Jack woke in the daybed in Bess’s room.
“How did I—?”
Footsteps neared the daybed. “We carry’d you,” Bess said.
“Who we?”
“Jenny and I. You aren’t heavy.”
Jack yelped as he tried to turn towards the sound of her, and caught a stitch against the coverlet. The sutures felt to be made from rusted wire. Each breath unleashed a volley of arrows into his chest.
“Don’t move. You’re leaking fluids everywhere, healing and—” She laid a hand to his boiling forehead. “Just don’t move,” she repeated.
“Evans?”
“Well.” A pause. “You happen to have killed him. Inadvertently or whatnot.”
“Killed him?”
“Very much so, yes. Dead at your hand. Well, maybe, more specifically, at your chest. You—well—smothered him to death with your bleeding chest.”
“I didn’t mean—I mean, I did mean to, but I—”
Bess shrugged. “He was a wretch.”
“But I didn’t mean—”
“Even if you did.”
“And yet—”
“I thought it was sweet—albeit a touch dumb.”
“Ah.”
“Caus’d some problems for Jenny, tho’. As she was the last one seen with him, she’s had to Flee.”
“I’m sorry,” he croak’d. “Is there something I can do?”
“A well-crafted calling card eloquently offering your most sincere apologies always suits.” She snickered. “This isn’t a tea party. A scamp went wrong. Jenny knows what to do. She went to Dennison’s seraglio, near Drury Lane.”
“Dennison’s?”
“Dennison’s is”—searching for the word—“shabby. It’ll do for a while at least. Look—” She pulled something from her skirt’s pocket. “I discovered this on Evans while pulling you off him.”
She handed him a crumpled note.
Met with Okoh and the Lion-Man at the Tower.*1
There is a replicability problem.
“What do you make of this?”
Jack squinted up at her. He was drifting into a half-dreamworld—images of the two doxies dragging Evans into the street. Them carrying him up the stairs. Did they put his Trousers back on? He reached for his legs. He was trouser’d.
They had cared for his Body like a child’s. He attempt’d to turn to his side and was stabb’d with Pain. His stomach rose in his throat and nausea overtook him. He garbled out something.
Bess put a brandy to his lips, and he pushed it away, reaching for her skirts, drawing her close. She dropped to her knees, and he rested his head against her Armpits, rooting with his nose, and she let him. He drank in the wet Smoak scent. Her Livingness. Her Bessness.
He breathed. He breathed. Bess. Bess. He slept.
Jack lay in the daybed for a week, villainous juices seeping from his ribs. He slept in the days and thrashed at night against the twinges of healing, scarring. Unaccountably, given his discomposed condition, he was besieged by flashes of Desire. His groin flared. Impossibly, but it did. He attemped to stagger from the daybed several times to lie with Bess. She would glance over. “Not yet.”
The scars took a week to crust. And there were Infections. Bess had closed Jack’s chest with rough brown twine that ached and itched when he breathed. Pus collected in small puddles around the twine, tiny irises of bright green Oil. A line of septic Lanterns cutting his torso in two.
And then an urchin dropped a broadside at the door of the bat house, announcing the imminent lifting of the Quarantine. Soon. Within the week. After which the centinels would remain on the streets— Of course, grumbled Bess, that’s what this entire charade was for anyway. Gettin’ us used to centinels breathing down our necks. But the quarantine would be lifted. The air shift’d and the return of daily life drew near.
By the time the quarantine had been ended, Jack found himself thrilled with his new quaddron,*2 and spirits buoyed. Quite buoyed. He wasn’t bluff*3 and buff-beefed*4 like some of the coves who frequented Bess’s rooms. He was still spider-shanked*5 and lithe. But he felt so alleviated of his dugs*6 he was inclined to parade about without a flesh-bag*7 on as often as possible. He became what Bess would say, with a smile, was “rather huggy.”
For Bess had freed him of a chest-burden so great he hadn’t even known, until it had been removed, what weight he had carried. Every breath was wholly a new event now. The touch of smish to his skin was an Ecstasy, even with the crawly feeling of the stitches. The touch of skin to skin an even greater joy.
The interstice between Jack’s insides and his skin—that chasm of echoing hollow, the miserable Gas that kept him from himself, and from the world, had been closed. Bess had closed the chasm, sutured it when she sutured Jack’s chest. And now, undeniably, there was a new thrumming in Jack’s body. He could feel himself inside and out. And he was on a constant prowl for Bess. Just the touch of his hand to the small of her back, where her spine arched into the top of her Bum, set him afire. The lock of their eyes sent Bess-flares to his groin. At night, when Bess returned from her strolls to the Thames—there are more of them, she’d say—more ships, like the ones we saw the night they put on the Quarantine—she would find the dark air streaming in and Jack with his head stuck out the glazes, huffing hard at the breezes, his shirt off, wet Atmosphere clinging to his chest, brightening his scars to a rose-pink. He would advance towards her, skin glistening with the ashes and wet of the City, and take her in his arms.