Rook (6 page)

Spear was pretending to read his newspaper, but Sophia could see where his attention lay: on the conversation he could no longer hear. She moved her rook and René immediately moved after her, almost as soon as she had taken her fingers from the black-carved wings. She considered holding back her words, and decided she could not.

“And while we’re speaking freely, Monsieur, there is something I have been meaning to ask you. I wonder what sort of proof you’ve offered my father that your inheritance is intact.”

“You think I am a … what is the word? A ‘con man’?”

“I think I shall know you are not before I make any plans with the vicar.”

René laughed, not the one that set her teeth on edge, but something deeper. “Oh, Sophia,” he said, shaking his head. “You see so much, and yet you only see so far. Shall I tell you why?”

She crossed her arms, staring down at her queen.

“It is because you do not choose to look.”

And it was then she saw it. She sat forward, staring at the board while the wind howled, lips parted in a silent gasp. Before her was a trap, subtle yet effective. It was not his king but her queen that was lost. The game was lost. She had been a fool.

She raised her eyes, and for the first time gave René Hasard’s face her full attention. He was still leaning sideways in the chair, their candle putting half his expression in shadow as he looked toward the hearth. Square jaw just showing the end of the day’s stubble, straight nose, and eyes that were an intense blue, a fire in the forge blue, an almost unnatural color against the powdered hair. The brows were drawn down, thoughtful, not black or brown, she saw, but a dark russet. Did René have red hair?

Who was this man who never contemplated the matters of his city, but who could so easily out-strategize her on a chessboard, apparently without even trying? And why had he really gone to see his cousin that day, his dangerous, murdering cousin, the cousin that was threatening her father with jail unless she brought him the Rook? And then she saw where those hot blue eyes were looking: straight at her brother’s bad leg, propped on the cushion.

A blast of wind whistled past the chimneys, smacking a branch sharp against the windowpane. “Oh!” Sophia squealed, leaping from her chair and upsetting the table. St. Just yelped and René caught the board before it hit the floor, chess pieces rolling to the far ends of the carpet. Bellamy woke with a snort.

“Blimey, Sophie,” Tom said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Stupid of me. The wind has me nervous, I think.” She saw the surprise on Spear’s face; she didn’t dare look at René. “It’s been such a long day, I think I should go to bed. Good night, Father.”

Bellamy was still looking about, blinking in confusion. René had righted the table and was on his feet, taking her hand to kiss it as usual. But this time Sophia felt her own eyes dragged up to meet his, two wells of knowing over half a smile before his lips touched her hand. She could not fathom what lay behind that smile. Then he whispered,
“Je pense que nous pouvons dire que ce jeu est un match nul, n’est-ce pas?”

Sophia pulled her hand away, only just keeping her walk from breaking into a run as she crossed the room to the door, where St. Just was already waiting for her. She shut out the light of the sitting room with a slam and leaned against the heavy oak.

René had offered to call their game a draw, when they both knew full well that he had won. And he’d said it in Parisian. She was unsure whether that, or his unsuspected skill at chess, or the way he had been looking at Tom’s leg was the most unsettling. Or maybe it was the way he’d been looking at her. St. Just ran down the corridor, unperturbed by the dark, while Sophia shivered, waiting for her eyes to adjust and her heartbeat to slow. She’d forgotten a candle, and the corridor was not heated. They only heated the rooms they had to in Bellamy House.

She heard feet approaching from behind the door and slid a few steps down the hall, but it was only Spear coming out of the sitting room with a light. He moved down the corridor to lean against the wall opposite. Spear was built like a fighter, or a footballer, so tall she had to tilt her head back to look at him in the chilly, narrow hallway.

“So what happened?” he asked quietly.

“Nothing,” she said. Or at least nothing that she could explain to Spear in a few stolen moments in a corridor.

“He’s lying about LeBlanc,” Spear said. “I swear he didn’t leave the north wing until he came out to find you this morning.”

Sophia wrinkled her forehead. “Why lie about that? It makes no sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense. Which is why you shouldn’t go tonight.”

“I think it’s the exact reason why I should go.”

“Put it off, Sophie. Please. Just for a night.” He reached out and straightened one of the sleeves on the gauzy pink dress. She shivered again. The corridor was freezing. “You know Tom is going to agree with me,” Spear said.

She bit her lip, thinking. “Are you sleeping here tonight, or going back to the farm?” Spear had had his own room a floor up from Tom ever since they were children.

“I can stay here.”

“Then between you and Tom, let’s make very certain that my fiancé does not leave the north wing.”

“I
’ll
do as I was told,” Orla said stoutly.

The hotelier of the Holiday folded two meaty arms across his chest. “I’ve no instructions about any shirts. The man said no one in his room till he’s coming back.”

“Then Monsieur LeBlanc has made a mistake. He specifically asked to have his shirts cleaned before tomorrow.”

“And you’ve come to get them in the rain.”

“I have no control over the weather.”

“And where do you come from again?”

Orla drew herself up straight, pulling her coat close around her, the picture of female dudgeon. “I don’t see how that is any of your business.”

The hotelier sighed. “Come back in the dawn, if you must.”

“Is that when Monsieur LeBlanc said he would return?”

“At the soonest. Now be on your way. I’ve things to attend to.”

“On your own head be it, then,” said Orla. She pulled her coat even closer and stepped out of the Holiday, into the inky rain and a waiting haularound. From the dark corner of the common room, where the firelight did not reach, Benoit lowered his mug.

LeBlanc lowered his eyescope. He was standing in the stable, watching sheets of rain batter the house of Mrs. Rathbone. The house was large and respectable, the light of oil lamps shining out from the windows onto a recently harvested, now soggy field. The horses whinnied, kicking at the stall doors, upset by the storm and the scent of wild dog on the cloth that LeBlanc had been waving before their noses. A house door opened, as he had hoped, and a small figure stepped gingerly into the rain. LeBlanc moved back into the shadows.

The figure entered the stable, unwrapping a shawl from around a blond head shorn short about the ears. The girl set a covered lamp carefully on a shelf, its light showing a spatter of freckles over her nose, and went to lay a hand on the nearest horse. The nape of her neck glowed bare and pale in the lantern light. LeBlanc’s smile crept wider. Luck truly was with him. He’d taken one step toward the girl when the stable door burst open. LeBlanc slid back into the gloom of an empty stall.

“Jennifer!” It was Ministre Bonnard, now shaved and looking considerably more clean, though no less fearful. “What are you doing?” His eyes darted over the interior of the stable, and he lowered his voice. “What are you thinking of, coming out here alone?”

Jennifer frowned. “It’s raining, Papa, and the horses were frightened. No one is going to be out here looking for us in the rain …”

LeBlanc shook his head. Women were so foolish.

“… and I thought I would go mad inside. The walls are too close …”

“It’s not safe, Jen, rain or no. Come back to the house. Quickly, now.”

Ministre Bonnard took the lantern in one hand and his daughter’s arm in the other, pulling her away from the stamping horses. They left the stable in darkness.

LeBlanc rose up from his crouch, still smiling, and when the door to the Rathbone house had closed, he stole out into the rain and back to the woodlands beyond the fields, where he’d left his own horse tied beneath a thick canopy of branches. Fate, he sensed, was moving her divine fingers.

Orla flexed her cold hands, a towel beneath her dripping steel-gray hair. “I argued with the man, but there was nothing doing,” she said.

Sophia was tugging her boots over tight breeches while the rain beat the roof tiles. “LeBlanc is being cautious, that’s all,” she said. As he should be.

“I don’t like it, Sophie.” Tom leaned on his stick, frowning at the pale pink, gauzy gown she’d left in a heap on the floor. He said no more words, but Sophia discerned the rest of his thoughts clearly. Too bold. “What Hasard said tonight was odd,” he continued. “There’s too much here that we don’t know.”

“Which is exactly why we must know what LeBlanc knows,” Sophia said, now tying back her hair. Her ringlets were brushed away, a knife worn sheathed at her side. With a very deliberate fit of shirt, she stood on the hearth rug looking for all the world like a slightly younger copy of her brother, and she understood his hesitation; she was feeling it, too. A net, coming from all sides, and drawing tighter. “Really, Tom. You know there’s no choice.”

The truth was, she’d been hoping Orla’s part of the plan would fail. Counting on it. She’d been sitting in the house playing polite for far too long. She wanted nothing more than to be out alone in the night and the rain. She tugged on an oil-slicked coat. “Do you have Mr. Lostchild’s gloves, Orla?”

Orla handed her a package wrapped in a freshly laundered piece of wool with leather over that, the bundle tied tight with string. Sophia tucked it into her vest.

“And here, child,” said Orla simply, holding out a leather string. Sophia nodded, twisting her ring from her forefinger, its large, pale stone winking in the lamplight. She strung it on the leather and pulled it over her neck, letting it dangle beneath her shirt.

Tom sighed and turned the iron latch on Sophia’s window, letting in a wet and salty wind. “The rain is unfortunate,” he commented. “Cartier won’t be able to start his run until it lets up or the foxes might lose his scent. He won’t have enough of a start.”

Cartier had been born in the Sunken City, along with an elder brother who’d gone beneath the Razor a year earlier. Tonight Cartier was running all the way to the hills above Mainstay in Mr. Lostchild’s shoes, coat, and pants, leading LeBlanc on a chase that would hopefully turn the man’s gaze from Bellamy House.

“Cartier’s fast,” Sophia said. “And willing, and you know as well as I do that the storm will have blown itself out before dawn. It’s a good plan, Tom.”

“I think we should be sending Spear.”

“Spear drinks at the Holiday much too often for this!”

Orla shook her wet head. “Do you think your sister is going to pass up the chance to have all the risks to herself?”

Tom’s frown deepened, and Sophia nearly stomped a foot. “Stop being such a grandmother, Tom! When will we have another opportunity to search LeBlanc’s room and put him off the scent?”

Tom shook his head. He knew there might not be another opportunity. “By dawn,” he said. “And don’t be reckless.”

“Reckless? Of course not!” She hopped onto the windowsill. “And keep an eye on my fiancé!”

“Two of them,” Tom replied.

Sophia gave them both one last grin, and jumped out the window.

The roof tiles were slick with rain, but the slope was gentle, and even in the dark Sophia knew exactly when to turn and how far to slide to the edge. She made another jump and landed softly on the flatter roof over her father’s study, ran across this, shinnied down a gurgling drainpipe, swung herself around to a window ledge, and dropped. Her boots thumped on a flat stone, placed there years ago for the purpose by Tom. She had the instinctive urge to move to one side so Tom could jump down after her. But there was no need for that, not anymore. She knew he missed it, the same way she missed him now. It had always been the two of them. And Spear.

The sea boomed on the edge of hearing, churned by the rain, filling the air with the smell of brine. Sophia lifted her face, letting the water pelt her cheeks until they stung. Then she took a deep breath and ran full tilt through the night, splashing across the lawns, around the derelict print house, taking the fence in one leap. She sloshed her way toward the woodlands, where her horse stood sheltered, saddled, and waiting for her.

It was well after middlemoon when Sophia tied her horse in another woodland, this time in a thick copse well off the road. The rain had finally poured itself out, only the occasional fat drop smacking against her shoulders and back. She left her wet coat on the horse, making the final part of her journey on foot. There was little danger in this. To come down the A5 was to take the long way around to anywhere unless you were headed to the Holiday inn, and even that was more of a pause than a destination, a place to stop on your way to somewhere better. No one ever used the lane except the vicar, and that was only after chapel, because he liked to shuck off his robes and have a dip in the sea on his way to the pub.

She was passing the last of the empty printer bungalows, at the place where the sea cliffs had eroded nearly to the road, when a glow caught her eye, up in the sky and far out to sea. Sophia slowed, and then stopped. There was a faint rumble, a short pop of very distant thunder, as if the storm had returned, and then the glow grew brighter, sharper. All at once a ball of light shot beneath the clouds. Sophia ran to the side of the road and jumped up to the first branch of a short, stunted tree, watching yellow fire make a streaking arc across the blackness.

She’d seen paintings that looked like that. On the walls of Parisian chapels. Fiery streaks of light that had led the dying to the underground of the Sunken City, sent to them by the saint that took the form of a rook. They were drawn as symbols of hope on those walls, like the black feather. But not long before her mother died, when Bellamy had been a different man, her father had told her that during the Great Death the nighttime had been filled with such streaking lights. That when technology failed, all the Ancient machines of the sky, the satellites, burned as they fell, rushing to the ground in pieces of flaming metal. So many machines that they’d fallen for years.