“I’m fine, Mr. Sawyer. Just a little mishap with the trigger.” She cocked an eyebrow at Nathaniel and the smooth expanse of his coat, no longer peppered with shot or silvered in his blood.
The silence on the other side of the door stretched for a moment before the boatswain spoke. “Aye, Captain.” A chorus of grumbles and questions followed, and from the sound of it, Mr. Sawyer was having a difficult time herding the crew away from Nettie’s door.
When it grew quiet again, Nettie gestured with the pistol. “How dare you,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “How dare you use my lost lad’s name as a weapon!”
Nathaniel’s already sore gut clenched at the agony in her voice. “Forgive me, Nettie,” he said, contrite. “That was unfair of me.”
“Who are you? What are you?”
He dared a slight smile. “Promise you won’t shoot me again if I tell.”
She matched his smile with a hard scowl of her own. “I promise to shoot you if you don’t, and I doubt you can put your skull back together after I put a pair of slugs between your eyes.”
She had a point. He was inhumanly strong and fast, with an uncanny ability to heal wounds that would kill a regular man, but a shot to the head from a pistol used to hunt tigers—well, he was tough, but he wasn’t invincible.
“You once had a lover named Tom Black,” he said. “A coster you ended up killing before he killed you. Widderschynnes is the name you took when you first signed onto the fleet. You sport a tattoo of a swan on your left hip, gotten in Algiers on a helium run.” Her eyes rounded as he recited fact after fact of a life none but a close few knew. His voice softened. “You had a sister named Ruth who died of the cholera in ’33. Your only child, an infant you christened Margaret, is buried in Abney Park. You carry a scrap of her gown in your pocket at all times along with a curl of her hair in a watch locket. They are the most precious things you own.”
The pistol wavered infinitesimally to the right. Nettie blinked, and her voice was hoarse and low. “How do you know all of this?”
The ache in Nathaniel’s chest had nothing to do with Nettie’s shot. “Because you were once my commanding officer, and I am still your devoted friend. It’s me, Nettie,” he said gently. “Nathaniel. Believe it or not, but please don’t shoot me again.”
A weaker woman might have fainted. Nettie Widderschynnes did not. She gazed silently at him for several moments before laying the Howdah on the desk. Nathaniel knew he’d won a small portion of her trust when she handed him a handkerchief to clean his hand and partially turned her back to pour them drinks at the sideboard. Now they sat across from each other, sharing a dram of brandy.
Nettie tapped a finger on her tumbler, her fingernail making a soft pink-pink pink sound in the silence. “My eyes are tellin’ me you’re a liar, but you know things only Nathaniel did. You move like him too, even if you’re thinner than a rasher of wind by comparison.”
The part of him wound up tighter than a new spring drive clock loosened. Nathaniel swept a hand from his chest to his knees. “This body once belonged to a knockabout droll named Jack Preston.”
Jack’s soul had departed his body before Harvel played God and rammed Nathaniel’s own dying spirit into it. While the soul was gone, some of Jack’s memories remained. An acrobatic comic who played the stage and entertained the low brow crowds of London, he’d lost his life to a thief with a knife and a fatal aim. The mad doctor had saved the body if not the man and bequeathed it to Nathaniel whose own physical form had been beaten beyond repair by war and the harsh Atlantic waves.
Nettie shook her head. “How is that even possible?”
He shrugged and swallowed half the brandy in his glass. “I don’t know. Galvanism combined with gehenna and whatever strange magic Harvel cooked up in that torture chamber he called a laboratory. All I remember are lights and the burn of liquid hell running through me.”
Liquid hell and lightning. The magic pairing that allowed dead men to live again. They lost most of their humanity in the process, turning the colors of ghosts and shadow. The seven men Harvel turned possessed extraordinary qualities beyond the abilities of normal men. Their blood ran silver instead of red, and like Nathaniel, all were much closer to the dead than to the living.
“I heard one of Harvel’s creations killed him.” Nettie arched an eyebrow. “Was that you?”
He only wished he could lay claim to that achievement. “No. His first experiment, Gideon, killed him. And rescued the rest of us.” All Guardians owed a life debt to Gideon.”
Nettie slapped the arm of her chair. “Good. He deserved it for what he did to you and the others.” She cocked her head, her sharp gaze noting every detail of his appearance. “Do you have the droll’s memories then, as well as your own?”
“Vague ones. More like shadows of memories. My own returned to me over time.” The first one had been that of a woman’s face. Smooth skin and brown eyes. Dark hair and an enigmatic smile. Lenore.
Nettie’s knuckles whitened where she gripped her glass, her features drawn and stiff. “You should have come to me,” she said in a low voice that quavered faintly. “The second you remembered, you should have come.”
Nathaniel rose, placed his glass on the desk and knelt in front of the woman who had been more a mother to him than the one who birthed him. He reached for her free hand, lacing his fingers with hers, trying to ignore the ghastly difference between the natural hues of her skin and his own deathly pallor.
“And you would have believed me just like earlier?” he said. “Look at me, Nettie. You just said it yourself. It’s difficult to accept this is the Nathaniel you remembered.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “Lenore doesn’t know.”
“No, and you can’t tell her.”
Her brief smile lit her eyes for a moment. “No worries there, lad. You have to be the one to bell that cat.”
Nathaniel shook his head and stood to resume his seat. “And I never will. Nathaniel Gordon is dead. My appearance alone should make that obvious.”
“Don’t be a fool. You might be keeping company with cold meat now and wearing some dead bloke’s body, but under all that you’re Nathaniel Gordon, and Lenore misses you as hard now as she did when she first heard the news of your dying five years ago.”
He crushed the swell of hope threatening to engulf him. “She’ll forget and love someone else.”
Nettie rolled her eyes and snorted. “Obviously your little journey to the underworld and back has made you a touch beef-headed.”
“I’m not here to talk about Lenore,” he snapped.
Another disbelieving snort. “Is that so? ‘I’m here regarding Lenore Kenward,” she repeated in an affected accent. Your words, lad, not mine.”