Стефани Баррон - A Flaw in the Blood

“Get me some cloth . . . a towel. The blood—”

“Sign.” He shifted the pistol to von Stühlen's left knee.

The Count took the pen; he scrawled his name at the bottom of the page.

Booted feet pounded up the stairs from the taproom; the shot had galvanized the rural drinkers. Fitzgerald seized the Count's cravat from the floor where it had fallen, and knotted his hands together behind his chair.

The innkeeper thrust open the unlatched door.

“Ah. Here are our witnesses, Georgie,” Fitzgerald said. “ Gastwirt, if you would sign your name below the Count's, please—”

Fitzgerald gave Georgie her second-hand black dress and a few minutes to don it, then threw her up behind him in the saddle and kicked his mount forward.

Von Stühlen would pursue them. His leg was bleeding and his horses were tired, but so was Fitzgerald's; he could assume a bare quarter-hour before the Count found a better animal and rode off, regardless of his wounded thigh, to find them.

The railroad cut through the dense Hesse forests a half-mile north of the town, and Fitzgerald made for it, forcing his way through the trees. He followed the rails along the gravel verge in the profound winter silence, snow beginning to fall, hoping against hope that von Stühlen would not find their hoofprints—that he would take the obvious road toward Mainz.

When, perhaps a half-hour later, a train whistled behind them in the darkness, Fitzgerald dismounted and helped Georgie to the ground.

Her hands, where they gripped his waist, were cold as death and her lips were colourless.

He held her close, trying to enfold her in warmth, to tell her of his love without using words, the ache in his throat at the misery she'd endured making all speech impossible.

She clung to him. He felt her body shaking.

“Patrick. I hated being afraid. My fear just gave him more power.”

“There, there, lass. You're safe now. Did he hurt you badly?”

“Nothing compared to what it could have been.” She reached up with both hands and grasped his head, pulling his mouth to hers, kissing him passionately. “I love you, Patrick. I love you with all my soul. I know it's a sin before God—I know you have a wife—”

“Georgie—I'm not worthy. I'm a crying shame. A drunkard and a care-for-nothing. Georgie, I'm old enough to be your father—”

The train was almost upon them, chugging slowly toward them, the great lantern at its fore catching them in its beam.

“—but I need you more than strong drink or air, more than all else in life together. Georgie—I'll try to do better—”

She put her fingers across his mouth.

Fitzgerald slapped his horse's rump and sent it off into the forest. “Can you jump onto the platform, lass?”

“Lift me,” she said.

Gibbon carried the stack of old shoes and worn shirts carefully through the scullery, negotiating the narrow doorway and the three steps to the small back garden. Twenty feet farther was the wrought-iron gate giving onto the mews, and the familiar bearded face of the rag-and-bone man who worked the Bedford Square neighbourhood.

Percy was his name, although Gibbon had formed the habit of addressing him as Perceval —this added a fragile dignity to the scavenger's occupation. He was not admitted to the gated central square, but the mews were open to carriage traffic, and thus approachable by all manner of riff-raff; and the riff-raff performed their necessary functions: nightsoil men who cleared the few remaining cesspools (most of the houses had converted to sewer lines, running into the ancient mains), knife-grinders, milkmaids, and coal vendors.

Percy was waiting when Gibbon unlocked the back gate; he placed the clothes carefully in his handcart, and gave Gibbon a pile of coins warm from his wool-mittened palm. They had haggled over prices Saturday, and Percy had returned this Monday morning to collect the goods. Fitzgerald's bespoke castoffs would be sold to a second-hand clothing shop, at a minor profit for Percy; and from there, they would descend through the social scale over the next decade: mended and re-mended and then torn to pieces a dozen times to fit, eventually, the smallest child of the back slums.

The Yard's back-mews man watched the exchange with obvious boredom from his lounging vantage against the carriage house wall.

“Thank you, Perceval—that will be all,” Gibbon said formally as he made to close the wrought-iron gate. But Percy was fumbling in his pocket, his look one of leering cunning as he gazed at the valet from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Might be as I've somefink you'll like, Mr. Gibbon,” he suggested. “Somefink you've been looking for. Might be as we could agree to a price. If it's worth your time o' day.”

He flashed a bit of paper in the soiled palm of his hand before returning it to his pocket.

“We agreed on the figure,” Gibbon said. “I won't give you a penny more.”

“Somefink from your master a'zus scarpered,” Percy muttered, his eyes shifting to left and right.

“Very well,” Gibbon said with studied indifference. “If you insist on the charge—I'll give you sixpence.”

“A shilling.”

“Ninepence and no more.”

“Done.”

Gibbon dropped a few of Percy's cooling coins back in his palm; the slip of paper slid into his own.

“Good day,” he said distantly, and locked the gate with a clang.

The train they had caught in the woods Thursday night was bound not for Mainz, but Frankfurt. They reached it by midnight, and too tired to go any farther, took a room in a hotel not far from the station.

They registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Georgiana refused to let Fitzgerald sleep on the floor; she was afraid, she told him, of what might happen—of men bursting through the door, of dreams turning to nightmare. She drew him down into her bed and when he asked if she was sure of what she was doing, she said simply, “I could die at any time, Patrick. So could you. We could be parted forever as soon as we reach England. There's no certainty in the future. I knew that, tonight, when I lay in that man's power— But we're together now . I refuse to waste my chance.”

“I would marry you tonight if I could,” he said.

She blew out the candle.

From Frankfurt they made for Koblenz, and from there, on Saturday morning, reached Ostend.

Fitzgerald had only a pound left in his pocket by that time, not nearly enough to buy their passage across the Channel. He sold his clothes and bought a second-hand set of worker's togs, then spent an hour looking for a steamer that was short a deckhand.

They had agreed that if he worked his way across to England, Georgie would travel in a respectable second-class berth as though they were strangers. If he could not find work that day, he would try the next. But it was vital, Fitzgerald thought, that she get out of Europe. He wanted her as far from von Stühlen as the sea could put her.

The seventh ship he queried had lost two men to the brothels, and was sailing that afternoon.

It was, Fitzgerald observed with an inner smile, his eternal recurrence: the Irishman who lived by his wits, making his way toward an uncertain future.

By dawn Sunday they'd landed at Dover.

Georgie boarded a train bound for London, and the refuge she hoped to find with John Snow's retired housekeeper is Islington; Fitzgerald made his way to Canterbury, and from there, by gradual degrees and found conveyances, reached London four hours later.

There had been no sign of von Stühlen since they'd left Hesse. But Fitzgerald was not a fool. He knew the Count would discover them, or die trying.