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Charlotte startled. She was transfixed by his collectedness, by the shift in the tension of the room. She had rehearsed her interrogation on the coach ride over, but it was gone from memory. “Is Benjamin Fletcher your real name?” she asked first.
The man breathed a laugh. Charlotte felt quite proud. His mouth curled into a side-smile, and he winced as it stretched his cut. Still, he refused to look at her. “Giving you an alias would betray my attempt at establishing a clean slate between us.” He dipped his head. “Yes, that’s my name.”
She swallowed hard, her thoughts spilling from her like run-off down a gutter. “How did you find out about me? About my poems?”
His brow quirked, and he hunched over a little more, seeming to relax with each question she asked. She was not relaxed. She was terrified. His tongue clicked against his palate before he said, “A friend of mine recommended a poem by Charles Huxley. His wife had caught it in a ladies’ publication. I read it. I made inquiries. Soon enough, I discovered no one knew who Huxley was—that it was an alias. I saw an opportunity. I took it.”
Charlotte bit her lip. The story was plausible enough. “What opportunity?”
He shrugged. “For money.”
“You spoke of my gamble earlier, but that seems a deadly wager. What if I had not been a woman writer but a man? If I had been able to contest your attempt at claiming my work for your own…?”
He smiled again, and her heart pinched in her chest. “There was no doubt you were a woman.” Finally, with a look that made her weak in the knees, he glanced at her. “Hang sense by the gate, and find me; body of flesh and dream; o seek the fruit of life, where we left our soles.” He was reciting her poem, the very first she had published. “Those aren’t the words of a man.”
“Are you so intimate with poetry that you can read the female voice between verses?” She dismissed the idea with a shake of her head. “You don’t strike me as a learned man.”
“I won’t pretend to be intimate with poetry, not beyond the classics... but I know a thing or two about the female sentiment.” He looked away coyly before surrendering himself to darkness again. Surely, he was not teasing her. Her heart leapt to her throat for his... well, she could only call itflirting. “Hathaway thought I was convincing enough when I presented myself as Huxley. I forged the originals of the poems. The rest, you know.”
He was saying everything she had yearned to hear, but she didn’t receive the admission like a prize. She got to her feet, feeling too restless to sit, and began pacing the attic. The floorboards creaked as she mulled over his confession. He was forthright enough that she couldn’t question him. Mr. Fletcher didn’t seem to be playing a game anymore. Then again, she didn’t know him.
“I’m not the devil, you know—nor the one you presume me to be,” she heard from where he was sat. She didn’t turn, but she did stop her pacing. “I’m not impervious to a woman’s suffering. We can put an end to this charade, to your torment, if you see no way out of this but violence. It was not my intention to deliver a woman unto ruin.”
Somehow, she believed him, on that point at least. She clutched her cloak tightly around her, casting a glance toward the open door. “Say what you will. This place seems like a den for a devil. It’s full of villains.” She recalled the leering man at the entrance; the smells of smoke, blood, and something medicinal when first he had opened the door. They were not alone, Mr. Fletcher and this fox-faced friend. She had seen more of their kind as he had led her up the stairs: beady eyes watching her. Worldly she was not, but she had heard stories of hideouts such as this.
“This place is my home. Thosevillains, as you call them, are my friends.”
“Friends of what sort?”
“Friends of ill-fortune.” He hesitated, but he buckled under the weight of her silence. “I will tell you the truth of things, but on this, you will ask no questions. We were soldiers in the war.”
Charlotte turned around. She had guessed the imposter had encountered some misfortune to have driven himself to crime. That he should impersonate a soldier did not make sense. Men of service, to her knowledge, were the most just among all men.
“You’re lying.”
He scoffed. “I wish I were.”
“If you had fought for your country, you would not be living in a place like this.”
“Is that what you’ve been told?” His accent shifted slightly, taking on a common lilt. “That the Prince looks after his rooks? He’s too busy with your kind to pay any attention to ours.”
“Then the fortune you sought from my poems—“
“I told you,” he muttered, “I’m not the devil you think I am.”
She didn’t need him to explain. If what he was saying was true, the money he had siphoned from her was not taken out of greed but, to a point, necessity.
She said as much.
He smiled. “You’ve been very charitable—rather, Huxley has.”
Charlotte circled back to the chair, plopping herself into it indecorously. She let her hair hang over the headrest and closed her eyes.
When she had set out for this cursed house on Walden Street, she had done so out of passion. The door had opened; the evil had been discovered. Expecting a beast, she had found only a man. Mr. Fletcher seemed more a fallen angel than a daemon if there was any veracity to his story. She wanted to believe he had been honest with her, that his story was one of strife rather than avarice. She could stomach her loss if the cause was somewhat righteous, but a niggling feeling at the nape of her neck told her more was afoot.
“There must be other ways to prosper.”
Fletcher took a moment to think. “There are, but not so many as you believe. We live in different worlds, you and I, Lady Charlotte. I don’t expect you to understand survival any more than I will understand the allure of ignorant leisure.”
