Chapter Seventeen

Cat had nearly finished peeling her way through a mountain of potatoes when Dottie burst into the kitchen, dust cloth still in hand, and cried, “Come quick, Miss Murphy! There’s a man gone mad in the street, beating someone to death.”

Roselyn, kneading bread dough at the other end of the big table, swore under her breath—words Cat imagined no respectable woman should know—and drew her fists from the dough.

Breathless, Dottie continued, “Ben says he thinks it’s your friend, Mr. Kilter.”

“What?” Cat leaped up and her paring knife clattered onto the table. As she moved to the door Roselyn cried, “Albert—don’t you be going out without your cap on your head!”

But Cat paid no heed. She trod on Dottie’s heels, and they burst out the front door together, joining a crowd that already contained many onlookers. Cat blinked in disbelief, and then blinked again.

A large cart horse, still in its traces, had gone down in the street. Cat couldn’t tell if it lived or had expired on the spot. Two figures beside it had become the center of all attention. One of them she recognized as James Kilter, though had he not been so constantly on her mind these past days she might not have known him. His damaged face, now further disfigured by a terrible grimace, looked barely human, and his eyes blazed.

The other man—the cart driver?—lay beneath him, back on the bricks of the street and doubtless unconscious. That didn’t keep James from striking him again and again with fists like hammers, without so much as a hint of the mercy she usually saw in him.

“Christ!” she breathed. And then, racing forward without a thought she cried, “Jamie! Jamie!”

By the time she worked her way through the intervening onlookers and reached the confrontation, two Buffalo police officers had arrived. One of them threw out an arm and barred Cat’s way when she would have rushed in.

“Here, lad, keep back.”

“But I know him. I know him!”

“Which of them?” asked the officer. Surely close to the age of retirement, he sweated in his too-tight uniform, looking unhappy with the situation. But his partner was a big, strapping fellow who looked all too capable of taking James on.

“Him!” She supposed she made no sense; she didn’t care. “Jamie, Jamie!”

Kilter did not respond. Blood spattered his fists and seeped from half a dozen places on his opponent’s face.

“Get him up out of there, Kelly,” the first officer told the second. The big fellow went in, seized James, and pinned his arms behind him, hauling him up.

But so great was Kilter’s rage he threw the fellow off and turned on him, blue eyes blazing. His gaze slid over Cat without recognition. Some sort of wild madness did indeed possess him, and the strength of a thousand.

The crowd gasped and murmured. Would James be so reckless as to engage in fisticuffs with a police officer? The two big men squared off, and Cat’s heart sank violently.

The big officer closed and grappled with James, who again threw him off with apparent ease. Roselyn chose that moment to hurry up, puffing.

“Do something!” Cat entreated her. “What’s come over him?”

“Gone off kilter, he has,” Roselyn declared. “It’s happened before. Sweet saints and the holy mother, this can’t end well.”

Indeed, it couldn’t. The senior officer loudly began to inform James he was under arrest, while the young one circled with obvious intent to seize him yet again.

James threw one more punch that crashed into the big officer’s jaw, rocked him back on his heels, but didn’t fell him. Then James turned and went to his knees beside the stricken cart horse.

The crowd exclaimed as he put his arms about the beast and tried to lift it up, and Cat’s heart constricted in her chest. He’d moved from mindless violence to total compassion.

Yet no man, however strong, could hope to lift a ton of cart horse. The animal stayed down, its head nodding, with James Kilter entreating it beneath the gray sky.

An emotion Cat couldn’t name took her forward. She dodged the big police officer, who stood looking on, and went to her knees at James’ side.

“Jamie, let me help.”

He disregarded her as if she weren’t there. His big hands, smeared with blood, caressed the horse’s neck and withers, and he crooned like a gentle song, “Come on, my beauty. Get up for me. It’s safe now—I’ve served the brute as he deserves. Come on, I’ll call the anti-cruelty league and get you clean away from him, so I will.”

The horse’s ear twitched, and it blew out a breath. James’ arms closed about it again, and he lifted. Cat added her puny strength to his, but still the poor beast failed to rise.

Cat bleated over her shoulder, at the crowd, “Help us!”

A few souls came forward—a man carrying packages which he set aside, a maid from one of the nearby houses, even a steam servant, its metal surface gleaming in the dim afternoon. With gentle care, they urged the animal up. It struggled to rise, and Cat felt someone take the place at her side. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of blue and, to her shock, realized she stood shoulder to shoulder with the big police officer.

The cart horse heaved and came to its feet.

Some members of the crowd cheered. Even Cat knew that a horse down in distress rarely got up again. She looked into James’ face, hoping for some sign of satisfaction, but saw bewilderment and hard anger yet.

“Very heroic, my lad.” The elder of the two officers stepped up to James. “But you’re still under arrest for assault and battery.”

James looked not at him but at Kelly, the officer who’d helped lift the horse. “Will you make sure the anti-cruelty league is called? I’ll not have this animal go back to that bastard.”

Kelly nodded. Cat, who stood between the two men, looked into his face. Incredibly, only then did she realize Kelly wasn’t entirely human. Shock raced through her: he must be one of the automatons covered with human skin; she’d heard about them.

“What about your victim?” asked the first officer, the human one.

Roselyn fought her way to their side. “Officer, I know this man. He works for my brother, Michael Murphy. You can see he was provoked. The cart driver clearly abused this helpless animal.”

“That, ma’am, doesn’t justify beating the man half to death.”

“It does,” Cat murmured, and shot another concerned look at James, who stood like a man coming slowly out of a nightmare. His gaze swept over Cat, still without recognition, and moved to the face of the hybrid automaton.

“Sir,” it—he—said, “you must come with me.”

“All right.”

“Jamie. Jamie!” Cat seized both his forearms; her touch seemed to steady and rouse him. The confused, blue eyes focused on her for the first time.

“Sir.” Roselyn stepped in and spoke to the elder officer, not the hybrid. “Surely there’s no need to take him to the station. It’s plain what happened here. That lout was abusing his animal.”

“I sympathize, ma’am, really I do. I hate bullies, myself. But he laid that fellow out.” The officer nodded to the steam ambulance, now just arriving. “The man will have to go to the hospital.”

Roselyn gnawed her lip and eyed James. “I’ll send word to Tate,” she told him. “Don’t worry; he’ll be down to the station directly.”

James’ gaze never wavered from Cat’s, and his forearms, beneath her fingers, had gone rigid.

The elder police officer lowered his voice and whispered to Roselyn, “What’s the matter with him? Is he mad?”

“A crusader, is our James Kilter,” Roselyn replied. “Carried away by his fervor sometimes.”

“Fervor, is it?”

James bent his head toward Cat’s. His mottled face, which had been flushed with rage, was now pale beneath its scarring. “I was supposed to warn you,” he said.

“Warn me?”

“Boyd. Looking for you. You must stay close.” His eyes caressed her. “Safe.”

“Come along then, son. You’re going to the station.”

The first police officer gestured to the automaton, who drew James’ hands from Cat’s grasp.

“No,” she said, “let me go with him.”

“Now, sonny, the jail’s no place for you, not if you’re smart. You wait here while we take care of this.”

“Please,” Cat beseeched, and tears came to her eyes. And, as he was hauled away, inexorably, she cried, “Jamie!”

James’ broad back twitched, but he never looked back at her, not once.