Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Read online

  Looking at the words, she glanced up at him and clasped her hands. “It is as equally marvelous in its inception as it is useful. I wish to learn this shadow language. Might you teach me?”

  He gave her a withering look. “No one who isn’t me can learn a language in three days.”

  She snorted. “Cease thinking yourself to be a greater prodigy than I. A few words is not going to confuse this mind. My memory is remarkably good. How do you think I learned English? Or became knowledgeable about flora? Teach me.”

  “No and no. And should there be any further misunderstanding…no.”

  She stared. “Why ever not? Are you denying me the right to learn?”

  This one was a girl of his veins looking to tickle her mind. “I appreciate your enthusiasm but as I told you before I have to work. Or have you forgotten?” He tsked. “So much for your memory being remarkably good.”

  She squinted, taking on the challenge. “As you can see, I have already forgiven you. However…” She tapped at her shoulder and feigned a wince. “It still hurts. I have no doubt it will turn into a sizable blister and bleed for at least a week. I have no doubt. It may even scar. I ought to have you arrested.”

  He rolled his tongue against the inside of his mouth. Her being eighteen showed. For she knew how to poke it. “Learning a shadow language is involved.”

  She brightened. “I enjoy learning. I enjoy—”

  “Shadow languages take time. It took me, its creator, eight years to perfect. There is no pattern as it is created out of the ether. I more or less piece together an array of nonsensical words and assigned them to a real word to create a language.”

  “Demonstrate. I promise not to share its secrets with anyone.”

  Dig, dig, dig. Go on, Ridley. Dig that grave for her. “I can’t.”

  She paused. “Do you not trust me?”

  “It isn’t that.” Ridley tapped at his head hard. “This is where it has to stay. Because if anyone figures out I have someone other than myself who can translate all of these…” He swept a hand to the piles around them. “That someone will end up being used against me like a wiggling worm on a jagged hook called Kumar.”

  She said nothing.

  “It’s a compliment. It means I don’t want you to die.” Picking up a quill, he dipped the nib into the inkwell and grabbed a missive he didn’t need off the desk, turning it over so he had an empty surface, he scribed: Oleald Ekcle Surogou.

  Ridley set the quill back into the stand and pushed the missive toward her. “These are the only words you need to know. It applies to you.”

  She picked up the missive. “Oleald Ekcle Surogou.” She tapped it and then set it against her crinkled nose, peering at him from over the missive with mischievous eyes. “It says, Be Mine Tonight.”

  He pointed. “Flirting is not advisable.” Not given what went through his head earlier.

  She tapped at the missive. “This is your attempt to be romantic. Haan?”

  Romantic? Him? Maybe, maybe a long time ago. As a child of…ten. He’d often seen his parents whisper and laugh and even chase each other around the house while his father dangled mistletoe during Christmas.

  And then they separated.

  And then his mother got involved with Lord Spencer who swept her into a far happier life.

  And then his father continued to do what he did best: spent his vast fortune on books and antiquities, making the rest of the house unusable, like this study. Making him, Evan, read and organize musty leather bound books each and every day while the two of them climbed over them like ants looking for the hill.

  And then the murder that all too eerily whispered of a passion gone wrong given he had heard violent lovemaking and grunts and moans and thuds while he had tried to sleep in riled discomfort through the words of ‘Hish! Yes! Mm! Mm!’ followed by a very long silence that eventually brought the slow, slow barefoot pattering of a faceless woman creeping into his own room naked with an ax. She rendered him unconscious prior to butchering his own father.

  It was as if she had wanted him to hear them fucking and live with it every time he now did.

  And then Vidocq and that iron fist that refused to let him sleep unless he solved the puzzles set before him in both English and French. Which wasn’t even the academy.

  And then he and his profession became overly popular at a mere two and twenty when he solved his first double-homicide.

  And then the women he tried to shove out the door for he hardly wanted to end up like his father: butchered well past the sternum known as the heart.

  And then Elizabeth who had tried to turn him – him! – into the very thing he was fighting against: irrational animalistic passions gone wrong.

  It never fucking stopped.

  How did one embrace the very thing that personified what hurt most and made a man do things no man should? “Romance and I aren’t related. I sentenced that codswallop to hang the moment he tried to sell me some mistletoe, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect those who entertain it. Some are known to survive it.”

  She lowered the missive and glanced at it again, smoothing it. “One day, I will find someone who offers me that and more.”

  “Not everyone shares the dream of avoiding reality.” He leaned forward and pointed to the missive. “It says Freedom is mine. It’s my promise to you regardless of what happens tomorrow night. I have an arrangement with Finkle to ensure this conviction does not touch you.”

  Her cheeks flushed, deepening the bronze of her skin. She tilted her dark head as if the words pleased her, her full lips subtly curving. “Oleald means ‘freedom’, Ekcle means ‘is’, and Surogou means ‘mine’.”

  He clapped, letting it echo in the vast study. “And those are the only words she will ever be able to translate lest she die before she gets on that boat.”

  She grinned, revealing adorably crooked but white teeth. Turning away, she held the missive high up over head, as if the ceiling were a person in need of seeing it. Touching her chest and forehead twice, she quietly chanted something.

  Observing her, he quieted his voice. “What are you doing?”

  She swung her skirts toward him and breezed back through the piles of newspapers, lowering the missive. She folded the missive twice and tucked it into her décolletage. “I was announcing my freedom to the gods. I wanted them to hear it so they can no longer deny what is mine. I also wanted them to ensure they bless you for giving me my freedom.”

  There was something…magical about her and what she believed in.

  As if nothing could dissuade her from seeing the brightness of tomorrow.

  It scraped at the muscles of his leather-toughened heart.

  It scraped it a bit too hard knowing she thought it was real.

  She leaned back toward the desk. “Now you. Scribe something for yourself. Scribe what you want most and I will ensure the gods hear it.”

  “We would be writing well into next year and another ten after that. How about I scribe the words ‘Go to bed’?”

  Giving him a withered look, she gathered his ledgers. “Cease treating me like a child. If freedom is truly mine, I decide when I retire. Not you.”

  He was done arguing. It’s not like they had to be anywhere until tomorrow night.

  He picked up his quill, still watching her and started paging through what he needed to do next. While still watching her, of course.

  He rolled the quill against his fingers that annoyingly quaked.

  He needed coca/limestone. “How much longer do you think you’ll be awake?”

  She methodically tucked ledgers into a neat pile and evened them out with quick hands, setting them all on the edge of his desk. She then proceeded to gather every last parchment into sweeping stacks they didn’t belong in, shuffling them together like cards.

  His heart flipped as his hand jumped out and slapped the stack hard, the quill rolling. “Whoa, whoa, and whoa. Do not….touch…anything.”

  She stilled in a half-bent
position that continued to lean toward him over the desk, then lifted a finger and veered it like a whirling fly to his forehead. She touched it. “Is this anything? Or it is nothing?”

  Their eyes locked.

  His mouth twitched.

  Her eyes sparkled knowingly. “Admit that you almost smiled,” she taunted, waggling her brown finger at him.

  To admit it would be to acknowledge that he’d be butchering men and women on the hour for even commenting on the coloring of her skin.

  To admit it would be to acknowledge that her rapier mind was already his.

  To admit it would be to acknowledge that he could fuck her until her soul and body ripped at its seams.

  To admit it would be to acknowledge that the future was now.

  He dragged his hand away from the papers and gripped the edge of the desk, allowing the hard wood to bite into his palm. “Go to bed, Kumar. When you see the carnage in the theatre tomorrow night, it will make you realize where your priorities should be. With them. Not me.”

  Her smile faded.

  With a half-nod, she turned and wove through the mess. She paused just outside the double doors and said softly over her shoulder, “Good night, Mr. Ridley. Your devotion is humbling and I enjoyed learning about you. You are a very noble and intelligent man. I only wish you would respect yourself more by admitting a raven will never be enough.”

  She left.

  If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up becoming the very thing he was accusing Dr. Watkins of.

  Knowing she was gone, he jerked open the drawer, grabbing a stack of leaves with a larger pinch of limestone. Rolling them together with trembling hands, he tucked it into the side of his mouth and chanted to himself to chew. Hard. To let the numbness in his mouth overtake the numbness he wanted to feel. The numbness he needed to feel so he didn’t give into what he wanted to feel.

  For it was true. All of it.

  She had read him like an open book in four different languages.

  He was lonely. It’s why he thought about hanging himself. He wanted more than a raven to converse with. It’s why he thought about hanging himself. He wanted to return to something other than a house filled with aristocratic treasures belonging to those beheaded and to musty books that only reminded him of lives unlived.

  Death surrounded him so much that he sometimes thought of just joining it.

  And yet…he wanted there to be more. He did. He wanted to find someone capable of giving him a reason not to crawl into a noose.

  Someone who wasn’t looking for marriage but freedom.

  Someone who wanted to be their own person yet part of something.

  As your associate, I wish to see your study.

  Swallowing against the bitterness of the leaves, he paused, his gaze settling on his trousers.

  He had missed a button.

  I will continue to be the conscience you clearly do not have, Mr. Ridley.

  He fastened the button back into place.

  If he survived beyond five years, he’d circle back to her and revisit what he saw in his head.

  It’s what made him an overlord.

  When others could no longer stand, he yanked on his leather boots and kept running until the leather fell off and nothing was left and still he kept on until he hit bone.

  Or thoughts of suicide.

  Restless, with his leg and boot jittering, jittering into the floorboard, he withdrew his pocket watch, rotating it twice. It didn’t matter that he was going on over fifteen hours of no sleep.

  He’d get plenty of it given he had nowhere to be tomorrow morning or the afternoon.

  He needed to know more about the logs he saw at Millbank.

  Or his mind wouldn’t let him sleep.

  It was Thursday. Thursday, Thursday.

  Past two in the morning.

  Think, think, think.

  Where was Pickering usually at this hour?

  Opium. Den. Devil’s Acre.

  Chapter 6

  She couldn’t sleep.

  It felt like the longest night she had ever lived.

  As if she were compiling thirteen lifetimes into one single gulp.

  Despite too many minutes passing, Jemdanee could do nothing but eye the lone oil lamp she had left burning. She did so in a childish attempt to ease her imaginings which were accented by countless shadows that were becoming too menacing to look at.

  What made it further impossible for her to sleep was that the tightly laced and overly small corset was digging into bare skin. With no chemise beneath it and no way to reach the lacings tied and tucked and knotted to the stretch at the back, she ached with discomfort.

  Still curled against the sunken mattress of the massive four poster bed overstuffed with pillows, she tugged up the layers of linen to her chin in an attempt to shield herself against the coolness of the night that penetrated her skin.

  She eyed the cavernous room whose gilded and ornate furnishings reminded her of items pulled from the palaces of European kings she had seen in illustrations from books Peter had kept on his shelf back in Calcutta.

  The wardrobe, which had been left open, seemed to be held into place by an unseen hand that sat in the darkness of the chest within.

  She had never been one to believe in ghosts.

  She thought it childish.

  And yet…

  Dark shadows shifted against the sparse light that fingered across the uneven floorboards and illuminated the heavy, velvet curtains around the bed. The wind caused branches beyond the window to rustle and sway, looking like countless witch-like arms attempting to find souls to drag in and eat.

  Occasional creaks within her room as if someone were walking toward her bed made her do something she rarely did: panic.

  Flipping aside the linen, she scrambled out of the bed and darted across the room. Jerking open her door, she peered out, her pulse roaring. The lurking shadows were even worse in the corridor, heading out to countless blackened rooms with smeared doors that no doubt housed things she dared not fathom.

  Bones. Lots of them.

  She bustled back toward the landing of the stairwell and thudded down the stairs toward the study, refusing to be alone. It reminded her of too many nights spent hidden beneath a manure cart buried in foliage in an effort to remain hidden from sight and keep others from grabbing her whilst she’d slept.

  Skidding into the study, she paused at finding it empty. “Mr. Ridley?” she whispered hoarsely as if he would somehow emerge from the hip-high piles of papers and books that filled the room.

  Where was he? “Mr. Ridley?”

  No answer.

  Eeeeeee. Though he had never once said it, she knew his father had been butchered in this house. And he was living in it. Living. In. It. Like a morbid king requiring a skeletal throne.

  What if she was sleeping in the room where it had happened? What if that body and its pieces had spattered the bed and the walls of…

  Jemdanee shuddered and swung around.

  An elderly, bony man in a robe veered in.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!” she screamed.

  The man cringed and set his fingers into his oversized ears, waiting for the screaming to end.

  Edging back between ragged breaths that made her clutch her robe and her beating heart like she had been stabbed with a katar multiple times, she was convinced this elderly man before her was…Ridley’s dead father.

  Only he was real.

  “Forgive the stealth in my approach, miss,” the gentleman intoned, his dark eyes shadowed from age and no doubt darker things seen. “I abide by the name of Mr. Fulton and serve to this residence as butler. Mr. Ridley has stepped out for a small while to tend to business. I was asked and tasked to oversee your wellbeing. Might I assist you in something, miss?”

  She swallowed, her limbs now quaking from over-fatigue. “When will…Mr. Ridley return?”

  “That I cannot say. He is known to keep odd hours.”

  Why did that not surprise
her?

  “Are you in need of nourishment or tea?”

  What she was in need of was assurance that she wasn’t going to die.

  She shook her head. “I require nothing.” She hardly wanted to come across as a ninny. Too many years with Peter had softened her to the point of feathers. What was wrong with her?! Maybe a part of her knew she was sitting in the belly of a morbid beast known as Mr. Ridley.

  She inclined her head in appreciation. “Knowing he will return, I will retire. I thank you for the offer of tea and your assistance, Mr. Fulton.”

  The man inclined his own head. “It was a pleasure, Miss Kumar.”

  She blinked. He knew her name. Which meant Ridley had instructed this gentleman. It comforted her. “Forgive me for waking you, Mr. Fulton.”

  “If only you were the one who had,” he countered with the slip of a lip. “I bid you a good-night, miss. Should you require my services, I will be in the kitchen as I was instructed not to retire until Mr. Ridley returned.”

  She cringed knowing it. “Please do not impose yourself in that manner on my account. I will retire and advise you to do so, as well. Good-night, Mr. Fulton.”

  “Good-night, miss.”

  Drawing the cashmere robe against herself to push away the chill that seemed to linger despite it being a summer night, she turned and thudded her way up the stairs as if something else might lunge after her.

  In between uneven breaths, she eyed the long corridors, then her room and Ridley’s.

  Deranged though it was to even think it, she knew she would sleep far better in his room. There was a dagger on his nightstand. One she had seen when she had chalked her teeth earlier.

  Not that…ghosts succumbed to daggers.

  Chapter 7

  Devil’s Acre

  People often whispered that he, Evan Oswald Ridley, was deranged.

  It wast true. He was.

  One could say his obsession with piecing together a past he’d never been able to unravel had turned him into a gothic champion for some and a lot of a villain for others.