The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  The sailing ship decorated the red seal with its familiar errant in aeternum motto. My name on the cover and the single sheet within had been written in the blackest of inks and the most gentlemanly of hands. I knew that spiky handwriting. It was the Stravaigor’s own.

  The letter confirmed what John had said. What Peter had just said.

  “My orders were clear, sir. If it came to a choice, I was to protect his Heir. He made the announcement the morning I left for Cairo.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but I couldn’t bear to look at him or Peter or John any longer. I dragged my gaze away and got to my feet, shifting Harry’s slight weight to keep me balanced. Harry murmured and complained, but his eyes remained shut, and he wasn’t truly awake.

  “Boat,” I said, setting off across the acres of Persian rugs between me and the saloon door. Hugh caught me up before I’d taken two steps, and old M. Archambault was at my other elbow. Todd waited for me at the door.

  Behind me came Tatlock’s voice, tone rather sad and regretful. “Like I said. That’s my job, and that’s what I’ve done.”

  Yes. Tatlock was very good at his job.

  I HAVE a greater regard for you than you realize.

  IT WAS nearly dawn by the time I walked into Ned’s room, Harry in my arms. By “walked,” I mean staggered. I was almost asleep on my feet.

  Harry had woken once we got him into the boat. The cooler air over the water had probably been enough to rouse him, and I was sorry for it. The child woke distressed and disoriented, calling for his father and Molly. He didn’t mention Frank.

  I had him on my lap, still, as Hugh rowed, and pulled him in tight. “Your papa and Molly are fine, Harry.”

  “They hurt her! They hurt my Molly!”

  “She’s with Banger Bill, and no one’s better than Banger Bill at looking after people. She’s probably in with your papa right now, waiting for you to get home.”

  Harry’s eyelids had drooped again, but he tried valiantly to deliver his best hard stare.

  “I promise,” I said. “Your papa and Molly are fine and waiting for you.”

  “All right, then.” He wriggled to get both arms around my neck. “Since you say so.”

  Having a child’s trust is a humbling thing.

  Sam met us at the courtyard door. The look on his face when he saw me carrying Harry, and that Archambault was there, unhurt, held more emotion than I’d seen him show since the previous summer when Ned had been abducted. Not that he said anything, mind. It was left to Molly to betray delight through whines and frantic wriggles, her ridiculous tail a blur. But Sam nodded and gripped my shoulder hard, and that was enough. He took me straight into Ned’s room, leaving Hugh to shepherd everyone to bed and promise explanations in the morning.

  Ned was asleep. I put Harry down beside him. Harry had woken long enough to hug Molly so hard she squeaked like a music hall squeeze-box, but he drifted off again almost immediately. The child burrowed in close to his father’s side, Molly crowding onto the bed with them, her chin on Harry’s ankles. Sam draped a blanket over them and turned to me, holding another.

  “You should go to bed.”

  “In a minute.” I groped my way into the armchair beside the bed. I took off my spectacles and folded them carefully before wrapping them in a silk handkerchief and putting them into my jacket’s breast pocket for safety. I’d go to bed when I had reassured myself that everything really was all right. And when I was too tired to dream.

  I don’t know what made Molly abandon Harry. She came to rest her head on my knees. Pulling gently on her ears was as comforting as the side swipes of her tongue against my hand.

  “Much trouble?” Sam asked. He got himself into a much less comfortable chair on the other side of the bed, but I was too lazy to offer to swap.

  “Some.” I rubbed the top of Molly’s nose. “It was Stravaigor.”

  When the silence could have cut through tempered steel, I looked across at him. He was frowning, running a forefinger across his forehead as if pushing away a headache. He caught my glance and shrugged. “Not a horse I even thought was in the race.”

  “It was John Lancaster, not… not his father. And Peter. They were behind getting me knifed in Cairo last month, and took Harry as leverage to force Ned to hand me over to them.”

  “Peter Lancaster? Your brother?”

  “Both my brothers.” I ignored Sam’s questioning look and turned my gaze toward the window. Dawn lightened the eastern sky as Khepri, the great scarab, pushed the reborn sun into a new day. That reminded me of the little scarab in my pocket. It felt soothing as it slipped between my fingers.

  “Is Todd bringing them back here?”

  “In the dahabiya. They’ll dock in the village.”

  “Good. I called the Khedive after you left. That Pasha of his will set out upriver at dawn with a contingent of soldiers. He’ll be here tomorrow. He can take care of them and Harper and Symington.”

  “John Lancaster’s dead.” I leaned back my head and closed my eyes. My bones felt as though they were melting into the chair, but for some reason it was important Sam understood that John Lancaster was gone. “And I don’t know what I think about that.”

  Sam said nothing. But now the silence was as comforting as Molly’s warmth, and I stopped worrying about it.

  I WOKE in the late afternoon, quite surprised to find myself in my own bed and in my nightshirt. I had no recollection of getting there. Hugh, who appeared, refreshed and energetic, as soon as I stirred, merely smiled when I asked him about it.

  He was just as reticent about the revelations of the previous night. “It’ll work itself out, sir” was all he said in reference to my translation to higher office, and went to get my breakfast. I wished I could share his confidence, but the coffee he brought, while not a patch on what we could make back home in the coffeehouse, was very welcome. As was his silent, unstinting support. No matter what happened, I knew Hugh would be there.

  Coffee and breakfast at teatime felt somehow very un-English, but after that and a hot bath—I smelled ranker than a camel in heat—I felt like a new man. My humors were more or less restored. Not exactly bouncing, but recovering.

  I couldn’t say the same for my temper. I drank my coffee while staring at the nearest wall, playing over in my head everything that had happened on the Theban Princess, and indulged in some satisfactory imagining of dire fates for the Stravaigor and his ilk. I had to be quiet, with Ned still sick in the next-door room, but a trip outside allowed me to vent my spleen on the generator hut wall. Frankly I’d have preferred to kick Peter, but a remnant of proper feeling prevented me from doing unto him as he’d done to me. I was mightily hampered by my conscience, it seemed. Instead, I launched one more kick against the mud-brick wall and went to see Ned.

  Ned was awake and compos mentis, which was a great relief. While the room was shaded to keep out the bright evening sunshine that exacerbated his headache, he was very much better. He was sitting up in bed, Harry playing quietly with Molly in a corner of the room, each of them reluctant to let the other two out of their sight.

  “Rafe!” Ned’s bruised face, all yellowy-green at the edges of mulberry contusions, lit up with an incongruous smile. “Rafe!”

  He threw aside his covers and pushed himself up, swinging his legs out of bed and trying to get his feet to the floor. Folly. The resulting greenish pallor contrasted horridly with the bruises. He wavered and wobbled, putting out a hand to seek a balance his rattled brain couldn’t find unaided, sliding down to the floor in an ungainly huddle.

  “You dunderhead!” I leapt forward to lift him up. He folded into my arms with the same disconcerting lack of coordination John had shown. “You’ll be ill.”

  It took him a moment to focus on me. I suspected his head was swimming. He choked out an odd half laugh, dabbing at his poor blackened eyes with one hand and holding out the other to me imploringly. “Rafe.”

  “Papa?” Harry said in a small, uncertain voi
ce.

  “Your papa is fine, Harry.” I returned Ned to his bed and turned to smile reassurance at the child. “He’s just being silly about trying to get out of bed when he’s still dizzy.”

  Harry stared from me to Ned and ran to the bed. He was horridly officious about plumping up Ned’s pillows. “Like this, Uncle Rafe,” he said, demonstrating by patting Ned’s hand and pulling the light cotton sheets up to Ned’s chin. “This is what you have to do. Mr. Hawkins showed me.”

  Ned groaned. “And there is nothing to choose between you and Sam Hawkins when it comes to fretting and fussing.”

  All the same, while I gawped like a fool at my unexpected promotion to unclehood, Ned meekly begged Harry’s pardon for being a complete juggins and scaring him. It was a few minutes before Harry was sufficiently appeased to administer a fierce and choking hug on his father and a rather less passionate one on me. I patted his thin shoulders when he clung to me and wound his arms around my neck, his head tucked under my chin.

  Uncle Rafe, eh?

  Another squeeze and Harry returned to Molly and resumed their quiet game. It appeared to consist of his reading extracts from the Adventure of the Crooked Man to her while she listened with apparent interest, her head tilted on one side and her eyes fixed on Harry’s face. If I’d known what a heart’s cockles were, the scene would have quite warmed mine.

  “Sam told me this morning,” Ned said when he got his breath back after his unwise excursion to his bedroom floor. He gripped my hands so fiercely that it made my eyes sting somewhat. “I can’t tell you what it means to me, you going to rescue Harry so readily and bringing him back safe. There truly are no words for what I feel and what I owe you.”

  I thought over the events of the previous night and early morning. “I wasn’t really very good at it. Tatlock saved the day, reluctant as I am to admit it.”

  “Hugh and Todd told us what happened, although neither of them were there for the whole story, of course. Tatlock is here—he came along with Todd, quiet as a lamb, and he’s apparently fitting in very well in the guards’ sitting room. Todd tells me he has a fund of stories that wouldn’t be out of place in a music hall. Very convivial.” We exchanged looks, and Ned’s smile was rueful. “Quite uncooperative in other ways of course, as he won’t explain what he is doing here in Aegypt. When Sam wheeled him in here to explain himself, he would only say he is here to do his master’s bidding and is not authorized to discuss it. He was very respectful and polite about it, but firm. Your brother was more talkative. He gave us the full story.”

  Ned’s gaze fell away from mine. He plucked at the thin bedcoverings with long, restless fingers. Once, he looked as though he’d screwed up his courage to mention the unmentionable, but the impulse died unspoken. So I said it for him.

  “John and Peter planned… you know, I don’t think they did plan, very well. From what little Peter would say last night, they destroyed the village generator and expected to use the chaos to find an opportunity to deal with me, but failed to make the most of it. I was too often surrounded by other people, I think. And then I went straight off to Cairo after we saw Anubis, and they decided it was a good idea to bring down the Osireion entrance tunnel as a diversionary tactic, take Harry as leverage, and then force an exchange. To be fair, they weren’t expecting that you personally would be caught by the roof-fall and they most certainly didn’t want you dead—that would have caused a serious upset with the Convocation. They just didn’t think it through. John always acted on impulse, and Peter is really rather stupid.” My laugh was an odd-sounding thing, half-smothered at birth. In truth, I was more despairing than amused. “What a pair of chuckle-headed chumps.”

  “Peter explained why John had set out to murder you. Was he serious?”

  “It appears you aren’t the only First Heir who’s in danger of assassination.”

  I fished the Stravaigor’s letter out of my pocket and offered it to him. He had to squint, and I suspect reading pained him, but he worked through it all, from the My dear Rafe at the beginning, through the whole I acknowledge this is something of a shock to you and I have declared to the entire House and the Convocation that I recognize you as my Heir, to the Yours, in more affection than you have ever realized at the end.

  “The old man is a master of understatement. Shock only begins to cover it.” I drew a breath that was shakier than I would have liked, and the answer to Ned’s quiet “What will you do about it?” was an unequivocal “I’d rather not talk about it, Ned. Not yet.”

  I hated it. Hated it. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t escape the House coils, wrapped around me like Laocoön and just as likely to be smothered. I’d rather not think about it at all, but that was more difficult to enforce than silence.

  He looked grave and nodded. “What will you do about Peter? When the Pasha gets here, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. He isn’t much of a brother….” I paused and laughed, only it sounded very shaky. “Only half a one, as it turns out. But still. It doesn’t seem right to just hand him over. What will they do, the Pasha and the Khedive?”

  “That depends on you. I expect if you ask, they’ll just declare him persona non grata and send him back to England.”

  “Perhaps that’s enough.” I found myself rubbing the new scar on my upper arm, where Sulayman’s knife had caught me. My brother had paid Sulayman to kill me. I wasn’t at all sure it was enough, but I was tired of thinking about it. I glanced at Harry, who had grown bored with Sherlock Holmes and, instead, taken it into his head to get around the room from one piece of furniture to the next without actually touching the floor. “I’ll talk to him later. How is Harry doing?”

  Ned grimaced. “He won’t go back into his room—”

  “Molly doesn’t like it in there,” piped up Harry, providing proof of the old saying about little pitchers. He hurled himself onto the foot of Ned’s bed and rolled off again immediately to clamber over my chair on the way to the table beneath the window. “We’re staying in here with Papa.”

  Harry had almost certainly seen Frank cut down before his eyes. His reluctance to go into the room was perfectly understandable, poor little tyke.

  “And Papa is very glad to have you.” Ned smiled at Harry, but the expression he turned to me was laced with guilt and sorrow. He lowered his tone. “It’s wrong, what we do to them. Children like Harry, I mean. He should have a life untrammeled by the Houses, free to make his own choices.”

  “We should all be free of the Houses. Just because something’s been there for four hundred years doesn’t mean it can’t change. We need a revolution.”

  Ned shook his head and took my hand, tangling our fingers together and holding on tight. His hand was very warm and dry. It was a great comfort.

  Chapter 30

  “DID YOU know?”

  “Not until John told me. The Stravaigor’s indulgence in the face of your insolence and your refusal to play by House rules was astonishing, but I didn’t know why he gave you so much leeway. And then John found out—” Peter stopped and turned away from the window of Harry’s room to face me. Since Harry refused to leave his father, his room was the easiest place to stow Peter until the Pasha arrived. And at least it offered some privacy as we talked.

  “Did Pa…. Did Papa know?”

  “Madame Stravaigor said he did, that he agreed to stand Moses for you. He never said anything to me, and there was nothing in his papers after he died. Whatever he knew, he kept to himself.”

  It accounted for the distance at which our father… Peter’s father… had kept me. If I wasn’t his son but instead an all-too-visible reminder of his wife’s faithlessness… that would do it. And dear Lord, that was why my mother’s jewelry had been left to me. Peter’s father hadn’t given her those rubies and diamonds and sapphires. The Stravaigor had, then bought them back to give me a start in my new life. How very… paternal of him.

  “So when he discovered his father’s plans, he decided to have me killed. It’s th
e way the Houses operate, and to be honest, John was always dicked in the nob.” I tapped my own temple in illustration. “But I don’t understand why you agreed to help him. I really don’t. Damnation, Peter! We were brought up as brothers. I know we never liked each other much, but it’s a big step to go from dislike to helping John have me murdered. Why? Why did you agree to that?”

  Peter threw up both hands in a gesture not of helplessness but exasperation. “What choice did I have? What choice have I ever had where John was concerned?”

  “The same choice anyone has, Peter! You say no, damn you! No! Even when it’s your best friend, like John, if it’s something wrong or illegal or immoral, you bloody well say no. What’s the matter with you that you don’t see that?”

  All the bombast and indignation drained out of him. He looked rather small, curled in on himself. “You don’t understand.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  He returned to his staring out of the window. His back bowed in a way that was both defensive and had me itching to kick him. The servility was all of a piece with the way he’d always kowtowed to John.

  “Peter, El Khawaga Pasha arrives tomorrow to sort out the Sulayman mess. If you want me to intervene on your behalf, I want to know why you hired Sulayman to kill me. Why you did John’s bidding without arguing or, apparently, remorse. I know you have always been John’s shadow. You always did what he wanted. You never argued. But even you might have balked at an order to have your brother killed.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. He came back to the bed, sat on the edge, and looked down at his hands instead, where they lay on his lap. Only his fingers moved, writhing over each other with a restless energy at odds with the slump of his shoulders. “His shadow.” His tone was flat. Empty.