A part of him had felt he deserved it: a miserable end to a miserable life.
As he had awaited the final blow that would deliver him from his pathetic existence, a masked figure had emerged out of nowhere. It had moved like a figment of feverish imagination. Through swollen eyes, Ben had made out the bodies of his attackers hurling through the air, thumping with a groan against the alley walls. He had heard curses and retreating footsteps before blackness claimed him.
When he had awakened, it had been in this clinic. His injuries had been treated, and he had met his rescuer, the man who approached him now. Chen, whom many of the men respectfully addressed as shifu, or “master,” was the founder of this center. The practitioner of Chinese healing arts had made Ben see his opium use clearly for the first time.
“It is not a mere habit if you cannot stop, Your Grace,” Chen had said. “Opium rules you, not the other way around.”
Chen’s treatment of Ben’s noxious cravings had involved cleansing the body and the mind. With the master’s help, Ben had wrestled free of opium’s grip. He had purged his demons—the ones involving opium, at any rate—and come out stronger. Yet he never forgot how close he had come to succumbing to that abyss. The sensual and inexorable gravity of that despair. Nor did he forget the debt he owed to the man who had pulled him from those abominable depths.
“Gor, guv, that were the longest ’our o’ my life.” While the others had filed from the room, a lanky, ginger-haired lad remained. He approached Ben, cracking his neck and grimacing. “Watching grass grow would be a sight more interesting.”
Peter Watkins, also known as Pete the Pinch, was a relative newcomer to the clinic. At sixteen, the barest hint of fuzz upon his chin, the lad was an accomplished pickpocket whose budding career had been compromised by his opium use. The drug had hampered Pete’s reflexes while inflating his sense of invincibility, and he’d been beaten half to death by a brute he’d tried to rob. After Chen had nursed the boy back to health, Ben had taken Pete under his wing.
Privilege had buffered the impact of Ben’s need for opium. He could afford to use the drug until it killed him, and being titled and rich, his use would always be viewed as “recreation.” Pete’s drug use, however, was seen as a vice and evidence of moral failure amongst the lower orders, even though Ben knew that he and the lad had more in common than many would think. Class differences aside, he, too, had been a brash youth, a neck-or-nothing whose impulses had led him to trouble time and again. He wanted to steer Pete in a better direction than he himself had gone.
“Contemplation gets easier,” Ben said.
Pete shook his head. “Not for me, guv. Makes me right twitchy, it does. Where I come from, you don’t stay still ’less you’re crippled or dead.”
It was the harsh reality of Pete’s life as an orphan of the slums. While Ben’s own background had been far more privileged, he understood the feeling of restlessness. He had been a hotheaded rakehell at Pete’s age.
“Have you thought about my offer?” Ben asked.
“Right kind o’ you to give me a job in one o’ your mansions, guv, but that life ain’t for me.” Pete shrugged his shoulders, his grin cocky. “My skill be in pinching silver, not polishing it.”
“You could try to learn a reputable trade,” Ben began.
“I’ll think on it. For now, the theatres are closing, which means pigeons are returning ’ome to roost. No be’er time to pluck some fine feathers.” Pete winked. “Good evening, guv.”
“Pete—” Ben found himself looking at the lad’s retreating back.
“Some horses were not meant to be tamed.”
Turning at the calm words, Ben bowed. “Master Chen.”
Chen returned the bow. A few inches shorter than Ben, the healer embodied strength and balanced power. This evening, his wiry form was clad in a plain grey tunic with matching trousers, but he often walked the streets dressed like an Englishman. His precisely clipped layers of black hair surrounded a noble face with piercing eyes.
Chen was probably not much older than Ben’s own age of one-and-thirty, yet the master possessed an air of sagacity that made him seem beyond the reach of time and place. His accent had the polish of elocution lessons. Although Ben had heard whispers in the clinic about Master Chen’s origins—rumors circulated that Chen was everything from a retired sailor, exiled royalty, to a former monk—the shifu’s past remained shrouded in mystery.
“The English have a saying about leading a horse to water,” Chen said.
Ben bit back his frustration. “Yes, but Pete could do much better for himself.”
“It is not your choice to make, Your Grace. I noticed your practice was disturbed this evening.”
As usual, the master missed nothing.
“Yes, shifu,” Ben admitted.
“We will discuss over tea.”
Chen led the way to his study, a room as simply furnished as the rest of the clinic. There was a desk, a pair of vertical calligraphy scrolls on the wall behind it, and a round rosewood table where tea awaited. The men took their seats on the round stools, and Ben picked up his cup, a lidded porcelain vessel with no handles. When he lifted the lid, a faint jasmine scent escaped, bringing back the moonlit garden and the yearning in Livy’s eyes.
You are the only man I could ever love. If I can’t have you, then I won’t marry at all.
His chest clenched. She was so young and innocent. He supposed it was normal for a girl her age to form a tendre, but she deserved far better than him. She needed a younger man and one who didn’t have a veritable army of skeletons rattling in the closet. As a man of experience twelve years her senior, Ben should have anticipated their kiss and prevented it.
He definitely should
