The Orphan Pearl Read online

  The Orphan Pearl

  No Better Angels, Book 3

  by Erin Satie

  Copyright 2015 Erin Satie

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by fair use. This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-1-942457-04-6

  Little Phrase Publishing

  www.erinsatie.com

  Cover design by Bookfly (www.bookflydesign.com)

  Cover photograph by Hot Damn Stock (hotdamnstock.com)

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Afterword

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  On June 4, 1840, Lady Lily Spark arrived at the London docks with nothing but the clothes on her back and two treasures: a legendary pearl, which she kept hidden, and her name, which she had not spoken aloud in years.

  “I need to go to Grosvenor Square,” she told the driver of the nearest coach for hire.

  The driver, a ruddy-cheeked, big-boned, unflappable sort of man, appeared skeptical.

  Well, and so he might. She wore a dirty, ill-fitting dress that she’d bought off a servant girl in Galata, the European quarter of Constantinople, back when she still had coin to spare. A day later, she’d sold her empty purse for a bit of fried bread before boarding the sloop that brought her back to England.

  She didn’t look like she belonged anywhere near Grosvenor Square.

  “You’ll show me your coin before I take you anywhere,” said the driver.

  “Listen.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Either someone at my destination will pay my fare, or you can take me around to the nearest dark alley and I’ll frig you for it.”

  The driver’s expression didn’t change. It was a fine day, blue skies overhead and not overwarm. Perfect weather for a light summer frock. Lily’s long-sleeved, high-necked gown fit the season about as well as it fit her body, which was to say very ill indeed.

  “Are you a betting man?” Lily threw back her shoulders. If her bosom couldn’t convince him, nothing she said would bring him round. “Think of it as a gamble, only you win either way.”

  He shooed her toward the empty seat with a wave of his whip. “I’ll hold you to that. Grosvenor Square?”

  “Grosvenor Square,” Lily agreed, foot on the baseboard and ready to hop. “Hastings House.”

  A single horse pulled the tiny two-wheeled vehicle. It swayed as she sat, lighter and flimsier than anything on the road when last she saw England. The driver stood upright behind her, and his horse lunged forward at a flick of his whip.

  She sat with her fingers around the door handle and her cheek against the window, fogging it with her breath. She had never known the East End, nor the docks, but the sun and the river told her they were headed in the right direction. More or less. If the driver stopped early, if he decided her offer made her fair prey, she’d open the door, tumble out and run. She’d bruise or break something in the process, but she’d suffer the injury here, on the main thoroughfares, where she’d still have some chance of reaching her destination.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have put herself at risk in order to spare herself a bit of walking, but she was hungry and the soles of her shoes looked like a sieve.

  So she’d been foolish. Nothing new there.

  But the driver took them away from the Thames exactly where he ought to, trotted her down the Strand, tall buildings clad in clean white marble looming on either side, up to Piccadilly and across Regent Street into the quiet avenues of her girlhood.

  She knew these streets and yet felt a stranger in them. Two feelings as incompatible as oil and water—it was like seeing double. Some ghostly remnant of her old self stirred inside of her, and while she could hardly process her return, it had never left.

  Her sense of disorientation only increased as the driver wheeled her into Grosvenor Square: massive, intimidating homes surrounding an oval park manicured within an inch of its life. Hastings House, her destination, stood fully five stories high, a red brick structure with five thin plaster columns dividing its facade like vertical stripes.

  The plain white-painted door opened before she could knock. The footman blocking the threshold—burly, military, her father’s sort of man—seemed to think he could scare her away with the intensity of his glare.

  But Lily was her father’s daughter, and of the gifts he’d passed on to her, one was this: a harsh look could not frighten her.

  “My name is Lady Lily Spark—”

  “Lady Lily is dead,” interrupted the footman.

  “I can see how you’d get that idea,” Lily replied. “Really I can. But as it happens, I was only missing, and now I’ve returned. Is there anyone in the house who’d remember me? My father, for example?”

  A tall, broad-shouldered fellow appeared at the footman’s back. Rundle, the butler. He’d gotten older, thicker and grayer, but she knew him instantly.

  Rundle’s jowly, bullish face gave no indication that the recognition was mutual.

  Rats.

  “Rundle, is that you? Looking very hale, if you don’t mind the observation. Not a day older than when last we met—you remember that, don’t you? It’s been years, of course, but you always had such a memory. If you please, this lovely man drove me here and I haven’t any money on me. Could you see that he gets paid?”

  Blank-faced, Rundle handed the footman a coin.

  The footman gawked at the bit of silver, then at Lily, his eyes widening comically.

  Lily stepped aside, clearing the way to the street.

  The footman dashed past. Lily waved cheerily to the driver and crossed the threshold into her old home. The vast front hall had once been light and airy, gold accents against a cream background. Now the walls had been papered over in dark blue, against which vases full of red roses stood out like spatters of bright blood.

  Ghastly.

  “Is he in residence?” she asked Rundle.

  “This way.” The butler led her up the grand staircase, down a corridor, then paused before a closed door. “If you’ll allow me to go in alone. Give His Grace a moment to prepare.”

  Lily laid her hand over the knob. “No.”

  The silence stretched. Finally, the butler dropped his eyes and Lily stepped through alone.

  Her father sat behind a large desk of polished wood, bathed in sunlight that streamed in through an open window. He, too, was older—they were all older, of course, time didn’t play favorites—his hair more silver than blond now. But it was the same long, thin, fine-boned face looking up at her that she had once looked up to when she was small. And his cold sharp eyes, the same tawny color as
her own, hadn’t dimmed in the slightest.

  He rose automatically, reaching for a gold-handled cane that hung from a hook bolted to his desk. He stood with his shoulders back, chin up, as though he’d just stepped onto a parade ground. He still looked taller than he was.

  “I’m home,” she said, more faintly than she’d planned.

  Recognition staggered him. He nearly crumpled—the bad leg, of course—and that flash of weakness staggered her. Lily raced forward, but he righted himself before she could cross the distance, leaning hard on his cane.

  “Papa?” She took his arm. “I’m sorry I startled you.”

  “Sit.” He pointed to the chair opposite his desk.

  She held fast. “You first.”

  That made him glare; he hated being told what to do, almost as much as she hated being cut down to size. But, for once, her father’s prickly harshness filled her with joy. She had hated him for the first half of her life and missed him for the second.

  Impulsively, Lily flung her arms around him and held him tight, though he didn’t bend in turn.

  “I’ll sit,” he conceded irritably. “What are you wearing? What—”

  “It’s a long story.” Lily waited for him to follow word with deed before she circled around the desk and sat. Unlike her father’s chair, sized to his frame and well-padded, it had a deep seat and no cushions. Designed to cause, rather than relieve, discomfort.

  “The short version is: I married a Turk, but he’s just died, and the whole Ottoman Empire appears to be on a—shall I call it a slimming regime? Because it’s smaller every day, and—listen to me, I’m babbling. It seemed like a good time to come home.”

  “You married—”

  “A Turk,” Lily confirmed. “His name was Rustem Pasha. He was not a Christian, but he had no other wives. I was terribly fond of him.”

  For once, the Duke of Hastings was speechless.

  “If it’s just too awful to contemplate, I can leave in the morning.” She’d beg for money first, but she’d go. “Do I have a tombstone somewhere? I ought to visit it. Pay my respects.”

  “Yes.” He swiped a hand across his forehead. “You have a tombstone.”

  Something cold fluttered in her chest. Fear of death, or just guilt? “At Irongate?”

  “Next to your mother.”

  “Ah.”

  “Adam stayed in Cairo for months,” said her father. “He searched for you long after the authorities had given up.”

  She had used her brother to engineer her escape—she’d have been found in a day if she’d tried to run away in England—and left him to take the blame. She’d known that Adam would suffer from guilt, fear, grief. She’d done it anyway. That, to the best of her ability to understand it, was evil—and she had perpetrated it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not,” returned her father. “But you’ll always have a place here. Nothing you do could change that.”

  All her muscles turned to water. She leaned into the arm of her chair, her bones a frail scaffolding that wobbled horribly under the pressure. Oh, praise the stars and the saints, the mules that had carried her down the long roads and the boat that had sailed her across the seas. Every hungry morning and uneasy night had been worth it. Every hard desperate moment had brought her, at last, to safety.

  And her father saw her relief, which revealed the depth of her need.

  “But, Lily.” He tapped the desk between them, suddenly sharp and confident. “You’ve come home at a… delicate time. The way events are shaping up in the wider world—in the world that you just left. I’m going to need your help.”

  The sweet relief drained away, faster than it had come. Whatever he wanted, she would hate it.

  Chapter Two

  John Tacitus Ware held a lantern high in one hand. The brightest lantern he could find, and the morning’s surveying expedition had burned through its whole reservoir of oil. But here, in the bowels of the earth, the light it generated was little more than a halo—a thin, fragile cocoon protecting him from the darkness.

  Nothing lived here. No mold, no lichen. A few spiders, sometimes, though even they kept close to the surface. In the cool, still air, the light crunch of approaching footsteps reached him long before Rudolph Pound emerged from the gloom.

  Lightly dressed, hair thin on top but with full mustache luxuriating across his upper lip, Pound advanced slowly. He bent his head, and most of his attention, to the biscuit-sized instrument in his hand, a combination compass and tilt meter.

  “Twenty-three paces,” Pound said. “Incline of twelve feet.”

  John let the lantern dangle from a finger and pulled his notebook from his pocket. Before they descended he’d sketched a rough map of the cave from memory. As they went along, he’d scrawled measurements into the corresponding spots on the map. Now, at the end of their planned route, figures crowded the sheet.

  He added the most recent measurements and slipped the notebook back into his coat pocket.

  “That’s the whole branch done.” Pound hammered an iron spike into the wall and tied a bright yellow ribbon around it to mark where they’d stopped. “Back to the ropes?”

  John took the lead again, lamplight wavering eerily in front of him. He dragged one hand along the rough rock wall as the passages opened up, taller and wider, until he couldn’t see the rock arching overhead. Only darkness, dense and palpable and pressing round him. More confining—more terrifying—than the smaller, tighter tunnels could ever be.

  He paused before the final turning and shaded his eyes, but still winced at the sunlight streaming through the hole, twenty feet up.

  “Halloo!” Pound shouted, his eyes squinted down to slits.

  The answering holler from above bounced from wall to wall.

  Two ropes dangled from the ledge, empty harnesses limp on the cave floor. John tested the nearest for soundness, tied himself in, and double-checked his knots. Then he checked Pound’s harness and waited for Pound to return the favor.

  “Lift!” John cried.

  The ropes went taut. The prickly jute bit through his sturdy clothing and cut off his circulation as he rose, foot by laborious foot, Pound swinging beside him. Sunlight blinded him as he reached the top, arms outstretched and grappling for purchase. Strong hands closed around his wrists and heaved him over the lip and onto the surface.

  A breeze ruffled his hair. It carried the scent of mud and grass and sap, manure and the spice of wild clover. Sunlight warmed his forehead, the tip of his nose. Birdsong filtered out from the woods.

  He opened his eyes. Ranged around him were the members of his Rambling Club. Sir Alexander Congreve, the squire who’d founded the group; Phineas Bell, a railroad engineer; Old Hugh Bertie, a retired naval officer… half-a-dozen men in all, the lot of them out of breath and red-faced from the haul.

  Among these bluff, familiar faces hovered one he hadn’t seen in several years. Handsome, blond, patrician. Julian Swann. The Duke of Clive now, but before inheriting his title he’d been a colleague at the Foreign Office.

  In fact, Clive had been one of the most influential members of the faction that had pushed so hard to have John dismissed from his post. An energetic and successful campaign that brought his career to a premature end.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living,” said Clive.

  John rolled to a sitting position, palmed the hard ground and vaulted to his feet. He held out his hand for Pound, who clasped it, and helped the man rise. “Good ramble.”

  “Very smooth indeed,” Pound agreed, whacking grit from the seat of his pants.

  “We surveyed the entire rift passage,” John told Congreve and the others. “Next time we can press on to the aven.”

  Congreve looked nervously at Clive and cleared his throat.

  John sighed. “Have you met the Duke of Clive?”

  “Er… he introduced himself when he arrived,” Congreve replied. “An hour ago.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” added
Clive. “I was passing through the area and thought I’d check in on an old friend.”

  “You’ve certainly got my attention.” John tapped his hat onto his head and collected the rest of his things before turning to Congreve and the Club. “I’ll use the measurements we took today to fill out the map and bring a copy to you in the next few days. Short Sump in two weeks?”

  “Meet at the manor at dawn,” Congreve confirmed.

  “Until next time.” John waved for Clive to follow him down the path that led to his property. It crossed through a bright wood, young oak trees planted in a grid pattern, the canopy only a few feet overhead. “So what’s this about?”

  “Do you take any papers?”

  John shrugged.

  “So much happening out in the wide world these days.”

  “Not my concern anymore.”

  “Yes, well…” Clive scratched his nose. “You did try to start a war.”

  He had. He’d hoped to strengthen the Ottoman Empire by weakening Russia, and so he’d moved along the coast of the Black Sea, fomenting rebellion. He’d wanted a buffer state, a bulwark against Russia’s advancing borders. He’d wanted an independent Georgia.

  He’d acted against policy and well beyond his allotted authority. He’d been stopped, chastised, and dismissed.

  Meanwhile, Ottoman power continued to decline, the borders to erode. Corruption weakened the Empire from within. And now rebellion threatened to tear the Empire apart.

  One of the Sultan’s most talented, ambitious vassals had claimed the territory he’d been sent to govern for his own. Mehmet Ali had taken control of Egypt, consolidated his power there, and invaded Syria. He’d crushed the Sultan’s armies and advanced dangerously close to Constantinople.

  The Sultan needed a savior, and Russia was eager—too eager—to volunteer for the job. If the other great powers didn’t intervene, the tsar and Mehmet Ali would split the Empire between them, and the Ottomans would be no more.

  Russia would gain a port on the Mediterranean. Britain would lose a critical ally. And the whole bloody situation could have been avoided, if they’d only acted earlier.