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Dangerous Games
CHARLOTTE MEDE
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
The Koh-I-Noor is at present decidedly the lion of the Exhibition. A mysterious interest appears to be attached to it…
—The Times, London, May 1851
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Postscript
Chapter 1
London, 1851
Isambard Kingdom Bellamy bit the inside of his cheek and tasted blood.
By the cold grate, eyes wide with fear, a young woman—hands, feet, and mouth bound—struggled like a trussed chicken. Her cap and soot-stained gown, the petticoats ripped in a brief but desperate scuffle, revealed her to be a scullery maid. The upturned nose and the plump cheeks were wet with panicked tears.
Bellamy bit down harder, savoring the metallic taste flooding his mouth. She would cry, then whimper before realization dawned that it was truly too late. His lips twitched beneath his luxuriant mustache. If Vesper really could make good on his promises, it would all be over too soon.
Dr. Aubrey Vesper stood with his hands tightly clasped behind his back, gaslight glancing off his wire spectacles. He was of slight build with the air of a scholar, the tightness in his narrow shoulders evidence of his unease with the sumptuousness of the salon. His reddish hair brushed back from a high forehead, he contemplated neither the quivering mass of muffled sobs by the fireplace, nor Bellamy. It was the figure directly across from him who held his attention.
Well over six feet of lean muscle, the man in Vesper’s view sat insensate and passive as a string puppet, staring off into some unknown horizon. Despite—or perhaps because of—his preternatural stillness he was an arresting sight, Bellamy thought, following the doctor’s gaze. He watched as Vesper took a step back to better study the relaxed features of his patient.
“You are remarkably certain that you can bend our guest here to your will?” Bellamy’s challenge rang in the darkened shadows of the opulent drawing room of his Hampstead Heath mansion as he took stock of the physical specimen in question. A clock somewhere in the caverns of the house chimed midnight, punctuating the unusual stillness of the room.
“There is no doubt in my mind, sir.” Vesper’s voice was soothing in its professorial blandness. “He may appear to be a strong individual,” he continued, his gaze glancing over the broad shoulders and long legs sprawled casually against the brocade settee. “But corporal evidence can be misleading.”
“Given his history…” Bellamy didn’t finish the sentence, thinking it both unwise and unnecessary at the moment. Instead, he stroked the silk of his mustache while eyeing the so-called doctor, noting his carefully erect posture. He could trust Vesper. Most certainly. He’d paid enough for his loyalty—and money did go far, that much life had taught him. And there were supplementary inducements, if required. Vesper’s weaknesses, the result of a life carelessly lived in exotic places, were Bellamy’s gain.
Bellamy understood weakness—he could smell it like a fox circling its prey. He liked to consider it an inherited talent, not that he thought often of his own desperate beginnings in the gutters of East London. Certainly his splendid house spoke otherwise, a direct rebuke to his humble origins. The acres of marble, the vast conservatory, the gilded music room that never heard a note. Waldegrave Hall was a pastiche of manorial Gothic, and no expense had been spared from the square-headed windows with double transoms and mullions of stone to the raised roofs and chimney staffs arranged in symmetrical stacks at each end of the building.
His money, and there was plenty of it, permitted every possible caprice and excess.
The whimpering behind him ratcheted up a degree, operatic to his ear. He permitted himself a careless glance over his shoulder to the huddled figure made small against the baronial splendor of the oversized fireplace. Soon the feminine sniveling would turn into outright hysteria, that last burst of energy that warred with the dimming of the light. Poetic bull-shit. He’d seen rats struggle with more conviction than that ridiculous slattern.
He knew struggle, real struggle, the kind that burned acid deep in the belly. It was a corrosive appetite that had made him the major stockholder in the British East India Company, a mogul, a potentate in his own right, recognized by all who had both profited and lost by his efforts. That scullery maid quaking in the corner was hardly worth his attention, dead or alive. He commanded an empire, a vast commercial enterprise that ensured the sun never set on England. Not that the poor excuse for leadership, that squat little queen and her effete consort, would ever admit it.
The taste of blood on his tongue was dissipating. Alas. He smiled coldly at the doctor, watching as he extracted a silver watch on a chain from his vest pocket. He dangled it steadily, like a metronome going through its paces, in front of the heavy lidded eyes of the man who would see the British Empire undone but who at the moment seemed little more than a corpse, his breathing shallow, his arms slung untroubled over the arms of his chair.
Bellamy was bored, a feeling he had no taste for at all. The proceedings were becoming decidedly tedious. “What about this John Elliotson at University College London,” he began sulkily, before settling himself into the wide berth of a rose-wood balloon-back chair. “He was disbarred from the medical profession as a direct result of his demonstrations of animal magnetism.”
Unlike Bellamy’s servants in India, slavish and devoted to the end, this London doctor needed testing, and his reaction just might provide a mildly diverting sideshow. Bellamy scooped up an elegantly carved chess piece from the board displayed handsomely on the side table at his elbow, turning it thoughtfully in his broad hands. “I’m intimating that your approach is hardly original, Vesper. After all, wasn’t it James Braid who discovered that his subjects could go into a trance if they simply fixated their eyes on a bright object? An object like a silver watch, perhaps?”
The doctor didn’t turn away from his task, the watch firm in his slender hands despite the acid lacing Bellamy’s words. Only the slight tightening of his shoulders revealed his disquiet at the challenge to his reputation. “Hypnosis is a component of medical science, a rigorous discipline. I’m not quite certain what you’re expecting, sir, but I assure you this will not devolve into a tea party séance.” He continued to swing the watch, from right to left, from left to right, in perfect metered arcs in front of the seated man’s impassive face. “I explained to you from the outset, if you’ll recall, that hypnotism is a neurophysiological process wherein a subject’s attention is focused upon the suggestions made by the hypnotist.”
“Ah, yes, the great god of science. I