Sophia wanted a pastime, or at least one that could be done in a sitting room, where sword fighting was frowned upon. Three days of torrential rain had left her cooped up and testy. René Hasard had been haunting her steps, paying her unearned compliments, stating his opinions on music, magazines, Parisian actresses, and, most memorably, an endless dissertation on his particular preferences in nursery carpets. Tom had nodded sagely while listening to this, asking her fiancé such detailed, serious questions that Sophia thought holding in the laughter might actually kill her. And if she did manage to be without René’s presence for the odd moment or two, up he would pop unexpectedly, full of a restless, boundless energy and incessant talk that, good looks or no, stretched her patience to the limit.
St. Just lifted his head from her lap, sniffing at her foul mood. René’s suggestion of a game was not appealing, but then again, Sophia wasn’t certain he could have suggested anything that was. Her father snorted, startling belatedly from his doze.
“What?” Bellamy said. “What? Play my Sophia, Mr. Hasard? Oh no, I don’t advise it. I’ve been playing her since she was ten years old, and the child has trounced me every time.”
Tom smiled from his armchair, adjusting the cushion beneath his leg. “You’ll make Hasard afraid of our Sophie, Father.”
“And you think that a bad thing, Tom?” Sophia said sweetly. “Do go on, Father. What were you saying?”
René laughed, a little too loud, a sound that grated across every raw end of her nerves. He said, “And now I must insist on the game or be thought a coward.” He turned back to Sophia. “Or you shall.”
She set her mouth, put St. Just on the carpet, and marched over to the chessboard. Spear’s newspaper lowered, and she could feel his eyes following as she sat herself down at the game table. René was in the green coat tonight. She found a silver button, the second one down, and fixed her gaze there.
“White first, my love,” René said.
“I prefer black.”
He turned the board while St. Just settled his bushy tail over her feet. They played in silence, she taking her time and with her attention on the board, he with quick, haphazard moves and his face turned toward the rest of the room. Sophia moved her sheriff and stifled a yawn. She was six moves from taking his king.
“My cousin says that he walked in the lane with you the other day,” René said loudly.
“You’ve been to see Monsieur LeBlanc?” She glanced once at Spear. He and Cartier were supposed to have been watching, making sure René didn’t leave the house. Spear almost imperceptibly shrugged a shoulder.
“Oh, yes,” René said, “I went to see him early, before breakfast.”
“In the rain?”
“It was a refreshing journey. But my cousin made me quite jealous.” René ignored her sheriff and unwisely moved a pawn. “Perhaps you might like to walk with me next time, when the weather improves?” When she remained silent, René said, “Do none of the young women from your Banns ever come to walk with you? I would not mind seeing Mademoiselle Lauren again. I thought she was very … pleasant.”
Oh, Sophia thought. So that’s what sort of husband he would be. She supposed it shouldn’t matter to her. She tried to imagine strolling down the A5 with Lauren Rathbone and failed.
“Bellamy has invited my cousin to dine with us tomorrow,” René went on. “That was thoughtful of him, yes?”
Sophia looked over at the armchair, where her oblivious father was again snoozing. She lowered her voice. “I am surprised that Monsieur LeBlanc stays in the Commonwealth. What can he possibly have to do here?”
“I believe that tonight he was intending to ride the coast.”
“Really? An impractical plan. Why would he want to do that in this weather?”
“I wish I could say he was riding out to have his hair dyed,” René sighed. “That streak is not in fashion.”
Sophia stared at the water streaming down the window glass. Sometimes it was hard to believe the man sitting across from her could possibly be serious. And then she did believe it, and it was depressing.
“But Cousin Albert does not share his reasons with me,” René continued. “I only saw his horse being saddled.”
“He’ll have found somewhere else to stay, I would think. In Forge or Mainstay, if he got that far.” For once she let her gaze rest briefly on René’s face. “If the weather holds, maybe he won’t be able to come to dinner after all. Maybe he’ll have to go straight back to where he came from.”
René laughed, again much too loud. “What a teasing little minx you are!”
This remark carried to the fireplace, earning her a surprised glance from Tom and a long look from Spear. Sophia felt a bit of heat rise to her cheeks. René had made it sound as if she was flirting with him. It threw another log of fuel on her smoldering temper.
“Such a shame Mrs. Rathbone couldn’t come eat with us tonight,” Sophia said to the room in general. “What did she say she had to do again?”
Spear immediately shifted in his chair, ready to accommodate her, but Sophia could see by the line of Tom’s mouth that he disapproved. Still, she couldn’t help it. She was ticked.
“Mrs. Rathbone mentioned something about a few unexpected duties that had come her way,” Spear said. “Five of them, I think.” He grinned, a thing of beauty and symmetry in the firelight. “And she mentioned old Mr. Lostchild. You did hear that he was no longer with us?”
“Yes, and I’m sorry for it,” Sophia replied. Tom had assured her that Mr. Lostchild’s death appeared to be from natural causes; he’d been very old. But the fact that she’d said his name to LeBlanc three days beforehand did not sit well with her. “Such a nice man,” she continued. “Always a cookie to spare when we were children. But I had hoped Mrs. Rathbone might come. She was telling me the oddest story at the Banns, about how the Bonnards had escaped prison on the very night of their execution. Was there anything about it in the newspaper, Tom?”
“I’m not certain.” Tom was frowning now.
Spear leaned his large frame back into the chair, his white shirt crisp and unblemished. “I saw something about it. They say it was the Red Rook. Isn’t that what they call him?” This last had been to Tom, but Tom did not respond.
Sophia said, “Yes, I’ve heard of him. He’s done things like this before, hasn’t he, Spear?”
“I believe so. The Parisians seem to think he’s some kind of ghost.”
“They say he is a saint sent by God,” said René unexpectedly. “Or at least those who do not believe that Allemande is God say it.”
Sophia blinked once before she said, “Mrs. Rathbone said he was the talk of the Sunken City. If he’s not a ghost or a saint, then who do you think he could be, Tom?”
“Whoever he is,” Tom replied, eyes on his book and his words measured, “I think he is getting too bold.”
Spear winked at her conspiratorially, but Sophia looked down at the board, supposedly to move her rook, really to absorb the shame brought on by the remonstrance she’d heard in her brother’s voice. It was one thing to give in to temper in the sitting room after dinner; it was another thing entirely to disappoint Tom. St. Just whined, stretched his back, and exchanged Sophia’s slippers for René’s buckled shoes. What a little traitor.
“Do you believe that?” René asked. Sophia’s eyes darted up, but he was speaking to Tom. “Do you believe Le Corbeau Rouge grows too bold? Do you think he will be caught if he tries his tricks again?”
Tom lowered his book, his brown eyes regarding René with interest. “I’m sure I don’t know. But if Allemande would stop murdering his own people, then I suppose he wouldn’t have to.”
“You are against the revolution, then?” René said, moving a chess piece with barely a glance. “You believe the rich have the right to fund technology and build their own machines?”
Sophia met Spear’s eyes, frowning a little. LeBlanc had asked her something very similar in the lane, whether or not she was a technologis
t. Tom folded his hands across the book in his lap.
“I’m not against the building of machines, Hasard, if that’s what you’re asking. Spain has broken the Anti-Technology Pact, as has China, and the Finnish Confederate. The loss of trade with those countries is crippling the Commonwealth. But I suppose that whatever your city does about technology is not really any of my business.”
“But you are a student of the Time Before,” René countered. Sophia looked up sharply from her queen. René’s voice had lost just a bit of its Parisian sophistication. “Do you not believe that machines made the people weak, that the Great Death, as you call it, came about because the Ancients were dependent on technology, and did not know how to survive when they lost it? That making heat and light, traveling, fighting, that these things were impossible for them, because of their dependence?”
Tom tilted his chin. “There is some truth in that, though I could argue that the wealthy of both our cultures are becoming weak and idle without any machines at all. But I believe the Great Death was caused by shifts in our planet just as much as technological dependence. Did you know that in the Time Before, north was what we would now call northwest? That has been proven with archaeological finds. At the university in Manchester they teach that when the magnetic poles of the earth shifted, the protective layer around the earth was damaged, allowing the radiation of the sun to destroy the technology that the Ancients depended on. What I think, though, is that this same solar radiation caused the first wave of the Great Death. Sickness killed the people first, technological dependence second, that’s what I believe.
“But that was more than eight hundred years ago, and the Anti-Technology Pact our two countries signed has far outlived its time. I think it more than possible to use machines without making the mistakes of our ancestors. That we could build a clock or a mill or play a piano without losing our ability to survive without them.”
René leaned forward and spoke, still in the lower, less Parisian voice. “And the fact that your Parliament has taken the license for the printing press, does this affect your opinion?”
“The entire South Commonwealth would be better off if the Bellamys still had the license to print. We were putting books in every chapel and school. Instead Parliament reserves that power for themselves, controlling everything we read and driving one more industry to the undermarkets.”
Sophia knew her brother thought Parliament was actually hoarding technology, using a much larger, more complicated printing press than was allowed by law. They were producing too many newspapers, and too quickly.
“But whatever I think,” Tom continued, “I would never say that I don’t obey the laws of my land. Or yours.”
Sophia moved her rook across the chessboard, setting the next prong of her attack. Tom was helping her disobey those laws every day. He just wouldn’t be so stupid as to say so, of course. Their father snored softly from his chair, and René moved a sheriff, his mind obviously elsewhere.
“And what about you, Hasard?” Tom said, turning the tables. “Do you agree with your city’s revolution? Do you think technology will make the poor poorer, and the rich richer? Do you think the people of the Upper City are being executed for funding the return of technology at the expense of the Lower City, or for merely having the money to do so and owning property your government wants? Or is it because of their religious beliefs, because your cousin wants to replace the chapels with a cult? Or are they being put to the Razor because they do not agree with Allemande’s absolute power, and the way he executed your last premier?”
For a few moments it seemed as if René wouldn’t answer, and then he leaned back in his chair and began to laugh loudly, like the man of her Banns ball. “Oh, no,” he said. “You have me, Monsieur! Here I was, hoping to impress my fiancée with lofty questions, when to say the truth, I never think on these things myself. Benoit is always telling me I should.”
Sophia stared doggedly at the game and moved her vicar.
“But one thing I know to be true,” René went on, recovering from his laugh. “No machine could make a better coat than my tailor. Now there is an opinion I can stand behind.”
Really, the man could not have annoyed her more if he sat up at night and planned it.
Tom was still smiling. “But isn’t a loom a machine, Hasard?”
“Or the Razor?” Sophia added.
René thrust his vicar across the board before he threw up his hands. “Please!” he cried in mock distress. “No more! I am defeated! Benoit was right again. As usual.”
Sophia ran a hand through her ringlets, wondering how she could ever survive a lifetime of nights like this. There might have to be sword fighting in the sitting room after all. Spear rustled his newspaper, but she did not look his way. She moved her queen. Two moves and she would win.
“My love,” René said, voice miraculously lowered. “Do you not think we should choose a date for our wedding? I really should write to my maman.”
“I’m surprised you ask me, Monsieur,” she replied. “I thought you would have banged out all those details with my father already.”
He jumped his sheriff. “You could call me René.” His voice was softer, but the amusement in it was loud and clear.
“I will call you ‘monsieur’ until you earn something better. And since you bring it up, I’ll also thank you to drop this silly pretense of ‘my love.’ ”
Spear was pretending to read his newspaper, but Sophia could see where his attention lay: on the conversation he could no longer hear. She moved her rook and René immediately moved after her, almost as soon as she had taken her fingers from the black-carved wings. She considered holding back her words, and decided she could not.
“And while we’re speaking freely, Monsieur, there is something I have been meaning to ask you. I wonder what sort of proof you’ve offered my father that your inheritance is intact.”
“You think I am a … what is the word? A ‘con man’?”
“I think I shall know you are not before I make any plans with the vicar.”
René laughed, not the one that set her teeth on edge, but something deeper. “Oh, Sophia,” he said, shaking his head. “You see so much, and yet you only see so far. Shall I tell you why?”
She crossed her arms, staring down at her queen.
“It is because you do not choose to look.”
And it was then she saw it. She sat forward, staring at the board while the wind howled, lips parted in a silent gasp. Before her was a trap, subtle yet effective. It was not his king but her queen that was lost. The game was lost. She had been a fool.
She raised her eyes, and for the first time gave René Hasard’s face her full attention. He was still leaning sideways in the chair, their candle putting half his expression in shadow as he looked toward the hearth. Square jaw just showing the end of the day’s stubble, straight nose, and eyes that were an intense blue, a fire in the forge blue, an almost unnatural color against the powdered hair. The brows were drawn down, thoughtful, not black or brown, she saw, but a dark russet. Did René have red hair?
Who was this man who never contemplated the matters of his city, but who could so easily out-strategize her on a chessboard, apparently without even trying? And why had he really gone to see his cousin that day, his dangerous, murdering cousin, the cousin that was threatening her father with jail unless she brought him the Rook? And then she saw where those hot blue eyes were looking: straight at her brother’s bad leg, propped on the cushion.
A blast of wind whistled past the chimneys, smacking a branch sharp against the windowpane. “Oh!” Sophia squealed, leaping from her chair and upsetting the table. St. Just yelped and René caught the board before it hit the floor, chess pieces rolling to the far ends of the carpet. Bellamy woke with a snort.
“Blimey, Sophie,” Tom said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Stupid of me. The wind has me nervous, I think.” She saw the surprise on Spear’s face; she
didn’t dare look at René. “It’s been such a long day, I think I should go to bed. Good night, Father.”
Bellamy was still looking about, blinking in confusion. René had righted the table and was on his feet, taking her hand to kiss it as usual. But this time Sophia felt her own eyes dragged up to meet his, two wells of knowing over half a smile before his lips touched her hand. She could not fathom what lay behind that smile. Then he whispered, “Je pense que nous pouvons dire que ce jeu est un match nul, n’est-ce pas?”
Sophia pulled her hand away, only just keeping her walk from breaking into a run as she crossed the room to the door, where St. Just was already waiting for her. She shut out the light of the sitting room with a slam and leaned against the heavy oak.
René had offered to call their game a draw, when they both knew full well that he had won. And he’d said it in Parisian. She was unsure whether that, or his unsuspected skill at chess, or the way he had been looking at Tom’s leg was the most unsettling. Or maybe it was the way he’d been looking at her. St. Just ran down the corridor, unperturbed by the dark, while Sophia shivered, waiting for her eyes to adjust and her heartbeat to slow. She’d forgotten a candle, and the corridor was not heated. They only heated the rooms they had to in Bellamy House.
She heard feet approaching from behind the door and slid a few steps down the hall, but it was only Spear coming out of the sitting room with a light. He moved down the corridor to lean against the wall opposite. Spear was built like a fighter, or a footballer, so tall she had to tilt her head back to look at him in the chilly, narrow hallway.
“So what happened?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing,” she said. Or at least nothing that she could explain to Spear in a few stolen moments in a corridor.
“He’s lying about LeBlanc,” Spear said. “I swear he didn’t leave the north wing until he came out to find you this morning.”
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