Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  His eccentricities were varied and well cultivated. His nickname, though never uttered in his presence, was The Grand Beekeeper. A poke of derision for the occupations he had kept throughout his lifetime: beekeeper, apiculturist, it mattered not to him what name one gave it, only that they were his solace, pursuits that did not require his mind to move in convoluted circles the way his human charges did.

  Behind the honey-toned eyes and the umber nuances of his Sicilian ancestry was a mind as fulgurous and fecund as a meteor in full spate. And rather than resembling his dear, droning friends, his mental machinations were more akin to the manoeuverings of a large, not entirely genial spider. He sat at the center of a society that was renowned for its scholarship, tough-mindedness and dogged determination. He had not gotten there by being anyone’s fool. Under his nimble hands lay the skeins of dozens of intrigues, scandals, government secrets, and caught in the multi-layered web were the souls of many he had encountered over the years. Whether Jamie had ever been fettered in that net was not something to which she was privy.

  “It is a pleasure to meet at last. I have heard much of you from Father Lawrence.”

  “It is my pleasure, Father General,” she said, uncertain of whether she was meant to kiss his hand or if that was only reserved for the other Pope. He solved her dilemma by placing his broad hands on his heavy thighs and leaning forward a little.

  “To say that Jamie’s past is complicated is, as you will no doubt already know, a vast understatement.”

  “I see we’re not going to waste time on polite preambles,” Pamela said dryly.

  The Jesuit smiled a broad grin that creased his face and exposed strong, square white teeth.

  “You and I are going to get along just fine.” He laughed—infectious laughter—and she laughed in response, deciding that he might be a ‘meddling bastard’ as Jamie had once described him, but she was going to like him. The universe had already decided that for her.

  “Let me just say this to begin, there is what is seen, those causes and effects that we understand we are setting in motion, just as whipping a horse’s behind sets the cart wheel to going. But there are things beyond that, behind the main picture if you will, that one does not always know one is affecting. Jamie is one who, merely by being, sets things in motion, often things he did not intend to begin. There is, too, a reckless vein in him so that he sometimes sets fire to things just for the pleasure of seeing them burn. I believe the boy has started a conflagration this time that he will not be able to put out. So it is for us to put it out if we can.”

  “And how is it that we will put this fire out?”

  He answered with a statement.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance in London. You paid him a visit recently.”

  Damn it, Jamie had warned her that the man missed nothing. There seemed little purpose in denying it.

  “Yes, but it was fairly unproductive.”

  “Perhaps not so much as it may have appeared, but that is neither here nor there just now.” Translated this meant that they should not talk further on the subject now. She had expected the conversation to occur on more than one level and she was long tutored in this art, as he would know and expect.

  “There are people who might find it convenient if James did not come home. If he expired and was buried in some unmarked Russian grave. I, however, do not find this convenient. Nor do I believe in walking into conflict without the appropriate arms. There is more at stake here than a man’s wealth, or even his life.”

  Pamela felt a wash of relief begin to run through her veins. The mere sound of his voice made her feel as though the angels were on her side and would help her man the barricades.

  “The letter he left you, you should read it.”

  “How did you know there was a letter?” she asked, for she knew he did not mean the letter about Adele. She wondered if the priest was psychic, for she had brought the letter with her to Paris for safekeeping because she had a feeling whatever lay inside should not be left to the prying of any eyes other than her own. She only half understood her own hesitation about it, only that she felt to open it would be to admit something that she could not. That to break the seal would be to open a Pandora’s Box for which she was not prepared.

  “Because he would not leave you without some words of comfort and farewell, if that is what he meant this madness to be.”

  “You cannot really think he meant for this to happen?”

  “He tends towards self-destruction. You know this as well as I do. When he was a boy, we protected him from it as best we could. I thought he would outgrow it as a man but it’s a dark thing that has a terrible hold on him. In his youth he vacillated between studiousness and brilliance, to being le bon follastre—you are familiar with this term?”

  “Suicidal clown,” Pamela said sharply. “It’s a longstanding tradition here in France.”

  “It also leads to an early grave. This suicidal foolishness was doubled when he was with Andrei. They are of the same ilk temperamentally. This is why Russia is the worst place Jamie could have chosen to disappear.”

  “This suicidal foolishness, as you call it, is an illness,” she said, an edge to her tone. “He didn’t choose it. He doesn’t walk willingly into that darkness. Nor did he choose to get caught in the Soviet Union.”

  The Father General eyed her shrewdly, and it felt as though those tourmaline eyes could pick over a soul the way a flood of locusts could strip a cotton field.

  “Didn’t he, Pamela? Have you ever known Jamie to fall into a trap he hadn’t devised in the first place?”

  She sighed. The man had a point. She ought to have remembered the first law of all interactions with a Jesuit—don’t argue.

  “I would just like to find a way to bring him home.”

  The golden eyes held her own, unblinking. The man would have made a bang-up inquisitor, she decided. People would be admitting to things their ancestors seven generations removed had done, never mind their own sins.

  “Home is merely the place where we are loved, and love has the ability to cross time and space, so one is always home if one has ever been loved. It is the place that one builds inside, the fire one tends within the soul. And as such, Jamie is always home. That being said, I should still like to bring him back to his correct geographical location.” He smiled, taking the weight from his words.

  “I think though, Pamela, you must be honest with yourself. He laid the path for you, after all. Perhaps you must now ask yourself why he did so.”

  “I know why he did it but I don’t accept it.”

  She shivered, for a sharp wind had come in off the Seine, filled with the scent of northern ice and frosted fields.

  “Winter has arrived,” he said softly, breath laced with crystals. “But the summer was generous and full, the harvests plenty, so winter’s bite will be that much harder. That is as it should be though, for the earth will rest easy beneath the snows.”

  They sat silent for a long moment and Pamela slowly became aware of a silent exchange taking place between them, something that she could feel in her spine, a shiver that crested in her head, but not one that was uncomfortable or foreboding. So it seemed natural when he held his hands up, the broad, flat palms open to her.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said, thinking it wasn’t likely anyone would find the courage to refuse the man.

  His hands covered her head, thick with callouses, heavy with warmth. Her shivers left her. It felt like warm oil suddenly spread out from his palms, anointing her, forgiving her, no matter the length and breadth of her sins. It was the same sense of time dissolved that existed inside the Cathedral, but held within the hands of a human vessel.

  “Grace is given to us all, Pamela, but perhaps it is given most freely to those who do not feel they deserve it.”

>   “I just want to be safe, to have those I love be safe. Is that really so much to ask of this life?” It seemed natural to say what was in her heart, simplistic as it might seem, to this man. Inquisitor, confessor, beekeeper, and God’s General. Fearsome, but a good man—she would bet her life on it. She was also betting the life of James Kirkpatrick on it.

  “Such things are like weighing fire or measuring a bushel of wind, beautiful ideas but impossible in the realm in which we live. We can only live by Faith, which requires much courage of us but is the only passport out of the land of fear. You hold that passport in your hands already. You simply need to open your heart to it.”

  He was gone then, as though he had never been in the garden at all, though she could still feel the gift of grace he had bestowed upon her, where it had settled like a bright spindle of warmth at her core, in her heart.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Christmas 1974

  Julian

  The house was arrayed in its gleaming best, the chandeliers lit, the wood polished to within an inch of its life, the wine uncorked and the crates of whiskey sitting in the cold room off the kitchen. Bowls of flowers scented the air, along with the spices wafting from Maggie’s kitchen. She was dressed in a gown of moonlit green that had caused her to raise her own eyebrows at her reflection in the mirror when she had first tried it on in Paris. It was cut low and ingeniously darted with a darker shade of velvet. Her hair was up, with a choker of black pavé crystals around her throat and matching crystals dangling from her ears. Casey was going to be apoplectic when he got a view of the neckline on the dress but by then it would be too late to do anything about it.

  She checked the dining room one more time. The table blazed with the good crystal and silver, the linens a deep crimson and the decorations simple wreaths of holly with their bright red berries intact. Outside, snow had begun to fall, drifting down slowly in big flakes, softening the fence posts and outbuildings and clinging in all its fugitive beauty on the windows before melting away.

  The evening had been choreographed, but in a way so subtle it would go unnoticed. People would only have a sense of enjoyment lingering with them. She had been trained to construct such evenings, first by her father and then, in a more natural fashion, by Jamie. One provided good food, music, wine and spirits, one cultivated an aura of conviviality, and then one got down to business. It was the art of making connections, of promises to meet later, of deals ghosted upon the air, of which the nuts and bolts could be dealt with down the road. It was introducing people who one felt would fit well together, would have things in common, or whose meeting would benefit business even if it wasn’t one’s own. People remembered such things, saw them later as favors and reciprocated in kind.

  Though Casey claimed such evenings made him feel like he couldn’t get a decent breath of air, he managed to mingle just fine and told stories that had the entire table laughing. He was very good at making certain no one’s glass ever went empty and drawing out those whose tendency was to remain quiet. He also made certain the musicians who had been hired to play didn’t indulge too freely in the flow of whiskey and wine.

  After dinner, the entire company retired to what had originally been a large parlor, a room fitted out comfortably with leather chairs and couches, an enormous fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows. A large Christmas tree, a-glow with fairy lights, held pride of place in front of the windows, framed by the falling snow, the flakes so big their starry shapes could be clearly seen through the glass.

  Everyone was relaxed and the atmosphere, spiked with generous amounts of whiskey, was as easeful as though the senses had been rubbed down with a double warp of velvet, cut to reveal the pattern only upon later inspection.

  Pamela found a quiet moment with Casey and leaned into his side as he wrapped one arm around her. She wanted nothing more than to go home, take down her hair, cuddle her son and sleep for about ten hours straight. Since she had come back from Paris things had become increasingly tense and she was certain someone had gone through all the papers in the study and rifled through Jamie’s vast collection of books, looking for something.

  “Christ, woman, how often do ye go through such things? I was sweatin’ just sittin’ there listenin’ to them question ye, never mind havin’ to come up with intelligent answers an’ convince them I was right.”

  “Oh, once or twice a week,” she said a trifle grimly, for the evening, though a success, had drained her completely. “I’ve got a few things against me in their view. I’m not Jamie, and I’m female and I’m too young as far as they are concerned to know my arse from my elbow, though I think perhaps I changed a few opinions on that score tonight.”

  “Well, I tell ye yer a better person than me, Jewel. I only just held myself back from stickin’ that bloody Dutchman’s head in the punchbowl an’ drownin’ him. Had he tried any harder to look down yer dress, he would have fallen straight into it.”

  She laughed, for it was true. She leaned up to kiss Casey’s stubbled cheek—and felt him stiffen suddenly, the arm around her tightening.

  “Pamela,” he said in an odd tone. She followed his gaze to the entryway of the parlor.

  The world tilted upside down for a moment and when it turned the right way again, nothing was the same. For Jamie’s Uncle Philip had arrived uninvited and brought with him a guest, a boy of about nineteen years of age. A boy with eyes of a dense sapphire blue and hair the color of winter chestnuts. A boy with a pure profile and every bone fitted perfectly to the next. A boy who moved across the room now with a cat-like grace, slender and straight, a natural athlete. A boy who must be Jamie’s son. For no relative whose blood spanned farther apart than father and son could so resemble another man, could so embody all those features she had only ever thought to see in one man. He was, quite simply, beautiful, and possibly one of the worst shocks she had ever had in her life.

  “Pamela,” Philip smiled, yellowing teeth sharp and nasty. “I’d like you to meet Julian. Julian, this is Pamela.”

  The boy took her hand, though she had no memory of putting hers out to him. Her breath was caught somewhere between her throat and lungs and refused to move. His hand was warm and hers icy in comparison.

  One thought with two minds at such times—the mind that wanted to curse and ask why and how and who, and the other mind which was cool and calm, carefully assessing what this might mean, what traps and pitfalls now yawned open at one’s feet. One never spoke in public with the first mind, only with the latter.

  “How lovely to meet you, Julian. Are you a friend of Philip’s?” This was said lightly but with a slightly dubious undertone as to the likelihood of Philip having friends at all.

  The boy still held her hand, sapphire eyes bold and face inquisitive. He smiled and it was utterly disarming, just as it was when his father smiled. And his father Jamie must be. She saw that clearly, for the boy had been brought here as a pawn in the Reverend’s game, she was certain. Only it was also clear he did not know himself to be a pawn. She wondered if he even knew there was a game, and thought it likely best if he did not. For innocent he would be more amenable to manipulation by his masters, and she had no doubt they had been grooming him for some time in anticipation of this moment.

  The second mind spoke to the boy while the first stood back, numb and reeling. He was clearly well educated, cultured, and had been raised with impeccable manners. He had already spent a term at Oxford. Jamie’s alma mater. She suspected that was not coincidence. She suspected nothing was.

  Philip watched the interplay between them with a look of smugness oiling the froggy sheen of his skin. Julian seemed unaware of the tension that existed between her and Philip but it was likely he was too polite to point it out had he noticed. The game had changed and she was not, despite gypsies and Jesuits, prepared for such a move as this one.

  Julian excused himself shortly after, bowing over her hand in
parting and on rising up, looked her full in the eyes and spoke in poetry as his father so often did.

  “Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”

  And so he had some small portion of his father’s charm, though not yet his grace. Perhaps never his grace, for it was not a thing acquired so much as innate to Jamie’s nature.

  “Well, he’s not backwards about bein’ forwards, I’ll say that for the wee beggar.” Casey was looking darkly in the boy’s direction as he joined a group of people near the window, inserting himself with ease into their midst.

  She excused herself and put her half-full wineglass on a table. Smiling all the way to the stairs, she gathered her skirt in one hand and walked up until she was well hidden in the shadows from the upper floor. Then she fled along the hall, certain she was going to be sick. She reached the bathroom and locked herself in, the ball of nausea cold as ice lodged in her chest.

  She sat down on the side of the tub, pressing her hand to her chest where her heart was still pounding hard enough that she could hear every beat in her ears. She swallowed, trying to dislodge the icy pain, wishing fervently that she hadn’t had the glass of wine earlier. Jamie’s son, here in Jamie’s home. Oh, that Jamie should be here to see this boy. What would it mean to him? Did he have any idea of this? It was hard for her to imagine that Jamie wouldn’t know he had a son, to think that a woman he had once loved could keep such a secret from him seemed beyond cruel. Though perhaps he had not loved her, and that might explain a great deal in itself.

  There was a knock on the door and then Casey’s voice, quiet, but filled with worry. “Jewel, are ye alright in there?”

  She stood and walked across the room to unlock the door. Casey came in and shut it behind him, his face pale beneath the dark of his whiskers.

  “It’s been the helluva shock, no?”

  She smiled wearily. “You could say that.”

  “Do ye think Jamie knew?” Casey sat beside her on the tub. The lip of it was flat and wide, and as porcelain went, fairly comfortable.