A Flaw in the Blood

“Didn’ you hear me? Get out! ” the woman shrieked in his ear.

“Aye, and we’re just going.” He reached for his purse and found her a shilling—enough to cover her share of the rent for a month. “Take this for your trouble. Now, up you get, Georgie!”

He put his hands together and she stepped into them, hoisting herself onto the sill. Then she swung her heavy skirt through the window, while all the children in the place ran up to Fitzgerald to tug on his arm and beg for coppers. He scattered coins at his feet and told the largest boy, “Close the door and bolt it, there’s a good lad.” Then he followed Georgie out onto the tiles, sliding toward the roof joint.

She was already at the bottom, picking herself up and brushing at the back of her fine dress with a quarrelsome expression. The silk was in a fair way to being ruined. She glared at his heels as they slid into the gutter, spraying her boots with filth.

“Was this really necessary, Patrick?”

Before he could answer, a cosh shattered the frame of the window above their heads and fragments of wood rained down on the icy tiles. Georgie turned without another word and began to inch along the gutter, toward the edge of the roof and whatever lay below it.

Fitzgerald thrust himself to his feet. He stumbled after her, waiting for the impact of another body behind him—when it came, he looked back and saw the ruffian with the cosh.

The garret room was at the very end of the hallway; there were no more windows giving out onto this section of roof. The gutter ran toward St. Giles Street in one direction, and in the other, toward the warren of alleys behind it. Georgie was headed away from the street, deeper into the rookery maze. But when Fitzgerald looked ahead, he saw she had come to a complete halt—poised on the edge of nothing.

A rough hand snatched at his shoulder. He lost his balance, feet flying out from under him, and fell backwards. Georgie’s medical bag sailed out of his grasp—and it was probably this sound, of the bag bursting open and the instruments clattering across the tiles, that brought her head around in search of him. Fitzgerald heard her yell—not a high-pitched woman’s scream, but a guttural, savage sound wholly unlike the Georgie he knew. He wanted to tell her to save herself—to get away while the tough was on top of him—but the man’s hand was at his throat. And then the cosh rose wildly above him—

Fitzgerald pulled his knees up, hard, into his attacker’s groin and dodged sideways, the cosh smashing into the tiles where his head had been moments before. The man toppled. Fitzgerald rolled upright and leaned on his enemy’s spine, taking great gasps of air through his grateful throat. The torso beneath him was broad, heavily muscled—the frame of a man who moved stone for a living, or hauled ropes, or placed a value on punishing strength in his line of work. There was the hand that held the cosh—Fitzgerald grasped the weapon and pulled back hard, as though it were a lever, shouting Georgie, go! while his enemy grunted and cursed his hatred of Fitzgerald and heaved himself upright so that Fitzgerald was straddling him now, the man corkscrewing like a maddened horse, the powerful wrist snapping in Fitzgerald’s grasp and the cosh sailing free of the nerveless fingers—

“Patrick!” Georgie cried in warning. “Behind you!”

Of course there would be more men; he’d counted six. A few had probably posted themselves at the building’s front and back doors, but the rest would be coming through the shattered window right behind their leader, and probably armed. He tossed the cosh in Georgie’s direction, then lunged from the man’s back toward the glint of metal in the gutter—one of Georgie’s knives, from her scattered bag. The creature beside him doubled up in pain, clutching his broken wrist. The scalpel slid into Fitzgerald’s palm, cold and wet.

He seized his attacker’s head, pulled it back, and thrust the edge of the scalpel against his throat.

“You soddin’ little Paddy,” the man gasped, his fingers clawing at Fitzgerald’s arm.

The second tough was almost upon them, but he stopped short when he heard his mate’s bubbling gasp.

“If you come any closer, he dies,” Fitzgerald warned, fingers clenched in the man’s dirty black hair. “And then you die. Understand?”

The second man glanced sideways, no doubt calculating the distance from one roof to another, or searching for a broken tile he could hurl at Fitzgerald’s head; over his shoulder, Fitzgerald saw a third figure easing across the garret windowsill. His grasp on his prey tightened, and the hum of violence sang in his ears, a familiar hymn as carnal as sex. The knife edge nicked the throat beneath his fingers and the throat whimpered faintly.

Georgie advanced, the cosh raised high, and said in that same guttural snarl, “We’ll cut his neck and call you murderer. A gentleman’s word against a labourer’s. Are you prepared to hang, my friend?”

The man inched backwards, his eyes widening; then he turned and stumbled toward the garret window, kicking and clawing his way back up the tiles.

“Who sent you?” Fitzgerald demanded, in his enemy’s ear. “Who pays your wage?”

An oath spat through his clenched fingers; nothing more.

“Patrick, they’ll be back,” Georgie said.

He released the black hair and forced the man beneath him, onto the tiles. Then he tore the cosh from Georgie’s grasp and delivered a punishing blow to the back of the skull. The solid bulk went limp.

“Pray God you didn’t kill him,” Georgie said faintly.

“Why? He’d have killed me. He’d have killed both of us and left our bodies on the roof. Just as he left Sep to die in chambers.”

She did not reply, her face as white as paper.

At the edge of the icy gutter, Fitzgerald knelt carefully and peered over the edge, senses swimming. He was unaccustomed to the eerie pitch, the irregular angles of this view of the world; he drew back, and waited for his head to steady.

“It’s a sheer drop.”

Georgie’s teeth were chattering with cold and tension, but she had retrieved her bag of surgical tools. “I refuse to retrace my steps. I will not walk past that man. I’m a doctor, Patrick—to leave him in that condition, in this weather, knowing what the result might be—”

“Your scruples do you credit,” Fitzgerald said dryly. “His men would be waiting for us inside, in any case. Georgie, that fellow called me a Paddy.”

“It’s hardly the first time someone has.”

“That’s not what I mean. I hadn’t spoken yet—he had no thought for my accent—and it’s faint enough after all these years. He came looking for an Irishman. He was sent here. By whom?”

“He probably followed you from Great Ormond Street.” She brushed the sleet from her cheek impatiently. “No doubt these people are watching Septimus’s house—to learn whether he dies.”

It was possible, Fitzgerald owned. And yet—

He glanced back, afraid of what he might see coming through the broken window, and said suddenly, “Would it cheer you to know, Georgiana, that our friends from the garret are already picking your man’s pockets?”

She turned swiftly, saw the clutch of women and children hunkered around the body. “Without even pausing to know if he’s dead or alive?”

“You might check his pulse yourself.” Fitzgerald rose and brushed fragments of ice and slate from his trousers. “That lot would never be out here unless the gang had fled. Which means we can go home in peace.”

Chapter Twelve

“You think von Stühlen is behind these attacks,” Georgiana said. “That’s why you inquired about him.”

They had retraced their steps through the tenement building without a further glimpse of the murderous pack. A swift walk up St. Giles to the hackney stand in Covent Garden, both of them unsteady from relief and fatigue. The early dusk of December fell swiftly, and the temperature had dropped as the afternoon waned. Georgiana shivered uncontrollably in her soaked gown, and Fitzgerald thought it imperative to get her home as soon as he could. Her gloves were torn and her hair sliding out of the bandage; they had not stopped to inquire of Button Nance where her bonnet had gone. She looked, in short, uncharacteristically slatternly. Fitzgerald looked as careless