The Orphan Pearl Read online

  “Lily?” Her father steadied her with a hand on her elbow. “What did he want?”

  “Want?” She swallowed a giggle. Nothing remotely funny had happened, but she could hardly contain herself. “Who?”

  “The Duke of Clive,” whispered her father, low and vicious. “What did he say to you?”

  “Oh, him.” This time the giggle almost got through. “Your nemesis.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “He wanted me to meet John Tacitus Ware.”

  Her father scanned the room, connecting the name with the face. Lily didn’t have to. His portrait may as well have been burned onto her eyelids. Eyes like burning tar, framed by deep crow’s feet. Unruly hair cut too short.

  “That’s his strategy? Resurrecting Ware and setting him after you?” Her father. “He’ll regret that.”

  “No need for threats.” Lily smiled giddily. “I saw right through him.”

  “John Tacitus Ware is not a man to trifle with,” he warned. “He’s dangerous. Unpredictable.”

  “Oh, Papa.” Lily gave her father’s cheek a fond pat. Foolish to bait him, but she couldn’t help herself. “All men can be trifled with. You taught me that.”

  He made a sour face. “Are you well?”

  She felt like she was breathing champagne, and the bubbles would carry her away. “I do believe I might have a headache.”

  “I’ll have the carriage brought ‘round.”

  Lily watched her father thread his way through the crowd. While she waited for him to return, she drifted into a conversation about the Russian plenipotentiary, who had apparently bewitched Lord Palmerston with his elegant dancing. The participants discussed the matter with obvious deep affront.

  Lily bit her lip to stifle a guffaw and slipped away to the door. She crossed paths with her father as she skipped down the stairs and gathered her things. A footman opened the door and she stepped out into the heavy evening air while knotting the strings of her bonnet underneath her chin.

  She craned her head back, but the city’s light and smoke blotted out the stars. A sulfur-yellow, low-hanging moon brooded over an empty sky.

  John Tacitus Ware.

  She wished she could introduce him to her younger self. I’d like to hear more. At fourteen, fifteen, she would have expired from delight. That clipped, intense way he had of speaking—she’d have rehearsed it in her mind again and again, thinking of all the different ways he could have meant it.

  She still might, at that.

  A footman helped her into the carriage. The springs creaked as she settled into the cushioned bench, and the door clicked shut behind her just as the one opposite swung open.

  Lily jumped.

  Nothing stirred. Light street noise filtered in, rumbling and clopping and a thin thread of violin from the Sewell’s salon. The shadowy trees rustled.

  The door stayed open.

  The carriage didn’t advance.

  Lily shifted along the bench seat, careful of her skirts, and peeked out.

  Ware stood by the rear wheel. He offered her his hand, smiled like a pirate. With teeth. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Perfect.

  Impossible, but perfect.

  The laugh that Lily had been holding in broke free. She leaned into his hand, kid-gloved and rock-steady, and floated to the ground.

  Ware eased the door shut and hustled her into the cover of Hyde Park’s greenery. Side by side, they watched her father’s carriage roll down the street. What on earth would happen when some poor footman opened the door and found the compartment empty? Panic, fear, chaos—oh, she wouldn’t think about it now. Later.

  “Where are we walking?” Lily asked.

  “You live in Grosvenor Square?”

  “That’s right.”

  A flame flared in the darkness, rising from the tip of a lucifer, and danced across the planes of Ware’s cheeks as they hollowed, pulling air through a cigar he clamped between his teeth.

  He blew out a puff of smoke. “This way, then.”

  He took a few steps. Enough for her to realize he’d heard her answer and headed, intentionally, in the opposite direction. Not toward Grosvenor Square. Away from it.

  “Do you have a destination in mind?” Lily asked lightly.

  He half turned. “No.”

  She hesitated. Too late. Always too late.

  “There’s no trick,” he promised. “I’ll see you home safe.”

  “A liar would say the same.”

  The red tip of his cigar traced a slashing downward line. Wisps of smoke drifted up, past his impassive face. Chiseled, every inch of it, as though by a brilliant sculptor working with an intractable material. All the skill in the world, and yet—and yet this clay refused to cooperate.

  He’d been stubborn before he was born, John Tacitus Ware. She’d wager on it.

  “It’s what I do,” he said finally. “What I used to do, anyhow, whenever I came home. Places are like skins. You leave a part of yourself behind when you go. Stay away long enough and the old skin doesn’t quite fit when you return.”

  “So you walk?”

  “It helps.”

  Was that why she wanted to follow him? Because some echo of her past self lingered here?

  He had been thrown at her, like a fisherman’s lure. A bright feathered fly, a gleaming translucent egg. The woman she had become could resist temptation. It was the callow girl she had been who went to him and said, “Well then. Lead on.”

  They cut through Hyde Park. The noises of the street faded quickly, replaced by the quiet crunch of their footsteps on the grass. Lily held her skirts up but the damp seeped through the soles of her thin slippers in seconds. She’d have to throw them out when she got home. Five minutes into this adventure, and already something had been ruined beyond repair.

  “Do you know,” she said, “I was sent away to school when I was young. A strict place, the sort that promised to make headstrong girls docile—you won’t be the first to wonder how they failed so abysmally at their stated goal, so we can skip right over that.

  “I got into the habit of sorting through trash that came out of the instructors’ dormitory,” Lily continued. “I’d creep out at night and hunt for contraband like a gleaner in a field of scythed wheat. Spent tobacco, bottles of laudanum with a few drops left at the bottom, stale sweets. Eventually, bit by little bit, I’d have something worth trading to the other girls.”

  “The ragpicker of Mayfair?”

  “The school was in Sussex, actually. Country air being more conducive to good morals. Can you guess what I always kept for myself? What I never showed the other girls?”

  “Not the tobacco, not the opium…” Ware sucked meditatively on his cigar. He had a pale, muscular mouth, the bottom lip a little overfull. “I’m afraid to find out.”

  “Newspapers,” Lily answered. “They were forbidden to pupils but not to instructors. That’s how I first read about you. Sitting in a closet with a stolen newspaper, reading by the light of a candle stub I’d nicked from a bin.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirteen, fourteen. I hated that school. Dull, suffocating place.” She hadn’t thought of Whitcomb Hall in years. The memory was… well, come to think of it, not so awful anymore. She’d spent a good portion of her years abroad similarly engaged. Picking through dirt, looking for buried treasure.

  She’d found it, at last, and lived to regret it.

  At thirteen, she wouldn’t have understood how triumph could serve as the advance guard for loss and disillusionment. Wouldn’t have believed it, if she’d been told. “You seemed so free. Like you could do anything you wanted. It was the perfect fantasy for a girl who felt confined, and hated it.”

  Ware snorted. “You shouldn’t talk so much.”

  “Oh, now, Mr. Ware.” Lily bumped into his side, sending a chunk of ash from his cigar scattering into the damp grass. “You’re here to make me talk, and I know it.”

  He gave her a quick, startled
look. Guilt. And then one side of his mouth curled, rakish and… admiring. “Shouldn’t you put up a fight?”

  Lily laughed. “Would that make you feel better?”

  “Yes,” he answered, utterly serious.

  “Then fighting would be counterproductive. I’d only be encouraging you.”

  That half smile broadened. His whole expression eased, and he looked more like a man she could like: engaged, unafraid.

  “Ah, and now I’ve gone in the wrong direction entirely,” she teased. “You see how inept I am. A helpless victim, and you—clearly the villain of the piece.”

  “You laugh,” he said, as they stepped out into the street again. Life teemed around them, horses and carriages, men in stiff hats and stiff suits, women hidden—always hidden. “But these are serious matters. Lives will change, not just today but for years to come, based on what is decided here in London. You have been to the Orient. You have lived there, side by side with people who must have meant something to you.”

  “Lives will change,” Lily echoed. It had grown dark, but they stood in a pool of bright light. Behind them, a gas lamp mounted on a slim iron pole hissed quietly. “Perhaps I decline to be responsible.”

  “That’s not a choice you can make.”

  “Oh, Mr. Ware.” Lily turned her best smile on him, brilliant enough to incinerate all replies. “Watch me.”

  While he blinked, dazzled, Lily signaled a hackney. She gave the driver her direction, climbed onto the seat, and didn’t look back until the little vehicle had rolled away.

  She allowed herself a little peek as they turned the corner. Ware caught her at it, of course.

  Chapter Four

  Predictably, she found Hastings House in chaos—servants scrambling about in a panic, wondering where she’d gotten to.

  Lily rested her hand over her heart. “Goodness, what’s this about?”

  “Lady Lily,” said Rundle, always the calm at the center of a storm. “You’re well.”

  “Of course I am.” She feigned wide-eyed confusion. “The carriage left without me so I took a hackney instead. I’m sorry if you worried.”

  Rundle’s heavy jowls quivered, but no matter how obvious her lies, he would never gainsay her. Unfair but useful. “I see. I’ll speak to the coachman.”

  “It was an honest mistake, I’m sure.” Lily leaned in, lowered her voice. “I’d be distraught if he were dismissed on my account.”

  Rundle’s brows, bristling like a pair of porcupines, drew together.

  “I’ll speak to my father about it,” she added. “We shouldn’t lose a competent servant because I’m a dawdler.”

  She passed into the house and up to her bedroom. It hadn’t changed much since she left it, ten years before. The finial on the top left bedpost still unscrewed. The thin pry bar she’d hidden inside had rusted, but hadn’t been confiscated. And the floorboard she’d loosened while still a girl still popped up when pressured just so.

  She lifted a velvet-wrapped object from the hidden compartment and, pinching the soft fabric, rolled a pearl fully the size of a ripe orange into her cupped palm. White as the dawn on morning dew, al-Yatima took Lily’s breath away every time she looked at it.

  Ware thought she was a pawn, he a player. Her father believed the same.

  They were both wrong.

  Armies had taken the field. Powerful men gathered, here and across the seas. No one thing could turn the tides.

  Except, maybe, this one thing.

  While the caliphs ruled from Damascus, al-Yatima had hung in their capital’s Great Mosque. Later, when the center of power shifted to Baghdad, the great caliph Harun al-Rachid had worn the pearl in his imperial regalia. By the time the Mongols swept in from the east, it had been moved to the Ka’aba, in Mecca.

  The Mongols had sacked Mecca. Picked the treasury clean. And al-Yatima disappeared from history. For hundreds of years, until the moment Lily dug it up from the earth, the pearl had slumbered in the arms of a skeleton.

  The pearl’s history gave it power. It was a direct link to another time—to the early caliphs, the great empires, an era whose memory burned brighter the more distant it became.

  After the last great battle at Nezib, the Sultan had no army to speak of. His navy had defected to Mehmet Ali. A little push—the right symbol, perhaps—might make the transfer of authority complete.

  She could deliver that push. She held the power, quite literally, in the palm of her hand.

  She put the pearl back in its hiding spot. Fit the board back into place. She hadn’t lied to Ware. She could enter this game as a queen—but she would not play.

  She’d already caused enough bloodshed to last her a lifetime.

  §

  Lord Wilsey was a burly, barrel-chested man who stood well over six feet tall. His sheer physical presence filled a room the moment he entered it, and he’d developed particularly gentle, gracious manners to compensate. Now, with his hair turned gray and a stoop in his shoulders, he had the air of a wandering friar.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said in his low, rumbling voice, squeezing John’s shoulder in one heavy hand.

  “I came as quickly as I could.”

  “And I owe you an explanation for that.”

  Wilsey occupied a fine townhouse with an excellent address, furnished without pretension. The homeliest items—the scratched tables, the mended cabinets—were the oldest and the finest, passed down for generations. John had always found Wilsey’s home welcoming, in much the way of Wilsey himself.

  They settled in a library stocked with hunting trophies and souvenirs rather than books, windows flung open to invite the sluggish summer breezes. Wilsey called for tea and paused by the bell pull before lumbering over to an armchair.

  “I have a favor to ask.” Wilsey stared into the middle distance, unseeing, while his hands moved restlessly, as though he were washing them. “I am sorry to place this burden on you. If I were even a little younger—but I’m not. There’s no one else I can turn to. No one else I can trust.”

  John grabbed hold of Wilsey’s wrist and gave it a shake, to stop the nervous fiddling. When the older man looked up, John said, “Tell me what you need.”

  “It’s Amelia.” Wilsey chewed at his lips. “She has—”

  “Go on,” John urged. “What happened to Amelia?”

  “Preyed upon,” Wilsey said haltingly. “Ruined.”

  “What?” Last he’d encountered Wilsey’s daughter, more than a year ago, she’d been a bright young woman on the cusp of adulthood, as thrilled by her first Season as she’d been eager to poke holes in the experience with wry comments and sly anecdotes. He’d thought She’ll do fine, with some pride, and left for Yorkshire. “That can’t be.”

  “She was… lured,” Wilsey continued. “By a man with a reputation so black—”

  “What was she doing in the company of such a man?” John stood, raked one hand through his hair. Wilsey hadn’t called him to London to ask for a tongue-lashing. That didn’t make it any easier to hold himself in check.

  “The guilty party is a man of some standing. A peer of the realm. And though his reputation is well-known, his rank persuades many to turn a blind eye.”

  “Who?” John snapped. “I want a name.”

  Wilsey looked him squarely in the eyes. “The Earl of Kingston.”

  “Hell and damnation,” John whispered. It couldn’t be worse.

  “He tricked her,” said Wilsey. “Deceived and misled her. My daughter—my sweet, innocent little girl.”

  John dropped to one knee. “I’m sorry, Wilsey.”

  “You must kill him,” said Wilsey. “He cannot be allowed to live. For what he’s done to Amelia—for what he’s been allowed to do, for so long, to so many girls. Put him down like a dog, and it will still be better than he deserves.”

  “A murder,” John said slowly, shocked despite himself. “In cold blood.”

  “Hot or cold, it’s no matter to me.” Wilsey’s mouth puckered
into a knot. “I’d like to spit on his grave before I go to my own.”

  “And Amelia?” John asked, looking away. “What have you done for her? Is there anything I can—any help I can give?”

  “My wife and I are taking steps,” Wilsey continued. “She’ll marry soon, and if we’re lucky, word of this tragedy will never spread.”

  John frowned. “Marry? Are you sure…?”

  “I will not have her shamed,” Wilsey said. “Can you imagine the consequences? No. This ends now. She will marry, and you will be my instrument of vengeance.”

  Vengeance. Just the word heated his blood. But to kill a peer. A well-known man, though not a well-liked one. One misstep, and he’d be forced to flee the country—or find himself on a gallows, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.

  “Tell me you will kill him,” Wilsey pressed. “I need to hear it.”

  John hesitated.

  “Amelia is upstairs in her room right now, crying herself dry,” Wilsey said, more forcefully now. “As she has been every day since… She is your sister, John. You have a duty.”

  It was the first time Wilsey had ever named their relationship so precisely. The first time that, for all his efforts to forge a paternal bond, he hadn’t simultaneously traced the boundary between them. A silent understanding that neither of them would speak the truth aloud.

  “I’ll kill him,” said John.

  “Look at me when you say it.”

  John met Wilsey’s eyes. “I will kill the Earl of Kingston. You have my word.”

  “Oh, God.” Wilsey buried his face in his hands. His broad, stooped shoulders shook; his voice thickened. “You can’t know—what it’s like to feel such rage for the first time in my life now, when I’m too weak to act.”

  “No,” John agreed, and hoped he never would.

  He stood.

  “You’re leaving?” Wilsey sounded surprised.

  Ordinarily, John would have stayed all day and on through dinner. He looked forward to catching up with Wilsey’s wife and children almost as much as Wilsey himself. They were times when he truly felt a part of the family, even though Wilsey was the only one who knew—though Lady Wilsey must have guessed, by now.