by Summer Devon
In the darkened bedroom, the doctor hung up his outer garments, rolled up his sleeves and to Jazz’s surprise poured out of a bottle something smelling of alcohol into the washbowl and rubbed his hands in it.
“Don’t look so shocked, sir. I am not unwilling to learn.”
Mr. Grace strode to the bedside and examined Steele. He felt the unconscious man’s head with a delicate, expert touch. “Ah, he’s sustained a nasty crack on the head. Fell, you say?” He peered at the purple mark across his throat. “Looks like he ran into something neck high first, then toppled over backward and hit his head on a paving stone. Poor fool, probably did it walking too quickly in the fog. Thick as soup out there already. Do you know the man?”
Jazz shook his head.
“Keep him very quiet. Don’t move him. Or are you expert enough to know this already?” Mr. Grace gave him a satirical smile.
“What else should we do?”
The doctor straightened, pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed his hands with it. “I would bleed him. And if the swelling does not decrease, I suggest trepanning.”
Jazz had no idea if either idea was worthwhile. The medicines Mag had given him were for disease and pain, not a head injury. He sighed and rubbed his arm.
“So, sir? What say you?” Mr. Grace watched him over his spectacles. “Shall I ready my instruments?”
Trepanning. Removing part of the skull. “Perhaps we should wait?” Jazz suggested.
“That’s another course of action I often follow, although not in a case of possible subdural hematoma.” The doctor picked up his leather bag and fumbled with the buckle. “Not much that can be done, but one does like to make an effort.”
“He’s your patient,” Jazz said. “You do what you think is best.”
From the bed came a thick, rasping snoring. It stopped then started again. The doctor dropped the black case onto the floor. It landed with a clank. “Help me roll the man onto his side.”
After they carefully positioned Steele, Mr. Grace didn’t pick up his bag. He pulled a chair near the bed. “Perhaps it is just a matter of time, and you’re correct, we should simply wait. One dislikes making a mess of a man on his last day on earth.”
Jazz shifted from foot to foot. He fingered his CR. “How do you know?”
“That noise. His reflex to swallow has been compromised—too common with head injuries. But I’ll wager this is something else.” Mr. Grace went to his jacket. He pulled a book and his glasses from the pocket and sat down on the chair by the bed. “You should summon a clergyman. I’ll wait here. It might take minutes, it might be a matter of hours.”
Jazz nodded and left the room. Liza, slightly disheveled from feeding Maggie, waited in the hall. She looked enquiringly at Jazz who said, “He’s a goner.”
Her brow furrowed. “I assume you’re saying he’s passed on?”
“Not yet. How do we find a clergyman?”
Eliza blinked and the frown grew darker. “I’ll send a servant.”
By the time Reverend Harris arrived, the sounds from the bed were less regular. Jazz found a wooden chair in another room and put that near the comfortable armchair occupied by the doctor. He silently apologized to Steele—there was no point in saying any words aloud, even if he’d been conscious to hear Jazz. They dying man probably had no interest in Jazz’s guilt in his own murder. Only the events of Jazz’s earlier life had moved Steele. Events that wouldn’t take place for centuries.
The young clergyman mumbled over Steele then looked uncertainly at Jazz. “I would stay and wait if you wished.” His tone made it clear he didn’t want to be there.
Jazz showed him to the door and thanked him.
A few minutes after he returned to the room and settled to wait, the horrendous noise from the bed stopped in the middle of a rattling gasp. The doctor slept but Jazz didn’t need the doctor to make an examination to know Steele had died. He got to his feet and looked down at the body, and waited for familiar pangs of guilt but nothing came but pity and a familiar weariness.
With Steele gone, Jazz doubted another DHUy would come after him. The man had probably broken all sorts of laws to stalk Jazz through the long months. Others might have helped Steele but no one else at the agency would be as reckless. No one else there had lived through the hell of the Way’s camps. Steele had been one of the few high-functioning survivors.
Had he ever noticed that similarity between them? Jazz’s scar and his tattoo that marked them both. Jazz touched the already chilled forehead. “Goodbye,” he whispered.
After he roused the dozing doctor, Jazz went to find Eliza.
She stood at the dining room window, staring out at the fog.
As he walked into the room, she started and turned. “Mr. Steele is…?”
“Dead.”
Jazz wanted to touch her, pull her close, but Eliza sank into a chair and folded her hands on the polished surface of the table.
“I would be a hypocrite if I said I was sorry,” she said at last. “But perhaps it is a loss for someone.”
“I don’t know.” He felt the loss.
“You know so very much, and it’s time to tell me more. Go on.” She gave a weak laugh. “Start with my future. You and Mr. Steele know the name of the man I am supposed to marry in this future you’ve mapped out.”
Jazz walked to the other side of the table to stop himself from grabbing her. “No one maps anything. I promise you.”
“Oh I think I understand that much.” Eliza smiled up at him. His insides did a few somersaults at the brief smile that lit her face.
As she tilted her head, a curl brushed her neck and she impatiently tucked it into her complex hair arrangement. A flower petal floated to the table and she rolled it between her fingers. “I must admit I will be glad to be shed of the name Peasnettle with which you saddled me. Who is this mystery man of mine?”
Jazz tilted against the wall and crossed his arms, setting off the tingling in his scar. Blast any long-forgotten rules. No, he reminded himself, these were rules that hadn’t even been imagined yet. She deserved a glimpse into her own happiness.
“You already know him. You will marry a man you’ve known and admired since you were a young girl. Your sister introduced you to him. He’s a good man, really. Awfully respectable.” He cleared his throat in an attempt to choke off the sneer from his voice before he continued. “He even gains some kind of royal honor or whatsit later on. He’s James Sandton, and eventually he’ll become a baron or baronet or some such thing.”
Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t her reaction. She slammed her hand down on the table, causing the vase to rattle. And then she gave a startling whoop of laughter. “Of course I will marry him! My own, my darling James Sandton. Now I wonder, how on earth did your seer ever find that out?”
“Eh?”
“As you would say, ‘the good old baronet’,” she said, shaking her head and lapsing into a fit of giggles. “Naturally I shall marry Sir Sandton. That has always been the plan. For most of my life, anyway. Oh, Jane would be pleased.”
“Because she introduced you? Eliza, why didn’t you tell me he’s back in your life?”
“No, the question is why in heaven’s name did you and your ridiculous seer not tell me this earlier?” Her giggles turned into gusts of laughter bordering on the hysterical. “And Mr. Steele believed it too. Did he carry a seer as well? He was a great fool also.”
He felt more dismayed than annoyed. “Why are you so amused if you knew you were always going to marry this baronet? Who is this person anyway? I’ve looked and looked and I know you’ll marry the man. But it’s hard to track down any information in this da’ place with no central source. Oh c’mon, Liza, please stop with the laughing fit and answer me. You’re beginning to worry me.”
She hiccupped, wiped the edge of her eye, and began in a voice still quavering with laughter. “I do not know how you stumbled on that name. You must be magical. The Baronet Sandton, is—was—a figment of my sister
’s imagination.”
Jazz frowned. “Eh?”
Eliza’s laughter died away. She still smiled but not at him. “My sister was very romantic. Do you recall when I described the games she and I would play? She loved to grant herself imaginary suitors. She’d amuse herself by cutting up letters and arranging them into likely names. One day she invented a baronet for me using her letters. She loved titles, you see. We had an enormous row about it since I informed her I would settle for nothing less than a prince.”
“She announced that Lady Eliza Sandton was good enough and she called me Lady Eliza from that day forward. I remember that when I was eleven I discovered she was wrong and I would be plain Lady Sandton, but she refused to admit she could ever be mistaken about something so all-important as a title.”
She pulled out her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Mr. Steele and your seer are very impressive if they can land upon that name. I have not heard it since I was a child.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Eh, no. Damn it. I get it now. I see. He doesn’t exist. Eliza.” Jas strode over to her and with one long finger touched the curve of her cheek, and then a blossom she’d tucked into her hair.
He stared at her hair or perhaps her ear. Suddenly intense, he reached for her hand and clutched it so tight her fingers hurt. “Eliza. Rose gardens.”
She wondered if he’d sustained a blow on the head. Alarmed, she tightened her grip on his hand. “Jas?”
But he interrupted. “Oh my God. Those things on the table and in your hair. They’re roses? Are those roses?”
She was startled by his fierceness about flowers. And when did her lover start using conventional epithets and call upon God? But then Jas tended to startle her with most of his turns. How she longed for his strange ways. “Yes, they are. Why are you so agitated? Do they offend you?”
“Not at all. The opposite,” he said in a strangled, slow voice. “I think they’re wonderful. Not as exquisite as you…Eliza, but I understand at last.”
He scowled and spoke as if to himself. “If you agree, well, I have no idea how we’ll solve the name dilemma since there’s Cousin Ann, blasted Cousin John, Wimble and the rest, but that must not matter. It always seems to work in the end, eh?”
Eliza growled and tugged at his arm. “Jas will you explain yourself or must I empty the vase of roses over you?”
He knelt by her chair and she caught her breath when she saw the yearning in his eyes. “Oh God, I hope I do understand…Eliza, love, please, will you consider marrying me?”
She felt the borderline hysterical laughter that still simmered in her throat and chest. What on earth had suddenly changed the man? Roses? If she had known that, she would have plucked flowers long ago, and flung them at him, thorns and all.
She witnessed the transformation before her eyes, but didn’t begin to understand, then again, perhaps she didn’t care—after all, what was one more mystery about the man. Certainly nothing to keep her from holding back her answer. “Oh! I shan’t be so coy as you were when I begged for your hand. Yes, Jas, please yes.”
She leaned forward to embrace him, but his strong hands clasped her shoulders and implacably held her off. With an unusually grave expression shadowing his face, he watched her for a moment.
“Wait. It isn’t so easy. I can’t live with you unless you know all of it. Everything.”
“At last,” she couldn’t help chiding him. “You share your dark corners.”
“Yes. If you believe me, perhaps you’ll agree to marry me. If you don’t, well, at least don’t try to cart me off to that stinking Bedlam. I will leave. I’ll promise to disappear if you want me to. Maybe even the way I originally planned. No matter what happens now, Jazz White will be gone forever. Okay?”
He was silent, and at last she understood he was perfectly serious and waiting for her answer. She could only nod and murmur that it would suit.
He pulled out the seer from his pocket again. For about a minute he stared down at the seer as he flicked and smoothed his fingers over it. She blinked and leaned forward. What had been a block of carved wood now appeared to be a slender, oval-shaped bar of silver.
“This begins a long time from now,” he said, then paused and cleared his throat carefully, as if he were gathering himself for some kind of dangerous act. “A long time from now, in my past.” And he told her everything that was impossible but—and on this she had no doubt—was true.
As he spoke, Eliza felt wave after wave of familiar shock, but no surprise. The stories he told sounded too recognizable, the lurking suspicion she tried to suppress had been with her too long.
She put her hand on his shoulder, the reassuring muscular warmth that had shielded her through long nights in Spain. Her Jas. “Your war is the worst of it. That the dreadful and bloody myth will be as real as the war we saw in the Peninsula. For some peculiar reason this cuts up my peace more than the fact that you and Steele are from another century.”
“Remember what I told you about the camps where so many people died?”
She nodded.
“Steele was one of the few survivors of a camp.”
She pushed her chair back and, standing, opened her arms wide.
He came to her at once, wrapping his arms tight around her. The scent and feel of him woke parts of her body she’d forgotten. The kiss he gave her was as startlingly wonderful and new as their very first. Except she knew his mouth now, loved the feel of it.
But then he pulled back and she understood. “You have more to tell me.” She settled back into her chair and tried not to examine him from the neck down.
He dropped to the floor next to her chair. “Yes. I suppose I do, about what happened after the war.”
“After your memory was erased by Madame Blanro’s machinery?”
He slanted an eyebrow. “Nothing wrong with your memory. I can’t believe you recall all the things I’ve told you.”
When he shifted closer to her, rested an arm along the seat of her chair, she again became acutely aware of his physicality. He wore only a thin muslin shirt and she had a good view of his smooth skin and well-defined muscles of his shoulders and chest. Her gaze traveled to the tousled hair and his potent blue eyes that so often played havoc with her heartbeat and breath.
She realized she’d been staring and raised her eyebrows in what she hoped was a sophisticated manner—and ruined the pose with a blush—but he didn’t seem to notice her reaction. He was too intent on talking about the strange horrors and marvels of his world.
Eliza reached for his hand as he described the contraptions that once lay beneath the skin of his arm. She rested his arm on her lap, palm up. With a gentle finger she traced the edge of the peculiar pink rectangle of a scar. His voice faltered at her touch. She glanced up to see pain in his eyes.
“They put in some other things to replace these chip items? Does it hurt still?”
He shook his head, but seemed unable to speak. She leaned over and carefully kissed the palm of his hand and the scar on his arm, then let him loose.
After a moment’s pause, he collected himself, cleared his throat and continued with his story, ending rather awkwardly with the moment he discovered he was the first stranger because of a dark knit hat and some strange cloak of his. She suddenly remembered the strange wording he once used when he said that the night in the cave “had to happen”.
He handed her the seer, no CR, he called it, then watched her in tight-lipped silence, clearly holding back more words as he waited for her outcry or her questions.
She turned the CR over and over in her hands, too dizzy to concentrate and think. The object felt lighter, colder and smoother than the piece of wood she remembered. She recalled the expert way he’d touched it, all of his supernaturally exact predictions, and his recitations of perfect Latin she had heard during their travels. She gave the peculiar thing a tentative little push, but nothing happened.
Jas—no he said his name was spelled with a dou
ble Z—this very strange man, Jazz White, reached for the object he’d carried for all those weeks. “It’ll only respond to my eye, touch or voice.” He leaned forward again and showed her a few shifting pictures and words. A piece of music, clear and sweet and very strange, came floating from the object as he handed it back to her. She listened to the music, but thought of all of his past words and actions. Everything he had done slipped logically into a sensible progression.
After a long time, she spoke. “If you are mad, then I must be also. For I find…I must conclude you are telling me the truth. I can think of no other answer, except an extremely elaborate prank that ended with one of the pranksters dead upstairs in my spare bedroom.”
She couldn’t fear the bizarre facts about him when he stood near her. This was Jas, the utterly natural, strange love of her life.
“Here, please, take back this……object. Turn it back to a bar of wood.”
He looked into her eyes for a long moment. She saw the question and answered. “I have already said I would marry you but there is one thing I do wonder.” She didn’t want to ask him, but knew she had to. “Do you truly wish to stay with us? Can you bear to not return to your age of miracles?”
His laugh was incredulous, as if her question was absurd. “Hell yes, I want to stay with you. I believe it’s all I’ve wanted since I first laid eyes on you. Jazz White is dead, Eliza. He must stay dead.”
“Long live Jas Sandton,” she said softly.
He took the CR from her and after a few moments of smoothing its sides, shoved it back into his pocket.
“It…the seer still looks magical and silver to me,” she said.
“I’ve reset it, though. Anyone else will think it is a piece of wood. Even Steele wouldn’t have recognized it. I was good at my work.”
She nodded. He could tell her that he would soon sprout a pair of wings or turn into a platter of Stilton cheese and she’d have to believe him.