Authors: J. Jay Kamp
Leaning back, Christian touched the blood at his mouth. His eyes were heavy with unspoken defiance as he attempted to pull himself up to his feet. But with his intoxication, he tottered in the effort until, grudgingly, James was forced to help.
Christian waited then for the promise to be kept.
“Kill the scoundrel,” said one of James’s guests.
“Yes,” Christian said, “give Banks what he wants. After all, he wishes me dead as much as you do, with all those precarious secrets of yours buried with me safe and sound. One good thrust and everyone wins.”
With his soft hair drifting in the morning breeze, his shoulders hunched ever so slightly, Christian seemed frail in the face of James’s leonine scrutiny, and yet he urged him. “Do you wait for the mood to strike you?
Deliver me!”
When this didn’t happen, he glanced at Ravenna. “Help me, Beloved. Indulge me this once and give him the sword.”
Ravenna stepped back. His voice was so rational, so calm and needful of his own destruction, and
now
his words were laced with love? When he’d driven her so far in the midst of his torture, when he’d so nearly killed what affection she’d felt?
But as she stood there miserably, feeding on the love she saw in his face, she heard James issue the final prophecy.
“I won’t,” James said, giving Christian one last look before turning toward Ravenna. “Not in front of your wife, I won’t. You have until Wednesday to put your affairs in order, Cousin, and after that, God help you.”
“
NO!”
Holding the sword out of his reach, Ravenna backed away. “James, you can’t do this.”
Holding out a lean, brown hand, James stepped toward her. “Give it over, Love. There’s two days yet before he feels that blade, and doubtless he’ll disappear long before then.”
He took another step. Ravenna’s heart hammered as she drew back further, but behind them, Christian’s expression had changed. As if he were struggling for air, for salvation, his eyes roved in a restless darting; his lips moved in a panic even as James raised his voice, tried to reason angrily with Ravenna. “He chose this destiny, not I. Can’t you see what will happen, should he take the estate? He leaves me no choice and he knows as much!”
Ravenna clutched the sword tighter, tears spilling down as she stood her ground. “If you kill him, so help me, I’ll leave you here, James. I’ll drink the potion and go back without you.”
Pain swept over James’s dark features. “Is that what you want?” Sharp voice, full of anger. “Because he’ll die regardless, but if your love for me runs as shallow as that—”
“Of course it doesn’t. But how could I look at you the same way again? How can money be that important?”
James shook his head bitterly, while beyond him, Christian was pacing now, gulping between stuttered words, “Not soon enough, it must be now, it has to be now…”
James didn’t hear him. “He made you his protector at Nootka, didn’t he? Is that when he told you? Is that when the lying began? Because I could’ve killed him, if only you’d said to me
one word
.”
Listening to him rage, Ravenna fingered Paul’s sword, that thing of sanctity David had worshipped. “Please,” she said, and heedless of James’s fiery eyes, she approached him then, didn’t fight when he pried her hands from the weapon; instead, she moved closer until, standing so near she might have kissed him, she whispered softly beneath James’s chin, “no more death and I’ll never drink it. I won’t go back without you, I promise.”
No sooner had she said it when, over his shoulder, she saw a flash, the muzzle of a pistol, Christian raising it to the back of James’s head. In a rush of fear, she shoved the sword in James’s hand. With one swift motion, he’d turned and thrust it hard through Christian.
In Christian’s fragile hand, the pistol shook, dropped.
He lingered there for a few seconds; tilting against the length of the blade, he glanced down, and where the scrolled steel disappeared inside him, blood began to spread. It turned the white of his waistcoat to scarlet. It seeped between his fingers where he clutched at the wound, and when he staggered backward, eyes cast desperately toward Ravenna, it drained from his face in a sudden, ghastly paling of his features.
She tried to catch him, to ease him to the grass even as James followed through, pinning him down in a cloven sprawl. “Fetch the doctor!” she cried desperately.
No one did. Sir Joseph Banks stood watching with his friends. Sarah clung to James. And with the sword extended unwaveringly before him, James stood righteously silent.
Managing to get her hands beneath him, Ravenna propped Christian up in her arms. His pulse was strong. His eyes were open, but still Ravenna knew it was useless when James withdrew the sword from his body, for Christian didn’t struggle. His fingers stirred through the slickness of blood, his dull lashes fluttered, but he made no sound as the weapon came out.
Instead, gray and wide, his eyes met Ravenna’s with rampant fear. “I’ll die, will I not?” His breath was weak where he shifted on her lap. “Is that not what your histories predicted?”
“I don’t want you to.”
Looking up at her, Christian cringed. “Dear God, how can you be so? After what I’ve done?”
“Nothing you’ve done is worth this,” she said.
“No, Beloved,” and moving his hand to touch hers, he gripped her tight, “you’ve no idea the unspeakable acts I’ve committed in your name. You can’t see what a back-stabbing, grievous coward I’ve been, but I’ve—”
“Shhh,” she soothed. “Cowards don’t attack James.”
“James is
nothing
.” As if bludgeoned by that nameless guilt, he clenched his teeth, went on stubbornly, “If you knew what lies in wait, you’d understand. You’d hate my very name and thank God for this day—”
“Quiet now,” she urged him. “Lie still until the doctor comes.”
But behind her, as James ordered the postilion to take the mare, to fetch the stable boys for Christian’s body, Ravenna heard Banks add with a shout, “And don’t bring the surgeon! We can’t have him recovering now, can we, Wolvesfield?”
As the boy went running, Banks stooped to the grass. He picked up the pistol, and Ravenna wanted to punch him when she saw how his face simmered with pleasure in examining the weapon, in glancing at James. “What a stroke of luck,” Banks mused.
With Sarah hovering at his side, James frowned.
“Plainly self-defense,” Banks explained. “I tell you, by Friday you’ll be appending to your name the letters F.R.S. if I have anything to say about it, regardless of who your father was.”
James’s eyes narrowed. “You’d make me a fellow? But you haven’t even read my treatise. And the voyage itself has been—”
“Oh, I’ll read it…eventually. They’ll have to on Thursday when they elect you, and you’ve most definitely earned it. When this rascal kicks off, a great many of my mistakes go with him and I owe it to you, my friend. I owe it most humbly to you.”
James studied Banks suspiciously, as if he didn’t believe what he’d said. “So I’ve spent nearly two years at sea and my treatise won’t even be read? I’m to be elected purely in payment for services rendered?”
Banks gave a nervous laugh. “I merely meant that, as I’m so indebted to you, I see no reason to suffer you the usual formalities of—”
“I hold no regard for what you meant. I am
not
your hired assassin, Mr. Banks.
I am not
.”
James glared at Banks. On Ravenna’s lap, Christian groaned; he tore at the place where the sword had been, and seeing him suffer, she pulled at James’s hand. “He needs to be in the house where it’s warm. I won’t have him out here for Banks to—”
“
He’ll die where I say so
!
”
James jerked his hand out of hers. “Had he gotten his way, I’d lie there in his place. Would you rather it were me?”
That sudden anger to James’s voice, as if he hated her, made Ravenna suck in a breath with tears, but in her arms, Christian was writhing, moving his bloodied hand within the folds of his coat as if prompted by James’s words. “Here,” Christian said. “Look here, in my pocket.”
His fingers closed around hers. Something was in his grasp, a small package, heavy and made wet by the wound. Even without looking at it, she knew by the feel what the package contained: As newly bought as the gun itself, a handful of bullets lay sealed and undisturbed within that paper wrapping.
She passed it to James, watched his mouth open.
“For my head, had you failed me,” Christian mumbled.
James looked down at the bullets in his hand, then back at Ravenna. It was only then she saw the rampant emotion in James’s eyes, the anger sliding fast into doubt, as if he needed her reassurance, as if he were saying,
How could I have known? What kind of idiot raises against me an unloaded gun?
Banks chuckled. In a burst of anger, James tore his eyes from Ravenna’s and, removing his hand from around Sarah’s back, he put it forth to Banks viciously. “Give me the pistol.”
“It’s not even loaded.” Banks smirked broadly. “You’ve just killed him for nothing so much as a trot with his—”
“
Give it to me!
And I’ll thank you to leave this house without a word to anyone regarding what you’ve heard.”
Banks squinted at James, toying with the pistol. “With such a tone, young man, why ever should I grant you that?”
“Because Christian’s told me everything he knows about you, all of you,” Ravenna said over her shoulder. “Now give James the gun and get out of here, or I’ll start naming names.”
She waited for Banks to react, but he didn’t. As if he’d heard nothing, the man kept his focus on James until finally, from Ravenna’s arms, Christian murmured faintly, “The Hadean Club, Beloved. Begin with the time Banks hired fifteen boys to fondle his—”
Already Banks was walking toward the house.
James didn’t wait for Banks’s friends to recover. Forbidding the stable boys to lay a hand on Banks’s carriage or assist the man’s servants in any way, he sent them instead to bring the surgeon and Reverend Wells while, with his own hands, James lifted Christian and carried him inside.
Up the front steps and into the great hall, James didn’t pay any attention to the blood smearing his best coat. Sarah was quick to touch him at every turn, leading him by the arm, ushering him into the bedroom with her hand at James’s back, and when she’d smoothed out the blankets for him to lay Christian down upon, the maid whispered, “Did you think I’d an eye on your money, Jem? I’ve known forever, you’d no fear in tellin’ me.”
Downstairs, Banks’s servants complained loudly as Mr. Scott roused them and sent them to packing. From Megan’s adjoining room, the baby began to cry. Megan herself scurried out in her bed gown to fetch the kettle and fresh linen, the housemaids ran about in haste, and all the while James stood in the corner, watched in silence as his future marchioness did the work of a common servant.
Sarah knew well enough how Ravenna reacted to blood. While the maid put pressure on the wound, she patiently directed Ravenna to unbutton Christian’s high collar, to take off his cravat, his shirt and waistcoat. Ravenna tried to keep from fainting as she did these things. She lifted the soaked fabric from Christian’s stomach. She kept her attention on the set of his thick, adolescent jaw, his soft brown brows, and holding his hand as it grew lax and cool in hers, she watched as Christian slipped away before her eyes.
The housemaids removed the rest of his clothing. They wiped away the remaining blood, but Christian had lost consciousness by then. The air came in and out of him with the weakest of breaths. His powder-dusted hair made a mess on the pillow; his cheekbones looked white in the strengthening dawn, while his lips, full and opened the smallest bit, seemed like those of a sleeping child.
Seeing it all unfold before her, it numbed Ravenna with a sense of truth, as if she knew the secret of the universe and the responsibility was too much, too awful.
This is the end of it
, she thought grimly, squeezing Christian’s fingers in hers.
When he goes, there is no more, just days and days of living here and trailing desperately after James
.
The reverend arrived forty-five minutes later, but she sent him away. When the surgeon came shortly thereafter, she didn’t answer any of his questions, either. Instead, she stared blankly at the rabbit fur trimming of the cloak Megan had put around her shoulders and she barely noticed what the man did or even how long he worked. When he gathered his medical implements and went on his way, he left Christian in a swathe of stained linen, pale and fragile, the back of his hand cold in Ravenna’s.
Soon the housemaids arrived to change the bedding, and she watched in quiet horror as they lifted Christian from the bloodied sheets. Like a doll without stuffing, that’s what he seemed, and she sunk even further into her shock until at last Megan took her from the room.
They didn’t speak as Ravenna got dressed. The nurse had little Eli in one arm and seeing his face, those wide baby eyes, she felt an impossible distance between them.
Everything is laid out for you,
she thought, watching Megan lay him gently in his cradle.
There’s no free will, but only destiny, that’s the real truth of it. Everything is fate and we’re all its prisoners
.
It seemed only a moment had passed and Megan was gone, a few moments more and James came in, bringing Shasta with him. He tried to persuade her to eat, to lie down, to come away with him while Christian slept, but she wouldn’t leave. She stood at the foot of Christian’s bed and stared at his lifeless face, thinking,
This is the death you never saw, this is the way Paul looked on that river
.
Eventually she lay down next to him. She closed her eyes, thought thoughts of death, felt it settling heavier than the blanket covering Christian’s form until, finally, certain he still breathed, she dared to sleep. Then the riverbanks, the muskets, the silver watches and Indian longhouses, these things troubled her no more. Curled around Christian’s limp hand in hers, she fell under the weight of dream.