Page 112 of Murder on Black Swan Lane

“The reaper doesn’t always win,” said Wrexford.

“Yeah? Who’s gonna beat him to a bloody pulp? You?”

“Yes, lad. Me.” In that instant, Wrexford had never believed anything so strongly.I will get him back. For all the brothers who had perished.

The force of it took him aback. God curse it, had he become a sniveling sentimentalist?

Raven was watching him intently, with eyes too old and too wary for a boy.

Curling a light fist, he brushed a quick cuff to the upturned chin before turning away. What did it matter if one more entry was added to the litany of his faults? Both the Devil and St. Peter had likely long since lost count.

* * *

Charlotte wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or weep. The sardonic Earl of Wrexford—an irascible cynic, renowned for his hair-trigger temper and utter disdain for sentiment—was seeking to comfort a ragged little imp from the stews?

Perception, she reminded herself, rarely aligned with reality. In her experience, no one was either all bad or all good.

All of us are all simply human.

“Mrs. Sloane?” Shadows tangled with the strands of black hair curling, making his face as shapeless as his rag market hat. “No protest? No demand to charge in where angels fear to tread?”

Charlotte wished she could see his expression. There was an undertone to his question that she couldn’t quite identify. “I know you think me ruled by impulse rather than logic—”

“Intuition, not impulse,” he corrected. “Which I’ve learned to respect. If you have an objection, I am willing to listen.”

“And I, sir, have learned to respect the way you use reason to attack a problem. Even with all the information we’ve gathered, there are many unknown variables within Lowell’s hideaway. It would be foolhardy of me to demand to accompany you. Worrying about me making a misstep would be a dangerous distraction.”

“A wise decision,” said Henning. “But then, I expected no less of you.”

She glanced up at the sky. The purples and pinks of dusk were darkening. Lowell’s ultimatum was fast approaching. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

Wrexford took Henning and Sheffield aside. A quick exchange, too low for her to hear, and then his two friends slipped away into the gloom. “We will follow shortly,” he said. “By a different route, to err on the side of caution.”

She nodded. A fluttering rose in her chest, a steel within velvet sensation of butterflies beating their wings against her ribs. The curse of a febrile imagination, she thought. In her mind’s eye, they all were colored in garish shades of gold.

Wrexford was calmly contemplating some faraway spot on the wall. Charlotte sought to draw strength from his unruffled attitude. For him, life was like science. It had a certain ruthless logic to it. One could control only so many variables of an experiment; then one simply had to step back and let the physics of the universe take its course.

Detachment disengaged from emotion.

It was a trait she seemed to be lacking.

Head bowed, Raven shuffled his feet. She moved closer to him and set a hand on his shoulder, sensing any further show of emotion might embarrass him. He flinched at first, but then allowed his scrawny body to slump against hers. The warmth of him was comforting.

Time seemed mired in molasses. The minutes slid by with a viscous slowness. The fluttering was now a drumming against her tautly drawn nerves.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

At long last, the earl turned. “Let’s be off.”

They moved in single file, three wraiths threading their way through the shifting shadows. Charlotte led the way, with Wrexford guarding the rear. He moved lightly, his steps sure and silent over the uneven ground. She could feel the thrum of a stalking predator’s flexing muscle in the night air. Repressing a shiver, she quickened her pace.

They were still several streets away from their destination when the earl drew them deep into a gap between two buildings. He pitched his voice low, the terse whisper nearly swallowed by the creak of a rusty sign swinging in the breeze.

“I’m counting on you to keep your position, no matter what you might see or hear.”

“I understand, sir,” answered Charlotte. She felt she owed him that.

“What if there’s an explosion?” demanded Raven. They hadn’t told the boy about Lowell’s chemical compound, but she wasn’t surprised that he had caught wind of it.