A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Thirty Two: The French Girl

"Well?" said Manda, when Emma had closed the door behind her.

"Untie me," he repeated.

"But can I trust you? Will you promise not to go around blowing things up, or threatening the lives of innocent people?"

"Innocent-?" Jack started incredulously, but he broke off, trying to get a hold of himself. "No, Manda, you can't trust me. Look what happened to the last girl who did."

"But that's just the point," said Manda. "It's because of what you did to her that I know I can trust you. Because I know you loved her. I know it's hurting you worse than anyone."

She went to a desk at the foot of the bed and threw open one of the drawers, seizing a fistful of envelopes in each hand.

Jack stared at them. They were old and discoloured, and yet the sight of them stabbed into his eyes as though they were the most dazzlingly white things in the room.

He knew them as he knew his own skin. They had been with him through the monsoons of India, the rank mists of the terai, the salt tang of the Mediterranean. They had spent long nights under his pillow, or folded reverentially in his saddle-bag. They were yet another part of his past that he had thought he would never see again.

"You had these sewn up inside your coat," Manda explained. "I was with Ellini when she found them."

She backtracked a little, perhaps sensing his bewilderment. "You gave her your coat to wear when she was up on the rooftops, remember? And she fell, and it got caught on some barbed wire, and the lining ripped open. And all these letters started showering her like a snow-storm! She wanted to destroy them, but I wouldn't let her."

"She wanted to-?"

"Oh, she didn't want you to remember her," said Manda, waving the letters impatiently, and letting a few of them cascade to the floor. He winced to see them being treated so carelessly. But then he remembered throwing Sam's letter out of the mortuary-window on a rainy night, and realized that he deserved so much worse than this.

"She didn't want you to be hurt when she died," Manda went on, oblivious to his discomfort. "Which seems ironic, given everything that's happened since. These letters are the reason I knew I could trust you to help me with the slave-girls. And you confirmed my suspicions last night. You could have fought me, but you didn't, did you? I saw you hesitate. And it's because I was kind to her."

Jack laughed. "Not even close."

She lowered her hands – still stuffed with letters – to her sides. Jack's eyes followed them with the same anxious tenderness he used to feel when he was watching Ellini.

Good god, did he still want them? Did he still want her? Bad enough when it was just horror and pain, but there was desire underneath, wasn't there? Twisted into bitterness by the impossibility of its ever being fulfilled.

When he thought about her glowing and smiling in front of that mirror, or giggling underneath him on the rooftops, kissing his nose, his jaw, his cheekbones – anything rather than his lips – and telling him not to make her think, not to make her be serious. When these moments came back to him, the longing started thrashing about in his stomach like some starved and baited beast. And that, in turn, made his stomach churn with nausea, because it was feelings like these – from men like him – that had got her captured and abused in the fire-mines. 

He couldn't stop wanting her, and he couldn't stop hating himself for it.

"You didn't spare me because I was kind to her?" said Manda, the colour draining from her cheeks. When this happened, her freckles became starkly visible, like stars coming out at dusk.