Wilderness of Mirrors (25 page)

Nigel twisted bit by bit until he made out black vestments and a silver beard. “You think I’m a soldier?”

“You are.” Long ushering fingers shimmered into view. “Sit for a minute. Behind you there’s a bench.”

With little reason to support his decision, Nigel did as he’d been bidden. There was indeed an alcove beside the carved seat, and within it, the warmth of a staircase leading to what must be the turret. “You’re not at vespers?”

“There’s a candle at the top, in the minaret.” The elderly priest eased himself down beside Forsythe. “Someone had to extinguish it.”

“And there’s no one any younger – more fleet of foot?” Nigel liked the man already.

The old priest’s chuckle trickled outward. “Many. But age has its advantages.” His eyes picked up the glint of streetlights. Their frankness brushed away some of Nigel’s desperation.

“You don’t seem surprised to find me here.”

“It’s a church; I have no expectations about who comes.”

Nigel set the knife between them, careful not to threaten with his movements. “You have low expectations indeed. So far I’ve trespassed and stolen from you.”

The gray eyebrows dipped as the priest took in the knife’s length. “That’s the one I would have taken.”

“Nice handle. Good balance.”

The singsong clip of the first psalm reverberated from behind closed doors. Nigel felt his lips part. “‘O Lord, how many are my foes. How many rise up against me.’”

“You know this psalm?” The knife remained untouched.

“David is one of the few Biblical men with whom I feel kinship.”

“There’s no surprise. I wished for such a slingshot myself.”

Nigel closed his eyes against the burn of exhaustion. “It wouldn’t have done you much good against Panzers.”

There was a small pause, enough to hear the end of the psalm. “There is truth in your words. But to me, my rifle was as David’s slingshot. I’d been a farm boy, used to simple rabbit snares and pitchforks.”

Nigel thought of the bullets’ paths through William and Tam. Thought of the one that grazed his Sam’s face and felt sick with vehemence. “Let me guess, you became a sniper.”

The priest ignored Nigel’s attempt at cinematic humor. “I knew a pitchfork could only stop one, maybe two, before I went down. But with my gun, I had my turn at Goliath.”

Nigel remembered Hitler’s ultimately unsuccessful venture into Russia. It had been horrific. “Were you captured?”

“Not at first. But that is not for today.”

Nigel opened his eyes. “How did you know I was – am – a soldier?”

The voices of many answered first, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Two spidery hands clasped bony knees. “Because I prayed you would come. I have need of a soldier.”

“You don’t know me, Batushka.” Nigel was cold, despite the room’s heated embrace.
You’ve prayed for an angel and have instead been visited by the devil.

“I know the mold from which you were made. It is not unlike that of our David.”

“Adultery is not murder.”
I’m a bad man, Batushka
.

“No, this is true. David was weak in that way. But you? I do not think you would commit adultery.” The eyes faded under a long blink. “What I mean to say is, your wife holds your heart. Bathsheba ruled his.”

Thoughts of Samantha, etched rune-deep in Nigel’s stern memory, sprang forward in the dimness. “I’m not married.”
I would though, if she’d have me.
It was a never-before thought. Surprised him, in a pleasant humbling way.

“Not formally. Soon then.” Batushka’s hand moved to strike the sign of the cross as was being done by the others, one room away. He breathed deeply. “Murder is different to be sure. I killed a boy in August of that long-ago summer; he was the age of my grandson, Yuri. He was running for a gap in a wall not far from where we were waiting to ambush a tank division. I think he was after a rabbit. You see; there was no food to go round, not with Nazis burning all and sundry and our men eating the neighboring villages out of carrot and leek.”

Nigel saw William against the night’s obsidian, young and carefree, chasing one of David’s endless lines of labs through the great ballroom. It might have been a gap in a stone wall. One beside a green rugby field.

“You know of such boys, I’m certain.” The priest arranged the edge of his vestments. “In any case, they were coming: audible and nearly in sight. If he’d run out, well, it would have drawn an eye to where we were hiding. Someone tried – gave that short whistle known by boys one and all under the age of ten. Only he didn’t turn, kept right for the road. Not much thought went through me, just
One dies or many more
. I raised my rifle and he was down before they sighted him.”

Nigel knew about that kind of shot. Legging someone wouldn’t work. The screams, the crawling, writhing agony. No, a clean shot to the head or maybe heart if the sniper had the right angle. Batushka must have had keen eyes. Maybe still did.

The night around Nigel and his priest remembered that pain.

In the chapel, the most somber of psalms was being read. The leading priest would be stepping from the pulpit to join his flock. A modern-day savior willing to walk among his people’s troubles.

“You know these words.” The priest’s voice was a tear on thick paper.

Together they prayed, “From the realm of created darkness into the realm of uncreated and everlasting light. This light cannot be taken over by darkness. Thus, our souls, cleansed through repentance, also become inaccessible to the darkness of sin.”

Nigel understood a spider’s web width about that light. She was bright as honeycomb, fragranced with the burn of desert sand. “Forgive me, Batushka, it has been too long since I confessed my sins.”
Never.

Batushka’s pectoral cross, a gold glint studded with the blues and greens of long-venerated gems, swung pendulum-like across his sunken chest. A thing of beauty, wrought years back by a smith who’d likely kissed its intricate surface, one last moment, before it vanished into the church’s hands.

“Do you wish for God to hear your confession?”

“I wish
you
to hear it. God and I have had little use for one another.” Nigel thought of Brad’s weekly trips to whatever Roman Catholic Church had been scratched into the surface of the anyplace they happened to be working. Never once had Nigel followed him inside. Never once had he wanted to – until Irina.

Nigel’s father’s voice echoed from as far back as a son could remember.

“Never once has God listened to me. First Kate’s mother dies, then you come along.” Brush-cut blond hair - not a gray in it - at attention, like Nigel himself. “You don’t know a thing about what being a Forsythe means. It’s in the breeding, boy.” There was a sneer there, just under the clean-shaven lip.

How Nigel hated that mouth.

“Unfortunate about the mongrel in you. I should’ve listened to Lady Emily. Half savage, your mother.” He’d paused to down another whisky. “Mad as your bloody grandfather on her side.”

The huge fist returned the Waterford tumbler to its polished silver tray. Strange how that hand could touch some fragile objects without cracking them.

Nigel knew to keep his chin up, even though the beatings had stopped when he returned from Africa: brown, having boxed for endless hours, seething about an injustice he would never mention, six feet tall.

His father had not touched him after that.

Old Man Forsythe, eyes like a stuck boar, turned his tweed bulk on Nigel. “You think I don’t know what you did there. Not even a respectable killing. You could have at least brought me the cat’s head. Then I’d have had something to point to on your behalf.” He waved a kerchief across his florid, muscular face and neck. “Nothing for you now but the Service. God knows, if they can’t make something out of you, no one will.”

Nigel made his decision in the space of that long ago sentiment. Part of him wanted his father to believe for once, that he’d been wrong. That God did listen to him. The other part believed something else entirely. If Nigel was able to kill men, he might as well be pointed by the ‘good guys’ in the right direction. He didn’t trust his own judgment.

Not then.

Maybe only a jigger more now.

“Did I murder that boy, soldier?” The question was edged with the lace of more chanting.

“Some would say so.”

“What of your David?”

Nigel considered until, “Did you have to kill him or was it convenient?”

There was no pause. “I did not
have
to kill him, but it was not convenient, no. Though it was a trajectory – that shot. Changed my life.”

Nigel pressed further, “Does your God think it murder?”

“My God knows about hard choices. Murder is not about hard choices.” The elder studied the knife. “You know that much yourself.”

Nigel remembered, like he would a tearing breath of crushed glass, that long stretch between when Irina lived and when she lay motionless. He had weighed all he could with what time and scales he’d been given him. “You’re married?”

“Yes.” There was joy and the grief of a strong love laid to rest in that syllable. “Olga was a dancer in the Bolshoi, but a better wife and mother to be sure.” He paused to slide one leg out. Nigel heard the cracking of deteriorated cartilage. The trip upstairs must have been ghastly. “She was taken by Our Holy Mother some years ago, perhaps to entertain God’s angels with her grace. I will be happy to dance with her again some day.”

Nigel felt echoes of that kind of grace deep in his fingertips; he’d stolen it along with notes of Samantha’s understated Parisian perfume. “You deserve such happiness?”

There was a shift in tone, one room away. The Canons had begun.

Batushka rubbed his knee absently. “Now
there
is a story.” He gestured with his opposite hand to the chapel. “The Canon sings of it.”

The glow of resurrected candles swirled beneath the heavily carved doors. Batushka grew in substance. He had been a tall man, probably never thickset, but ropey and strong like sailing cordage. “It is the story of Habakkuk. You know of him?”

Nigel shook his head.

“Ah.” This pleased Batushka. “He was a man of God. Believed wholly in Him. However, he did not comprehend tragedy. Loss. The seeming triumph of evil over goodness.” The priest let the words remind Nigel of his own quarrels with the Almighty. “Habakkuk wrestled with God about why He didn’t right these wrongs, aid those in need, that sort of thing. They had many arguments, those two.”

I understand Habakkuk,
thought Nigel,
even with so short a definition.

The priest hummed a few bars before adding, “We sing about God’s answer. About Him coming to Habakkuk on a thickly wooded mountain within the spectrum of a brilliant beam of sunlight.”

Nigel began to understand Brad’s motivations. “God wished Habakkuk to trust in Him?”

There were less lines along the priest’s eyes than Nigel would have imagined, more when he smiled. “If
we
can’t always comprehend the reason behind our own lowly actions, is it any wonder we cannot understand the patterned wisdom in God’s?” Batushka touched the knife’s tip. “You have wrestled like Habakkuk; it does not make you a stranger to God. Trust in His gift of sunlight.”

“Olga was yours.”

“Sunlight. Women. God has a sense of humor.”

His Sam?

The doors would open soon. Nigel sensed time escaping. “Forgive me, Batushka, for my many sins. There is much of what I’ve done to weep for.”

The priest laid his hands upon Nigel’s bowed head. “You are forgiven your sins, my son.”

Peace flowed along Nigel’s weary paths. It gave him a measure of strength. “What penance is asked of me?”

Hands withdrawn, the priest studied Nigel with eyes very like David’s. “There is a pestilence among us: drugs, violence, human trafficking. And I fear for many of our young men. Their grandmothers come to bake, but their eyes are shadowed with grief. Something must be done. I have prayed for God to put a slingshot in my hands. He answered me with you. Go from here, soldier. Keep God at your side, be lit by sunlight, and destroy those behind this menace before more are swallowed by it.”

Nigel sensed a great turning of invisible tumblers. “Do you know a twenty-something Estonian by the name of Jaak?”

Heat flared in the priest’s dark eyes. “Yes. His Christened name is Yuri. And he is my grandson.”

T
he bastard would come by car. Obsessions had uncanny ways of tripping up even the canny, Sam thought as she waited unseen by the Lion’s Gate Entrance.

He would go directly to the Pagoda where he could watch her approach. Watch her cross the endless, friendless track from the smoke-stacked side of Kew to the Temperate Gardens.

All along, she guessed it might end here.

He’d brought her to Kew often enough. Lectured to her about the Chilean Wine Palm. How it had grown from a seed, carefully so carefully, in the hands of guardians, until it was the world’s tallest, indoor plant. There were others there too. Misfits like the endangered South African cycad or the worshipped darlings of the tea family.

How she hated it there. Kept quiet though. Smiled and nodded as he rattled on all the while projecting inaudible thoughts he never imagined she could hear.
You are like that seed, Samantha. I am the gardener. Your cultivator.

Even before her twentieth birthday she sensed his handling. In the clicks and turns of his conniving mind she caught an echo of his real desires. Running away would have been useless. So she feigned ignorance. Acted like a properly grateful goddaughter.

Until Nigel made her see something else.

Fingers cold, body colder, she forced the pressure of his buttons into her marrow. He would be with Kate now. Should be, if Sam read him correctly. Under the surface of the conflicting pair, there rippled a shy current of affection. Not a scrap of genetic similarity, except those steely cores and a dash of love that might someday reach the glass-paned top of The Palm House.