Wayfarer Read online

  Etta, with patience she had no idea she possessed, managed to tamp down her temper long enough to say, “There was a storm….You slipped on the path leading up to the monastery, Taktsang Palphug—”

  “Did Grandpops really give the world that much detail?” Julian asked, flattening his hair with his hand. “He’s usually so quick to defend the family’s honor, but I guess even he couldn’t resist making me sound like a right idiot.”

  There was a sharp undercurrent to the words that seemed at odds with his jocular tone. Etta studied him again—the slouching posture, the unkempt clothes, the glint in his eyes she’d originally taken as mischief—and wondered which side of him was the truth, and which he’d simply made a home in.

  “I thought he would have…” He kept pacing, but this time turned his eyes to the floor. “Did he…I never heard anything about a memorial or the like…?”

  Etta’s brows rose. “I don’t know. I’m assuming.”

  “It’s not that it matters to me,” he said quickly, shaping the words in the air with his hands, “but it’s sort of…anticlimactic to disappear into a puff of snow and mist. A chap wants to know that—you know, actually, it doesn’t matter. None of it really matters.”

  “Stop—stop pacing, you’re making me nervous,” Etta said. “Can you stand still for one second and actually explain this to me?”

  He popped himself up onto the corner of the grand desk, folding his hands in his lap. Within seconds, his bare feet were swinging, drumming against the leg of it, and Etta realized she’d asked for the impossible. Not only did he not shut up, he couldn’t seem to burn off enough energy to stop moving.

  “In that instance, the Thorns were also responsible for orphaning me,” Julian said. “Three years ago, they used a passage to New York in 1940 to set a fire at the New York World’s Fair, hitting at Grandfather’s business interests in that period. At the same time, I happened to be stupidly falling down a mountainside in Bhutan. Since I was born in 1941, I was kicked through the passages to 1939, which was, at that point—”

  “The last common year between the old timeline and the new one,” Etta finished. Between tracking the timeline, the collection of years at the mercy of the travelers’ actions, and each traveler’s personal life that they lived straight through, even when they were jumping between centuries, she thought her brain might explode. “But I was born after 1940, too, and I wasn’t orphaned when that change occurred.”

  “Then the change must have been confined to that year, and not rippled past 1941. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times by now, but you know how the timeline is about inconsistency.”

  Etta did know. It had self-corrected as if passing over a speed bump, instead of the road completely diverging. Interesting.

  “At least that time I got spat out in the Maldives. Made for quite the vacation. But by the time I located the necessary passages and resurfaced, I caught news of my supposed death and decided I might as well make the most of it.”

  “And it never occurred to you once—once—over the past few years that you might, you know, tell someone that you were alive?”

  Not Nicholas? Not Sophia? Not any other member of his family?

  Julian pushed away from the desk. He moved to the bookshelves, dragging his fingers along the beveled spines of the books as he made his way around the room. It was like watching a cat pace in front of a window, restless and watchful.

  If she hadn’t heard the words leave Nicholas’s mouth, she would never have believed they were related at all. It went beyond their looks. Where Nicholas moved in assured, long strides, even when he was uncertain of where he was going, Julian had a kind of agitated undercurrent to his movements. He didn’t have Nicholas’s height, either, and his body hadn’t been honed and chafed by the hard work of life on a ship. Julian’s words fell over each other, as if fighting over which got to escape first, while Nicholas took careful measure of each and every word he said, knowing how they might be used against him. Julian seemed to be bursting at his seams, and Nicholas had been so careful, so steady, in holding his feelings in check.

  Because he had to.

  Because he’d had none of the privileges Julian had, born into a family that never wanted him and a society that scorned and disrespected him.

  Anger bloomed, vivid as the crooked portraits on the wall. If this really was Julian Ironwood, then it was the very same person who had taken advantage of Nicholas’s love for him, the one who’d turned around and treated him like little more than a servant, rather than genuinely teach him the ways of travelers.

  I’m the fool, Nicholas had told her, because in spite of everything, he was my brother. I never saw him as anything else. And it clearly wasn’t the same for him.

  Julian hadn’t even had the common decency to find a way to tell his half brother he was still alive. Instead, he’d let Nicholas drown in his guilt. He had let him spend years questioning his honor and decency. He had let Nicholas take the exile and rage-fueled beating from Ironwood.

  All of this time, Nicholas had been suffering—and for what?

  Nothing.

  “Well, kiddo, to continue this tale, I floated around for a while, living life as one does—without much money to speak of, which got me into more than a few scrapes. It all became rather tedious and boring. Enter: the Thorns. I thought it might be best to sell some knowledge about Grandfather, try to exchange it for steady meals and a safe place to sleep at night.”

  He glanced at her, as if expecting Etta to coo with sympathy. She kept her gaze on the unlit brass chandelier overhead, fingers curled so tightly around the lip of the desk that her hands prickled with pain. Don’t do it. He’s not worth it.

  “Speaking of,” Julian said, swinging around toward her, “I’d like to get back to you—holy God!”

  Etta relished the throbbing pain in her knuckles as her fist made contact with his cheek and he stumbled back over his own feet, landing in an ungraceful heap on his bottom. He stared up at her with huge eyes, one hand still cupping the red mark on his face as she shook out her hand.

  “What the bloody hell was that for?” he howled.

  “Do you have any idea,” she said, voice rising with each word, “what your ‘death’ did to your brother? Do you have any idea what he went through—what your jackass of a grandfather put him through?”

  “Brother?” Julian repeated, rather stupidly. Her instinct to give him another kick, this time beneath the belt, must have registered on her face, because Julian scrambled back on the rug.

  Then, to her surprise, he said, “But…how do you know Nick?”

  Etta studied him. He looked genuinely shocked, either from her hit, Nicholas’s name, or both. Unsure of how much information to trust him with, she answered, “I traveled with him for a little bit.”

  His brow creased. “On behalf of Grandfather?”

  She shook her head, but before she could elaborate, a key scraped in the door’s lock. It should have been enough to send Etta diving behind the desk, out of sight. Instead she stood there, towering over Julian, the door letting out a tortured groan as it was thrown open. Two men barreled in with guns in hand, both dressed in trousers and plain white shirts, coming up short at the sight of her. The one out in front, a dark, bushy mustache disguising half of his face, actually took a generous step back, crossing himself.

  “Christ,” said the other, glancing at the first. He was somewhat shorter, his pale hair cut close to the scalp and almost gone from balding. “The others were right. It’s the bleeding ghost of Rose Linden.”

  The other one merely crossed himself.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting me?” Julian complained. “This girl is clearly deranged—”

  “Deranged is one word for it,” the dark-haired man said. Now Etta recognized his voice as that of the man who had sparred with Julian over the water. “How in the hell did you get in here, miss?”

  “I think the better question is, why did it take you almost
a half hour to realize I was gone?” Etta said, reaching back for the water glass she’d left on the desk. Before either man could answer, she slammed it down on the edge of the desk, shattering its top half and leaving a jagged edge on what was left. For one insane instant, Sophia’s lesson on where to cut them, how to slit their throats, floated to the front of her mind.

  Get a grip, Etta. She needed to stay here and find the astrolabe, and she wouldn’t be able to do that if she was locked away. But part of her hated that these people had seen her at her weakest, her most helpless, and she couldn’t ignore it. They needed to know she would fight back if they pushed her.

  “Easy there!” Julian cried. He craned his neck up to look at the men. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  The pale-haired man raised his small black pistol, then swore, tucking it back into the waistband of his trousers. “Come along, girlie, it’s time for you to go back up to your room.”

  Etta swung her makeshift weapon toward him, ignoring the small, warm pool of blood collecting in her palm from where she’d cut herself. “I don’t think so.”

  Dull footsteps grew to a pounding storm out in the hallway, and the music she’d heard before cut off with a loud scratch. She caught snatches of voices shouting, “She’s gone!” “Find her!” and a variety of swearing that would have made even the men in Nicholas’s crew blush.

  “She’s here!” the dark-haired man called. “The office!”

  The rush of panicked activity ceased, but one voice rang out. “Thank you; that’ll be all the excitement for this evening, God willing.”

  The two guards straightened—the smaller of the two even reached up to fix the limp cloth hanging around his neck into something resembling a bow tie. A man strode into the darkened corner of the room, hands tucked into his trouser pockets.

  “We were handling the situation, sir,” the dark-haired one said quickly. “I was about to return the girl to her quarters.”

  “I see,” came the amused response. “But it seems to me that she’s the one who has this situation well in hand.”

  The man stepped into the shallow firelight, giving Etta her first real glimpse of him. It was the guard from her room. Dark eyes swept around the room, studying each of them in turn, but his gaze lingered on her, so unflinching that it seemed to wipe everyone else away, leaving just the two of them.

  The man’s presence made her blood slow, and finally still in her veins, but the trickle of uneasiness she’d felt at his appearance was nothing compared to the torrent of uneasiness that came in the moment where her memory met recognition. Etta wasn’t aware that the glass had slipped from between her fingers until it fell, striking the top of her bare foot, and rolled away.

  The black hair, cut through with silver strands…his rough-hewn features…she wasn’t seeing him in the high-waisted pants or loose white shirt he currently wore. She saw him in a classic black-and-white tuxedo, wearing silver-rimmed glasses, in the Grand Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the twenty-first century.

  “You recognize me,” he said, with a small, approving note in his voice—like he’d expected she wouldn’t?

  Not only had she bumped into him, he’d come running when she and Sophia had found Alice dying in a pool of her own blood. Almost as if he’d known it might happen.

  Or as if he’d been the one to pull the trigger.

  The two guards immediately stepped closer to the man’s side, as though they’d been drawn into his orbit.

  He looked to Julian and said, this time with a slight edge, “How did I know to check this room first?”

  “She dropped in on me,” Julian protested, pointing to the window. “I was minding my own business. For once.”

  The man flicked his dark gaze to Etta, and this time she forced herself to meet it. The corners of his mouth tipped up again. “I don’t need to ask how you got in here, for I suspect the mountain of scaffolding piled up outside is likely my answer. Tell me, did it ever occur to you that you could have broken your neck?”

  He was so calm, his voice so measured, that he made the rest of them sound manic. Even his posture, the way he hadn’t once tensed up, made her want to ruffle his composure, just to see how far he could be pushed. To see where the boundaries of his anger began. It would be useful later, she thought, in trying to trick him into saying something about the astrolabe, and where the Thorns might be keeping it.

  “You know,” Etta said, “you’re making me wish I had.”

  She wiped her slick palms against the horrible nightgown, wary of the man’s warm laughter, the spark of enjoyment in his voice. He turned to the bald guard, knocking the back of his hand against the other man’s chest. “I told you she had some spirit, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” the guard confirmed. “Sir, I take full responsibility for all of this—”

  “Sir” waved his hand before placing it on the guard’s shoulder. “I was there and slept through her clever escape. Have Winifred dress her and bring her to me once she’s comfortable and presentable, will you?”

  “Yes, of course, sir,” the guard said, nearly sagging with relief.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Etta said, taking a step forward. “I don’t even know who you are! What right do you have to order me around?”

  The man had already begun to turn toward the door, but at her words, his shoulders stiffened. He glanced back over his shoulder, but the candlelight flared in his glasses, masking his expression. Julian coughed, either to hide a laugh or his discomfort.

  “My name is Henry Hemlock, and you’re here at my mercy,” the man said. “You will do as I say, because I am your father and we have much to discuss.”

  THE STORM HAD BROKEN AT DAWN, bringing a bit of mercy to what had been a night that redefined misery. Nicholas and Sophia trudged and waded through still-flooded streets, following the path of the runoff toward the beach. Servants were waking, appearing on the balconies of bright, two-story wooden buildings to beat rugs and toss out the waste, and the smell was rank enough to leave him feeling as if the small town had become one large chamber pot. After a rather unfortunate splash of something he didn’t care to inspect, Sophia’s mood had gone from sour to curdled.

  They’d spent hours hiding from the tavern owner; the whoreson had sent out a veritable gang of men and Redcoats to find someone to hold accountable for the damage the fight had wrought, and had settled on them. This, despite his own gleeful participation. The dodging and hiding had considerably hampered their search for the man who’d stolen Rose’s letter. As it turned out, even a rare Chinese man in the Indies didn’t attract the necessary attention to leave a trail of witnesses behind. Nicholas had caught himself wondering more than once if he’d had more to drink than he thought, and made a man out of a shadow.

  But the doxies and their customers upstairs had seen him, so surely…

  He stilled, turning back toward the harbor. Would he make for a ship? If he was an Ironwood, not just some enterprising opportunist looking for possible targets for theft, he’d try to catch the first ship out. The more Nicholas turned over the thought of investigating that area, the sounder it seemed. Information traveled like flies between sailors, and surely someone of the man’s ethnicity wouldn’t have evaded their notice. Someone might know where he was staying, and if he had any plans of sailing out of port within the next few days.

  Damn your eyes, Rose, he thought, not for the first time. You couldn’t have come yourself and saved us the trouble?

  Sophia had charged forward as his steps slowed; a good three lengths ahead, she turned back. “Did your mind suddenly go on holiday? Let’s move. I’m ready for this hellish cat and mouse game to be over.”

  “You continue on,” he told her. “I’m going to follow another lead—”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than she came stomping back toward him, sending muddy water shooting up around her already-soaking shoes and splattering him in the face. “What lead is this?” she press
ed. “Or have we started redefining ‘lead’ as ‘wild guess’?”

  He took a deep breath for patience, and parceled out his words carefully, so as not to reveal anything she might be able to use herself. It would be like handing her the knife she’d later jam into his spine. “I’m headed to the bay, to see if anyone might have information on our thief.”

  “Fine,” she grumbled, turning in that direction. “We’ll make it quick.”

  He shook his head. “You go back to the beach, get some rest—”

  “I have to say,” she interrupted, her small, pale hands curling at her sides as her stare burned into the side of his face, “I have no idea how Linden tolerated traveling with you. A few hours into our special partnership and I wanted to push you out a window.”

  Nicholas was surprised by how hard, how fast, fury gripped him. Exhaustion, hunger, frustration—he could make any excuse he liked, but the truth was, she’d touched the one sore on his heart that was still raw. “Utter her name again. Test my resolve, ma’am, please.”

  Sophia glowered. “I meant, I don’t know how she could stand this game of evasion and stupid, masculine pride you seem so fond of: stay here, go back, don’t move, go on ahead. You’re not my governess, and I’m not one of the men on your stupid bloody ship, so stop ordering me around. Try to leave me out of this—try to leave me behind—one more time, and I will actually shoot you. In a delicate area.”

  “Do I need to remind you,” he said, hating how quickly she seemed to be able to get his temper rolling on stormy waves, “that you got so deep into your cups last evening that instead of being reasonable and maintaining our disguise, you fired a pistol, and fired it badly, inside of a crowded tavern? That just yesterday, you harassed and abused a British regular because you ‘disliked the way he looked at you’ and nearly got us thrown into a rank gaol?”

  “Would have been an improvement over where we’ve been sleeping,” she grumbled.

  She will never respect me, he thought, sick with hate. She will always see me as nothing.