Читать книгу An Honourable Thief - Anne Gracie - Страница 7

Near Batavia, on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies. 1815

“Promise!” The dying man grabbed her arm in a hard-fingered grip. Promise me, damn you, girl!

Kit Smith winced under the pressure. She glanced down at her father’s thin, elegant fingers biting into her flesh. Gentleman’s fingers. White, soft, aristocratic, seeming too fine even for the heavy ring he wore. Refined hands, good for lifting a lady’s hand to be kissed. For gesturing in an amusing fashion to illustrate a sophisticated story. White-skinned, blue-veined hands. Hands which had never done a hard day’s labour in their life. Hands which excelled at the shuffling and dealing of cards…the clever, extremely discreet dealing of cards…

Kit bit her lip and tried to ease her arm from under the punishing grip. He did not know his own strength, that was Papa’s trouble.

People didn’t when they were dying.

“Promise me!”

Kit said nothing. With her other hand she picked up a linen cloth and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

“Dammit, girl, I want that promise!” He searched her face angrily. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to do anything you haven’t done a hundred times or more in your life!”

Kit gently shook her head. “I cannot, Papa.”

He flung her hand aside in disgust. “Bah! I don’t know why I bothered even asking you. My daughter!” The scorn in his voice lanced through Kit. “My only living child! She, who has refused to help her father since she turned thirteen!”

“Hush, Papa, do not try to talk. Save your strength.”

“Be damned to it…I’m dying, girl…and I’ll not…be hushed. By sunset tonight—” He spat blood and lay gasping for breath before he could continue. “Dying, curse it…and without a son to…” He rolled his head away from her, muttering, “Nothing but a daughter, a useless daughter—”

Kit did not respond; she told herself she was inured to the pain of his tirade on the uselessness of daughters. She’d heard it all her life.

Her maidservant and companion, Maggie Bone, bustled in, carrying a pile of clean linen and a bowl of fresh water. Kit nodded her thanks and, as Maggie removed the blood-soaked wad of linen, Kit pressed a fresh pad against the wound in his chest.

“Done for, curse it.” He gave a snort of bitter laughter. “And by some clod of a colonial lout! Me! In whom the finest English blood flows…”

Kit pressed harder, willing the flow to stop.

“Not so hard, girl!”

Kit eased the pressure slightly. In moments fresh, bright blood seeped through it. Her father’s life blood, draining inexorably away into a napkin.

“Blasted stiff-necked Dutchman. Accusing me of cheating! Me! The Honourable J—” He broke off in a paroxysm of coughing.

“Hush, Papa, you will only make it worse if you try to speak. And besides, you are not the Honourable Jeremy Smythe-Parker here. That was in New South Wales. The name you are using now is Sir Humphrey Weatherby, remember?”

Not that it mattered any longer, she reflected. The Dutch doctor had left, the Javanese servants could not understand English and Maggie’s loyalty was unquestioned. There was nobody to pretend to any more. But one could not break the habits of a lifetime so easily, and keeping track of her father’s many identities was such a habit.

Her father ignored her. He lay gasping for breath for another moment of two. “Felled by a grubby tradesman, in a dirty foreign village in the middle of nowhere. If the blasted Pittance hadn’t been late—”

The Pittance was what he called the money which arrived so mysteriously from time to time. It seemed to come, no matter where they were, though it was often late. Kit had no idea where it came from, or why. Her father refused to discuss it.

She glanced through the window at the sea sparkling under the sunlight. It was so blue it almost hurt her eyes. To be sure, there were the swamps and the mosquitoes were very bad—malaria was a serious risk—but on some days, Kit had thought they had landed in paradise.

Yet in her father’s eyes, everywhere they had ever lived, no matter how wonderfully exotic or beautiful, had soon been declared grubby or obscure or provincial. Nothing compared with England.

He was, he had always been, a most bitter exile.

Kit reached for a fresh pad of linen. He was growing paler by the moment.

Her father coughed painfully. “Dammit…why could not Mary have given me a son who lived…sons…”

She tried not to listen. She pressed the linen pad more firmly against his wound. Was it her imagination, or was the blood flow slowing?

“A son would understand about a man’s honour.”

“I understand honour very well, Papa,” said Kit. “Even if I am only a girl.” If her father was unaware of the irony of a card cheat and swindler lecturing his daughter on honour, Kit was not. But it was not the card game or the recent duel with the Dutchman he was referring to. No, it was about what had happened in England all those years ago.

“Don’t take that tone with me, girl! If you understood anything at all about a man’s honour, you would make me that promise.” He lay back, wheezing with the effort of his outburst. “Females have no understanding of honour. Their minds are too clouded with emotion…If only my bonny boy had lived.”

Her mother had died giving birth to a little stillborn brother when Kit was six, but her father still spoke of her brother as if he was a person he had known and loved.

“If only he had not died. Now…” He looked at her with bitter grief. “My son would not let me die refusing to promise to avenge the great wrong done me.”

There was a long silence. All that could be heard in the room were the far distant noises of life going on outside the cottage: the chattering of monkeys in the jungle behind the house, the laughter of children in the nearby village, the squawking of a chicken.

And inside the cottage the sound of laboured breathing.

Not for the first time, Kit wondered about what had happened back in England, before she had even been born. He had always been bitter about it, and yet uncharacteristically silent about the details. He’d always vowed revenge, but on whom and for what, she’d never known.

Whatever it was, it had never stopped festering in him.

If it hadn’t happened, he’d said over and over—generally when he’d been drinking—he would be a rich man, respected, living in a beautiful big house in England. His beloved England.

She’d never quite believed it. But now she wondered. Had she been too quick to dismiss it as another one of Papa’s fantasies?

Had that—whatever it was—truly been the cause of her father living the sort of life he had? Drifting from one place to the next. Living from card game to card game. Arriving in obscure corners of the far-flung empire as Sir Humphrey This or The Honourable Mr That; leaving as a reviled card cheat and scoundrel…as they had just a few weeks ago from Sydney Town in the colony of New South Wales. An ignominious exit, tossed on the first outgoing ship…arriving in the Dutch colony of Batavia.

If the Great Wrong—as he put it—had not been done to him, would he have lived as a decent, contented man in England?

She would never know. But he was her father. She ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Kit bit her lip. He was her only living relative. And he was dying. Who was she to deny him peace on his deathbed? Her scruples suddenly looked a little like selfishness to her.

She looked down at him. His face was grey, his lips had an ominous tinge of blue. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep—the tension in his body testified to that.

He looked like a man drained of all hope.

All her life Papa had always had a new scheme, a new horizon, plans…

Who was she to say no to a dying man’s last wish?

Kit sighed. She leaned forward and took his hand gently in hers. “I will do what a son would, Papa. I will retrieve your honour for you. Tell me what I must do.”

The heavy-lidded eyes opened, wary at first, then suddenly sharp with triumph. The long-fingered hand tightened convulsively and painfully as he pulled his daughter closer to whisper the instructions in her ear.

At last he finished, closed his eyes in exhaustion and sank back against the pillows.

The heat of the afternoon pressed on them. A hot moist wind lazily stirred the leaves in the trees outside. The only other sound was that of a man fighting for every breath.

Suddenly he opened his eyes. “Sent a letter to Rose from Sydney Town. Told her—” He choked suddenly and went into a long paroxysm of coughing.

He subsided shaken, grey and immeasurably weaker. Kit wiped his face with a cool, damp cloth and wondered who this Rose was.

“Hush now, Papa, do not worry yourself. I will do what is necessary. Just lie still and try to save your strength.”

A ghastly smile settled on his lips. “My son…” he muttered, so low, Kit could hardly hear him. “My beloved son…”

And with that, her father died. On a low pallet in a simple Javanese cottage on the other side of the world from where he belonged. Killed in a duel for cheating at cards. The final blow in a life that, according to him, had contained nothing but blows.

He died without a word of love or farewell to his only child, his daughter, the companion of his exile for the whole nineteen years of her life.

“Never mind, Miss Kit,” said Maggie Bone comfortingly. “He did value you, really. Some men never can say how they feel.”

Kit accepted the lie with a nod and a tremulous smile. “I know, Maggie.”

“I wish you’d never promised him, though.”

“Yes, but I did, so there’s no going back on it now.”

Maggie sighed. “London, is it?”

“Yes, London. To stay with someone called Rose.”