Page 23 of Courting Trouble
Nora.
“What I would have given to stay,” the man sighed, leaning in conspiratorially. “As Dorian Blackwell, hisown self,showed up just as I was being drug ‘ere by me mate, Stodgy Tim. It seemed to me like he and Morley ’us after the same poor ponce in the warehouse.”
“You don’t say.” Titus tugged the suture clamps tight to make certain that if Ludlow moved again, they’d make him uncomfortable. He absorbed himself with stitching the wound so as not to reveal the odd amalgamation of tensions swirling within him.
The Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard and the king of the London underworld after the same enemy? There were certain to be casualties. He knew Morley from the army. He knew Blackwell from the streets.
How they knew each other was anyone’s guess.
By right of their professions, alone, they were natural adversaries.
Titus worried for Prudence. A fondness for all four of the Goode girls had developed during his tenure at Cresthaven. He truly hoped that Pru—a child he remembered as sweet and mischievous—was unharmed. That Ludlow had the story completely wrong.
Was a war between the police and the underworld here at his doorstep?
The very thought curdled his stomach. How the streets would run red with blood if Blackwell and Morley truly went to battle. There weren’t enough surgeons in the Empire to clean up after such a nightmare.
Titus exchanged a meaningful glance with his nurse, a battleax in her thirties by the name of Euphemia Higgins. Effie’s hands were almost as large as his, and twice as gentle. She could just as easily carry a two-hundred-pound man as she could swaddle a newborn, and he’d follow her level head into a battle before most officers he’d served with. Beneath her nurse’s cap and frizzy blond hair, was a brain with enviable computation capabilities. Wereshethe one with a medical degree from Cambridge, she’d rule the world and then some.
“So, you’re not certain if anyone else was wounded?” he asked Mr. Ludlow with increasing urgency.
Any chance at a reply was squelched by a commotion outside.
Most people who called at Titus Conleith’s Southwark Surgery door also lurked on death’s doorstep. Therefore, patients or their loved ones rarely knocked politely. They pounded and screamed. Begged for help. Sometimes, they begged for death. He’d treated people who bled or leaked from every possible orifice, starting at the eyes and concluding at the other end.
Having his door splintered at the hinges with one kick, however, was entirely new.
A good surgeon trained himself not to startle. Titus had been educated with explosions rocking the earth beneath him, and bullets whizzing past his ears, so he was—luckily for Mr. Ludlow—more imperturbable than most.
“The door was unlocked,” he blithely reproached Dorian Blackwell, the Black Heart of Ben More, whose boots thundered like the devil’s on the rickety old floors of the clinic.
Doors didn’t close to a man like him.
Not even Newgate could hold Blackwell, or so the story went. His suit, hair, and one eye were as dark as his heart, the other eye covered by a patch that almost hid the evidence of a vicious slash from his brow to his nose. The scar made his grim expression sinister as he surveyed the surgery with a critical frown.
“Someone’s been shot, Conleith. Which table?”
Titus relinquished Ludlow’s final sutures to Nurse Higgins, before marching past the one other empty examination table to pull back the curtains of the clinic’s makeshift operation room. He’d done everything from delivering babies to removing ruptured spleens and appendixes here. Though, he usually dug bullets out of criminals after dark, and it was barely five in the evening.
“Tell me Morley’s not on your heels, Blackwell,” he demanded, glad to be one of the few men in the world tall enough to glaredownat the Black Heart of Ben More as he marched past him to the sink to ruthlessly scrub his hands. “If there’s a clash between the law and the underworld in my surgery, then you can find someoneelseto stitch up your army of reprobates and degenerates in the middle of the night; do I make myself clear?”
Blackwell, who had killed men for lesser offenses, merely held up his hands in a gesture of good will. “I forgot how fast news travels in these parts. I imagine Morley will be along shortly, but not for the reason you fear.”
“Oh? Enlighten me.” Nearly finished stripping the skin from his hands, Titus moved up his wrist and forearms with the stringent suds.
More footsteps clomped up the few stairs from the street into his surgery, these weighted down by the burden of a stretcher. As he stood at the sink, Titus’s back was to the door, and Blackwell’s bulky shoulders blocked any view he might have had.
“Where do we put her?” a rough voice inquired.
Her?
Titus froze, his hand at his elbow, his breath caught in his throat.
“Operating table at the back,” Higgins directed in her starched Cockney accent.
“Is—is it Pru—Morley’s wife?” he asked, after clearing dread out of his throat.
“No, Prudence is unharmed. She was kidnapped by her own brother-in-law, who used her as a hostage to not only escape the police, but some rather ruthless cocaine smugglers, even by my standards.” Blackwell examined him oddly as Titus rinsed his hands. “The villain shot his own wife before Morley eviscerated him with frankly astonishing rifleman skills.”
