The Kingdom of Bones

instant, it was as if every fine hair on his skin was alive and bristling with static.

She said, “It must be very hard to carry the disappointments of all those generations on one set of shoulders. Stand up.” He stood, the chair scraping back on the boards. “Does it help if you harm yourself?”

“It calms me down,” he admitted.

“Let me see.”

He hesitated for a moment. Then he took off his jacket and vest, and put both on the chair behind him. He pulled the links from his cuffs and the stud from his collar and unbuttoned his shirt. He dropped the suspenders that held up his pants and then pulled shirt and singlet together over his head.

He stood with his hands down by his sides, not meeting her eyes, knowing that she was studying him, sensing her gaze like the track of a burning glass across his skin. She was looking at his scars. Some of them were fresh, and not yet healed.

“I got more than this down below,” he said.

“Show me.”

“Please,” he said. “Lock the door first.”

There was no key, but the door had a bolt. By the time that she’d crossed the room, slid the bolt, and turned around to face him again, he was stripped to the skin from his head to his socks.

“Are you cold?” she said.

“No,” he said. He was shivering, but he was not cold.

She came back and walked all the way around him, giving him a close inspection. It was almost as if she was taking an inventory of every mark and scar, noting every object, sharp and otherwise, that he’d managed to shove under his skin and which remained lodged there. He was no Adonis, but he was hard-muscled and thin. She couldn’t miss the physical evidence of his anticipation.

He said, “How did you spy me out?”

From behind him, she said, “Like always seems to know like. Who can say what the signals are?”

“That won’t explain it. My instincts aren’t always good. I paid a woman in Iberville to horsewhip me. When we got to it, she said it was a disgusting thing to ask a Christian woman to do. She was one of the reasons I had to leave town.”

“Only one of the reasons?”

“The main one.”

She stopped and ran a fingertip lightly along a weal that crossed his belly, just above the pubic bone.

“And now you’re here,” she said. “Risking it all again. Is it the pain or the danger that you most enjoy?”

“You are nothing like her,” he said. “I do not believe you would expose me.”

“But I am a Christian woman, too. Do you think you deserve me?”

“I’ll be damned if I do,” he said.

“Very good,” she said, and then turned serious again. “How would you like to feel clean?” she said. “Really clean for the first time in your life? How would you like to feel cleaner than you’ve ever felt before? That’s something I can do for you. Kneel.”

It took him a moment to realize that she’d instructed him. He knelt. She went over to the mattress and, with her back to him, drew off the shift in one single flowing motion. The body that she uncovered was long, lean, and rounded in its contours, pale and flawless, as white and smooth as newly worked marble. She folded up the shift and leaned over to put it in a safe place. She was not undressing for erotic effect. She was stripping for work.

She turned to him. She had the body of an alabaster Venus, toned and taut and entirely without blemish. His chest tightened so that he was hardly breathing.

“You need to know something,” she said. “You should understand that this next hour will spoil you for all others. Perhaps even for all time. You can back out now before it’s too late.”

“No,” he said, and the sound almost didn’t come out.

“Very well, then,” she said, and she turned away again for a moment and picked up something that had been lying out of sight alongside the low bed.

“You wanted to pay me for a kiss?” she said. “Then kiss this.”

She walked across the room toward him.

THIRTY-THREE

When Sayers returned from the barber and the bathhouse, Sebastian was immediately struck by the change in his appearance. Even though the prizefighter’s hair had been cropped so close for the ring that there was little to be done to improve the look of it, a good shave and a sharpening up of the sideburns had begun the effect. As it grew out, he would no doubt begin to look even less of a crop-headed bruiser and more of a human being.

And not only that. The puffiness had left his features, and those cuts were already starting to heal. Sebastian hadn’t realized it at the time, but when they’d met back at the boxing tent, the fighter had been in a steady alcohol-sustained haze. Not drunk, but in the functioning state of the habitual drinker.

Without its influence, he’d become more alert. His eye had cleared, his hand was steady, and he didn’t shamble anymore. He’d touched no liquor since entering their house, and if he was suffering for it, he kept that to himself. All in all, it was as if some new sense of purpose had occasioned a return of the Tom Sayers of old.

Sebastian relayed everything that the bookkeeper had told him.

“She skipped without paying her bill,” he said. “Oakes made a point of mentioning the Pinkerton name, and the hotel people put him onto the house detective. From what he’d been able to establish, she sent her two servants to take her bags out of the back of the hotel while she was walking out of the front door like it was just another day. The doorman remembered asking her if she wanted a cab, but she didn’t.”

Sayers, clearly no stranger to Louise’s operating methods, said, “A hotel doorman knows all the cabmen. It would have made it too easy to track down the driver and find out what her destination was.”

“But the hotel did locate the carrier who picked up her baggage from around the back. He had to deliver it to the waterfront for loading onto a steamer bound for Richmond. That’s where the trail went cold. There was no Mrs. Caspar on any passenger list for that day or the next.”

Sayers strode up and down. He ran his hand across the stubble on his head.

“Richmond,” he said. “I’ve been this close and she’s evaded me before. But never with such a strong lead to follow.”

“I suppose you’ll go after her,” Sebastian said.

“I suppose I will,” Sayers said. “But not blindly. I’ll need to make a plan. Don’t worry, Sebastian. You won’t have to put up with me for very much longer.”

When they heard Elisabeth and Frances returning with the boy, Sayers waited to offer a greeting. Then he picked up the parcel with his new clothes and went to his room, leaving the family to its family business.

If Elisabeth noted the improvement in Sayers’ appearance, she gave no sign of it. She had other things on her mind. From the moment that she came in through the door, Sebastian could see that the afternoon had not gone well.

Her face was set. Frances was fussing around nervously, as if in the presence of some unstable device. In a quiet voice, Elisabeth sent Robert to the sitting room at the back of the house. He raced on up, and Frances took the opportunity to follow. Sebastian noted that the boy was carrying five new dime magazines.

“What did the doctor say?” Sebastian asked, rather dreading the answer.

“He offered Robert a place to live among the insane,” she said, and then her fury boiled over. “He is not insane!” she said. “Nor is he handicapped or retarded! Why can none of them see it? I don’t want him taken away. I just want him to have a normal life. All the pieces of a normal life are there. All he needs is someone to help him put them together.”

She would have said more, but the creak of a board reminded her that there was a stranger in the house. Sayers was pacing again, making his plans.

Elisabeth made a gesture of exasperation, then turned away.

In a low voice, Sebastian said, “At least Sayers will be gone by tomorrow. With the news I just gave him, he’ll need no urging.”

It was poor compensation, but it was all that he could offer.