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“This,” he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, “was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again.” He stopped, with a fixed look at me.
On any other night, Jacob might not have listened closely enough to hear the quiet clatter of shoes on metal ground outside, but apparently he had been paying more attention than he’d been aware of because he almost dropped his book at the sound. With a frown, he put aside the collection of Charles’ latest tales. Perhaps reading ghost stories about a railway-bound spectre on a train past midnight was tempting fate, but after all, ghosts did not exist – not even Spring-Heeled Jack, whom Jacob still wanted to get his hands on if only to prove to himself that he was just a man and erase that small, niggling doubt.
So if no ghost had boarded his train, who had jumped on? They’d just passed through Victoria Station at a crawl. Probably just one of his Rooks, Jacob guessed, even as he slipped on his brass knuckles just to be safe.
It was dark with only the lamp dangling over his couch. Narrowing his eyes, Jacob saw a crouched shadow standing in the doorway at the other end of the waggon. Some trick of light caused by the lanterns outside – that’s what it had to be, Jacob told himself – cast it in a red glow just like the ghost in the story. Jacob swallowed.
The figure moved. “Frye,” it rasped.
Jacob let out a breath and quickly slid the brass knuckles off his fingers when he recognised the voice.
“Wynert, what’s going on? Can’t sleep?”
“I’m afraid I need a hand.”
As Ned approached, Jacob could already see something was off from the way he staggered. When he stepped closer, Jacob offered him his arm for support and hauled him into the circle of light by the sofa, revealing the full extent of the damage. Someone had done a number on Ned: his lower lip was split, blood had poured from his nose over his mouth and chin and dried there, and there was a laceration on his cheek as well as a several fresh, reddish purple bruises all over. His glasses sat askew, the thin frame bent and the left lens cracked. Looking down, Jacob found one sleeve of his suit jacket hung on only by a few threads and the rest of his outfit had not fared much better.
Shock coursed through him cold as ice water. Jacob saw people in this state all the time; hell, he was the reason for it often enough. However, it somehow wasn’t right to have prim, immaculate Ned Wynert messed up like this. Even as Jacob had fished him out of the back of a police carriage, he’d still looked good and ready to go to a theatre uptown and charm the money out of some posh banker’s pockets.
Jacob sat Ned down on the couch.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“The Blighters disagreed with my business decisions,” Ned muttered.
He’d lost his hat somewhere. Jacob noticed that despite the fact that he looked ready to pass out, he wasn’t leaning back against the couch, and that’s when he saw the blood-stained shirt through the tears in the fabric at the back of his jacket. Knife slashes had left those, he was sure – too straight and even for anything else. At least the wounds didn’t seem to be gushing blood anymore, but the fabric looked like he’d lost enough.
“Christ, they got you good.”
“They only left me alone because I play dead pretty well,” Ned said flatly.
Jacob glanced over to the other waggon where his sister had built her nest. It was dark. He remembered she’d told him she would be out following a new lead on the Piece of Eden.
“Evie isn’t here,” he said.
Ned shrugged carefully.
“No offence to your sister, but I see a lot more of you, so I came to you on purpose. I figured you might be able to patch me up, since you’ve gotten into a fight or two in your life.”
The answer gave Jacob pause. It was true that Jacob dropped in at Ned’s Southwark office regularly, though he was a little embarrassed to have Ned point it out; and of course he also knew how to clean a wound and put on a bandage. No one came to him for that, though. People asked for Jacob when they needed someone hurt or something blown up and he didn’t mind that at all. Still, he was a little pleased to hear Ned didn’t think his talents began and ended at punching someone’s lights out.
“I don’t get my arse beaten like this, though,” he joked. “Don’t you have people who can put you back together?”
“Not the sort who need to see me torn up like a ragdoll. I’d have gone to them if I hadn’t seen the train, but I prefer this.”
“I get that,” Jacob said, even if he wouldn’t have expected Ned’s choice for a confidant to fall on himself, either. He sure as hell wasn’t going to complain, though, and maybe the fact that Ned somehow always found time to speak to him when Jacob climbed in through his office window at every hour of the day or night should have tipped him off that Ned didn’t mind him. Would have been a nice thought if the proof hadn’t had to come in the form of Ned beaten to a pulp. “Stay put.”
He jumped across the gap to the next waggon and grabbed a bowl to fill with water from one of the barrels they kept on the train. Clean cloth and bandages laid folded on a shelf, along with a tin box that held needles and gut strings. This was where the Rooks came to lick their wounds and Jacob was very happy that Agnes had a hand for keeping things organised so that he didn’t have to go looking for stuff.
With this bounty he returned to Ned, who looked paler by the second, sitting with his elbows leaning heavily on his knees. If he’d crawled his way here from who knew were, he’d probably lost a hell of a lot of blood. Jacob sat the bowl and cloth down and grabbed a bottle of cheap whiskey off his shelf.
“Here,” he said, after ripping the cork out with his teeth. “I’ll use this to clean your wounds, so better take a drink because it’s going to hurt.”
Ned sighed. “Bottoms up,” he murmured as he swallowed a mouthful and then shuddered like a wet cat. “How you survive drinking this swill regularly I’ll never know.”
“I have a special talent. Take your glasses off.”
Jacob sat the bottle down on a small table and dipped a cloth in water. As Ned reached for his glasses, Jacob saw his fingers shaking and missing twice before he managed to grip the frame. The shock wouldn’t help, but this looked like something worse.
“Did you hit your head?”
“Yeah,” Ned said bitterly. “Got it trapped between a boot and the pavement.”
Jacob concentrated on wringing the extra water out of the cloth to suppress the urge to get to his feet and find the Blighters who did this to pull them apart limb by limb. Ned needed him here, so revenge would have to wait – for now.
He took Ned’s chin in hand and dragged the cloth over his face to get the worst of the dirt and blood off and see the full damage. Ned watched him carefully, but did not attempt to pull back. When Jacob pressed his thumbs into the sides of his nose, he winced, yet still didn’t complain.
“It’s not broken,” Jacob said. “You’ll keep your pretty face, Wynert.”
Ned snorted quietly. “Lucky for you. You’ll still have something to look at.”
Jacob grinned, feeling his pulse spike briefly like always when Ned decided to humour his flirting. Not that Jacob lacked people who entertained his advances, but it meant more from Ned. Better not to think too much about that right now when he had him inches away from his face, though.
He emptied some of the whiskey onto another cloth and cleaned the wounds properly. The way Ned’s face twisted in pain made him want to hesitate, but there was no point and no mercy in dragging this out.
When he was finished, Jacob put the dirty cloth aside.
“I have to see what happened to your back. Do you need help taking your clothes off?”
“Probably,” Ned said unhappily. “I can’t reach backwards.”
Jacob nodded his head and moved behind him to take his jacket off. The undone tie came with it. Ned fumbled clumsily with the buttons of his ruined shirt before losing his patience and simple tearing at the two halves until the buttons gave or popped. When Jacob helped him out of the sleeves and pulled the shirt off of him, he had to rip frayed edges of fabric out of blood that had congealed over the wounds. Ned hissed, but kept sitting still. For a business man, he really knew how to keep it together. Jacob wondered if he’d gotten into scuffles back in his thieving days in New York.
There was another layer under the shirt: a broad bandage, already partially sliced and half unravelled, draped loosely around Ned’s chest.
“This needs to go, too,” Jacob said, tugging it once. “I’ve got a cut here that goes up to your shoulder blade.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. My back feels like someone cut off slices.”
Jacob removed the bandages and used a wet cloth to wash away the dried blood. Neds attackers had managed three strikes, one worryingly close to the spine. However, though all the wounds were long and ugly, none of them looked deep enough to have gotten at the organs from behind. They’d still hurt like hell, though, and could easily start to fester.
“How bad is it?” Ned asked tersely.
“Depends. How do you feel about battle scars?” Jacob asked. “The wounds should close up unless you get unlucky, but I’ll have to stitch them up.”
“Sounds like the best I could have hoped for,” Ned answered dryly.
Jacob got on cleaning these wounds, too, and then started sewing, pressing the needle through Ned’s flesh. While he did, he tried to ignore the twist in his stomach as Ned’s breathing sped up, interspersed with half-swallowed sounds of pain. He would have almost preferred him to scream just so he’d better know when to slow down and give him a second, but Ned wasn’t the type for that. After he had finished closing up the wounds and reached for another wet cloth to clean his hands, Jacob noticed Ned sniffing and raising a hand to his eyes. Jacob kept his mouth shut.
“Almost done here. You think they broke any ribs?”
“I can’t tell, Ned said.
Jacob carefully laid his hands against both sides of Ned’s ribcage while telling himself to ignore the view of Ned leaning forward, his middle bracketed by Jacob’s hands, a view he might have imagined before.
Bad moment to think with your prick, Jacob. The man’s in pain.
Ribs could be tricky. He didn’t feel any bones obviously standing at a worrying angle, but that didn’t need to mean much.
“There’s no swelling. They’re probably sprained at worst, but it’s hard to say. Best not to join any rugby matches soon.”
“I’ll restrain myself.”
Jacob grabbed the bandages and stopped. If he was going to do this properly, there’d be no way he wasn’t also going to look at the front of him, or otherwise risk grabbing Ned’s chest by accident while fumbling blindly reaching around him, and he wasn’t sure how Ned felt about Jacob seeing him naked. He hadn’t said anything so far, but then, the placement of his injuries hadn’t left him much of a choice.
“I need you to turn around for the bandages,” he said carefully.
“Like it matters now,” Ned answered, shifting awkwardly so he sat with his left side to Jacob.
He looked annoyed, exhausted, and beaten down. It was true that Jacob had already seen the dip of his middle and the shape of his hips when he’d taken the shirt off. Since Ned called himself a man, Jacob figured Ned knew best and had never seen a reason to argue, but he could imagine Ned had gotten enough shit for it in his life to be wary. As Ned looked at Jacob now, he kept a gaze as sharp as a blade on him, expectant, poised to throw whatever Jacob wanted to tell him back in his face.
“Well, this is a new one,” Jacob said. “I don’t get handsome naked businessmen on my couch that often. Most blokes in clothes as expensive as yours don’t like spending the night on a train.”
Evie probably would have hit him over the head with good justification for flirting with Ned in a moment like this, and even Jacob wondered immediately after the words were out of his big mouth if he had just earned himself an excommunication from Ned’s circle of closer associates.
Ned just stared at him for a moment, almost confused. Then he turned his head away to grin tiredly.
“You’re a goddamn moron, Frye,” he said.
“Yeah, sometimes,” Jacob admitted.
“And trains have never been a minus for me.”
Jacob breathed out quietly and then smiled to himself. He picked up the bandages.
“Come on, let’s get it over with.”
He wrapped the bandages as tight as he dared without knowing for certain whether Ned had any broken ribs and fastened them securely at the back. For a moment, he considered trying to keep his hands from brushing Ned’s skin, but it would have been awkward and Ned didn’t shy away from him. In fact, when Jacob placed both hands on his shoulders to make Ned sit up and give Jacob a chance to look at his final work to make sure it wouldn’t fall apart in a day, Ned leaned into the touch after a moment. The tension in his body had dispersed and Jacob hoped it was because he was comfortable, not because he was about to pass out.
As he looked at him, Jacob’s heart was suddenly in his throat, now that he had nothing to do with his hands, no more ways to help Ned. Death wasn’t new to him, he brushed shoulders with it daily, but seeing Ned sliced up neck to tailbone had somehow hit him differently, and seeing him covered in bandages brought it home with the force of a blow.
He wished he could have hugged Ned, but with his back being sliced open, that wasn’t a great idea. Instead, Jacob, who acted too often before he thought, dropped his forehead against Ned’s. Ned put his hand on Jacob’s knee.
“I’ve got to be honest, that looked like a pretty close call, Wynert,” Jacob said when he sat back.
A blade slipping two inches deeper, a wrong angle of the boot which had hit his head. It wouldn’t have taken more.
Ned peered up at him. “I’m not trying to make it a habit, believe me.”
“Good.”
To calm himself down, Jacob got up and rummaged through a chest for a clean shirt, which he helped Ned into. It hung formless on him, going down to his thighs and over his fingertips.
“Not exactly the latest fashion, but it’ll be comfortable enough to sleep in,” Jacob said, thinking that he liked Ned in his clothes.
Ned huffed. “So I can stay here for the night? That’s gracious of you.”
“I’d say I get some of your clothes tomorrow and you stay here for a couple of day days, at least. You could still collapse from a fever. You never know with wounds like this. I’m sure you don’t want to have your people see that, either.”
Frowning, Ned pulled at the overlong sleeve. “How did I end up in a situation where Jacob Frye is the voice of reason?”
“It scares me, too,” Jacob said, raising a brow at him.
He sat down next to Ned, who leaned over the bowl to wash his dirt-stained, scratched-up hands in the clean water.
“I owe you one,” Ned said, staring at the bowl.
Jacob groaned. “Great. So now you’ll hold a grudge against me?”
Ned chuckled roughly. “I did force this favour on you,” he admitted.
“Well, I have something for you free of charge,” Jacob said, feeling an unpleasant grin pull at his lips. “Point me the way of whoever did this and I’ll take care of them. It’ll be my pleasure.”
Ned shook his head, winced, stopped.
“I don’t know, Frye. I’m not saying I could beat you in the fighting ring, but those people might have done worse to someone stronger than me, too.”
“Look at that. You’re actually worried for me?” Jacob teased to get over the fact that his chest warmed pleasantly at the idea.
“Someone should be, since you’re obviously not going to use your head.” Ned lifted one cold, damp hand and leaned the back of it against Jacob’s cheek. “We should have a plan, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not opposed to you using that kukri in whatever creative ways you can think of.”
“I guess I wouldn’t want to get killed now.” Jacob grabbed his wrist and pulled Ned’s hand down to cover it with his own, watching a thin smile spread on Ned’s lips. “I have that favour to call in.”