by Archer, Zoe
“Behold, Madam Ghost,” Bram said, his voice cold and cutting as a shard of ice. “I call this Portrait of Folly.”
She continued to stare at this other Bram, this inchoate form. He held himself with such confidence, assured that whatever he desired would be his. His eyes were bright and clear, looking into a future of gallantry and daring, a boy dreaming of tomorrow. He had seen nothing of the world. Not yet.
No scar marred his throat. He was unmarked.
“Not folly,” she said. “Hope.”
“Ridiculous hopes. Other younger sons went into the military, and in that, I was no different. But I was singular in that I truly believed I’d do some good. I didn’t want to spend my military career doing useless drills and showing off my uniform in town. When they told us we’d be going to the Colonies to defend our people, I was happy.” He spit out the word. “Thought I would make a difference.”
“You did. I have seen it. Those people on the frontier, you defended their homes. There are scores of lives you saved.”
He made a dismissive wave with his free hand. “Token gestures. Nothing could keep pace with the spill of blood.”
“All of it meant something.”
Turning to her, his mouth twisted in a sneer. “Ned Davies would argue otherwise.”
“Ned . . . ?”
“He’s here.” He tapped his forehead.
Memories began to engulf her, swirling around her in a misty vortex. The chamber receded, fading, transforming into a muddy hill. The scent of gunpowder hung thick in the air, as did the groans of dying men and horses. Atop the hill stood a military fortress, its walls made of felled trees as though hastily constructed. Part of the walls had been blasted away. The yard within the fortress held more wounded men and bodies.
Outside the fortress, soldiers in red picked their way through the fallen.
“Find all the wounded,” said a blood and smoke-streaked Bram to the soldiers. “Bring them to the surgeon.”
“He looks fair gone.” One soldier lifted the shoulders of a man upon the ground, his head lolling back to reveal an ugly wound in his shoulder. If he lived, the injured soldier would of a certain lose his arm.
“Does he breathe?” Bram demanded.
The soldier bent close to the wounded man. “Aye, sir.”
“Then there’s a chance for him. Get him to Dr. Balfour.”
After signaling for some assistance, the soldier and one of his comrades bore the wounded man away, toward the fortress. Bram continued to move through the bent and contorted shapes of fallen men, his face ashen, lips pressed tight. Yet he appeared familiar with the aftermath of battle and the sight of the dead. He waved away clouds of flies from the face of a dead boy holding a drum.
“What of this one, sir?”
Bram turned at Sergeant Davies’s question. Bram outranked the Cornishman, not only in rank but station. Back in England, they would have had little to do with one another, Bram being the second son of a baron, Davies being the fifth son of a farmer, yet in the strange methods of war, they had become unlikely friends. They told one another stories of home and laughed raucously at remembered childhood exploits. He’d had no idea that a farmer’s boy could be just as reckless and foolish as a baron’s supplementary heir.
The other officers did not care for Bram’s fraternization with an enlisted man, but it seemed even war could not dim his insistence for doing whatever he damn well wanted.
Now Davies stood over a fallen French soldier, the enemy moaning weakly. One of his legs was nothing but tatters, taken off inelegantly by cannon fire.
The battle had been a rough one, with losses heavy on both sides. Bram had witnessed many of his brothers in arms killed, including men with families, and men who weren’t men, but boys who hadn’t grown a single whisker or been between the thighs of a woman. These were the fellow soldiers who, only the day before, talked longingly of their mother’s elderberry preserves, or cleaned their muskets and whistled. Now they were carcasses.
“The Frenchman goes to Dr. Balfour, too,” said Bram.
Davies looked hesitant. “You sure? I saw ’im gut Fitzhugh with a bayonet. Just tore ’im open, innards spilling out. Made me lose my tea and hardtack, it did.”
A wave of nausea threatened Bram’s struggle for composure. Evisceration was no way to die, slow and brutal. “We won’t leave him out here to be picked at by crows.” He’d seen too many men, still breathing, torn apart by scavengers.
Davies shrugged. “You’re the officer.”
The sergeant bent down to pick up the wounded enemy soldier. As he did, the Frenchman lifted his hand. He held a pistol. And aimed it at Davies’s face.
“Davies!” Bram shouted. He ran toward them.
Too late. The French soldier pulled the trigger. A flash and bang, and the pistol fired directly between an astonished Davies’s eyes. Most of his face blew apart.
Bram was there in an instant, his sword drawn and ready to run the Frenchman through. But the soldier denied him the pleasure, toppling back to the mud, dead.
Davies also lay in the mud, his arms outflung, his one remaining eye staring at the cloud-smeared sky. What was left of his face held a look of almost comic surprise. As other soldiers came running, Bram sank down to the sodden earth and could not look away from the fallen Davies, burning the image into his mind and heart.
The field covered with the dead vanished. As did the overcast sky, the ravaged fortress. Livia found herself once more in the elegant but unused chamber in Bram’s home, the bodies of the soldiers now pieces of furniture, the muddy ground turned to patterned carpets. Bram wore a robe instead of his uniform, but the expression on his face was the same. As though he’d torn the heart from his own chest and stared at it, clutched in his hand.
“For nothing,” Bram growled. “Ned Davies died for naught. The battle was over, the Frenchman was to have been given medical attention. Ned got his brains blown out anyway.”
Hollowed by his grief, she looked away. “I cannot pretend to know the whys and wherefores of combat. In my time, men fought and died simply for the amusement of the crowd.”
“In my time, men fight and die for many reasons, none of them worthwhile. There’s only death, and more death. That stupid boy”—he nodded toward the portrait of himself—“was an ignorant child. The only thing he achieved was the fashioning of the man standing here. And that’s a piss-poor accomplishment.”
“Nothing has been decided,” she fired back. “For over a millennium, I have seen this world change, constantly remaking itself. Until our bodies become the food of worms, we’ve the means of transforming ourselves. We might be anything we want. Anything at all.”
His jaw tightened. “Including those that would take up a futile fight against the Devil.”
“Winnable, unwinnable—all that matters is the fight.” She drifted closer, wishing she could touch him, though she didn’t know if she wanted to gently stroke his face or strike him. Any means of reaching him within the depths of his self-constructed crypt.
Gaze bleak, he turned away. “No.”
She darted through him, passing through his body, to stand in his line of sight. She pointed to the painting. “That boy was ignorant, yes, but he believed. That belief still dwells within you.”
“Don’t you understand?” He bared his teeth like an animal. “Men went to war. Some were killed. Others maimed. And others returned home and took up their lives. Not me. I was never strong enough. I came back broken.”
He stepped nearer so only a few inches separated them. Though she could feel nothing, some vestige of his heat penetrated the mists surrounding her, the first hint of sensation she’d had in over a thousand years.
“I see the world going to hell all around me,” he rumbled. “I know what will come. But I cannot fight anymore. If I ever possessed honor and virtue—which I doubt—they are long gone.”
“Wrong. You are wrong.” She flicked her gaze to his scar, dull and raised in the candlelight. I
t had to have bled copiously, covering him in scarlet, his clothes, his hands, smelling of metal as it poured upon the ground. “It’s because you have a good heart that the war damaged you so badly. You cannot go back to being that boy. He’s unneeded. But you can move forward and become someone wiser, someone stronger.”
“Damn you.” His voice was barely human. “Why can’t you leave me in peace?”
Moving away from him, she hovered beside the window. So little was this chamber used that the servants had not closed the curtains for the night. The fog-choked city appeared beyond the glass, and the muted sounds of men and women plummeting deeper into an unrelenting nightmare speared through the heavy silence.
“There is no peace, Bram,” she said over her shoulder. “This night has proven it. You can close your eyes and cover your ears, but it makes no difference. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the world is crumbling away. All we can do—all we must do—is fight.”
“None of this was my doing.”
She whirled around. “Tell yourself that, but you know otherwise. I did summon the Dark One, so the original blame is mine. Yet deep in your heart, no matter your protestations, you understood exactly what your bargain with the Devil meant. The burden falls to both of us.”
When he only scowled at her, she spread her hands wide. For the first time ever, she had to supplicate herself, show . . . humility. I was wrong. We have the means of transforming ourselves even after death, because I am not the woman I once was.
“Please, Bram.” Her voice was a bare whisper, raw as a scraped knuckle. “I cannot do this alone. I need your help.”
The entreaty in her eyes and words must have shaken him, for he looked away. “This cause deserves a better champion than me.”
“Perhaps it does.” She felt a flare of exultation as he whirled to glare at her. He wasn’t immune from pride, and she needed that. A humble man made for a poor warrior. “But you are all we have.”
Chapter 6
He could not recall being awake at this hour, not having already seen his bed. Usually if Bram watched the sun crest the spires and rooftops, he was on his way home after a night’s revelry, experiencing the waking city as a visitor from a distant land. Men of trade bustling to their offices. Farmers walking beside their drays laden for market. Crossing sweeps, housemaids, bankers, merchants, costermongers. Here was the realm of business, ambition, subsistence—concepts as alien to him as breathing underwater or flight.
Yet now he rode his chestnut mare through the glare of a daytime London, and though oppressive clouds draped low in the sky, he squinted against the brightness. He had the oddest feeling that the good, industrious citizens would stand and point accusing fingers at him as he wended through the streets, demanding the intruder be driven from the gates and there to pass his days in exile.
But rest had been in short supply as of late. He’d barely dipped below the surface of sleep before his eyes had opened, sticky and hot, to stare at the bed canopy overhead. Livia’s words had dug beneath his skin like burrs, banishing peace. He’d risen from bed no more replenished than he had been hours earlier. Almost on principle, he’d thought to lie abed until his usual hour, but disquiet churned like a rising storm. After nearly murdering an innocent man, he doubted he’d be welcome at the fencing academy. How then, to quell the cagey energy that goaded him into motion?
His grooms had been startled by his appearance in the stable and demand for a horse to be saddled. They had complied, as they were paid to do, and minutes later he trotted toward the park. Impatience burned him. A full gallop was the only pace that could give any measure of release, yet traffic demanded that he keep himself at a sedate gait. At the least, it allowed him the rare experience of seeing London at the height of its bustle, the innumerable people jostling and hurrying from one end of the city to the other on important—or unimportant—business.
All was not order and civility, however. The streets were littered with broken glass, shattered pieces of masonry, and charred wood. An overturned carriage lay on the cobblestones like a carcass, picked clean by carrion feeders. Broken windows reflected back the cloudy sky in shards. And the people moved as though chased by resolute assassins, their heads down, shouldering aside whomever crossed their path, snarling in anger should anyone prove a slow-moving obstacle.
The disease advances, Livia’s voice murmured in his mind.
If a limb is infected, he answered, it’s amputated.
Too late for that. The sickness is in the blood, and our own hearts spread its decay.
He had no answer to that. Everywhere around him was proof. As he progressed toward the park, he felt Livia’s presence, always near, always close. Impossible to feel truly alone when she never left him, like a second heartbeat.
The greater irony? Only days ago, he considered her the greatest punishment. Now . . . the piercing loneliness he had felt, even sometimes in the company of the other Hellraisers, kept itself in abeyance. She was opinionated, obstinate, maddeningly headstrong. And the only person—if a ghost could be called a person—who gave him no quarter. Whit, his closest friend, never knew him as thoroughly as Livia did. Whit never had access to Bram’s most closely-kept self. Livia was everywhere within him.
Guiding his horse around two women arguing in the road, Bram thought, Last night was a first for me.
Visiting a brothel without partaking of its merchandise? Her voice was wry.
That was novel. But I’ve never had so much conversation with a woman in my bed.
Technically, I was on your bed. And I’m not truly a woman.
Most assuredly you’re a woman. When sleep had come, his dreams had alternated between scenes of chaos and fevered images of Livia, fully flesh, fully nude, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, her olive-hued limbs entwined with a man’s. Sometimes the man had a stranger’s face, sometimes the face was Bram’s. A mingling of her memories and his. He’d awakened with an uneasy heart and an aching cock.
Did he desire her? Resent her? Like her? Or was it an uncomfortable alloy of all these feelings?
You must have spoken to the women you took to bed, she answered.
Not certain if ‘Spread your legs,’ counts as legitimate discourse.
Her low chuckle was that of a goddess, pagan and earthy. I was never one for an exchange of confidences either. There were more important matters to attend to once a mattress was in the vicinity.
I’d no idea Roman women were so . . . unconstrained, he thought. Aside from Messalina.
She was too stupid to conduct her affairs with discretion, Livia scoffed. But my freedom was my own doing. I didn’t want to suffer the confining virtue of being a wife. And honored daughters resigned themselves to respectable, stultifying chastity. A priestess of Hecate, however, and one with my wealth of knowledge about magic, the years of study and natural ability . . . if there was something, someone I wanted, I could have them.
You sound like a Hellraiser.
Had there been such a thing when I lived, I surely would have been one.
You would’ve been fearsome indeed. He seethed with restlessness, but thinking of beds port was a continuous drumbeat, like an ancient slave ship urging its captives to greater speed on the oars, lest they suffer the wrath of the lash.
At last, Hyde Park came into view, its treetops and wide swaths of field a welcome respite after the tight press of buildings and people.
A relief to see that it wasn’t a hanging day at Tyburn. Massive crowds would gather around the triangular gallows, with wealthy spectators in Mother Proctor’s Pews to get the better view of the condemned’s last few moments alive. People of every stripe and class all assembled—shopkeepers, apprentices, gentlemen, ruffians. All hoped for a good show; displays of bravery were applauded, but fear received boos. Gingerbread sellers and people hawking copies of the condemned’s last words—before they had even uttered them—worked the crowd. Pickpockets found ample prey, an irony given that many of those about to be executed were thieves.
The din and bloodlust could make one’s head pound.
Only once after his return from the Colonies had he gone to see a hanging. He had comported himself with reserve, watching the criminals dance at the ends of their ropes with a façade of disinterest, but the moment he had returned to his private chambers, he’d emptied the contents of his stomach. Thereafter he found ways to occupy himself far from Tyburn Tree on hanging days.
He avoided Rotten Row and the early risers sedately parading their horses up and down. What he wanted was a good, hard gallop.
Reaching an open expanse of grass, he kicked his horse into greater speed, and his heart gave its own kick to feel the animal bolt into motion.
The wind in his face, his greatcoat flapping behind him, the horse tearing across the field, he smiled.
He felt Livia gather close around him like a mantle, and together, they rode like demons through the park. Bent low over the neck of his horse, he gave the mare full rein. The animal was bred for speed, and it took the open space with ground-eating strides. Its hoof beats became the beat of his heart, fast and heedless, the world turning to a blur of gray and green. He lost himself in the velocity, his muscles attuned to the horse’s, his thoughts naught but motion.
Faster, urged Livia.
His mouth pulled into a grin, and he pushed the mare into greater speed.
Above the rush of wind and the pound of the hooves, he heard Livia laugh. He couldn’t stop his answering laughter, both of them caught in the heady taste of freedom, where nothing existed but speed. As if they could outrun the coming catastrophe. For a few moments, they could pretend.
Yet the horse could not sustain its pace for too long. It would run itself to death, if he so desired. He had no wish to have the mare collapse beneath him, and so he was forced to slow, gallop to canter, canter to trot, and finally, a docile walk. The horse snorted and steamed, pleased with itself.
That was . . . a marvel, Livia said. Pleasure sparkled through her voice, and he felt her smile like a caress.