Lord of Sin (23 page)

And how did that fact change anything? Whatever
the spirit may have done, Nuala
had
used her powers, not for good, but to harm…and not only to harm, but to come near to destroying a human life, however despicable that life might be.

And then she’d turned her powers on him, driving him before her as a wolf drives a sheep. Rejecting him completely, in every way.

You are cursed, Sinjin Ware
.

The earth wobbled under Sinjin’s shoes. He considered summoning a cab, but the thought of a bumpy ride through the congested London streets set his head to spinning.

He had to decide what to do. Nuala had been correct; he hadn’t the strength to stop her if she chose to continue on her present course. Would she graduate to greater mischiefs? If she would go so far to protect a friend, how might she punish anyone she perceived as an enemy to others for whom she held affection?

If he could not influence her with logic or an appeal to her better nature…

The spirit will know
.

Needles of ice pierced Sinjin’s spine. The apparition was not yet done with him. It hated Nuala, to be sure. It could not be trusted. But it might provide Sinjin with valuable information, information that might enable him to find an answer to a problem for which he had found no solution.

Knowing at last what he must do, Sinjin made his way home. His butler examined him in alarm. His valet clearly wished to smother him with concern over his state of dishevelment, but Sinjin dismissed
him. There was only one kind of help he needed now, and no mortal man could supply it.

He undressed, lay down on his bed and reached inside himself for the
other
. It was well past midnight when he felt the bone-deep chill settle over his skin. He sat up, threw off the sheets and stood naked in the middle of the room, listening. Gooseflesh covered his arms, and he knew he was no longer alone.

“I trust I have not disturbed you?”

Sinjin held his ground, though every human instinct recoiled in horror. The mist congealed before him, a formless cloud that gradually took on the shape he had seen in Mrs. Summerhayes’s parlor.

“Of course I have not,” the apparition said in a deep, mocking voice. “Can it be that you require my assistance?”

Sinjin stared into the spirit’s hollow eyes. He could make out more detail now: the deep lines bracketing the spirit’s mouth and creasing his forehead, marking him as a man of middle age; the reddish glint reflected in the hard, metallic gray eyes; the sharply cut bones that gave his cheeks and jaw a skeletal cast.

“Who are you?” Sinjin demanded.

“I am Martin Makepeace, and I was the first of the Wares, two hundred and forty-four years ago.”

It seemed unlikely that anything could be quite so absurd as a ghost in his bedchamber, but the spirit’s pronouncement left Sinjin almost breathless with laughter.

“The first of the Wares?” he repeated when he could breathe again.

The apparition—Martin Makepeace—stared at Sinjin in cold appraisal. “Yes,” he said. “It was the name I chose to give my son when I had no further need of my own. And I have been watching over my family for those two hundred and forty years. Watching for one who will finally bring an end to my long quest.”

Sinjin grabbed his dressing gown from the chair near the armoire and shrugged it over his shoulders. “You are a ghost. A spirit of the dead.”

“If you like.”

“And you’ve come to haunt me because I’m your descendant?” Sinjin found an unused cigar on a table and rolled it between his fingers. “I presume I am to feel honored by your attention.”

The razor Sinjin had laid on the table beside the washstand suddenly flew from its place and clattered to the carpet inches from his bare foot.

“Do not mock me,” Makepeace said softly. “I have but one purpose, and it will be fulfilled.”

Sinjin bent to pick up the razor and turned it about in his hand. “And what would that be?” he asked with equal softness.

“To ensure the punishment of the witch Nuala, known to your world as Lady Charles.”

“Punish her for what? Am I to infer that she has done you some personal injury?”

“I warn you, boy…”

“How can she have hurt a man who lived more then two centuries ago?”

“Ah.” Makepeace closed his eyes, and his shape became more solid, until it seemed as if another
living man stood in the room. “I told you it was not a story to be related in a moment.”

Sinjin set down both razor and cigar, found a chair and dropped into it. “I surmise that you won’t leave me alone until you have told it.”

“Very astute, boy. As it was astute of you to discover the witch’s true nature.”

“How in God’s name do you know what I’ve discovered?”

“Did I not say I was watching you?”

Sinjin gripped the arms of the chair. “How long?”

“Since you were a boy. As I watched your father, and your brother before you. The brother
she
killed.”

“No.” Sinjin started up, but that invisible force slammed him back into the chair. “Whatever she may have done to earn your hatred, she was no more responsible for Giles’s death than I.”

The apparition smiled. “Has she bewitched you so completely?” The windows rattled as if at a ferocious wind. “A few more days and I fear there would have been no saving you.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“Then why have you summoned me?” Makepeace stroked the fine black wool of his doublet with a slender aesthetic’s hand. “You believe yourself free, but you are not. She controls you, boy. I shall give you a chance to truly be rid of her.”

Was that what Sinjin wanted? To be rid of her? Rid of the responsibility he felt for her actions, of the lust that could not be driven away by even the most rigorous discipline?

“What do you want of me?” he asked.

“Very good. We have made a beginning.” Makepeace glanced about, selected a chair and sat, his half-translucent body blending with the chair’s upholstery. “You shall be my instrument of justice.”

“I’m no one’s instrument. You’ve used me before, but that ends now.”

“I did not use you in any way that did not reflect your own desires.”

“Liar. You would have had me abuse her.”

“As you, in your unbridled lust, would never have done.”

“No.
It was you. Only you.”

There was something like approval in Makepeace’s hooded gaze. “I see that your will is so much stronger than any of the others. That is why we shall succeed.”

Sinjin leaned back in the chair, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. “We go no further until you explain why you wish to punish Nuala.”

“That is a very simple matter, boy. I shall show you.”

The room darkened. Sinjin braced himself.

And the fire came. It began at Sinjin’s feet, eating through to bone, and licked up his legs. His dressing gown caught fire, but he was unaware of anything save the agony of his immolation.

“Feel it,” Makepeace’s distant voice intoned. “Feel what it is like to die.”

S
INJIN FELT HIS BODY
give way. The room vanished in a pall of acrid smoke.

“Do you feel what it was like for my father?” Makepeace said. “What it was like for him to burn, for his very organs to catch fire and be consumed within him while he yet lived?”

Unable to think, to see, to move his tongue, Sinjin could not answer. His lungs were white-hot coals in his chest, his heart a seething mass of melting tissue.

“
She
did this,” Makepeace said, so close that he must surely be burning, as well. “Your witch used her foul sorcery to contrive the most terrible death any man could imagine.”

“No,” Sinjin croaked.

“How can you deny it, when you now suffer the very fate to which my father was condemned?”

“This…” Sinjin’s felt his lips crack and peel away. “This is not real.”

“So you said of me.”

“You have…no power.”

“Do I not?”

The already unbearable pain intensified. Sinjin’s legs were naked bone now, and his ribs had begun to collapse into the empty cavity of his chest.

“You are right, Sinjin,” Makepeace’s voice murmured. “I have not the power to kill you here and now. Nor would I.”

In an instant the flames vanished. The smoke lifted and was gone. The agony receded, and Sinjin felt the air seep back into his lungs, the frantic rhythm of his heart begin to slow. Carefully, he moved his arms, lifting his hands to his face.

It was whole. So were his legs, his chest, every part of him that had burned. Even his dressing gown was untouched.

He tried to focus on the figure that reclined so easily in his chair.

“Damn you,” Sinjin whispered.

“Perhaps,” Makepeace said. “But if I fall into the Pit, so shall she.”

Sinjin dashed the sweat from his eyes. “Why?” he rasped. “Why have you done this?”

“To make you understand what she is capable of. Why she must be stopped.”

“Nuala…Nuala would never—”

“You have seen what she can do.” He leaned forward, staring into Sinjin’s aching eyes. “Do you think I would be here in this world of sorrow if it were not necessary to preserve it against such evil as the witch can inflict?”

Sinjin bent his head. The memory of pain was still very fresh. But now that he could think again,
he remembered seeing a face amid the smoke…a face he knew as well as his own.

Nuala.

“Yes,” Makepeace said. “My father, Comfort Makepeace, was the witch’s first victim.”

“Her first victim? She is, at most, five-and-twenty. How do you propose that she achieved this…miracle?”

“Because she is not five-and-twenty. She is as old as I.”

How many times, since the events at Donbridge four years ago, had Sinjin scoffed at fantastical proclamations such as these?

And how often had they proved to be true?

“Rubbish,” he snapped.

Makepeace sighed. “Did she tell you of her tragic past? Of her brave, innocent people who were driven into exile?”

Sinjin’s memories of his and Nuala’s conversation at the garden party were very clear. “She said nothing about exile.”

“Then she did not tell you why she was among the children of Satan when they were rightfully driven out for the most vile and wicked sorcery?”

“‘Children of Satan?’ You’re mad.”

“She killed my father because he would have prevented her and her kind from corrupting and destroying England.”

“Destroying England?” Sinjin gathered his legs to rise. “I’ve heard enough.”

“Sit yourself down!” A great weight ground into
Sinjin’s shoulders. He fought it, and fell from the chair. The weight pressed him into the carpet as if he were a beetle being crushed under an enormous foot.

“They are not human!” Makepeace roared. “They have always despised our kind, and intended to rule us all in Satan’s name. Had they succeeded, they would have begun a reign of terror surpassing the worst in human history!”

With a grunt of effort, Sinjin pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “Three centuries ago,” he grated, “people like you believed in demons and unicor—” He stopped, stunned by his own idiocy. Three hundred years ago, people had believed in unicorns. And fairies.

He had seen both.

“You have taken a witch to your bed,” Makepeace said, sensing his weakness. “You stand on the very lip of Hell.”

Sinjin rolled to sit with his back against the wall. “If such broad claims and illusions are all you have to offer as proof—”

Makepeace surged up from his chair. “Puppy,” he snarled. “What must I do to convince you? How far must
she
go? Is it not enough that she has, in your very sight, used her powers to harm? That she killed your brother?”

“She would never have harmed Giles.”

Makepeace sneered in disgust. He lifted his hand as if he would work some new mischief and then sank into his chair again. “You continue to deny that she had anything to do with your brother’s death. Yet it was she who manipulated both him and Lady
Westlake so that the woman would shoot her lover. She made them both mad, by driving Lord Donnington to desperate lust for the girl Mariah and promoting the foulest jealousy in Lady Westlake’s heart.”

“Why? What possible purpose could she have for such acts?”

“Because she hates us. She hates the Wares, who once bore the name of Makepeace. It has been her purpose for the last two centuries to take the lives of every male in each generation. Only I have been able to salvage one heir in each family, to carry on our name and continue the battle.”

The apparition’s words made no sense until Sinjin cast his memory back to his father’s generation, and
his
father’s, and all the others about which he had learned as a boy.

In every family, several sons had been born. In each, all but one heir had died in young adulthood, childless, often after they had inherited the earldom, leaving it—as Giles had left his title—to a younger brother.

“Accidents,” Makepeace said. “Was that not always the way of it? A fall from a horse, a shooting mishap, a drowning, a suicide. All coincidence, Sinjin?”

Of course they were. They must be. To believe that Nuala was over two hundred years old, that she could conceal such malice in her heart and yet lie in his arms, filling him with the kind of happiness he hadn’t known for as long as he could remember…

“Think also on this, boy. Have you never wondered how the Earls of Donnington came by their great wealth? It was
I
who brought it about. I who
advised my grandson beyond my own death, urging him to support Charles the Second during his exile in France. From King Charles he received the earldom and lands enough to make him rich. With every passing year, I have made the Wares more wealthy still.”

“Then I am not the first to receive the signal honor of your ‘advice?’”

“Not at all. I merely suggested…a whisper in your ancestors’ ears when an opportunity for advancement arose. And you?” He smiled that skeletal smile. “I whispered in
your
ear when the witch came to you.”

Sinjin clung to his composure, remembering his original purpose. Not to give in to the ghost’s threats and blandishments, but to learn.

“Everything you have said is balanced upon the presumption that Nuala and all her kind are evil,” he said.

“Would I be here, separated from Heaven, if she were innocent?” A deep weariness passed over Makepeace’s face, and he closed his eyes. “I ask your help not only for myself and my murdered father, not only for the generations who have suffered, but for the sake of this new age, this new city. If you have any doubts about what the witch may do, what she has done to your family, then you must not shut me out.”

Doubts. God, yes. He had doubts. Nuala was not innocent. Whether or not she had been ultimately responsible for Giles’s death, as he had once believed, she was capable of violence against anyone who crossed her. She could not or would not control her abilities.

Perhaps Makepeace’s father had deserved what
had become of him. Perhaps he had “driven out” a people who did not deserve such treatment. Sinjin had no way of knowing. But if he were to ask Nuala of her past, of her supposed age, of her alleged crime, would she ever admit to any of it? To
him,
whom she had so soundly rejected?

“Even if I were to accept anything that you have told me,” Sinjin said, “I will not be your weapon of revenge. I will not harm Nuala.”

“Harm her?” Makepeace leaned his head on his hand, and had he been a living man it would have seemed as if he were weeping. “I would punish her, yes. But I would not take her life.” He looked up, the hollows in his face no more than wells of shadow. “It has been so long. So long. I have let my anger get the better of me. But I am no murderer.”

Sinjin picked up the razor again. The sharpened edge cut a thin red line in his finger. “What would you have me do?”

“Complete the vow. Strip Nuala of her powers, so that she may never harm another living soul.”

Strip her of her powers. What would that mean to a two-hundred-and-forty-four-year-old witch?

Salvation. Freedom from a cruel master she was incapable of defying. A normal life. The happiness Sinjin knew eluded her.

“How is such a thing to be achieved?” he asked thickly.

But Makepeace’s shape, previously so solid in appearance, had begun to dissolve as if he were losing the power to hold himself in the mortal world.

“You must learn for yourself,” he said, his voice growing faint. “Go to Donbridge. You will find a concealed door behind the paneling in the library. It contains a book written by my father.”

“A book? What sort of book?”

“I cannot stay.” Makepeace’s shape became so transparent that the chair was fully visible through it. “You will find the means at Donbridge.”

And then he was gone, only a trace of dark mist left behind.

Sinjin stood very still, waiting. Makepeace did not return. The room was deathly silent as Sinjin found his way back to his chair.

So he was to go to Donbridge and find a book that would explain how he was to put a stop to this madness.
If
he were to believe anything Makepeace had said.
If
he were to learn that this mysterious method of ending Nuala’s power would do her no harm.

He knew there were things the ghost had not told him, things he had kept hidden. But what choice did Sinjin have?

Go to Nuala one last time. Speak with her. Ask her for the truth
.

But she had closed her mind and her heart to him. It had gone too far.

He summoned his valet to help him pack.

“W
E HAVE FOUND HER
.”

Nuala focused again on Clara’s face. It was good news. The best. Deborah had been discovered at a country house in Kent, one of her late husband’s
properties previously unknown to the Widows. She had been persuaded to return to London…not by the Widows, who had assumed the work for which Nuala should have been responsible, but by Ioan Davies, who had insisted upon accompanying Clara, Frances and Julia Summerhayes on their sojourn to Kent.

“They cannot be separated,” Clara said with an air of bemusement. “It is most definitely love, despite the barriers that ought to exist between them. Even Tameri has acquiesced to the inevitability of Deborah’s downfall.”

Inevitable, indeed. If Nuala required any further proof that her magic had become as wild and undependable as a Fane lordling’s honor, Deborah’s situation must have provided it. Nuala had been bent on putting Deborah and Melbyrne together, and she had been wrong. Blindly, inexorably wrong. Her path forward was now clear.

“Of course she will not stay in London,” Clara continued. “It does not appear as if those ridiculous rumors will gain any further traction, but there would be the worst sort of talk once Deborah’s relationship with young Davies became known.
She
might defy Society, but Davies will not permit it. I believe they mean to—” Clara cocked her head. “I should not tell you what Deborah will tell you herself. She, Julia and Mr. Davies should arrive by two.”

So soon. It was nearly ten o’clock now, and Nuala knew she was in no fit state to speak to anyone.

“I…will not be here to see her,” she said. “I am leaving London. I do not know when I shall return.”

Clara leaned forward in her chair. “What nonsense is this?” Her eyes narrowed. “Has it something to do with Lord Donnington?”

“Nothing,” Nuala said too quickly. “Whatever you may have heard…I have not been flinging myself at his head in the expectation of a proposal.”

“A proposal?” Clara laughed. “What an astonishing thought. I have heard no such talk. But we
have
noticed that neither you nor Deborah have attended our gatherings in the past weeks, and you have been seen speaking intimately with Donnington on more than one occasion. Of course it had seemed that you had no liking for each other….” Her voice trailed off. “What goes on between you and the earl, Nuala? Has
he
been pursuing you?”

“Nothing of the kind. You are quite right—we despised each other from the moment we met. I…I knew him before I came to London, before my marriage. It was not a pleasant acquaintance.”

“Ah.”

“I knew I might see him again, but expected that we would avoid each other. Apparently, Lord Donnington’s quarrelsome nature could not be denied.”

“I see.”

Clara did not see. A bee had found its way into her bonnet, and she had already drawn her own conclusions.

“I have been a poor friend to all of you,” Nuala said. “But you need have no fear that I will follow Deborah’s path. I have recently learned of certain holdings from my husband’s estate in Scotland and
Northumberland. It is necessary for me to visit them before I can determine what must be done with them.”

“But surely you can put this off until another day, when Deborah—”

“I cannot.” Nuala rose. “Deborah is safe. She does not need me now, and I must finish preparing for my journey. Please give Deborah and Mr. Davies my very best wishes for their future happiness.”