She was a puzzle. So prim yet . . . utterly unruffled by his delinquencies. By his outcast status. In truth, he’d never met a woman like Hulda Larkin.
Who are you?
He’d been equally surprised by her willingness to talk about this Silas Hogwood. Merritt had a vivid imagination; it had felt as if he were standing beside her as she witnessed those horrors in her vision. The bodies. Surely that had to trouble a person. Surely not even someone as strong as Hulda could shake it off. He’d wanted, badly, to comfort her. To reassure her. If she hadn’t already done so, Merritt would have made his own inquiries regarding the man.
He heard her voice passing by his door with a second set of light footsteps that had to be Beth’s. “—not a bother. You’re smaller than I am; take the bath first. I’ll carry up the water. I need the exercise—”
Merritt wiped his hands down his face before resting his chin in his palms, trying not to let his thoughts wander to the bath. Corsets aside, Hulda was a well-shaped woman, and—
There was some rule against this, wasn’t there? Moon-eyeing your staff.
He groaned and leaned back in his chair, filling his eyes—and brain—with the shadowed wall in front of him. There had been plenty of nice women in his life. He’d taken a few to dinner, even. One had gotten awkward around him when she learned he had no family ties, but she’d been a snob, anyway, always wearing mountains of lace even on the hottest summer days. Then there was the mess with Fletcher’s sister, who’d turned him down outright, and he’d had to avoid her while living in the same house for months. The woman he’d fancied during his undercover employment at that steel factory had not been happy with him when his article put her job in jeopardy.
Sometimes he wondered if his father had placed a curse on him, stripping him of not only his past family, but any chance of a future one as well. He didn’t think about it much, but that was because he didn’t want to. He’d dug his graves for the loved ones torn away from him long ago, occasionally adding more soil to top them off.
His thoughts drifted back to Hulda. She was so rigid it was comical, but sometimes she softened, showing her humanity as if by accident. When she’d taken his cravat. When he’d mentioned Ebba, the girl he’d been ready to marry. When he’d told her she was safe.
He shook his head. No. She was his housekeeper. That would be awkward. And kindness did not equate interest. He was just letting his loneliness get the better of him.
Not that he was lonely.
“I need to work,” he growled, pulling a piece of paper in front of him. His characters were undercover with the local crime lords now, and Merritt needed to pull on that imagination of his since he had no desire to do firsthand research. He tapped his pen on the paper, leaving bleeding ink circles like unsightly moles across its face. He wrote, Elise, which was the name of his heroine. Thought for a moment, then added, Elise wasn’t fond of dressing like a man.
He could work with that.
A bubble appeared under the wallpaper of the bedroom, about the size of his head, and moved in lazy circles like some sort of sleepy demon trying to gain entrance.
“Don’t go spying on the girls, Owein,” Merritt murmured, redipping his pen. “Wouldn’t want your soul to rot out of this house, now would we?”
The bubble rippled and sunk as though disappointed. Leaning over, Merritt pet it like it were a cat, and the entire wall rippled.
“Help me out,” he said, grateful for the distraction. “If you ran an infamous crime ring, where would you want your headquarters to be? Is beneath the city too dank, or would you be out in the open, maybe in a gambling house?”
The wall pulsed twice.
“Gambling house it is.”
And he started writing.
Three days after she’d discovered Whimbrel House had a second source of magic, Hulda received a letter via windsource pigeon, which was a rather expensive mode of communication. It required specific spells of elemental magic—air, to enhance flight—and communion magic, which allowed the birds to receive instructions for delivery. In the Middle Ages, the method hadn’t been terribly pricey, but in the nineteenth century, it was hard to find people who possessed the right spells to enchant new birds. Thus the people who could accomplish it were paid lavishly for their services. But where there was no telegram or appropriately connected communion stones, this was the next best means of communicating quickly.
BIKER’s seal was on the letter, so Hulda opened it immediately.
Hulda,