A Lily Among Thorns (19 page)

Serena and René were left standing in the hallway. They looked at each other and then at Solomon’s door. “We are
not
going to listen in,” Serena said. “And to make sure of it, you’re
going to come and have breakfast with me in the kitchen.” He gave her a pleading glance, but she swept majestically past him down the corridor to the servants’ stair.

Halfway down, Serena remembered what she was wearing. She could go back up and change, couldn’t she? And if she overheard something, that wasn’t her fault—

She hovered, undecided, and René said mischievously, “So now that you’ve seen Elijah, I imagine you won’t have much use for his brother,
hein?
”

Let everyone stare. There was no way she was letting René near those boys if she could help it. She took off her hat and handed it to him. “Quite the opposite,” she said coldly as she re-pinned her hair. “Elijah is a dear, but there’s something
showy
about him, don’t you think?” René laughed softly and Serena felt very irritated indeed.

In the Stuart room, the two brothers faced each other awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” Elijah said again.

Solomon had been surprised to find that life went on without Elijah. Now he was surprised to find out that it went on
with
him. He wanted time to stop and let him figure out how he felt, accustom himself to this new world. But of course it didn’t. He must carry on as if the dominant emotion of the past year and a half of his life hadn’t been—unnecessary. Irrelevant. He sighed. “What really happened?”

Elijah looked down. “I explained that.”

Solomon crossed his arms. “I know you’ve been gone a long time, Li, but I can still tell when you’re lying.”

Elijah nodded resignedly. “But it sounded plausible?”

Solomon frowned. “Yes, except for the part about your trying to write to us. That was an obvious fabrication.”

“Good. Now loan me a pen and paper. I can’t risk anyone overhearing what I’m about to tell you.” In spite of his shock and
anger, Solomon felt a deep thrill of anticipation. Elijah always made things exciting.

Elijah, gesturing to Solomon to stand by him, wrote,
I had to pretend to be dead because I’m a spy.

“You, too!” Solomon exclaimed. Elijah glared at him and offered him the pen.

The marquis is a spy, too
, Solomon wrote.
For the French. I assume you’re a spy for the English?

Elijah rolled his eyes.
Naturally. And I already know René is a spy, because.
Elijah stopped. He ran his fingers through his hair. Then he wrote, very firmly,
I’m in London to bring him and his informants to justice as soon as I can find concrete evidence.

Solomon did not know quite what to write. Elijah looked so grim. He wrote
But
and paused. Then he continued,
you and Sacreval are friends. Aren’t you?
Of course, Sacreval and Serena were friends, too.

Elijah glanced at Solomon.
We were. But he’s a French spy. The best. He’s passed lakes of information. We can’t afford to have anything leak right now, or it’ll be him hanging me.

You didn’t know it was him when you took the assignment, did you?

Elijah’s shoulders sagged. He shook his head.

You can’t though, yet. The marquis
—

Elijah ripped the pen out of Solomon’s hand and started writing very quickly.
He’s no more a marquis than I am, damn it. He’s got two little brothers and a sister and a mother, and they all live in a cramped apartment in the quartier Saint-Germain and keep a very small bakery that belonged to his father.
He stopped writing.

Solomon took the pen from his brother’s unresisting hand.
I’m sorry, but you can’t hang him just at the moment. He forged marriage lines to get the Arms from Serena, and if he’s hanged, the inn will be forfeit to the Crown.

And what am I going to tell the Foreign Office then? ‘I’m sorry, but
my brother says we can’t hang an enemy
—the nib caught and ink spattered across the paper. Solomon took the pen again.

Can you tell the others you’re back?

Elijah nodded.
I have to. I’m supposed to stay here quite openly. That’s why they were willing to sacrifice my connections in Paris, because they knew you were staying here and if I came suddenly back from the dead, I’d end up here too.

If his connection to Serena hadn’t suddenly proved useful to the Foreign Office, how long would he have had to wait to get his brother back? But there was no point asking that.
They’ll pay your shot, won’t they?

Elijah laughed. “So, you and Lady Serena—”

“What about us?” Solomon asked.

“Sol.”

“We’re friends.”

“You might as well tell me, because if you don’t, I’ll find out anyway.”

“I forgot what a bully you are.”

The two brothers looked at each other. Suddenly Solomon was smiling tremulously and Elijah’s lashes were wet. They each looked firmly back at the paper, embarrassed. Then Elijah took the pen and wrote,
What the devil does he want with the inn anyway?

I don’t know,
Solomon admitted,
but I’d swear he set a fire in my room two nights ago while we were out. Someone did, anyway. Tried to make it look like I left a candle burning on the mantel and it fell off.
He pointed at the damaged mantelpiece.

Elijah’s eyes narrowed.
Destroy this paper,
he wrote. As Solomon reached for his tinderbox, Elijah went to the hearth. Getting on his knees, he examined the charred bottom of the carving. Solomon burned the paper in the bottom of a glass bowl and looked at his brother, who was really back.

“What’s on the other side of the wall?” Elijah asked.

“Serena’s room.” Solomon flushed at his brother’s raised brows. “She keeps the door locked.”

Elijah glanced at the melted keyhole.

“Well, she did, before I dissolved the lock.” Solomon flushed deeper. “She was having a nightmare.”

Elijah, miraculously, decided to save the teasing for later. “Is it easier to break into this room than that one?”

“I’m not sure—oh. Yes, it is. Serena has a bar on her door. And I’m sure he wanted it to look to Serena as if I had done it.”

“Can I take a look on the other side?”

Solomon hesitated. Serena would take a dim view of such proceedings, but maybe that was a good reason to get it over with while she wasn’t around. Elijah didn’t wait for his permission anyway. He just turned the doorknob and went in.

Solomon followed, trying not to get distracted by Serena’s shift lying on the bed, or the three hairpins and a brush on her dressing table, or any of the countless other intimate things that said
Serena lives here.
“He’s more likely to have been trying for my room anyway. It used to be his and he was very irritated that I’d got it.”

Elijah rapped on the wall and listened carefully to the sound. “Maybe he was just annoyed at having to cross the hall to reach the Siren’s bed,” he suggested morosely.

This lowering thought had occurred to Solomon, too. “Don’t call her that.”

Elijah examined the floor near the wall. “I may have to take this flooring up. The fire makes me wonder if there’s something important hidden in the Ravenshaw Arms. You’re right, it’s more likely to be on your side.”

“Shall we search for it now?”

Elijah hesitated, then shook his head. “Later. Right now I want to know all about Susannah’s engagement.”

Serena expected Elijah to join her and Solomon for dinner that evening, naturally. And she was definitely unsurprised when Elijah and Solomon talked feverishly, their conversation heavily
punctuated with ancient private jokes and obscure allusions, while she toyed with her food. After the first couple of courses she got up and left altogether. She wasn’t sure Solomon noticed.

But that night she was awakened by knocking on the connecting door. “Come,” she called.

Solomon opened the door. She couldn’t quite see his face in the moonlight. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

Serena sat up on her elbows. “What is it?”

“It’s just—he’s really back, isn’t he? I didn’t dream it?”

She shook her head. “No. You didn’t dream it.”

The tension eased out of his shoulders. “Thanks. And thank you for finding him.”

She was angry with Elijah all over again, for tangling Solomon in whatever game he was playing. “Well,” she said softly, “you did engage me to find things you lost, didn’t you?”

The moon silvered his mouth as it curved, just a little. But she thought he was still staring at the floor.

“You must simply try to be a little less careless in future.” When his chin jerked up, as she’d known it would, she pulled up the corner of the quilt and patted the sheets next to her.

The hopeful lifting of his brows made her bite her tongue to keep from showing—she wasn’t sure what, but whatever it was she was feeling. He came to the side of the bed and stood there, looking down at her as if she were a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. Her skin began to tingle pleasantly. After a few improbably long moments, he climbed into bed, the mattress shifting under his weight. Serena settled comfortably down with her nose pushed into his side.

“But don’t think this is a permanent arrangement,” she told him in a muffled voice.

“I know,” he said. Then, “I was grieving for so long. I don’t know how to make sense of myself anymore. I don’t know how to feel.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see then, won’t we?”

His hand settled, warm and heavy, on the back of her head. She could hear his smile in his voice. “I suppose we will.”

Elijah had removed his coat and pried his boots off before he realized his cravat pin was missing. He didn’t see it anywhere on the floor, so he went out into the hall with his candle to look. He was prowling past René’s door when it swung open. Damn. This ought to be awkward.

“Thierry. You have lost something?”

Elijah was silent a moment, looking at René with his fashionably tousled hair and his brocade dressing gown. Marquis du Sacreval. Christ. “Yes, I rather think I have.”

René opened the door a little further, and Elijah went in and put down his candle.

He tried to cast a professional eye over the room, looking for anything incriminating. But all he saw was René’s burgundy coat hanging over a chair before René seized him by the shoulders and slammed him up against the wall. The door swung shut with a heavy clunk.

“Thierry—you—you—” René kissed him, hard.

Elijah kissed him back, too numb to put up any resistance, or even to put his arms around René’s neck. He leaned against the wall as René’s hands roughly untied his cravat. René’s hands—

Tears stung his eyes. He closed them. Despair and heat pooled in his chest, a surprisingly intoxicating mixture. Surely it wouldn’t be wrong to allow himself this, one last time. One last time before—he failed to finish the thought as René began on his buttons.

Suddenly, from any number of long Palm Sunday services he’d daydreamed through in his father’s church, a verse came back to him.
Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.

Elijah opened his eyes and took René’s familiar hands—which were on their last waistcoat button—in his. They were large and brown, with firm wrists and strong fingers. A baker’s hands. “I never thought I’d see you again.” If only he hadn’t.

“
C’est la faute de qui, ça
?” René asked shakily.

Elijah raised his eyes to René’s face. “It was my fault. But what would you have had me do? Leave you my address?
Stay
with you? The week before I left, Napoleon came back from exile, or don’t you remember that? Every hour I spent with you was an hour I risked discovery—an hour I risked arrest. If any of you had noticed anything amiss with my accent—”

Of course, he’d already been living in Paris as a Frenchman for over a year then, as an under-clerk at the Ministry of Police. But with Napoleon back and seeing spies and assassins in every shadow, and the British Foreign Office desperate for anything he
could give them, he hadn’t been able to risk anyone getting to know him too closely. He hadn’t been able to risk anyone asking what was in that locked trunk at the foot of his bed, or wanting to meet the fictitious sister he visited so often in Le Havre. But the lies flowed so naturally, so smoothly, that Elijah was almost surprised when a little bit of truth slipped in. “I only stayed so long because I couldn’t—after I left, it was weeks before I learned how to fall asleep without you again.”

“Me, I still have not learned,” René said raggedly and dove in for another kiss. “What is this I taste? Salt? Ah, Thierry—”

René’s mouth traced the tear tracks down his cheek. Elijah bit his tongue, hard, to keep from saying something else foolish. Soon René’s hands began, more gently this time, to tug Elijah’s shirt out of his breeches. “But now things will be as they were,” he murmured.

Elijah pushed him away, at the same time propelling himself off of the wall. “René, they can’t ever.
We
can’t ever.”

René stood still, breathing hard. “But why not?” He seemed almost menacing, standing so close in the darkness with an angry note in his voice. It sent shivers down Elijah’s spine. The good sort.