by Lara Archer
In the center of the room, a small stone fountain streamed ribbons of water, which splashed into a tiled pool beneath. There were plants—ferns in celadon pots—ringing the pool, adding to the sense of misty moisture in the air. She’d never before seen living greenery inside a chapel.
Against one wall stood an old wooden table, very simple, like in a peasant’s kitchen. Time and thousands of touches had worn it to a subdued gloss. A linen cloth of spotless white lay across the top, covered with perhaps a hundred glass cups holding glowing candles.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“What do you think it is?”
She looked around. The open window, the greenery, the flowing water. What might have been closed and dark and airless was full of life and movement. Peaceful, but suggestive of freedom.
Oh, Lord.
“It’s for her, isn’t it? For Sarah.”
The Giant nodded, his hair screening his face. “For Sal.”
“Why? Who—who made it this way?”
He gave her a meaningful glance. “Who do you think?”
No. It couldn’t be. But there were very few options for him to be referring to. “You don’t mean Lord Gar—Lord Hawkesbridge? The man has all the tender sentiment of a scorpion.”
The ghost of a smile touched his lips again. “You’re wrong about that.”
“I’ve seen all the evidence I need. And why should you defend him? I thought you disliked him. The two of you nearly came to fisticuffs the first time I met you.”
“I told you, I’ve known him since we were boys.” He paused, and the muscles of his mouth shifted, seemed to catch, like a seldom-used machine forcing its way against rust. “He learned to be the cold thing he is. When I first knew him, he was . . . like a wild creature. Uncivilized, and quite out of control.”
“Sebastian? Wild?”
“Broke every rule he could, no matter how they beat him afterward.”
“Beat him? Who beat him? He’s a marquess.”
“Now he is. Then he was a ten year old child, whose father had just died.” The Giant’s mouth stilled again, seemed to catch on grit. Clearly, he was not used to making such revelations. “The father had been a rebellious sort, as I understand. Lived to outrage the old marquess, who was apparently easy to anger, and impossible to please. Most hated man in the south counties, I heard Sebastian call him once—the grandfather, I mean. He’s never spoken much about it, but from the bits he’s let slip, I gather Sebastian lived those first ten years with his father in a farmhouse on the family land.”
“That man? Grew up in a farmhouse?”
“Happily, too. It become obvious a few years ago when we had to hide out in a barn one night, and it turned out Sebastian knew how to deliver a calf.”
“He didn’t!”
“He did. I’ll never forget the sight of him, smeared with muck, holding that little wet creature. And he had the most enormous grin on his face.”
Sebastian, smeared with muck. And happy about it. She shook her head in disbelief. All the hidden layers she sensed in him, this was not one she expected. “So what happened? When his father died?”
“It was bad. A bad death. There’d been a storm, and a sodden riverbank gave way beneath his father’s horse. A broken thigh bone, I think it was. The leg was amputated. He survived that, but not the infection that followed.”
“Oh, God.” A bad death indeed. “And Sebastian was left at the mercy of the old marquess.”
“Aye,” said the Giant. “And the nasty old rotter was bound and determined to make a proper civilized gentleman of his heir. Hence the permission given the masters to beat him as cruelly as they wished. But even those bastards couldn’t break him.”
“Masters? What masters? His father died when he was . . . ten, you said. So this was, what? A boys’ reformatory? Or were you all precocious enough to have landed yourselves in prison?”
“Close enough.” The Giant stretched one of his enormous hands above the rustic tabletop and touched his fingertips to one of the glass candleholders. He circled around its rim, then let his fingers drift meditatively back and forth above the dancing flame. “We were all troublemakers of the worst sort,” he said, his voice falling lower than ever. “Damaged goods. If it weren’t for Mawbry, we’d probably all have ended up being flayed alive.”
“Mawbry again! Sebastian said he was the one who recruited him for—for what you all do.”
“Oh, yes. One of his forebears served Walsingham under Queen Elizabeth, and since then all heirs are trained from birth for the job.” His fingers still hovered over the candle, and he began passing his fingers, one by one, through the fire itself. It was unnerving to watch.
She wanted to grab his wrist, pull his hand back. But she felt afraid of him again, suddenly, as huge as he was—like a dog that had chosen to be friendly, but might savage her if she came at him wrong. She held her ground, licked at her lips. “Sebastian said Mawbry did him a kindness of some sort.”
The Giant’s odd, rasping laugh sounded again, and he lifted his hand from the flame. A line of black soot stained his fingers. “A kindness? Is that what he called it?” He glanced directly at her for a moment, his expression wryly amused. “Let’s just say Mawbry has a knack for seeing into people. Seeing potential. He took Sebastian aside one day, and they came back an hour later, both bloodied, with their lips and cheeks split and their clothing torn.”
“They fought?”
“And looked damned pleased with themselves about it. And after that—Sebastian seemed to settle in. And seemed eager to master every skill he could, civilized and otherwise. I’ve no doubt Mawbry held out the promise of interesting adventures once they were grown.” He ducked his head once more so his hair completely obscured his face. “Mawbry saved a great many of us. And we work to return that favor. He calls us his Brotherhood of Sinners.”
“His what?”
“It’s an apt name, believe me.”
Was he serious? He certainly seemed to be. Brotherhood of Sinners—good Lord. A thousand questions crowded her mind, but she wasn’t sure how much more the Giant would be willing to tell her. So she settled for a practical one. “Where in heaven’s name was this?”
The black hair swung back as he lifted his head, and mischief sparkled in his eyes. “Eton.”
“Eton?”
“Not always as civilized a place as one might expect.” His expression resumed its usual seriousness. “And you must believe there’s more to the marquess than he shows the world. He arranged for the friars to have this chapel consecrated. He pays a small fortune to have prayers said here throughout the day; the candles are kept burning around the clock.”
Rachel looked around, trying to bring all the strange pieces of this story together in her mind. Sebastian had arranged this place. For Sarah.
He’d made it exactly as she’d have wanted it, as only someone who truly knew her would be able to do. Oh, damn it all. It was so much easier to let herself believe Sebastian had a lump of marble in place of a heart. It was what he wanted her to believe, what he worked so hard to convince her of. But she knew better. She knew better. She’d seen his tender side too many times, hard as he tried to hide it.
All at once, a great well of emptiness and grief opened in her chest, and tears filled her eyes. “Sarah,” she said. “Was she . . . is she buried here?”
The Giant shook his head. “Not inside. She’d never have wanted to be kept inside. There’s a small courtyard in the center of this building, with a garden. There’s an orange tree, new-planted.” He broke off, his eyes suddenly hooded again, and he drew in a rattling breath. “It’s a good place,” he said, once he blew the breath out again. “She’d have been pleased with his choice.”
Her tears swelled and began to spill; her throat felt half-choked and raw. “Why did Sebastian not tell me of this? Why did he not bring me here himself?”
“You know why. It reveals far too much. Besides, he won’t step foot on sanctified
ground if he can avoid it. Neither of us has much right to such places. It’s astonishing a thunderbolt hasn’t struck me down by now.”
“But you have come here. That monk recognized you at the door.”
The Giant turned his head away again.
So he had layers of his own. Layers and layers beneath all these men.
“Sarah was important to you, too?” she dared to ask.
The Giant went still as stone. “We should go now. Sebastian will discover you’re missing before too long. I don’t mind him suffering a bit, but he’ll tear apart Vigo if he can’t find you.”
“No, wait. You knew my sister. Please. Tell me . . . something. Anything. I want to understand what happened to her.”
He stepped backwards, his fists clenching at his sides, his chin pointed squarely at the floor. He was shutting her out, his method different from Sebastian’s, but just as stubborn.
But then, to her surprise, he spoke. “Your sister was a good person,” he said softly. “You should understand that above all.” He faltered then, his fists loosening, then squeezing shut again, and his enormous body went rigid as though with a spasm of physical pain.
“Of course I know that.”
“She—she knew how to be kind. Even to those who didn’t deserve it.”
That sounded like a confession. “And you didn’t deserve it?”
He went silent again.
“Were you—” She didn’t even know how to ask what she wanted to ask, what she needed to know. None of the terms of this world seemed familiar. “Did you know Sarah well?”
“Yes.” He hesitated, then lifted his head to look her directly in the eye.
Without the veil of hair, his pitch-black eyes were strikingly bright, not cold as she’d first believed them to be. There was a molten heat in them, emanating from the very core, and some deep well of emotion, some great and terrible pain.
Fear prickled at her, and now she was the one who wanted to look away, but he held her gaze.
“Your sister was kind to me,” he said at last. “At a time when I’d have gone mad without a little kindness.”
With a quick toss of his head, the sort a horse might make, the Giant dropped the shield of his hair between them again.
“Sal was not afraid of monsters,” he commented solemnly from beneath that shelter. “And neither, I suspect, are you.”
He paused, then turned, and not towards the door they’d entered through. He moved to a different door, one that faced the internal courtyard. The orange tree. “Come on, then. You should see this.”
The courtyard was lovely too, with paving stones the color of sand, and another fountain in the center in which small finches hopped and flicked at the water with their wings. Winter-blooming roses climbed all along the walls, above thick fragrant masses of lavender.
Lavender. Of course. Sarah must have told him how much she loved it. The soft scent soothed the air here, softened all rough edges of emotion with a sense of tranquility.
The young orange tree, maybe six feet high, glossy and healthy and green, was given the place of honor in the full glow of the southern sun. Clusters of tight ivory buds thrust outward between the whorls of its leaves; they’d make quite the show of fragrant blossoms in just a few weeks.
There was no bench, so the Giant simply sat down on the bare ground not far from the base of the tree.
Rachel did the same, close beside him.
He didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, and she was grateful for that. It was comforting somehow, to sit like little children, with the earth warm beneath them and the dappled shade of the leaves moving caressingly over their faces. She pressed her palms flat against the soil, knowing Sarah rested somewhere here, that this was a place of peace made just for her.
By Sebastian.
A surge of tenderness swept through her. A dizzying, frightening tenderness.
Her fingers clutched at the earth.
Suddenly, it was all too much. She wanted everything to go backwards. She wanted to be away from all this, from the danger and the confusion. She wanted Sarah back, alive, to have her sister with her again, and not just this little patch of earth, and the faint heat of this alien winter sun.
Her lungs ached, and hard pressure rose through her chest and behind her eyes. All at once, a great swell of sorrow roared up and broke inside her.
Its force was shocking—like a river breaking through a dam. Like the violence of an ocean wave. The feeling washed up and over, and suddenly the tears couldn’t be held back.
All the tears she’d fought down since the first day she’d come to London and Helm’s words burned away the last of her hope—they came violent and breathless and horrible, sobs jerking from her lungs until there was no space left to breathe. And all the years she’d spent, waiting, longing for Sarah to come back, trapped in that cold and loveless house, turning slowly gray and lifeless as the cottage stones—she wept for that, too.
Why? What had it all been for?
Why hadn’t she run after Sarah that night Sarah first left?
Why hadn’t fate just once taken pity in all the years since—let Mr. Rapson find her sister while she still had some innocence left? Let Sarah escape with her life from Victoire de Laurent?
Aching and anger and fury and regret all clawed their way up from inside her, such a great weight of pain, from so deep down, she thought she might be ripped to shreds by the sheer bulk of it. It hurt and it hurt and it hurt.
She didn’t know how long the storm of it lasted. When at long last it slowed, and her head fell to rest against her knees, she was dimly aware the sun had moved. Her chest still shuddered and her throat ached as though it had been scoured out, but the tears were done at last. She felt bruised and empty—but lighter, too, somehow.
Over the years, she’d shoved so many things deep down inside, such a great, dark mass of awfulness, it was a wonder the weight hadn’t sunk her through the earth long ago.
It had always been a point of pride with her not to complain, not to let her pain show to anyone on the outside. But just at the moment, she couldn’t recall why that had seemed a good idea.
Swallowing hard, she wiped at her face with the heels of her hands.
Gradually, she realized that the Giant was watching her. He hadn’t so much as shifted his legs while they sat beneath the tree, but had waited like a very large and very patient watchdog. Not a savage beast at all.
On a sudden impulse, she stretched out her hand towards his. He looked at it for a moment as if baffled over the meaning of it, but then he moved his own the few inches necessary to make contact. He bent his strong fingers around hers briefly, awkwardly, as though he were not used to such contact. He squeezed lightly before dropping them again.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
She tried to give him a smile. “Not your fault, is it?”
He seemed to wince. “Rachel, listen. There’s—there’s something I really ought to tell you.” His voice had gone low, scarcely audible, and rougher in its accent than before. “It’s something no one else can. But you have the right to know about it. How I met Sal.”
Rachel stilled. Given his tone, she couldn’t imagine this would be good news. But a pulse of something—pain or longing, she wasn’t sure which—cut through her hesitation. She had room inside now. She could take more. “Please,” she said.
The Giant seemed uncomfortable; his boot-heels dug grooves into the dirt. His lips half-formed words, and then stilled. And then he tried again. “It was a long time ago. About eight years, I suppose. A night when I . . . well, when I couldn’t stand to be alone,” he said. “Something had happened that—” He broke off, agitated. “Well, it doesn’t matter why. But I had nowhere else, so I went to a place called Madame Jonas’s.”
“Madame Jonas’s?”
“A bawdy house, I’m afraid.” He wasn’t looking at her now, and there was a faint flush to his swarthy skin. “This story doesn’t flatter me.”
&
nbsp; “You mean the place Sarah went after she escaped from that monster who locked her up?”
“From Murdoch? Yes. So you know that part already?”
“Sebastian told me.”
The Giant seemed surprised. “Did he? Well, yes, she got herself away from Murdoch, and came to work for Madame Jonas. It was a better place by far, but still.” He glanced up at her sideways through his veil of hair. Anguish was visible in the brightness of his eyes. “If you prefer, I can stop the story there.”
“No. Go on.”
“Forgive me, but it was either go to Madame Jonas’s or hang myself from London Bridge.” His legs gave a jerk, and he hooked his arms around his knees as if to restrain them.
“Nothing even happened that night, I swear to you. I asked for a girl who wouldn’t talk, who’d just let me . . . be there. I fell like a damned stone on the bed and didn’t move except to grab hold of her arm and cling to it. I’m sure I was terrifying.”
She glanced over his huge, rough frame and laughed despite herself. “I’m sure you were.”
“But I don’t think Sal could stand the silence, with this great stupid ugly lummox taking up most of her mattress and crushing the life out of her elbow. After a bit, she smacked me on the forehead and asked if I was planning to die in her bed—which, to be frank, was about as good a plan as I had in mind.”
“She hit you?” Sarah was even braver than she thought.
His mouth curved in the subtlest of smiles. “She did. And then she took it on herself to fill the silence, despite the quiet I’d asked for. Started talking.”
“About what?”
“I don’t remember. But, as it turned out, I liked listening to her. Her accent was a gentlewoman’s, and her vocabulary was astonishing—half chimney sweep, half Cambridge don. Filthy street cant mixed with learned references to Herodotus and Voltaire.”
“Oh.” Rachel squeezed shut her eyes. “I wish I could have heard her.”
“It was something to listen to, believe me. Her talking got me through till dawn. And through the next night as well. I came back, night after night, just to hear her. We went on like that for months. I’d be in Bedlam now if not for her.”