Rook

by Cameron, Sharon

  “Really, Sophia,” Spear said. “Can’t you wait?”

  “You haven’t been wearing that weight since nethermoon, and I am perfectly decent, thank you.” But she couldn’t help smiling as she carefully folded the fluffy white material around the precious firelighter. That was three censures in one day from Spear. Somebody should write a song about it.

  “Monsieur Hammond,” said René. “Do you prefer that we speak in Commonwealth?”

  “Parisian is fine. The luggage is coming up?”

  “Benoit is on his …”

  “Then I’d like to see the flat,” Spear said. “All of it. Is there a way down other than the lift?”

  Sophia saw a frown brush across René’s forehead, but he only nodded and picked up the light. “Come, and I will show you.”

  They followed him through the echoing main room to a door that led into a long, bending corridor, carpeted in cream and midnight blue, continuing the curved shape of the window wall. There were doors on both sides, opening onto grand, windowed rooms on their left, utilitarian, interior rooms on their right. The entire flat was almost a complete circle, spiraling on two different levels around the central lift shaft.

  “Attic space?” Spear asked.

  “Yes,” René said, “but it is small and unused. There is a trapdoor in the ceiling of the linen room. You can get onto the roof from there, but it is steep. Very dangerous, and of no use unless you wish to fly or elude your tutor. But at the end of this hall is the kitchen, and a back stair that leads to the ground. That door will lock from the outside, and there is a drop bar on the inside. So you may leave that way, if you wish, but if for some reason you wish to return by climbing all twelve floors, you will have to make much noise until someone lets you in. And here is the water room.”

  René opened the door of a small, closet-like space that had a rectangular wooden panel built into one wall. He slid this up and there was the water lift, a bricked shaft, two ropes inside, a water bucket dangling from one of them. Sophia stuck her head in the opening and touched the rope. The walls were slimed from constant splashing, and it smelled a bit musty, but the rope seemed to be in decent condition. She couldn’t see the bottom.

  “Did you hear a door?” Spear asked from the hallway. The little room wasn’t really big enough for him and anyone else.

  “That will be Benoit with the luggage. He has a key.”

  “And where are you putting us to sleep?” he said. “I need to see to my things.”

  René looked at Spear closely, but again he only said, “This way.” They left the water room and followed René back down the hallway to a set of stairs, also following the curve of the inner wall. At the top of the stairwell was another corridor, straight this time, the wall space that was not interrupted by doorways gleaming dully with hanging weapons.

  “The rooms we use most often are here,” he said. “This is my room.” Sophia looked with interest at the closed door. “Benoit is the next door down, and you are the next from that, Hammond. Mademoiselle, across the hall. Take the last door, that is the better room.”

  Spear started asking about the roof again while she examined a sword hung near her head on the wall, a bit shorter and lighter than the others, with a hilt of twisted silver. The hilt had been worn smooth by hands.

  “Sophia,” said Spear. “I assume you’re tired and going to bed. I’ll have Benoit bring up your bags and something for you to eat.” He started down the hall, then looked back. “Are you going?”

  Sophia raised a brow. “No, I don’t plan on locking myself in my room just this moment. Am I confined to quarters?” Spear hesitated. “Really, Spear, what is wrong with you? I’ll go in a bit, when the bags come up.”

  He stood still, torn by some decision that Sophia could not fathom. “I need to see to my things,” he said. And before she could close her mouth or even say a word, Spear was away down the hall and through the door at the end, the door she assumed led to the gallery and stairway she’d seen in the flat’s main room. Never had she seen Spear behaving this way. She was surprised he hadn’t ordered her to brush her teeth.

  René watched Spear go, then put his gaze on Sophia. “Do you like that one?” he asked. She turned to the sword she’d been examining, with the twisted silver hilt. “You can try it, if you like. These are not decorations.”

  His eyes stood out bright in the dim. She smiled and lifted the sword from its hooks. She held it out, feeling the weight, swung it once, twice, and turned to find René where she had left him, only now the gold jacket was on the floor and he had a sword as well, loose and ready in his hand.

  “Come. I do not think you wish to sleep. I think you would much rather hit something. Tell me I am wrong.”

  “You want to fight me? Right now. In the hallway?”

  “Unless you are frightened, Mademoiselle.”

  “I’m wearing a dress. And you are much taller than me.”

  He tsked as he approached in his vest and shirtsleeves, looking every inch a gentleman thief. Or assassin. “Your disadvantages are many. I can understand your fear.”

  She smiled at him from beneath her lashes and raised the sword. So did he, fiery blue on either side of his blade. She moved forward, bare feet silent on the carpet, as if trying to ascertain his reach, and then she darted ahead quickly, getting her sword over his on the inside, but he was back and away before she could get it out of his hand. She cursed once beneath her breath. She’d wanted to take it on the first try. René’s smile was devilish, and it was distracting.

  “Oh, no,” he said, as if sad and sorry for her. “That will not work on me, Mademoiselle. I have seen you do that before.” He came at her and she blocked.

  “What do you mean you’ve seen me do that before?” She blocked again.

  “To your brother. On the beach, at Bellamy House. The night of our Banns.”

  He blocked her this time. So René Hasard had been watching her on the beach that night? That was cheating. She parried him once and then twice, but only just. She was in trouble. She knew it, and so did he. He was quick, had reach, and she was hampered by cloth even without the voluminous underskirt. His grin was even bigger.

  He came at her fast again, and instead of meeting him head-on she ducked and turned, switching their positions. She stepped back, knocking his sword aside and then crossing with him again, letting him push her up against a door. His expression was a little disappointed from the other side of their blades. “You ran? I did not think …” She gave him a beatific smile, reached behind with her free hand, and pushed down on the door latch.

  She’d been ready for the loss of resistance but he had not. She dropped to her knees and he went down to the floor through the doorway, though he managed to knock her sword from her hand on the way. There was a scramble in the dark as they fought over the loose blade, Sophia crawling right over his back to get it, her struggle becoming ineffectual from laughter. René was cursing up a storm in Parisian, a flurry of words that would have made any man on Blackpot Street proud.

  Then he froze for just a moment, grabbed her hard by the arm, and thrust her behind him, both of them still on their knees. There was someone else in the room, moving with soft footsteps across the carpet. The window curtains were yanked back, the lights of the city and a rising middlemoon showing a tall woman in her nightgown. Even in the dim Sophia could see that the woman’s hair was flaming red.

  “Maman!” said René, in a tone rather close to his words from Blackpot Street.

  “René,” the woman said. In her voice, the name sounded like an accusation.

  Sophia sat straight-backed on one end of the pale green settee in the main room of the flat, René on the other end, her discarded underskirt piled in fluffy disarray between them. Her hair was a mess but her dress was righted, shoes scattered somewhere on the floor near the windows. Madame sat enthroned in a gold-painted chair, regal in a dressing gown, looking pointedly at the underskirt. The silence stretched. Sophia wondered where Spea
r had gotten to. Then Madame Hasard held out a handkerchief from an outstretched hand.

  “Miss Bellamy,” she said, face unreadable, “you have hair powder on your … chest.”

  “Oh, please, Maman,” said René, throwing up a hand.

  Sophia took the handkerchief with a smile. “Thank you, Madame Hasard, for pointing that out.” She made a show of tidying her skin before handing it back. “Is that better?”

  Benoit came in with a tray, eyeing René with what Sophia thought might have been amusement. He offered a glass of wine to Madame Hasard, a mug to René, and a mug of the same to Sophia, then stepped away to hover in the background. Sophia peeked inside the mug.

  “Warm milk,” said Madame Hasard. “It promotes sleep, and discourages nighttime rambling.”

  “Enough, Maman,” said René, slamming down the mug alarmingly hard on a tabletop of glass. “I apologize for disturbing you. But might I remind you that you were supposed to be in prison?”

  She feigned surprise. “You prefer your maman to be locked away?”

  “When did you get out? Are you on the run?”

  “René! You will offend the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy.”

  “I do not think you are concerned with the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy!”

  “If you were concerned with the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy, perhaps you would not have been ravishing her in the same room where your poor maman was trying to sleep!”

  René loosened the cravat and then he was on his feet and pacing. Sophia’s eyes bounced from one powdered white head showing streaks of red to one mostly red head showing a few streaks of white. She considered saying, “No, Madame, he was only trying to skewer me with a sword,” but decided to hold her tongue. Benoit put his hands behind his back.

  “Miss Bellamy,” René was saying, “is my fiancée, Maman. And by your orders, if you will remember.”

  “What Miss Bellamy is remains to be seen.”

  That statement stopped René’s stride. He turned on his heel to look at his mother. “Maman, why are you out of the Tombs?”

  Madame Hasard sipped her wine. “I am out of that filthy place, dearest, because I signed away your fortune.”

  Sophia’s eyes darted to René, and she watched shock hit him like a blow to the middle. He sat on the edge of the settee, elbows on knees, breath knocked out of him, expression uncomprehending. And then his head was down, hands on the back of his neck. When he finally looked up he said, “I was coming to get you, Maman.”

  “Were you?” She sipped more wine. She was thin beneath her dressing gown, but Sophia did not know her usual build. “It seemed to be taking quite some time.”

  “You signed?”

  “Yes, René.”

  “And what do we have left?”

  “Not a franc in the city.”

  “The flat?”

  “LeBlanc owns the flat.”

  And that, Sophia thought, explained the guard at the street level of the building. René said, “What about the ships?”

  “LeBlanc does not know about the ships.”

  Sophia breathed. That was good.

  “And how long do we have the flat?” he asked.

  “Two days, René.”

  Sophia let out her breath again. They needed only one. One day, and they could do what they had to. René’s eyes met hers, but the fire had gone out of them. He leaned forward again, fingers tented over his nose, staring at the floor that now belonged to LeBlanc.

  “You should feel privileged, Monsieur, to call this place your final home. Not many have seen it.” LeBlanc’s smile was long and wide.

  He watched Tom push himself upright in the dirt, panting from where he’d landed on his broken ribs, then frowning as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The room was circular, but the walls were made of bones. Old and yellowed, stacked in rise and fall patterns like layers of continuous waves caught in cross-section. The bones rose higher than could be seen, to a vast ceiling that was in shadow, hundreds of thousands of them. LeBlanc’s smile lengthened. This was a place strong with those who had accepted Fate.

  Two gendarmes, still with their training patches on their uniforms, fastened Tom Bellamy’s chains around a stone pedestal in the center of the room. They backed away quickly, obviously wishing to leave.

  “Where is Jennifer Bonnard?” Tom asked. His lips were cracked.

  LeBlanc shook his head. He was not going to tell him that.

  “Tell me where she is!”

  LeBlanc turned and walked away with the lantern, the gendarmes behind him.

  “Tell me!”

  The echoing words gave chase as LeBlanc reverently walked pathways thick with Ancient dust, the shouts eventually dying on the air. He made a slow way back to the Tombs, the young gendarmes following soundlessly behind him. LeBlanc ordered them to stand, and when he finally stepped out of the lift and into the upper level of the prison, Renaud was there, waiting.

  LeBlanc nodded. Renaud drew a sword and a knife and walked into the lift. LeBlanc listened as the young men died. Now let the Red Rook try to find her brother, he thought. And when she tried, he would have her. Exactly where she was supposed to be. As Fate had decreed.

  Sophia smiled when Madame Hasard showed her to her room. It was huge and also sparsely furnished, the bed an afterthought in an ocean of pale gold carpet and a beautiful view of the Upper City. It also had an interior door. Connecting with Madame Hasard’s. Benoit brought the rest of her luggage a short time later, but before he left he stopped, turned, took her hand, and kissed it. Sophia was so surprised she said nothing, only watched as he inclined his head just a little and shut the door softly behind him.

  She opened her suitcases and hung her clothes, including the underskirt with its extra weight sewn inside, humming while she did it. She put both her knives and her sword under her pillow and climbed into bed, but she had not put on a nightgown. She was wearing breeches and a loose shirt of Tom’s. She looked through exactly twenty pages of the Wesson’s Guide, flipping them regularly before she blew out the light.

  She stared into the dark, motionless, envisioning again the reaction she’d seen when Madame Hasard told René that the money was gone. The way his fists had clenched on the back of his neck, the roughness of his voice that had not been from the rope. It had taken her a little time to analyze, but now she knew. What she had seen was more than shock or the loss of money. More than just pain. What she had seen was the loss of hope. And to lose hope, you must have had hope in the first place. René had been hoping to pay the fee. He’d been hoping to have her. And without the money, he thought he’d lost her. How ridiculous. What could the money have to do with it? How could René Hasard think any such thing, when it was perfectly clear that he belonged to no one but her?

  Sophia ran her fingers through the ringlets, letting her hair go back to some of its natural wildness. Now, finally, after all this, she knew exactly what she would risk. Not for any certain kind of future she might prefer, or Bellamy House, or even the Red Rook. She knew what she would risk to have him. And it was everything.

  She threw off the blanket, picked up the dead candle, went softly to the door, and opened it. She knelt on the carpet, looking carefully in the light from the wall sconces in the hall, and there, at about the level where her knees would have been, was a single thread. She smiled, stepped lightly over it, shut the door without noise, and went down the silent hall to the last door on the left. But she didn’t have to knock. René was coming up the stairs from the lower corridor.

  He stood on the last step when he saw her, waiting for her to come to him, away from the closed doors of the bedrooms. “What is wrong?” he asked. He’d washed out his hair. It was loose and russet and still a bit damp, and he was back in his linen shirt, like at the farm, like the ones she’d ruined. He smelled of outdoors, and chimney smoke.

  “Have you been on the roof?”

  “Yes.”

  She could see him being careful. Afraid of her, beca
use to be near her was pain. She knew exactly what that felt like. Only she wasn’t going to be careful anymore. “Would you look at my stitches?”

  He shot a glance down the dim corridor. “I thought perhaps you had taken them out yourself.”

  “No. But I think they should come out. Before tomorrow. And I can’t see.”

  He hesitated, looking again down the hall with its rows of occupied bedrooms. Then his shoulders slumped a little and he said, “Come with me.”

  He went back down the stairs, Sophia pausing only to light her candle with one of the wall sconces, then moved quietly along the lower hall, opening the door across from the water lift. They stepped inside a storage room the size of a large closet, sheets and towels and tablecloths stacked on the shelves.

  “The linen room?” Sophia said, a little amused. She set the candle on a small table for folding as he shut the door. “Couldn’t we have just gone to yours?”

  “It has been a long day, Mademoiselle, and still I hope to avoid fighting a duel for your honor before the night is out. I do not think we will be bothered in here.”

  “I brought you this,” she said. It was a thin knife, tiny, for opening letters.

  “You will allow me to look?”

  She lifted her shirttail cautiously, and René got on his knees to untie the knotted bandage, unwinding it from her middle until he could see the bare swath of skin with her stitches. The air was cool, giving her goose bumps. Sophia tried to slow her breathing, not an easy thing when her heart was slamming such an unnerving tattoo against her chest. René’s expression was controlled. Set. Like the day he’d cut the cornfield. He held the candle close, studying.