FIC: Gentlemen of Last Resort (Tim, Tony, Gibbs, Everyone, Victorian)
Chapter XII
The housemaid was Peggy Dawes-properly, she said, only the second housemaid. She was eighteen and had a smattering of freckles across her nose, which kept twitching upwards as she talked to them, as if she were restraining a sniff. They had lurked like vagabonds outside the house until she had come to empty out the contents of a dustbin, and then they had approached her with their purpose. Now all four of them stuck close to the house wall so that they would be invisible to the window, and Peggy said that she would have to talk as quickly as she could, or else she would be missed.
Gibbs nodded. “Is Thomas Travington a good man, Miss Dawes?”
Her nose twitched again and she shook her head. Anthony patted his pockets and, finding his handkerchief still missing, turned a fierce look upon Timothy until he produced the purloined item in question and handed it over to the girl. To his surprise, she did not cover her face with it so she could have a good cry, but rather crumpled it hard in her first and squeezed it there.
“No, sir,” she said. “He is not a good man at all. And I am not the only one who could tell you so.”
“Cruel?”
“Cruel,” she said, “heartless, persistent. He likes to make you cry.” She twisted the handkerchief between her hands, wringing it like a chicken’s neck. “He was at me, and he was at the other girls, all the girls in the house, and nobody ever would come to us if we cried, and you, sir-sirs-you haven’t come for us, either, have you? Be honest, then.”
Gibbs took her hands in his and trapped the handkerchief between the two of them. “If we had known, Miss Dawes, we would have come for you.”
“And to hell with Thomas Travington,” Anthony said.
The corner of her mouth twitched. “But why you’re here,” she said, “-that’s because of the lady, isn’t it, sirs? The Lady Bennington. He dared too much there. Do as you like with your own girl’s, but a lady, a duke’s daughter? He’s foolish as well as cruel.” Perhaps she had never dared to say that out loud before-she said it as if she were just realizing it, and recognizing its truth as she heard it in her own voice. “Poor girl. Her parents will marry her to him, and that’s who will meet her at home, all the rest of her days.”
“Not if he is dead,” Gibbs said. “Or imprisoned. Then he will not marry anyone.”
“Gentlemen of quality do not go to prison for rape,” she said. “Nor unkindness. Not to a maid, and not even to a duke’s daughter.”
Was that true? --He hoped it was not true. It’s a sweet faith to have in the world, Anthony had said of this belief, that gentlemen were gentlemen, and monsters were monsters, and a wolf in such sheepish clothing would surely be rooted out and exposed. But Peggy Dawes sounded more certain in her belief than he felt in his.
“No,” Gibbs said, “and more’s the pity, but for murder, or attempted murder, they hang as well as anyone else.”
“Better,” Anthony said. “More kicking. Little kicks of disbelief.”
“He’s going to do murder?”
“We believe that he intends to murder Duke Bennington,” Gibbs said.
Her brow furrowed. “No, that does not sound like him at all.”
“It does not?”
“He never even quarrels with his parents, he’ll go on his belly before them rather than argue. It’s us he wants, us he hurts. The girls, and especially the ones where no one comes when we cry.”
Timothy put a hand over his mouth. “That is why he wanted the steam. That is why he wanted the clock. So that it looked like an accident, yes, true, but because it would do its work even if it were never fatal. But if you lean over the clock-just before the last moment-”
“The Lady Bennington,” Anthony said. His mouth curled as if he were going to be sick. “Her parents protected her when he thought they would not, they will not marry her to him under any circumstances, and still men dance attendance on her-her disgrace was not so much as he thought, not with all the money, not with the occasional drop of human kindness. Not with everyone pretending not to know. She cried and someone came, he could not ruin her.”
“But he could ruin her face,” Gibbs said.
“Take her life if it fell that way,” Timothy said, nodding, “but that is not what he intends, necessarily, it is not his primary goal.”
Peggy Dawes looked back and forth between the three of them. “What’s all this about steam? What would he do to her face?”
“Scorch it, boil it,” Timothy said. “He gives her a gift, a lover’s gift, and that is what happens.”
“I could never decide if I ought to hate her,” she said. “The Lady Bennington. For she distracted him from me, for a while, but she is safe from him, too, and he was frustrated by that, and more unkind than ever. She is not safe now?”
“She needs your protection,” Gibbs said. He did not say, Tell us, please, where he has gone, tell us how we can find him. He did not even promise to protect her in turn.
But what he said was enough. She folded the handkerchief into a neat square and, hesitating between handing it back to Timothy and Anthony, gave it at last as a warm touch into his own hand. Because he had given it to her, he thought, though she had recognized it as Anthony’s by the looks exchanged between them-but he had given it to her, and fair was fair, and right was right. She looked only at Gibbs when she spoke. “They cannot refuse him from their parties, you know. It makes things obvious. They cut him as much as they can, but they cannot cut him entirely.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight is the Lady Bennington’s birthday party.”
“And what a gift he will bring her,” Anthony said.
But even as they hastened back towards their cab, Anthony said, “Excuse me for a moment,” and turned on his heel and made his way back towards the house and Peggy Dawes.
“What’s he doing?”
Gibbs looked rather pleased. “What I thought he would do.”
Anthony returned to them a few seconds later. “I really do not think Miss Fleming will ever come back, do you?”
“I meant to tell you that she had left,” Gibbs said. “Something about the clock, and then all the blood in the parlor was really the last she could handle.”
“You hired Miss Dawes?” Timothy asked.
“We are perennially short a housemaid,” Anthony said reasonably, climbing into the cab, “and she could hardly continue on with the Travingtons after this, could she? It’s a pity, though, I’ll be looking for another girl in a year.”
“You think Miss Dawes could not handle blood in the parlor?”
“No, I think she could face that very well, and as I said, more’s the pity for losing her, but any man she gave her favor to would be a fool not to marry her, don’t you think? There’s little enough courage and decency in the world without scrupling about where it comes from, and if a gentleman will not take her, some sensible shopkeeper or hostler will, I guarantee you that.”
“What did you offer her?”
“What she wanted,” Anthony said. “Money, and a room with a lock on the door. I should hope Thomas Travington’s neck does not break all at once as he drops.”
*
It was dusk when they reached the Bennington house. Judging by the glow in the windows and the shadows that passed back and forth across the glass, Lucy Bennington’s birthday party was already under way. At least there was no screaming, and no rush to the doors, so, as Gibbs noted, time was still on their side.
“Not if we cannot get in,” Anthony said. “And even I cannot win us invitations at this late hour, no matter how glorious our imagined identities may be.”
“We could just-go in,” Timothy said hesitantly.
“I admire your enthusiasm, McGee, but what would we do when we barred at the door by any number of staff? Shoot our way out of the situation? That would be a poor way to repay Miss Dawes for her kindness, to treat all those people as if they were expendable on our way to saving Lady Bennington.”
“There is no way to stroll in through the front door,” Gibbs said. He raised his eyebrows at Anthony.
“I cannot,” Anthony said. “I had no notion of us coming to this pass, I’ve no tools, and I’m years without practice going at it without the proper equipment. I’ve lost the skill.”
“And now you’re losing our time.”
“I’ll lose even more of our time if I fail to get us inside!” He shook his head and then, before Gibbs could even step towards him, reached back behind him and slapped himself hard-not on the back of the head, as Gibbs might have done, but lower, on his shoulder, where the tip of the horsewhip had curled around and left a livid welt. His face tightened instantly with pain. “No. No, you’re right. Come on, there’s little enough time as there is, and I am out of practice.”
He made his way to the back of the house-the door to the servants’ quarters. “I promised Miss Dawes a lock,” he said, “and I did not think of this.” He knelt down. “That no one is ever really safe.”
“You are no Thomas Travington,” Gibbs said, as Anthony took a knife from his pocket.
“And I should hope never to be,” Anthony said, “but we look alike, should you see us on the street, and we danced at the same ball, and at the end of one dance I took Abby’s hand from him for the next, and I never saw him for who he was. McGee,” he said, as the tip of his knife scratched and scrawled ineffectively against the lock, “I need the unfathomable contents of your pockets, if you please, thank you very much.”
Timothy tore the cloth in his hurry to rid himself of the toys. He saw at once why Anthony wanted them-they were sharp with steel and copper and bits of very pliable wire. Anthony dashed one of them against the ground and began to pick quickly through its parts to pull out a long twist of wire. He turned it clockwise to undo its curl. He was biting hard into his lower lip, but his hands were steady, steady-like the doctor’s with the body, like the Lady’s with the revolver, like Gibbs’s with Anthony himself. There was a spot of blood seeping through his shirt where he had reopened the wound on his shoulder and, as Timothy watched, it blossomed open like a rose.
The lock caught-and Anthony’s breath caught with it. He stood, kicking the scattered toys to the side of him, and slowly turned the knob.
And the door gave way before them.
Inside, deeper into the house, where the audience of Lady Bennington’s eighteenth birthday waited, the music stilled and stopped, for it was time, as they heard the distant voice announcing, for the Lady to receive her gifts.