gather, right?”
“Yes, yes indeed.” Richard's disappointment resounded in the cavern where they stood.
“I see no way out but the way we came,” Jessica said, even as she searched the walls here for a doorway, a set of stone steps leading up or down, any sign at all that they were not completely dead-ended. “We've managed to investigate our way into a blind comer.”
“What about the other corridor at the T-section,” suggested Richard, stubbornly hanging on.
“I tell you, it would take you nowhere near St. Albans,” Tatham assured them.
“Why the deuce doesn't this wall show up on the specs?” shouted Richard, his voice bouncing off the slick walls.
“We're not dealing with specs. We're looking at it twice removed, from my replicas and maps made from the ancient maps, and then from your photo enlargements. We're lucky to have found our desUnadon at all.”
“Some destination,” grumbled Richard. She knew that to Sharpe, the wall represented far more than a wall below London's streets. To him it must mean an impenetrable barrier leading to an inglorious end to his entire career.
“Come on, Richard,” she coaxed. “Let's get out of this vile place.”
He finally nodded, indicating the way. “Yes, let's find the world. Why I ever let you talk me into mucking about here, I don't know.”
“Richard, it was your idea.”
“My idea, indeed!”
“You brought RIBA into it, remember?”
He frowned in Tatham's direction, Tatham saying just the worst thing in response. “Sorry, old man, things didn't work out as expected.”
“Just lead us back to light, Dr. Tatham,” Richard groused. Silence and regret marked their arduous journey back.
Their Wellington boots, dripping and smelling of the stagnant water from the out-of-use canal, Jessica and Sharpe drove Tatham back to the RIBA where they had enlisted his help, bidding him good-night and thanks. He waved them off and they drove back toward Victoria Gardens Embankment and the York.
“I desperately need a shower,” Jessica said.
“Feeling a bit dirty from ratting around in the sewers?”
“You know it.”
“Yes, I feel the same way.”
“Your place is on the way. Stop over, pick up an overnight bag, and come stay the night with me,” she suggested.
“Are you sure?”
“I'm sure I don't want to be alone tonight.”
“I don't relish the thought, either. If you're quite sure.”
“Quite, yes. And when's the last time you showered with a woman?” she asked.
He smiled and reached out to her, squeezing her hand warmly in his. “You've made me care about things of that sort again, Jessica, small things like touch and warmth. It's rather true what Luc Sante says about the child within us all, clamoring to surface, to be given attention. Somehow, with you, when we're intimate, I feed that child all and more than he ever bargained for.”
She reached across, and tugging at her seat belt, she kissed his cheek. “You've made London a beautiful place to be, despite all the shadowland horror we're chasing.”
He smiled. “You've made life a great deal more bearable for certain, dear Jessica.”
Again, they spent a warm, affectionate evening together, indulging in fantasies, one providing whatever the other wished, and then the other reciprocating. Jessica had always felt that making love in the shower, under the warm spray, to be the perfect place to begin a night of unbridled passion.
The following day, Jessica awoke to find Richard gone, a note announcing that he had been unable to sleep, and so he had gone into the office to get an early start on much neglected paperwork.
Jessica prepared for her day, showering and dressing with much thought given to what she guessed Richard would like. She had learned that his favorite color on her to be blue, and that he liked to see her hair held back by a band across the front. “It's much softer than wearing your hair up always,” he'd said. She dressed for Richard this day. She had decided that whatever came, whatever evolved from their intimacies, she would accept. She'd become so intensely focused on James Parry when she had fallen in love with him that, in a sense, she had become a prisoner, a shackled person, shackled by her own emotions and fears and passions. She found she had as much, if not more feeling for Richard, and yet, this love felt intensely novel, startlingly and wholly unconventional, despite Richard's “conventional” veneer; in fact, this love felt freeing, liberating in every sense of the word, delivering her from… she must wonder from what?
Actually, she told herself, Richard Sharpe delivered Jessica Coran from Jessica Coran. He made her feel completely free; his love was not measured in give-and-takes, compromises or restraining demands. His love knew no constraints and placed no constraints on her. She could never be the object of his love, for he did not treat her as an object. Rather, he treated her as his equal, and he asked for no des, no commitments, and expected none to be hoisted upon him. In a word, Richard Sharpe turned out to be the most continental man she'd ever known.
Onoe dressed as she felt Richard would like, Jessica hurried out to Scodand Yard, hoping that today she and Sharpe would find a solution to the Crucifier mystery.
Just as she stepped from the door, however, the phone rang. Richard, she thought, and not wishing to miss his call, she returned to find an excited J. T., filled with good news about the outcome of the Tattoo Man's case.
She had to slow J. T. down, thinking he might hyperventilate on the other end as the story of Maxwell Sanocre unfolded. Jessica encouraged him to take it slow and to tell her everything.
J. T. told how he had located the dead man's family, and how it appeared from all evidence that members of his own family had first plotted and then killed the man.
“As it turns out, the dead man's own children arranged for both the dogs to tear him to shreds and for the rabies infection, to insure his death. The daughter in particular really hated the old man, and she had damned good reason to.”
“What reason led her to kill him?”
“She had a child by him. Incest. Then she tries to get out from it, tries to marry a boyfriend, but the old man won't hear of it. Says nobody but him is 'good enough' for his baby girl. Sick, I know.”
“Evil is what it is. A man deprives his own daughter of a natural life.”
“The boyfriend, whom she did marry only days after her father was killed, turns out to be an apprentice veterinarian. He saw to the rabies, but the dogs they used, the dogs actually belonged to the old man. Family says he treated his dogs better than he did his wife and children.”
I“ Sounds like one man who deserved what he got,” she muttered.
“More I learn about the case, more I'm thinking the same, and we're educated doctors, Jess.”
“So? We can hate with the best of 'em, J. T.”
“The old man was infuriated at his daughter for wanting a normal life. Blocked her every avenue. I think the court will have to take in the circumstances, show some mercy. Sure it was a vicious murder, but in a sense, the girl was driven to it.”
“And the accomplice?”
“Nice young man by all accounts, but premeditating with the rabies like that. It's not going to go down well. The rabies was his idea.”
“How do you know he's not covering for her, that it wasn't her idea all along?”
J. T. considered this. “You're right. Could well be.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“You may have something there, Jess.”
“Find out how long the boy and girl had been seeing one another. The shorter the time period, the more likely she hatched the whole show, putting him up to it.”
“They'd been seeing each other for less than a month when they started planning the details and planning their marriage. The boy meant to raise her child as his own, and they meant to have children between them as well,
