FIC: Gentlemen of Last Resort (Tim, Tony, Gibbs, Everyone, Victorian)
Chapter VIII
The four of them stood very still in the emptiness around the doors. The street was bare. No cab, and no Anthony-the darkness of London suddenly seemed heavy and oppressive, as if the whole of the night sky were knotted together to fill the gaps between the gaslights. The last cheer of the final dance and the last scent of the ladies’ flowers evaporated into the air. Silk brushed against his leg-the Lady David was reaching into a pocket cut into her skirts. By reflex, he looked away, though he saw nothing and heard only the rustle of cloth.
He felt that some voice of rationality, or an attempt at it, was needed, and said, “Perhaps he is only having trouble with the horses,” though this sounded stupid and irrational the moment he’d said it.
Miss Abigail said, “Trouble with the horses? Tony?” and Timothy remembered Anthony stretching out his hand to let them lap sugar and apple slices from his palm. He thought that they would save his life because of that, if it came to it, and here they were with no horses and a murderer somewhere, unrecognized but attentive to them.
“Stables,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Mr. McGee, take Abby back into the Travingtons’. Make some excuse.”
He set a brisk pace for the stables, the Lady immediately behind him, and Timothy thought of protesting-could he not help Anthony just as well as they could?-but then reconsidered: Smith and Stebbins were terrified of Mr. Gibbs, after all, and the Lady David’s skirts were full of weapons. He took Abigail’s arm in his own. “We can say that you were taken with a chill, and must sit down-”
She wrested her arm away from him. “You can be taken with a chill all you like, I intend to help Tony.” She took off running towards the stables as well as she could in her dress, and he ran after her. If he could not keep her safe, and he could not help Anthony, the least he could do was run after both of them as if he would be of any use to them once he caught them.
They made it to the stable doors only an instant behind the Lady and Mr. Gibbs, but Timothy’s feet were still carrying him forward when her heard Mr. Gibbs shout to someone to stop. Something in the distance flickered up above their heads, black and coiled like a snake-and then there was a shot, so close to him that he almost jumped into Mr. Gibbs’s back.
He turned his stumble into a run as Mr. Gibbs also darted forward in the silence after the shot had rung out, and caught sight of the revolver-smoke still tumbling from it-in the Lady’s hand.
The horses were whinnying, crying, screaming-all of it was going straight through his head. He dropped down to his knees beside Anthony on the ground and thought for a second that it was Anthony that the Lady had shot-there was so much blood-but then he saw the other man-the body of the other man-and what had fallen from his hand. Long, black, bloodied-a horsewhip.
Anthony’s face was white and he was breathing hard through his teeth. Mr. Gibbs pulled him from the ground and held him upright, one hand clamped around his arm and the other around the back of his head to stop it from drooping sideways like a top-heavy flower, his thumb against Anthony’s cheek. “Tony,” he said, “Tony.” He had tried, Timothy saw, not to touch any place on his back, where the fabric was matted to him with blood.
Anthony’s eyes opened just a slit. “Sir.” He tried to turn his head and made a little hiss of pain. “Where did he go? The man?”
“Dead,” Mr. Gibbs said. “The Lady shot him.”
“Happily,” the Lady said, now also on her knees beside him, close enough for Timothy to smell the horses on her and know that she was the reason for the quiet now-she had gone stall to stall and calmed them, but still their screaming was in his ears. He knew why she had done it-the noise would have attracted more attention than they could afford-but still he felt a pang of entirely personal gratitude towards her, as if she had done it to save him from losing his head at some crucial moment.
“I am not ungrateful,” Anthony said, his voice still hollowed-out, “but we might have learned the identity of his employer first.”
“No,” Mr. Gibbs said. “She had no choice.” And Timothy saw again, in his mind’s eye, the curve of the whip arching upwards to come down again-if the Lady had let him live even a second more, the blow would have landed, one more among many, and that had given them no choice. How much of Anthony’s flesh and blood to trade for their answers? Not this much, surely, and Mr. Gibbs answered his thought by adding, “I would have done the same thing.”
Anthony opened his eyes a little wider. “Yes?”
Mr. Gibbs nodded. “But not so cleanly.” He held Anthony’s gaze. “Can you stand?”
“If you will help me up.”
Mr. Gibbs did so, and then directed Miss Abigail to stand under Anthony’s arm. Anthony straightened a little more as he held onto her. “No fear, Abby,” he said to her. “It’s nothing so much.”
“Can he not rest?” Timothy heard himself say-it was cruel, it was brutal, it was entirely unfair, he was all over bloody, he should not be made to walk out of the stables on his own two feet, propped up by Miss Abigail or not. He had seen horses cut to ribbons with horsewhips, but never men, and Anthony was pale with shock.
The Lady David said, “He cannot stay here. Someone would come, sooner or later, like flies to money.”
“Honey,” Anthony said. “You did that for me, did you not?”
“I have no earthly idea what you suppose I did, or for whom,” she said lightly. A lady who smelled of gunpowder and horses and still, faintly, flowers, and the sweat of the ballroom. “Mr. McGee, I will need help to move the body.”
“But I do not-I have never-” He looked at the patch of blood in the packed dirt of the stable floor. It was a dark stain on the otherwise colorless background, like a bruise, or a scar. “Yes. Very well. I suppose we take him to the Thames? There’s never a body that turns up without which first it was thrown into the Thames, or so I have heard.” He had learned that from Smith and Stebbins, so long ago it felt like something he’d taken in at his mother’s knee.
She shook her head. “An admirable, if common, thought. No, we may take him anywhere we like, provided we do not leave him for the Travingtons, who will not know what to make of him. His employer has left him with no charity, and I see no reason why we should take any more. Let us simply carry him out of doors and lump him against a wall.”
“And if anyone asks our purpose, carrying around a corpse?”
“Then he is no corpse,” she said, “merely very drunk.” She produced a flask from her skirts and, with no hesitation, sopped a large amount of alcohol down the man’s shirt-front. “And so close to us, it will cover up the stench of the gunpowder, likewise. Come and help me.”
Between the two of them, they hauled the man outside and met with no one whatsoever, which mildly disappointed Timothy, who had been counting on a chance to irritably complain about the man’s incredible drunkenness. They, as the Lady had advised, “lumped” him against a wall, and the Lady tucked her flask into his hand and, after a moment standing above him, spit upon him with the same utter matter-of-factness that she had done everything else that evening-dancing, curtseying, killing, disposing of the body. Dangerous, Anthony had said, and a mystery. Well, that much was clear, at least. Timothy stared at her, his hands still shaking from the queer excitement and horror of carrying out the body and letting it fall where it would.
Back in the stables, they brushed the blood into the dirt again with their shoes, Anthony’s blood on the soles of his feet, black-red against the leather. His stomach curdled inside him.
Mr. Gibbs and Miss Abigail had found the cab somewhere down the opposite road, uncollected but unharmed, and loaded Anthony into it. Mr. Gibbs sat inside as well, allowing Anthony to lean against him so that his back did not press against the wood and cushions of the cab-seat, but when he saw Timothy and the Lady coming closer, he squeezed Anthony’s shoulder and Anthony moved just to the side to allow him passage out again.
“Where did you put him?”
“Down an alley, the other way,” the Lady said. “He’ll smell of drink. One drunken man more or less, shot on the streets of London, and who’s to care? Surely his employer will not call for him. It will not lead back to you or to Anthony.”
“Good. Thank you.”
The Lady inclined her head. “What’s to be done now, sir?”
“We will take him to Ducky, and then home.” Mr. Gibbs’s jaw was tight; there was blood on his jacket from holding Anthony. “Ziva: Duke Bennington.”
She nodded. “I will find out what I can.”
“Mr. McGee?”
Timothy understood what Mr. Gibbs was offering him: the door to the cab was open, yes, but all of London, too, was open around them. Mr. Gibbs meant that he could leave, that the situation was in truth as Timothy had believed it to be before: they would go on in his absence. And had he not done enough? Anthony’s blood was on his boots, he stank of alcohol and gunpowder, and he had carried a dead man out into the street and laid him to his rest in a puddle. Mr. Davies was still dead, whatever he did now, and Anthony still hurt.
But Anthony was waiting for him. You can be taken with a chill all you like, Miss Abigail had said, and the truth on her face was still the same as she stood, waiting for him, too-both of them braver, better, but still content to wait for him.
Mr. Gibbs had meant that he could leave. But he had not said, “We will not think any less of you,” nor “You will not think any less of yourself.”
Damn it all. “All of this,” he said, “started with me, and so how could I go?” and, without any further hesitation, climbed into the carriage and took up Gibbs’s place next to Anthony.