Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Draw gently,” she said softly, “but deep. It will take you where the elephants dream.” She watched him draw, and draw again and again, until the weight of the drug stole over him. The smoke would caress each cell and float down the rivers of vein and artery, smoothing them and preparing the way for the darker notes of morphine which held the key to release. It would also provide the relaxation necessary for the second part of her cure.

  This pipe was her grandfather’s and inscribed upon the bowl were the words, Spring Flowers and Autumn Moon. She had not handled it since her grandfather’s death and would not have brooked its use by anyone other than the man who lay before her now. She hoped that some of her grandfather’s spirit still lingered with the pipe and would help to lift the fog of pain that Jamie was wrapped within.

  She waited until the first pellet was entirely burned up and she had inserted the second before saying, “I have invited someone to share your bed tonight.” Her tone was the same as she would have used in offering him a cup of tea but there were many butterflies below the belt of her robe. She was crossing a line she had never thought to cross with Jamie before. Under different circumstances, with a different man, she might have offered herself. But long ago she and Jamie had agreed that their friendship would outweigh any other concern and that they would not succumb to the temptation to bed one another. They had both, over the years, thought perhaps they had been smug in thinking that would be an easy pact to keep, but keep it they had, appearances in front of stout-spined Scots secretaries notwithstanding.

  “You’ve done what?” Jamie said, though his voice, fogged with the drug, lacked the necessary impact.

  “She is extremely well versed in the art of reflexes and muscles, she is an expert in relieving tension,” Sallie said, imbuing her voice with just the right amount of rebuke.

  “Is that what we’re calling it?” he asked, sarcasm scattered heavily through the few words.

  “Are you too weak for such activity?” she asked, tone light but unmistakably scornful.

  One corner of the steaming cloth was lifted and a green eye looked out at her with a certain cynicism, tempered though it was by the opium veil. “I have a headache. I’m not dead.”

  “Good,” she said crisply. “Then I trust you will know how to behave.”

  The green eye shot her a look of profound disdain before disappearing behind the cloth once more.

  She was a woman forever divided between East and West. In some areas she was purely Western and in others the East, with all its opulence and art, held sway. In the bedchamber, she thought with the Qiuyue half of her mind and spirit. She had chosen Jamie’s companion for the night herself, for in her business of international trade and finance, of complex negotiation between Eastern modes of thinking and Western, she had become expert in an array of things. Men came to Hong Kong for business, but when the sun sank into Victoria Harbor, they expected pleasure. From the depth of their gratitude on the day that followed such arrangements, she knew which woman was best at the business. And that was Li.

  Sallie crossed the room and opened the small door hidden behind a silk screen. Behind it stood one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. Though Li’s name merely meant ‘pretty’, no such pale word could describe her. There were legends of a Mongol warlord in her ancestry, and if the cut-glass cheekbones and deep amber eyes were anything to go by, it was more than mere legend. Her business sense and shrewd management of both men and money led one to believe it as well.

  She did not need to tell Li her business. She knew it well and could assess instinctively what a man needed to force the loss of his control. Even James Kirkpatrick had a breaking point, and right now he was very near it. Li understood this, just as she knew the effects of carefully controlled opium on a man’s sexual nature. She would know when to prolong certain acts, and when to drive them to the finish.

  Li nodded to her, a faint smile on her lips indicating, Sallie knew, that she was welcome to leave. She inclined her head to the side in a gesture of grace and gratitude, even if inside her feelings did not match these virtues in the slightest. This was the Chinese way. Face must be maintained despite whatever emotions roiled inside the body. She crossed the room on lightly padded feet, silent as moonlight on leaves.

  At the door she hesitated for a moment, her hand on the ornate knob, and looked back into the room, hoping she was doing the right thing for Jamie.

  Li had disrobed. In the dark her body was a ribbon of silk, pale as water and every bit as fluid, strong where she needed to be and melting where she did not. Yes, Sallie acknowledged with grim satisfaction, she had chosen rightly in this matter.

  Li stepped into the opening of the bed enclosure and murmured a few words in Cantonese. Then Jamie spoke, his voice low and slightly jagged from the drug and pain, but flawless in the singsong cadence of Hong Kong’s primary language. Sallie could not hear what he said, but the gist of it was clear for Li, sinuous as a wave, joined him on the bed.

  There was a soft laugh and a gasp, and then the movement of two bodies. The laugh shocked her, for it was the laugh of a woman who well knew the night that lay ahead of her, which told her this was not Li’s first experience of Lord James Kirkpatrick. Now many things made sense—Li’s smile when she had requested this favor of her and her refusal of any form of payment.

  “I do this favor for you,” Li had said, “and later you do one for me.”

  Li’s business here tonight was purely that of pleasure. Still, she was the right woman for the task. The only partner who might have served the purpose better in this regard would have been herself, but she had made a promise, and with this one man she knew she must never make the mistake of breaking it.

  Li was a professional and therefore would not mind that there was another woman in the bed with them, invisible, but there nevertheless, for Sallie could feel the shadow of her upon Jamie. It was this, she was certain, that had brought him to his current state.

  She closed the door behind her and went down the stairs, the sound of the rain in tempo with her steps.

  Chapter Nineteen

  November 1973

  Robert

  It was early November when a visitor showed up unannounced at their door. She was upstairs with Conor, having just fed him, and he had generously returned the favor by spitting up all down her clean clothes as well as his own. She had only managed to change him when Casey poked his head in at the nursery door.

  “There’s someone here to see ye, Jewel. Says he’s Jamie’s secretary.”

  She turned and gave him a quizzical glance. “Jamie doesn’t have a secretary anymore,” she said, wondering if Casey might have heard wrong.

  “I’m only tellin’ ye what the man told me, darlin’. He seems a decent enough sort. Come down an’ see for yerself.”

  She sighed and handed Conor over to him. “Keep the man busy for a minute, will you? I need to change my clothes.”

  Moments later she descended the stairs, clad in a clean sweater and jeans, hair brushed and bound into some semblance of order but certain she could still detect a faint whiff of sour milk about her person.

  A small man stood perusing the books on the shelf built into the wall that divided the kitchen from the stairwell. He was short and dark-haired, well groomed in an impeccable suit and wore a pair of glasses that lent his small face the aspect of an addled owl.

  He turned at her entrance and smiled, holding out a hand as he crossed the floor in his argyle socks.

  “Mrs. Riordan?” His Scots burr was as thick as porridge and just as comforting as that particular dish. She liked him immediately.

  “Yes.” She took his hand, hoping the smell of spit-up wasn’t wafting off her.

  “I’m Robert MacDougall, Lord Kirkpatrick’s secretary. I’ve a few things I wish to discuss with you, if you can spare about a half hour?”


  “Of course,” she said politely, but her skepticism must have shown in her face for he said,

  “He hired me several months ago but I’ve only arrived in Belfast yesterday.”

  “Please sit, Mr. MacDougall. If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”

  In short order, the kettle was humming on the Aga, a plate was filled with tidy slices of lemon loaf and she was feeling slightly more ready to hear whatever it was the small Scotsman had come to say.

  She joined them at the table, where Casey and their visitor were discussing the odds of Glasgow Celtic winning the League Cup this year. The small Scotsman had Conor deftly ensconced upon his knee. This caused her to raise an eyebrow in her husband’s direction, who merely smiled and shrugged almost imperceptibly in response.

  Robert caught the look. “I’ve twelve nieces and nine nephews. Babies are a constant in my life.”

  She sat and offered cake around before fixing the Scotsman with a pointed look. He laughed in response.

  “Forgive me, but you remind me of him—Lord Kirkpatrick that is. You both can freeze with a glance.”

  Casey gave a slight snort of agreement and stood to fetch the tea. He brought back the pot and two cups, setting them on the table between Pamela and their visitor. “I’ve things that need attending to outside. Ye’ll call if ye need me?”

  “Actually, Mr. Riordan, what I’ve come to discuss concerns you as well.”

  “Oh,” Casey said and sat back down, an expression of surprise on his face.

  “Lord Kirkpatrick hired me some months ago, as I said, during a meeting in Hong Kong—”

  “Hong Kong?” Pamela interjected, not from any real surprise. Jamie could turn up on a mountain top in darkest Peru, clad in silks, a chilled martini in hand and it wouldn’t surprise her in the least.

  “Yes, I’d been asked to deliver a package to him.” He cleared his throat quietly, but in such a manner that told Pamela that whatever circumstances he had met Jamie under, they had not been dull in the least. “By the end of the interview, he had hired me as his secretary. Since then I’ve been kept busy with his various interests and only now managed to visit his home. I had expected to meet him here.”

  Conor, well behaved until now, reached up and took the glasses off Robert’s face, promptly stuffing one lens into his mouth. Casey stood and took him from Robert, patting the baby’s back to put paid to the howl of outrage before Conor could get it out.

  “Come on, laddie. Let’s find you something more digestible,” he said, and walked toward the kitchen with Conor’s small face peering over his shoulder.

  “He ought to have been home this fall. Leastwise, that was his plan when I spoke to him.” Robert said, polishing Conor’s drool off of his glasses matter-of-factly before setting them back precisely on his nose.

  “When did you meet with him, exactly?” Pamela asked, feeling a serpent of dread flick its tail in her stomach.

  “It was early last February. Since then I have received instructions at regular intervals. I assumed they were coming from Lord Kirkpatrick but it turns out the instructions had been left with his lawyers who sent them off to me at preordained times.”

  “Are you telling me that no one has heard from him since last February?” The serpent unleashed a coil or two, making her feel distinctly sick.

  “I can’t ascertain that one way or the other,” Robert said. “I didn’t get the impression he was a man who could be easily trailed and he seems to have left a few smokescreens in his wake, whether by design or merely circumstance, I do not know. Only of late, I profess, have I become worried that he has been away far longer than he intended. To that end, I felt I should come here and see if I could trace his whereabouts through his household staff or his friends. Yourself being the obvious start to those enquiries.”

  “I—I,” she glanced at Casey’s back and made a silent apology in his direction. “The fact of the matter is, I don’t know where he is and I haven’t heard from him since he left—his departure was rather abrupt and he didn’t say goodbye to anyone—well, beyond a letter of sorts,” she finished, feeling as though she were the color of a pomegranate.

  She could feel Casey stiffen slightly, for she had not spoken of the letter to him. Jamie being the loaded topic he was between the two of them, she had thought it best not to mention it.

  “Might you tell me if the letter contained anything that might help us now as to his whereabouts?”

  “No, it didn’t. I have no idea where he might be.”

  “It’s my understanding that if anyone other than yourself knows where Lord Kirkpatrick might be, it’s his friend Jonathan Wexler. However, even if he knows, he’s not likely to tell a total stranger.”

  “By which you mean you would like me to speak with Mr. Wexler,” Pamela said, raising one dark eyebrow.

  “Yes. I’m afraid, Mrs. Riordan, it’s only the first of several things that I’m here to talk to you about.” He shifted in his seat and adjusted his vest.

  Pamela put her teacup down, aware that it rattled against the plate before settling. She didn’t want to hear what this man had to say, didn’t want to acknowledge that Jamie had been gone far too long for easy explanations and simple homecomings.

  “There are several business matters that need to be attended to, things that only Lord Kirkpatrick has the power to sign off on—or in his extended absence, of course—yourself.”

  “Myself?” she squeaked, not daring to glance at Casey, though she heard his gasp clearly.

  Robert furrowed his brow, clearly puzzled. “Mrs. Riordan, you hold the Power of Attorney for all Lord Kirkpatrick’s businesses. Surely he made you aware of what that might entail when you signed the documents?”

  “Yes, but I suppose I didn’t think I’d ever need to exercise that power,” Pamela said, a terrible chill spreading out from her core. “I—what does this mean for the immediate future? Because I’m certain Jamie will come home sometime soon.”

  The wee Scot had an inscrutable look on his face as he neither agreed nor disagreed with her statement. She clutched at the one straw in her possession.

  “I do know that he keeps an appointment in February each year, but I don’t know where that is.”

  “Yes, the Father General mentioned that as well.”

  “Father General?” she queried.

  “Father Brandisi, he’s the Father General for the Society of Jesus.”

  “The Black Pope,” Pamela said, her own eyebrows arched now. “Jamie has mentioned him a time or two. Are you here at his behest?” The Father General of the Society of Jesus had long been nicknamed ‘The Black Pope’ both for the black garb of the Jesuit and for the immense amount of power the intellectual order wielded.

  “No, I am in Lord Kirkpatrick’s employ now, though I do know the Father General rather well. I am related to him through my father. It was he who had me take the package to His Lordship in Hong Kong.” The small man cleared his throat again, causing her to wonder just what state Jamie had been in when Robert met him—in utter deshabille, with a courtesan on each arm? It wasn’t beyond the man, certainly.

  “Perhaps, Mrs. Riordan, you will know that Father Brandisi took a personal interest in Lord Kirkpatrick’s education when he was a boy.”

  “I knew Jamie was educated by Jesuits, but I wasn’t aware it was such a superior one,” she said, and saw that Robert didn’t miss the tart note in her voice. It seemed the man didn’t miss much.

  “I see he has told you somewhat of Giacomo’s methods, at least.”

  “Yes, somewhat,” she said, thinking it very likely that Robert had determined from the look on her face that Jamie’s portrait of Giacomo Brandisi was less than flattering.

  “I—what am I supposed to do now?” she asked, feeling as if her world were a glass globe that
had just been given a severe shake.

  “That will be for you to decide, Mrs. Riordan,” he said matter-of-factly. “Perhaps we could meet at Lord Kirkpatrick’s house, say, tomorrow morning. Much of what I need to go over with you would be better served there.”

  “I—ah,” she swallowed and looked at Casey. His face was unreadable, eyes dark as onyx.

  Casey gave her a long look and then turned to the small Scot. “She’ll be there.”

  Robert nodded, swung his briefcase down to his side and walked to the door. Pamela joined him there, still feeling slightly numb from the information and below that, aware that her worry about Jamie had turned to real fear that something irrevocable had occurred.

  The small Scot left after setting a time for their meeting, getting into a car that was fastidious in its cleanliness and neat lines. Conor had gone down for a nap, leaving her and Casey alone.

  “Ye never said the man left ye a letter,” Casey said quietly, face turned from her as he added peat to the fire. But his tone was slightly gruff as it was when he tried to mask strong emotion. Not for the first time, she wondered what the hell had taken place between the two men before Casey returned to her and Jamie abruptly left the country.

  “It wasn’t so much a letter as a book of poems with a small note in it.” It had been more than that really, but it served no purpose to tell Casey. It would only hurt where hurt was unnecessary. Jamie had left her a small leather bound edition of Rilke’s poetry and there had been a slip of paper in it so that the page fell open to a particular poem. Still, she did not know if it had significance or was merely where the paper had been placed.

  The piece of paper had held only a few words… ‘I wish you only joy, always—Jamie.’ No more words were necessary and Casey did not need to hear nor carry the knowledge of that with him in any way.

  Thankfully, Casey did not say anything more on the subject.

  She moved to sit down on the sofa near to the fire. Casey had built up a good blaze, but she was terribly cold and could not still the shaking that seized her the minute the Scotsman had explained why he’d come.