A Lily Among Thorns (33 page)

As they were turning up onto the road to Newgate, she turned to Serena and said, with a tiny quaver in her voice, “Does it hurt very much to be beheaded?”

Serena swallowed. René had told her stories from the Terror of severed heads looking at their bodies, blinking, even trying to speak.

“No one knows for sure,” Solomon said gently. “But my anatomy lecturer at Cambridge believed that a beheaded person loses consciousness after only a few seconds. Those tales about guillotined heads winking at the mob are probably tripe. And even in the worst of the stories, none of them looked to be in
pain
.”

Jenny looked as abjectly grateful as Serena felt.

They pulled up in front of the prison. Jenny sat perfectly still, a greenish tinge to her cheeks. Serena wished she could think of something to say.

Solomon leaned forward a little, though he did not lower the pistol. “You look dreadful,” he said gently. “Do you want them all to see you shamed and frightened?”

Their eyes met, and suddenly Jenny smiled. “Will you wait just a moment while I put on some rouge?”

Solomon nodded. “Serena will get it out of your reticule and hand it to you—and if you try to escape or injure her in any way, I’ll shoot you.”

Serena searched through the bag, retrieved a little pot of rouge, and handed it to Jenny.

She rubbed some color into each cheek and took a deep breath. “Shall we go, then?”

They gave her over into custody of the warden of the prison. Two hulking turnkeys appeared to escort her to her cell. Just before they rounded the corner, she blew Solomon and Serena a kiss, calling gaily, “
Vive l’empereur!
”

Only René was left now.

Solomon watched Serena, who was staring out the window of their hackney. It had been hard for her to turn over Lady Pursleigh; he could see that. And he thought he saw why.

He would have said that no two women could be more different, and yet—both women, forced to fend for themselves in a man’s world, had been obliged to choose masks. Jenny Pursleigh, faced with men’s expectations of what a pretty girl should be, fulfilled them all. Serena rejected them, every single one. Lady Pursleigh pretended to feelings she didn’t in the least have. Serena pretended to feel absolutely nothing.

He’d resented that, all this time. But he was beginning to understand, finally, that the stubbornly blank lines of her face weren’t a rejection. Not of him, anyway. They were an open challenge, a refusal to perform for the crowd.

I can’t be what you want
, she had said. What, exactly, did she think he wanted? He remembered Miss Jeeves, the happy, girlish
role she’d played at St. Andrew of the Cross, and how angry she’d been when he enjoyed it. Did she think he wanted what Lord Pursleigh wanted? And how, living in the world they lived in, could he expect her to think anything else?

The afternoon stretched. Sacreval did not return. He must have really gone for good. There was nothing left to do. Serena retreated to her office, and Elijah was holed up in his own room with a couple of other agents. Solomon wondered what would happen between him and Serena now. They had found the earrings. She no longer needed his help against Sacreval. He was on the very last wallpaper sample for the Arms. Once he had matched it, he and Serena would have no external reason for further contact. He didn’t know how matters stood between him and Elijah either, or how they would stand.

He tried to work on Serena’s last dye, but his heart wasn’t in it. In fact, his heart was dead set against it. Instead, he tried to read a poor translation of one of Chevreul’s papers on indigo, ate an early supper alone in his room, and went to bed.

He dreamed he was thrashing Elijah. He was smashing Elijah’s face with his fist and kicking him in the chest, and he could feel each blow in his own body, each sudden bright blossoming of pain. He could feel it when Elijah’s ribs cracked.

He woke up. It was dark. Serena stood over him, having evidently shaken him awake. She looked so worried about him: her jaw tight and her hand firm on his shoulder, her perfect brows drawn together stubbornly as if she were doing a painful duty but would be damned before she’d let anyone, including Solomon, stop her. He wanted to bury his face in her shoulder and cry, and he thought she might let him. Instead he pulled her down on top of him and kissed her, smelling sweat and almonds.

Reluctantly, he pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely, passing the back of his hand across his eyes. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why
not?
”

He sat up, giving her a rueful smile. “Because it was stupid.” She glared at him, not bothering to set her clothes to rights. He had to get out of this room.

“I’m going to get my earrings.” Having a goal cleared his mind, a little. By dint of not looking at her, he managed to get out of bed and pull on his breeches—carefully—before changing his nightshirt for a shirt. “Can I have your key?”

She rolled her eyes, tugged her clothes into place, and went into her room to get it. She came back holding the key, but instead of giving it to him she went past him and out into the hall without a word. He followed her.

The earrings were not where Elijah had seen them. Serena watched him search tensely for a minute or two before suggesting, “Try the ledge inside the chimney. I sometimes hide things there in my room.” He got soot all over his hands, but she was right.

Back in the Stuart room, he set the earrings on his worktable and went to wash his hands in the basin. When he turned around, Serena was turning the box from side to side, trying to see the earrings in the moonlight.

She saw him watching her. “We should examine them for damage,” she said hastily.

He sighed and lit the lamp. Light glinted off the Hathaway rubies lying in her palm. What would they look like in her ears? He glanced at her face. She was gazing at the earrings with a kind of fascinated horror.

Then someone put a key into the lock and turned it, and before Serena could do more than take a step toward the fireplace poker, Sacreval was in the room with a gun pointed straight at them.

Neither of them moved as he shut and locked the door from the inside with his free hand. “Back away from that table,
sirène
,” he said calmly.

“You couldn’t shoot me,” Serena said with confidence.

He smiled a little sadly. “That is why I am not pointing the gun at you.” And it was true, Solomon realized. The pistol was aimed straight and true for his own heart.

Serena had a sudden vivid memory of pointing her pistol at the face of some drunk young tulip who’d broken into her room on a dare, back in the early days of the Arms. René had heard and come in.
As in all battles
, he’d said,
the heart makes a better target than the head. Even if you are a little off, you are likely to hit some vital organ or other.
She’d said she was never a little off, and he had smiled approvingly and shrugged and said,
Have it your own way then
, but he’d escorted the tulip off the premises himself and the next day the bar had appeared across her door—

Serena snapped herself back into the present.

“You can’t shoot him either,” she said calmly, still hoping against hope that she could somehow brazen this out. “He’s Elijah’s brother, or have you forgotten?”

“Back away from the table,” René repeated.

The look on his face made her ill. “Oh, but you would, wouldn’t you? And you would think you were doing a fine thing, a noble act, sacrificing your chance at happiness for—God, for what, René? Why the devil did you come back?”

“
Back away from the table,
” René said through gritted teeth, and he cocked the pistol.

Her back was against the wall and she couldn’t remember moving. The sound of that pistol cocking was the loudest thing she had ever heard. There was still a roaring in her ears like a hundred people cheering.

“Let him go,” she said, her voice sounding distant in her own ears. “Let him go, and I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“I don’t think so,” said René.

“I’ll sign over the Arms to you.”

René looked pitying. “I don’t want the Arms,
sirène.
”

Of course he didn’t want the Arms anymore. She couldn’t think. She had simply offered him the biggest thing she could think of, like poor Jenny Pursleigh trying to bribe her with sex and her carefully hoarded cash. René had ruined Jenny, too.

“It’s all right, Serena,” Solomon said. “Sacreval isn’t going to shoot me if you just do as he says.” He sounded calmer than she was. Her strength was just an act, had always been an act.

But it was an act she could still do. She drew in a deep breath and pulled herself up and away from the wall. “Very well, René. What is it you
do
want?”

René nodded at her approvingly, just as he had when she’d threatened the tulip, and she felt sick. “You are holding the Hathaway earrings, are you not?”

She unclenched her fist and held out her hand, palm up, so he could see the rubies in their box.

“Very good,
sirène.
I want you to examine them very carefully for any kind of catch or spring.”

It was hard to see, even in the light from Solomon’s newfangled clockwork lamp, but after an endless half minute or so she saw the tiny catch. She pressed it back, hard, and the central ruby and its gold backing popped out and lay in her hand.

René smiled in relief. “Excellent. Now, is there a piece of the backing that isn’t attached?”

She looked, and sure enough, a thin strip of gold flipped out and extended from the back center of the gem. It looked almost like a key—she gasped.

“Good,” he said, seeing that she understood. “Now do the same for the other and go and put them in their places.”

“They’ll go back together, won’t they?” Solomon asked worriedly. “Susannah needs them.”

“Hush, Solomon.” Serena walked over to the mantelpiece. The left ruby fitted perfectly into the empty socket at the bottom of Diana’s carved hair—she had always wondered why there was
a tiny slit at the back. The other ruby fit equally perfectly into the empty socket in the sun’s biggest right-hand ray. She looked at René, waiting for his signal.

He nodded. “Turn them, I think. It will need both of you. I couldn’t reach, and between that and the guard you set on the room, I’ve had a devil of a time.”

“So sorry to have inconvenienced you.” Why had she posted the guard? If she hadn’t, he would be gone now. He’d only come back for this. If he hurt Solomon—

“Don’t try anything,” René said as Solomon moved closer to her. She tried to calculate how much of Solomon’s body she could shield with her own and decided that it was not enough to take the risk. Together they twisted the rubies, and the entire left-hand side of the mantel sprung forward slightly with an audible click. Serena felt oddly betrayed, as if the Arms had been conspiring with René against her.

“That royal bastard!” Solomon gave the portrait of Charles I a glare, as if that king were somehow to blame for his son’s perfidy to the Hathaways. “He might have
told
us!”

Serena ignored him, looking at René.

“I want you to open it and take out all the papers that you see in there and burn them. I would like to blindfold you, but I do not have time, so let me warn you now: if you try to keep any back or leave any in there, I will see, and he will die. It is as simple as that.”

She swung open the front of the carving. The back of the carving was covered in clockwork, and a shelf divided the interior into two compartments. The bottom compartment was empty. The top one held a mass of papers. She took them out, careful not to let any fall. “Why the devil would I try to keep any back—”

And then she saw the map. Even in the semi-dark she recognized that bit of Cornish coastline. Ravenscroft. “My
father
? My father was helping you?” She gaped. “I suppose that explains his sudden interest in me—”

There was a knock on the door. “Sol?” Elijah’s voice asked. René turned white, but his hand did not shake. He raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Solomon didn’t answer. In the listening silence Serena became aware that what she had thought was a roaring in her ears really
was
people cheering in the room below. She felt dimly that she ought to wonder why.

“Sol, I heard Lady Serena’s voice, I know you’re in there.”

Solomon looked at René, who nodded, very slowly.

“That you, Elijah?”

Serena was amazed at how natural his voice sounded.

“Can I come in?” Elijah asked.

“The devil you can, Li. Serena and I are a trifle occupied at present and we wish you at Jericho.”

When had he learned to lie so well?

Elijah laughed. “To Jericho I go, then.” His footsteps retreated.

René let out his breath. “Now burn them, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to throw acid at me or anything of that nature,” he said softly. Serena was already moving to obey him when Solomon spoke.

“No, wait,” he said.

Serena and René both stared at him.

“You might need those. If your father threatens to lock you up again. Sacreval said he couldn’t shoot
you
.”