He acknowledged her designation with a low bow but said no more.
Her somber features softened a little, and her eyes warmed. “You’ve done a fine job taking care of Highgate’s citizens.” She gestured to Arthur’s grave. “Not a brick moved. Even the flowers I placed here last time are as they lay.” She bent to trace the discolored edge of a wilted white rose with one fingertip. It had taken all of Nathaniel’s willpower not to claim the small bouquet for himself or at least the ribbon that bound it together.
“It isn’t safe to be here alone, miss. Have you no companion?” Some things never changed. The one time he’d remarked on Lenore’s penchant for taking solitary jaunts, she’d arched an eyebrow at him and tipped her chin in such way that he braced himself for a setdown. She wore the exact same expression now.
“This isn’t Whitechapel, sir, and we’re in broad daylight with many perfectly respectable people nearby taking the air.” She shrugged. “Besides, had I a maid or companion with me, she would no doubt have abandoned me to my fate the moment you made an appearance.” The eyebrow lowered, and she offered a faint smile.
He tipped his head. “While I might argue the wisdom of taking the air of London, I cannot refute the last. Guardians aren’t sought after for their charming wit and illuminating conversation.”
“True, but there is a difference between avoidance and fear.” A puzzled line creased the smooth skin of her forehead. “People flee when they see Guardians, as though their lives are in immediate danger if they so much as glimpse you, yet I’ve never heard of a Guardian doing harm to anyone.”
That was because he and his brethren made certain there was nothing to investigate or report when they did away with resurrectionists. The only evidence left of the ones Nathaniel had immolated were soot marks on the grass, and those had washed away with the next inevitable rain. All but one body thief’s soul had crossed the Veil, and Nathaniel ignored that ghostly voice which joined the chorus of others. He admitted none of this to Lenore.
“We’re frightful sights to look upon, and our choice of employment far too macabre to discuss over tea.”
Her mouth tightened, a sure sign she was settling in for an argument. “Those aren’t adequate reasons to flee as if the Dartmoor Hound were snapping at your coat or dress hem.”
“For some, those are perfectly acceptable reasons.” He suspected people would be more inclined to linger and stare if they saw the Hound. It was a creature far removed from themselves in every way. He, on the other hand, was still a little too similar for comfort. After Harvel’s experiment, and with gehenna-tainted blood in his veins, he was no more human than the Hound and a hundred times more terrifying. Like those fearful folk, he’d once been an ordinary person. Now he represented the horrors that might have happened to any one of them but by the grace of God had not. In his observations, people feared the almost far more than the what if.
The ever-present pall over London deepened. Clouds, heavy with rain, lowered even more. Drizzle that had threatened all afternoon finally fell to beat an arrhythmic tattoo on High Gate’s crypts and verdant landscape.
Lenore snapped open the umbrella looped on her wrist and swung it over her head. She raised an eyebrow. “Improper or not, it seems hardly fair that you become drenched while I remain dry. I’m willing to share.”
Nathaniel smiled a little, as charmed by her offer cloaked in challenge as he was by the memory of her subduing a belligerent pack of butchers boys on a Camberwell street with the same umbrella.
Rain didn’t bother him. He acted as sentinel here in all weather, had even survived a lightning strike once with only the acrid smell of burned hair to mark the event. Still, her offer tempted him beyond words. To be close to her once more, breathing in her scent of bergamot and lemon water and hearing the gentle rise and fall of her breathing...
“Your offer of shelter is kind, miss, but it’s only water. Everything dries in time.” He noted the continually darkening sky. Once the rain stopped, the fog would roll in, blotting out what little light still remained and turning the city into a murky sea. “You should return home. Even the hardiest person doesn’t stroll through a pea-souper if they can help it.” He frowned. “And it isn’t safe for those alone, even when you aren’t in Whitechapel.”
A soft whirring sound overhead forestalled her reply. Nathaniel followed her gaze to watch one of the many airships dotting London’s sky drift past them. It flew low under the cloud ceiling, the whirring noise that of the two rotating disks that spun around its girth at bow and stern. Nathaniel recognized the ship; so did Lenore.
“After the Pollux, my father was always partial to the Merope. Her design made it easy to retrofit her engines for adiabatic demagnitization.” Her smile was wistful. “He was almost as proud to see her inaugural flight after the upgrade as he was to watch the Pollux after retrofit.”
Rain sheeted off the ship’s sleek exterior as it glided past them. Nathaniel had sailed on the Merope once years ago when Nettie brought him with her to inspect the gun batteries for ideas on how to improve upon her own ship’s arsenal. He’d come away unimpressed. The engines were indeed a marvel, no longer subject to overheating from the volatile empyrean used to fuel them, but the Pollux’s firepower remained superior. The Merope was built for transport, the Pollux for war, and their designs reflected their different purposes.
“She’s a good ship for a thermal and her pilot one of the best. He’d have to be to keep her from porpoising every time the throttle settings change.”
The weight of Lenore’s measuring gaze rested heavily on him. “You know something of airships,” she said in a voice both curious and admiring.
“A fact here and there,” he replied. The common knowledge they shared—his through experience as a deckhand, hers through design and theory—had provided him with the perfect excuse to talk with her when he visited her father’s workshop. She’d seduced him as much with her passionate descriptions of membrane structures and buoyancy ratings as she had with her beauty.
She asked him a question that made the breath die in his chest. “Would you like to sail in one in the future?”
Of everything he’d lost since the Pollux’s near disaster at the Redan and Dr. Harvel’s experiments, the greatest—besides Lenore herself—was his post on Nettie’s ship. Any ship for that matter. He strove to keep his voice even and free of bitterness lest she sense it and question him, as had always been her wont.