Jarvis is his wife’s father!”

“He is, yes. But Devlin is not Jarvis’s ally. Far from it, in fact. If anyone can find your brother’s killer, it’s Devlin. He’ll not be letting Jarvis’s involvement turn him from his purpose-and he’ll not be betraying you to his lordship either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Her gaze met his. “I don’t trust him.”

He caught up the heavy lock of hair that had tumbled forward to half hide her face. “One of these days you’re going to be needing to tell me what happened between the two of you, in Portugal. But not now. This isn’t about the past. It’s about the men and women who are dying here, in London, today. First your brother, then Karmele, now Foucher. If you know anything that can stop it, you must tell Devlin.”

“You trust him?”

“With my life.”

Her lips parted, trembled with uncertainty and proud stubbornness and an onslaught of memories he could only guess at. Then she nodded, and he found himself both humbled and inspired in a way he could not have defined.