The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  He looked down, his hands thrust into the pockets of his black wool overcoat. Dry leaves skittered across the grass at his feet.

  “Imposed upon me. Is that what you think this is?”

  “Coming to you for help with something that isn’t your battle? Yes. I should call that imposing.”

  “Not my battle?” He raised his head, his eyes flashing. “Do you forget that I know who he’s killed? I know them far better than you.”

  The words were edged, and they cut. Lily thought of Annalise Boyden with her clear, church bell laugh. Sylvia Durst, whose last moments the man before her had inhabited both body and soul, an intimacy she couldn’t possibly imagine.

  He stepped closer as the wind tugged her skirts. His anger was as clear as it was uncharacteristic. It startled her, sparking a reaction that felt uncomfortably like guilt.

  “Do you truly think I don’t know who’s next? That I can’t discern the pattern here and connect it to a motive for your own interest in the matter? How much of a fool do you think I am?”

  There was no answer she could give him. She should have known all of this and been sensitive to it, but she had been too wrapped up in the discomfort of her own attraction to the man. She had been looking for any excuse she could find to escape him and those she had chosen—that this wasn’t his responsibility, that it was for his own protection—were as false as the painted backdrop on a stage in the face of his truth.

  Silence lingered, becoming more uncomfortable. Should she apologize? How could she? It would mean admitting the reason for what she had done.

  It was Strangford who finally broke it.

  “What did you bring me?”

  She took the pendant from her pocket.

  “I should warn you . . .” she began as he pulled off his gloves.

  “. . . that this could be difficult?” He tucked the gloves back in his pocket and extended one of those pale, elegant hands. “I’m aware.”

  She hesitated.

  “Strangford . . .”

  “Just give it to me, Lily.”

  She placed the pendant in his palm.

  He moved away from her, closing his eyes.

  She waited as the skeletal branches danced against the pale sky.

  “There is a forest. Mountains, wolves in the wood. Not England. Far too wild for England. A burning forge. Voices. Chanting, like an incantation.”

  “Too far back,” Lily cut in. “We need London. Something more recent.”

  He shifted, tilting his head. Sharp emotion flashed across his features, anger mingling with fear.

  “Someone had his hands around your throat.” He opened his eyes, broken out of the reading, and the fury in his dark glare made her mouth dry.

  “Not that recent,” she replied, voice a touch hoarse.

  He tore the glare away from her with obvious effort and closed his eyes, pushing himself back into the object in his hand.

  “I smell soot. The stink of the river. Something else . . . brewer’s yeast. A woman was wearing this someplace foreign and dangerous. Dirty. Things worse than wolves roaming about.”

  “Someplace foreign? Not London?”

  “It’s London.”

  “She was foreign,” Lily filled in.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see a hospital? How did she get there?”

  “There was a baby. It was . . . she was frightened. The community would force her out and alone in this place she would die. She’s so certain of that. She doesn’t have any choice. She has to get rid of it. God, it hurts her . . .”

  The muscles of his face convulsed, grief shuddering through the lines of his jaw, the twist of his mouth.

  “They told her not to go. She should have listened to them. They warned her.”

  “Who warned her?”

  “The dead,” Strangford replied.

  The world stopped. Time stretched across a heartbeat, her focus complete.

  “How did the dead warn her?” she asked, forcing her tone to remain even, neutral.

  Strangford opened his eyes. His tone shifted, emptying of all the pain and confusion of the moment before, though Lily’s careful gaze could still see the vestiges of it in the slope of his shoulders, the tension around his eyes.

  “She could see them. Hear them. Had been able to ever since she was a girl.”

  “The woman who wore this was a medium,” Lily clarified. She had to be certain.

  “Yes. She was,” he replied. His tone was hard.

  He extended the hand with the pendant.

  Lily retrieved it, slipping it back into her pocket.

  “Thank you. That was most helpful.”

  Her voice didn’t shake. It was a small miracle, given the tumult quaking through her.

  The Jewish woman in the clinic had been able to see the dead. The woman that Hartwell had become obsessed with, whose blood he had stolen over and over again until she finally burned herself alive to be free of him.

  Another medium with her essence ripped from her body. Her life forfeit.

  The connection. The link she had been waiting for. This was it.

  What the mirror had shown her had been no accident. It was not just the latest in the parade of horrors she had been subjected to all her life. She had asked something of her power and it had delivered.

  It was Hartwell.

  But why? Why was he doing it? Was it just some sort of madness? She thought of the man she had met in the gallery. He had not seemed at all mad. He was lucid, clear and sharp as glass. So what could he possibly hope to gain by stealing the blood of women who saw the dead?

  Strangford stepped away from her, tugging back on his gloves. His gaze was directed across the clearing, every line of him rigid.

  “You’re angry.”

  “Yes. I am angry.” He turned to face her. His voice was even but his eyes flashed. The tension in him was taut as a bowstring. “You come when you have use for me. You make me part of this and then you shut me out of it to go barreling into another victim—to end up assaulted by thugs in the street with only a boy for protection.”

  “Sam isn’t a child.”

  “That is not the point.”

  “Must I run every decision I make in this matter past you?”

  “No,” he countered. “You’ll not deflect this into some other argument. I want to know why. Why do you insist on shutting me out of this, on shouldering all of it alone even though there are other people’s lives on the line?”

  Lily raised her chin, meeting his glare evenly.

  “I have always taken care of myself and my own matters, and I will continue to do so. I will not be anyone’s burden.”

  “Who ever gave you the impression that you were?”

  “Then who do you do this for? Mrs. Boyden? You’d barely spoken to her in years.”

  “She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  “So justice, then? Some abstract ideal?”

  “It is hardly abstract to the women who have died.”

  “Women die every day in this city. I did not think you made a habit of prowling the streets in search of rapists and murderers and heavy-handed husbands.”

  “What do you want from me?” he snapped, coming closer. She could feel the heat coming off of him, the force of the emotion raging through him.

  She refused to step back.

  “I merely needed some help with a necklace. Nothing more,” she replied, channeling all her strength into holding up that thin facade of calm and control, making herself as placid as a lake in winter.

  “That is not what I asked you.”

  “It’s still the answer.”

  “And I know it is a lie,” he replied.

  He was close, the fight pulling him nearer until only a breath separated them. She remembered when they had stood like this before, when his hands had grazed the surface of her skin, his mind delving into the innermost secrets of her soul.

  It took a mountain of effort to remain steady in both voice
and body.

  “This is not a level playing field.”

  It was meant to be a blow, to force him away, and it succeeded. The anger in him cracked like a mirror. He dropped back, pulling his hands through his hair, disheveling it.

  “A level playing field isn’t possible with me. It never will be. No matter how I bared my soul to you, it would be nothing compared to what I could pull from yours with a single touch.” He held up his black-clad hands like weapons that had to be sheathed. “Do you understand what that would mean for any intimacy I ever shared with someone?”

  “I never asked for intimacy.”

  “There’s no point in equivocating. I know—”

  “—that I wanted to take you to bed?” Lily cut in baldly. “I feel desire for you, Strangford. That is hardly worth denying, as those hands of yours undoubtedly learned it from me. But there is a vast distance between desire and action. I never had any intent to try the latter. You may rest assured on that.”

  It was as though she had struck him, a quick slap to the face. He drew back.

  “I see.”

  She should have left it there. It would have been the wiser thing to do, to simply allow him to believe that her feeling for him had a mere impulse of the body, as fleeting as it was shallow.

  But it was wrong. Safer, perhaps. But wrong. She owed him more than that and to ignore it meant she was, at the heart of it, nothing but a coward.

  She forced the truth out, coughing it up as though something were still strangling her.

  “I will not be any man’s secret. I have seen what it does to the souls of all parties involved and I want no part in it.”

  “You thought I would make you my mistress?”

  His voice was dry with shock, rasping from his throat.

  “As I am the daughter of a woman who made the better part of her living on her back, there is hardly another option for ‘intimacy’ between the likes of you and I.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Because I am a peer of the realm. And I must have a respectable wife.”

  “To pretend otherwise would be foolishness.”

  “And we mustn’t be foolish,” he concluded.

  There was something off in his tone, something that rang of sarcasm. The possible implication of that rattled her, unsettling her presumption that this man who put glorious scribbles on his walls and saw unthinkable truths with every touch would give a fig what society thought of his mate.

  That was a door she must never open. She should not even know it existed. It would only make this harder, make the inevitable fall all the more crushing.

  She wouldn’t give anyone the power to do that to her again.

  The wind gusted through the clearing. A spill of dead leaves danced across the ground that separated them.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s settled, then.” She stepped back. “I’ll not take up any more of your afternoon.”

  Across the clearing, he raised his head, dark eyes locking onto her own.

  “May I make one final request?”

  “Of course,” she replied, though every fiber of her body screamed for escape. This conversation was twisting her into knots, no matter how well she pretended otherwise.

  “I have told you that I am committed to this. There is nothing you could ask of me to further it that I would consider an imposition. So I must beg, Miss Albright, that you ask. Before you are throttled again.”

  The leaden sky twisted overhead, roiling between the naked branches of the lime trees.

  “Your request is noted, my lord.”

  “Then I wish you a good evening,” he replied stiffly.

  He turned and walked away.

  She watched him go, waiting for her knees to steady enough to make her own escape, her energy focused on holding together the fault inside of her that threatened to split into a chasm.

  She could not be a chasm. Not now. There was a murderer out there and she could think of only one way to stop him—a path that led her straight into the den of the most dangerous lion she knew.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER rose in Gothic spires and imposing towers on the banks of the Thames. Around the looming statue of Richard the Lionheart, his crusader’s sword held aloft over the restless hooves of a war horse, a snarl of gleaming carriages slowly unfurled, delivering Britain’s noblest to the gates of the House of Lords.

  “Stop here,” Lily ordered her driver. She paid her fare and alighted from the hackney at the entrance to the courtyard, making her way along the jam of polished and painted vehicles to the palace itself.

  The cold air bit at her cheeks. The leaden sky hung heavy over the ornate elegance of the building. From the clock tower, the bells of Big Ben peeled out, the hands of the great clock showing Lily it was half-past three.

  The Lords was set to enter session at four o’clock. The stream of bodies clad in well-tailored overcoats and silk top hats were all making their way to the prominent entrance set into the center of the wing. The gaslights that accented it were already lit, glowing against the encroaching gloom of an early twilight.

  Lily steered away from it to an unobtrusive door set at the base of the great Victoria Tower.

  This was the public entrance to the building. A pair of guards at the door were carefully scrutinizing everyone who walked through. One of them gave a long, skeptical look at Lily’s walking stick but finally waved her on.

  The stream of bodies pushed her along a twisting corridor, then out into a wide, elegant hall. It was crowded with peers, a river of men moving in and out of the cloakroom, eddying into little clusters of conversation punctuated by raucous laughter.

  The women stood out like exotic birds, the bright hues of their gowns startling against all that black and gray and tweed. Lily was uncomfortably and unavoidably conspicuous here, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  She had a greater challenge to consider—how she was going to find the Earl of Torrington in the midst of all this aristocratic chaos.

  She wove her way out of the flow of bodies, taking up a position by the wall between a pair of marble busts that allowed her to make a quick scan down the length of the hall. There was no sign of him, though she did catch herself on the receiving end of a few puzzled looks, as though the sight of a lingering woman were something slightly untoward in here.

  “You heard, of course.” The nobleman beside her was whispering to a colleague. Lily could smell the sherry on his breath from where she stood.

  “Of the arraignment?”

  The word drew her attention—arraignment.

  “Torrington hasn’t said a word about it, that I’ve heard.” The sherry-scented one’s voice had grown bolder and drew a few glances from other men in the hall.

  His companion stepped back, his own tone lowering.

  “I’d not assume the father will fall with the son. That man is clever as a cat and twice as resilient. Best watch your words,” he added in a whisper, then moved away.

  The House of Lords hadn’t brought one of their own to trial in half a century. It was apparently the talk of the halls that Lord Deveral was set to break that record.

  Well, that would make Lily’s errand a bit easier. If she wanted to find her father, she need only watch the gossip move through the crowd.

  She stepped out from her niche and joined the flow of bodies. It carried her around a bend and down another corridor. Some of the lords moved along while others pressed directly into the chamber of the House of Lords using the doorway that lay directly in front of her.

  As men passed the entrance, she saw them pause, heads peering round into the great room. Whispers were exchanged.

  Lily knew that sort of whisper.

  She moved to the side, studying the doorway. The chamber beyond was huge, with plush red leather benches and walls of ancient, elegantly carved wood. A great golden throne, just visible from where she stood, gleamed untouched on a dais.

  There were several men already inside. She caugh
t glimpses of them moving back and forth, calling out to an acquaintance or shuffling to a seat.

  Lily’s gaze lit on the tall, straight-backed figure of her father.

  She crossed the hall to the door.

  “No ladies on the floor.”

  The voice was strident, the words as practiced as a mass. The speaker was a plump, elderly man in a gray suit decorated with several prominent brass pins and seals. A docent of some sort, Lily surmised.

  She didn’t have time for this. She needed to get inside.

  She pulled herself up straight, fixing him with her most haughty glare.

  “I’m Lord Torrington’s daughter. I need to speak to him before the session starts.”

  The docent was unmoved. He merely puffed up his chest, like a pigeon intimidating a rival, and repeated his line.

  “No ladies on the floor.”

  She was contemplating the value of simply creating a scene and hoping it garnered her father’s attention before she was tossed out into the street when she noted a few brightly-colored figures glittering in the gallery that overhung the Lords’ chamber floor. The handful of women clustered there looked like butterflies lost in a dark wood.

  “Can I view the session from there?” she asked, indicating the gallery.

  “Visitors’ stair is through the Peers’ Lobby.” The docent pointed a stiff arm down the hall.

  The lobby felt like it belonged inside a cathedral. The richly tiled floor was barely visible under the press of polished black leather shoes. A massive chandelier was suspended overhead, its light glittering across the gilded archways and the shining surface of the great brass gate, which currently sat open to admit a continuous flow of noblemen. Stained glass panels set into the high walls bore the crests of some high-ranking family or another.

  A dark, narrow doorway on the far side indicated the promised visitors’ stair. Lily started to make her way toward it, threading through the press of men.

  A pair of peers stopped in front of her, blocking her way, as unconscious of her presence as if she were merely another piece of the decor.

  “Did you lunch well?”

  “Just a sandwich. Her ladyship’s insistence—she claims I am outgrowing my waistcoats.”

  “Pity that. I’ve heard it’s to be a long night.”