Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Read online

  It haunted her to think that her mother might have floated by without her ever knowing it.

  He squinted. “So the bodies in that theatre won’t be a problem? Seeing them, that is?”

  This one needed a finger poked into his head. “The sight of any dead body unnerves me. That, Mr. Ridley, is normal.”

  He said nothing. Stretching his broad torso in an attempt to settle himself better into the carriage seat, he thudded his boots onto the upholstery beside her and observed her past his cap, but still said nothing. His rugged face, however, showed that he had a very long list of questions and wanted a very long list of answers by way of an essay.

  Something had changed. “If you have questions, Mr. Ridley, I should hope you would ask them.”

  His head leaned back against the seat. He closed his eyes. “Who says I have questions?”

  This one was a combination of hero and strange. Swatting at the veil that kept tangling against her face and hair, she tugged it off.

  “Put it on.” His head remained tipped back against the seat, his eyes still closed.

  How did he know she had removed it? “It annoys me.”

  He opened his eyes and leveled her with a gaze of bleakness. “You let me save you once when you agreed to take the books. Now let me save you again. Put in on.”

  “You draped the windows.” She waggled both hands toward them in exasperation, demonstrating no one could look in. “As such, there is no need for me to—”

  “When I say there is a need, Watkins, there is a need.” His tone turned lethal. “Do you know many Indian women are jostling about London? Not. That. Many. And with those blue eyes set against the darkness of your skin you might as well holler murder. It’s for your safety and I didn’t spend the past two days orchestrating your release merely for you to end up dead. Now put it on.”

  Murder? “Comparing my skin to murder is rather crude to say.”

  “Facts don’t give a damn about your feelings and neither do lynch mobs.” He stared. “I can take on three men, easy. Anything after that, we’re both dead. Put it on.”

  It wasn’t worth arguing over.

  Using two fingers, she plucked up her veil from the seat and yanked it back over herself. “Might you cease calling me Watkins? It unnerves me given Peter’s intentions.” She shuddered at the thought of his greying mustachio tracing its way up things it shouldn’t. “I prefer you call me Jemdanee Kumar. It was the name I was born unto.”

  The clattering of wheels of the carriage prolonged the moment.

  The line of Ridley’s mouth tightened a fraction. He pushed up his cap, further revealing his shadowed face. “’Tis a pleasure to formally meet you, Kumar. You should have never taken his name. Kumar is who you are and who you will always be. Kumar it is and Kumar you are. Kumar, Kumar. I like that.”

  She lowered her chin. He was missing the point of this conversation. “I prefer you call me Miss Kumar or Jemdanee. Not a mere Kumar. I do not like it on its own. Kumar is supposed to go at the end of a name, not the beginning.”

  “An unconventional girl deserves an unconventional respect. I am offering you esteem and am addressing you as I would a colleague. For you to object insinuates you have no understanding of how men address each other.”

  She half-coughed and almost snorted, knowing he was being utterly serious. He was taking equality to a level no man should. “I have no understanding of such esteem, Mr. Ridley, because I am not a man. Despite its long list of hardships that do not include my being an Indian, I take pride in what I am: a woman. If you prefer to remain formal, and I agree to respect that, you may call me Miss Kumar. I insist.”

  “Never,” he bit out as if offended by the prospect. “Society has a horrid tendency to define a woman based on the man she belongs to. ‘Miss’ parades that she belong to whoever plays the role of her father, and ‘Mrs.’ parades that she belong to who? Her husband. Only socially ambitious women needing to identify their lack of marital status use ‘Miss’ and they do nothing but annoy me. If you genuinely feel the need to be defined by who you belong to, why not start calling all of the men around you ‘Master’? For that is what they try to be to anyone who lets them, be they woman or man. Is that what you want for yourself? To be controlled even by the leash of your own name? Because I, as a Mister, belong to no one. Don’t you want the same for yourself, Kumar?”

  The pulsing heat of that gaze made her feel like she was back in the jungle.

  Deranged as she was, it made her want to reach out a hand and push aside the ferns. Those soulful eyes reflected a granite-like strength that were as charming as they were feral.

  Very few people knew that crocodiles had soft bellies.

  And this crocodile had the softest belly of them all.

  Kali save her from falling in love with him for she knew he was too dark to ever love her in any normal way. It was there in his eyes which taunted. His heart was slumbering in the deep cave of his chest, yes, but it had not seen much light for it to grow into anything normal.

  Not once had she seen this man smile. Not. Once.

  It unnerved her. It was as if he were denying himself even that one pleasure. “I thank you for surprising me in a way few ever do,” she admitted, softening her voice to reflect her sincerity. “Not to pry, but…are you known to smile?”

  “I think you answered your own question.”

  It saddened her. For overly serious and wry though he was, he was also profoundly generous and kind. Such a strange, strange combination for a man. “Confining one’s self to a shadow-ridden existence without ever smiling, Mr. Ridley, cannot possibly be good for your constitution or your heart.”

  He tsked. “You needn’t worry about the vitality of my organs. They do what they always do: function.”

  Which meant he didn’t care.

  No longer meeting his gaze, she veered her eyes to his sizable black leather boots which were still set beside her. An angled scuff on the otherwise well-polished leather tip was revealed by the faint lantern light of the carriage.

  Odd though it was, it bothered her. For it was like seeing the scar on his soul that was made completely of leather.

  Lifting the corner of the veil draping her shoulder, she moistened the black lace with the dab of her tongue. Angling his boot toward herself, she drew it beneath her veil and quickly used the moistened lace to rub and buff at the leather.

  His leg stilled.

  She didn’t care. In between the tilt of her veiled head and a few more buffing measures against the scuffed leather, she offered, “Your boot required attention, Mr. Ridley. Much like your soul. I therefore wish to acknowledge both.” She patted it. “Yeh lo, saaph ho gaya. May one day, you learn the art of true joy and how to smile given what you do for others. That is my wish for you.”

  Sitting up, he dragged both boots from her, letting them thud against the floor of the carriage. His face swayed in and out of shadows and lantern light. “If a smile could erase all that I have seen, I’d be doing it on the hour like a clown who’d been given paint. There is a reason I offer my mind and services to others. Assisting humanity in a world as pissed up as ours enables me to do something far more important than smiling: it’s called breathing. The problem with you, Kumar, is that you seem to think all this world needs is a bit of sunshine sprinkled with humor water. But as you can see by the night you’re having, the bramble has long overtaken the dirt that choked out the tulips. Everyone, right down to the pastor, is telling humanity lies. They try to hide the crimes of mankind behind the veil of ‘faith’ but ‘faith’ doesn’t keep death from making a visit. There is only one god and master of this universe and his rightful name is death.”

  She edged down her chin realizing darkness and bones was all this one saw.

  It was not a path she preferred to take. For she knew it led the mind into places it never returned from. She had touched more than a finger to it when her mother had disappeared and she herself had almost disappeared with her mother bec
ause of it.

  She was all she had and all she would ever have in a world that tried to take everything.

  Even now, knowing she had lost Peter (Peter!) whilst also being sentenced to the crime of another, she refused to swallow what the world wanted of her to feel: hate, despair, and misery.

  The world choked on it enough.

  “In my culture,” she confided, “there is not any one way to believe in the path we take under the Supreme God and its pantheon of divine beings. I choose to believe in all of them for a reason. In a world such as this, one divine being is not enough. They assist each other in their duties and it is a lesson we as humans must draw from. For even a divine being has limited power and relies on the strengths of its fellow consorts. And you, Mr. Ridley, with your dark talk, are in dire need of not only faith but a consort. Though I highly doubt you know it.”

  “Oh, I know it.” He removed his cap, scattering his hair into his eyes. He pushed his hair back with dragging fingers, then bent the rim of the cap forward and back as if wanting to break it. “Sometimes, even I forget to be vigilant in remembering I am human.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long time.

  He tapped at the worn edge of his cap. “Vidocq gave this to me a long time ago. He was wearing it whilst waiting for me at the docks at La Manche. My mother didn’t want me being raised in London after what happened to my father, especially when I became suicidal at thirteen, so there I was in Paris standing before an imposing man who by the steel of his hand redefined my path given I had none. He tugged this cap on my head and said, ‘Welcome to the life you never wanted. Now live it or die.’”

  Ridley half-nodded. “I wear it to remind me of exactly that. For I didn’t choose to be this, Kumar. It chose me. I don’t take pleasure in being in the presence of the dead. I don’t need them. They need me.”

  He lifted his gaze from the cap and after rotating it a few times in his hands, he snapped it out. “For as long as you are in London, it’s your burden to carry, as well. Toss the veil given it bothers you so much and when I ask you to, you’ll tug it down over your nose. Welcome to the life you never wanted. Live it or die.”

  She eyed it, sensing it was his way of announcing they were acquaintances. Real acquaintances. The sort only men were to each other.

  Aside from Peter, she never had any male friends. And with good reason. The men of her culture were no different than the men of the white culture: women were an accessory to procreation and their pleasure at a woman’s pain.

  In all but a few breaths this Mr. Ridley had already taken her breaths proving to be what few men ever were: a paragon of virtue.

  It was humbling.

  “I thank you.” She removed the veil with a rustle, setting it aside, and took the cap as if it were a crown. After rotating it in the direction it needed to be in, she tugged it on.

  It swallowed her head like a monkey swallowing a whole orange.

  It sank alllllllllllllllll the way down to her chin, leaving her to see nothing. Nothing but fuzzy fabric. She felt stupid. “Arrey,” she chided from beneath it. “I might as well be in your head. Darkness is all I see.”

  “Don’t make me take it back.” Leaning toward her, he quickly removed the cap. “Learn to problem solve.” Dragging up her waist-long black braid, which made her pause, he bundled it onto her head, never once meeting her gaze and yanked the cap back on hard into place. “There.”

  It fit. Perfectly.

  He leaned back against the seat, setting his shoulders. “Get some sleep.”

  She adjusted the cap and heaved out a breath. “Welcome to the life I never wanted.”

  “Keep saying it.”

  “I will. I will, I will.” Lowering herself against the corset that made her feel like a piece of timber being laid on its side, she awkwardly set her head on the seat, tweaking her neck far into her shoulder in doing so.

  It was a miserable position for her to try to sleep in.

  It reminded her of mud walls and dirt, despite all the velvet. There wasn’t even room for her to pull her legs upward or fit all the fabric of the heavy gown she was wearing.

  She missed India. She missed her greenhouses and the wild land that always sought to make its presence known to anyone who thought they were civilized. Even the home she and Peter had shared with its recreation of western comfort had the carved wooden legs of furniture set into porcelain filled with salt water to prevent termites from burrowing into what nature always found: itself. The unrelenting heat of the summers she was so cursed to love lulled everything into an eerie calm where the dust ruled and even the horses became too overwhelmed by the weather to swat their own flies.

  Peter. Oh, Peter. It gouged her soul knowing she no longer had a father or an actual home in Calcutta.

  She would have to make one on her own.

  How could he do this to them? Yes, she loved him, yes, but not in that way. Never in that way. He was and would only ever be what she never had, a father.

  Wincing miserably against the corset that had not been shaped for a body at all, she shifted against the rigid seat. Jemdanee kept shifting and shifting and shifting, attempting to set her bum and hip, left and then right. Then left again. “What I require in the name of any rest is a hammock, the sun and a tin of pineapple pulp.”

  Holding her gaze, he slowly edged his head from side to side. “However did you survive prison?” His voice softened. “Hm?”

  Sensing he was trying to relate, she searched his expression from where he was angled sideways. “By never sleeping.”

  “Wise on your part.” He unbuttoned his coat button by button, using both hands to push it wide open and away, exposing his weapons, waistcoat and trousers. He removed his weapons, one by one, setting them into a mahogany box he had opened by lifting its lid beside his head. It had been cleverly inset in the side wall paneling of the carriage. He shut the case and latched it.

  He patted his knee. “Come, Kumar. Take my knee. It will be more comfortable.”

  Astounded by the offer and that he had put away his weapons in her honor, she eyed him from where she still lay contorted against the seat. “I thought you did not want us to become overly acquainted.”

  He lowered his chin. “It’s a knee. I’m not asking you to kiss it.”

  Her heart flipped. “You do not mind if I assemble myself onto you?”

  Shifting all the way over against the seat, he offered, “You require rest or that botanical mind won’t blossom.”

  Her lips twitched, sensing it was a compliment. “Few men care to compliment the mind of a woman.”

  “Few men have the right mind to be able to acknowledge education is the only barrier separating a man from a woman.” An inexplicable look of withdrawal came over his face. “Do you want your hammock or not? Pineapple pulp is currently unavailable.”

  An exasperated smile touched her lips, sensing this was their first step toward…something. “I will take the hammock, Mr. Ridley.” She staggered to sit up against the corset. With her cap still in place, she pertly settled into the seat next to him, wondering how many other women were granted the honor of his knee.

  No matter the direction.

  Nestling herself against the velvet cushion of the seat, she lowered herself onto the warmth of his lap. She set her head onto the heated firmness of his thighs and felt like a marigold chosen for display. Welcoming the divine scent of his peppery cologne tinged with sweet tobacco, soap and freshly starched wool trousers, she melted and dreamily closed her eyes.

  The earlier brandy made her soul further flutter and sway.

  He lifted his muscled arm and adjusted it firmly around her, his large hand resting on her arm. He tightened his hold to keep her into place.

  Every inch of her swooned at being transported to windy hilltops knowing he was holding her. Mr. Ridley was holding her. Her. As if she were worthy of the honor, his knee, his arm and his protection.

  Whatever this was, it felt…different from an
ything she had ever known.

  Kissing dashing Persians was like falling into mud water compared to this.

  For Mr. Ridley was beyond divine. “May the stars kiss you for sheltering me from harm and giving me more in one night than anyone has given me in years,” she offered softly against his knee. “May they also kiss you for making me feel welcome in a land that is not mine.”

  He said nothing.

  Nestling her face and her head further against the heat of his muscled legs, she daringly slid her hand down toward his large boot, regally settling into a world that made her feel like his queen.

  He didn’t object.

  It was nice.

  The constant clattering of horse hooves and carriage wheels against the cobbled stone coupled with the sway of the carriage eventually gave way to her eyes getting heavy.

  The night disappeared and she with it. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to sleep without worrying about the world around her.

  It was nothing short of bliss.

  She dreamed of nothing.

  Not of India. Not of prison. Not of dead bodies. Nothing.

  It was the sort of rest her soul needed.

  She slept for a long time.

  The shifting of muscled thighs and his hands beneath her made her stir.

  “No,” Ridley whispered, the warmth of his brandy-tinted breath grazing her head and her cheek. “Sleep.”

  She vaguely felt herself being lifted and carried, but was too devoted to the bliss of heavy sleep to do anything more than tuck her head against what she knew was Mr. Ridley’s chest. The sensuous scent of his cologne and the heat of his massive body made her nestle closer.

  He was carrying her.

  As if life had always been like this.

  As if his duty were to cradle and protect her and only her.

  As if she mattered despite the world telling her otherwise.

  Her fingers curled against the smooth fabric of his coat, making her drift into the anomalous reverie that maybe, maybe life could be what she wanted: a large cup of steamy happiness she could stir her finger into and gulp.