Angel Falling Softly (29 page)

R
achel watched the Lincoln turn the corner, cruise down the street and out of sight. She wondered how long she should wait. She’d gotten into the habit of bursting in on Milada and was reluctant to do so today, even when she had a good excuse.

“Aren’t you going to take her attaché back?” her husband asked.

“Maybe after dinner.”

After a light meal eaten in uncomfortable stillness, Rachel picked up the attaché case and walked down the street to Milada’s house. Milada didn’t come to the door when she rang the doorbell. Maybe she was napping. Milada didn’t strike her as someone who napped. She tried the doorknob.

The door was open. She called out, “Milada? It’s Rachel Forsythe.”

She tiptoed into the kitchen and glanced down through the banisters into the family room. Milada lay on the floor on a bath towel, her head resting on a small throw pillow. The louvers across the sliding glass doors cast lines of light across her waist and legs. Her robe was pulled down from her shoulders. Next to her on the carpet were a water bottle, several prescription pill bottles, a cell phone.

Milada’s eyes followed her as she came down the short flight of stairs. “Hello, Rachel,” Milada said. Her voice was stiff and muted. She did not lift her head.

“You left your attaché case at the hospital.”

“Thank you,” Milada mumbled.

Rachel set the attaché case next to the staircase and stood there, trying not to stare at the pill bottles, trying not to wonder what the drugs were, because it was none of her business. But then she looked closer and gasped. “Milada! What happened to you?”

“A sunburn. Don’t you know your lore, Rachel? We do not fare well when exposed to the light of day.” She tried to smile. “You needn’t worry. A temporary setback. What do you want? You always get that look on your face when you want something.”

Abashed, Rachel retreated a step. “There’s something I have to ask you.”

“Then ask me,” Milada said, the resignation clear in her voice.

“What happened in London?”

Milada turned her eyes toward Rachel, a pair of diamonds shining out of a pool of soot. “You know what happened there.”

Rachel did. She felt the touch of evil and forced herself not to imagine what she knew from that simple statement.

Milada spoke without prompting. “I understand now what Rakosi wanted. He wanted a family, companions to share the long night of eternity with. But he was in no way prepared to be a parent. When we alone survived, he had not the slightest idea what to do with us. Yet he did it over and over. Perhaps it became the only way he knew how to connect to women with any semblance of passion, as perverse a passion as it was.”

“But how did your stepfather—” Rachel pressed in a taut whisper.

“Garrick found us. He was a sheriff’s bailiff, his way of staying one step ahead of the Puritans. He recovered the body of a girl near London Bridge. He recognized the marks as being what only one of our kind could make. Such careless violence imperiled all of us. He ferreted out Rakosi, arrested him, and turned him over to the Royal Court. The three of us he sent to Michael’s estate at Cheapside. We took his name and became his daughters. Years we spent isolated inside those walls. We were quite mad at the time and each of us unique in our madness.”

“And Rakosi?”

“He confessed to the murders. Better that than be condemned a warlock, with the Witchfinder General prosecuting the cases. He spared himself the torture. But he never reached the gallows. He died at Newgate Prison—he stopped taking blood. He could have survived. He could have pled benefit of clergy. He could have escaped. He had the power, and I know what that hunger is like. A death by hanging would have been kinder punishment.”

“You think he deserved kinder punishment!” Rachel exclaimed.

“No. And yet—I believe that all his life he rationalized his predilections by telling himself he was an evil man in the thrall of an evil passion. But in the end he was not evil. He was a pathetic man who led a pathetically lonely life that made him desperate to ruin everything he touched. I felt sorry for him. The Stockholm syndrome, isn’t that what they call it—when the captive falls in love with the captor? But as I said, I was by then quite mad.”

Rachel bit her bottom lip. “How many?” she asked faintly. “How many girls?”

Milada didn’t answer. Rachel could not leave the stone unturned, could not leave without knowing the mundane, ordinary horror of what had happened.
What did you do?
she’d asked Milada at the beginning. And now she needed the answer, a death she could understand. If not her own daughter’s, then someone else’s. She said, “You killed them. Not that—that Rakosi.” When Milada didn’t answer, she repeated the question: “How many?”

“The last one, the one Garrick found, was the only one I killed to further my own ends. The rest for—” She paused. “For mercy. They would have died anyway, after what he did to them. The fever burns. The blood boils in your veins. You think you will kill yourself before it kills you.
I
got better. But you never are better. Those girls never would have gotten better. They would have suffered for nothing.”

“Not all of them. You don’t know that.”

“Mathew Hopkins and his witch prickers had the run of London. Cromwell and the Roundheads ran everything else. You prick us, and we do not bleed. It is written in the Bible:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
I wanted us to live. That was the only way I knew how.”

“And Garrick?”

“I learned the routines of his watch. I left the body where I knew he would find it, the key to Rakosi’s strongbox in her hand, and in her pocket a locket identifying another of the missing girls. As if she had stolen, fled, and died.”

“Because Rakosi raped you and your sisters?”

“
He never touched them in that way.
” A quiet fierceness crept into her voice. “I was responsible for my sisters. I was responsible for the fate that befell us. If he would not have me, then I would procure the necessary surrogates. Yet I knew he would betray us eventually. Through incompetence or willful self-destruction. I was sure I could care for my sisters on my own. We had lived almost five decades with him. Alas, five decades had not made me wise. Only cruel. Wisdom does not come with time, Rachel. Wisdom comes with age. Wisdom must be worn into the soul. And we Daranyi age very slowly.”

The sun settled in the west, the bands of light slipped across her face, illuminating her chin and cheeks and the bridge of her nose. The skin was charred, almost blackened.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“It is less severe than it looks. It only feels that way.” She tried to smile. “I met today with a gentleman farmer. He also owns a company I wish to buy. We spent the morning stacking hay. Such are the lengths I will go to. This is an allergic reaction. I am allergic to sunlight. Ironic, don’t you think? The one thing I cannot cure is myself. Or your daughter—”

Her voice caught in her throat. She closed her eyes and fought to retain her composure. Rachel knelt on the floor next to her. Despite all that the woman had confessed, Rachel wanted only to somehow comfort this terrible, fallen angel. But she could see the stripes on her shoulders and didn’t know how tender the rest of her body might be.

“You don’t know that. I asked impossible things of you. I put you in an impossible position. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair.”

“You worry about being fair to me? And yet how your God harries me.” This time she did manage a smile.

“I don’t know who you were, Milada. I don’t even know who you are. I’m in no position to judge you or judge your past. But I know what you were willing to do for me. You didn’t have to, but you did. And that is enough.” Rachel got to her feet. “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything I can get you?”

“No. I will be fine. By Tuesday I should be as good as new.”

T
he drugs at last lulled Milada to sleep. The narcotics freed her dreams. Dreams that flew her halfway around the world. Dreams that loosed the restless past from its sepulchral moorings. The rain fell, the hurricane roared, and the doors of the manor house shook with heavy reverberations.

Milada awoke with a start. Her breath caught in her throat. The shock of realization raced through her veins and struck hard at her heart: the consummation of her own design, sooner than expected and hostile beyond expectation.

She parted a slit in the heavy curtains. The street below her window was painted with the flickering orange glow of fiery torches, the dancing gray and black shadows of the jostling throng. She crossed to the door, cracked it open, and peered out. She heard the swift padding of small feet behind her, turned and caught Kammy by the shoulders.

“No,” she whispered in their native tongue. “Leave it be.”

An awful crash below made them both jump, the battering ram at last deployed. Across the room, Zoë’s wide, frightened eyes stared, aglow in the dark. Milada spun her sister about and pushed her toward the bed. “Stay with Zoë till I return.”

She looked once more to ensure that Kammy did as she was told, and then she stole down the hallway. The way was clear. She darted to the balustrade and crouched low behind the banisters.

The Master staggered from his bedroom. “What? What?” he exclaimed, his mind confused by sleep. “Robbers!” he shouted. “Brigands!” He twisted his head, the movement almost a spasm, toward the narrow staircase.

Milada ducked her head, overcome by guilt and fear.

The final assault splintered the jamb. The door fell inward and crashed onto the flagstones. The Master shrieked and stumbled backward. A phalanx of uniformed men swept through the entrance hall, an angry tide drowning the Master in a rain of pummeling fists and kicking feet. Furniture broke under the force of blows, as did glass and bones. The Master was as strong as half a dozen men; half a dozen more surged into the breach. Milada heard the harsh clank of chains, the muffled roars and curses as the bolts were locked and hammered into place.

She smelled blood in the air. The rich odor of steel and salt brought out the prickle of sweat on her skin. A casualty supported by two compatriots hobbled to the shattered entranceway. Another man followed, hand clasped to his bloody forehead. The clutch of constables came next, dragging the bound Master. They needed no more violence. Terror had numbed his faculties to the point of paralysis. They dragged him out of the house, onto the cold, cobbled street. Then came the thud of a body cast hard onto the bed of a wagon, the rattle of irons against rough wood.

The horses unhitched. The shake of reins. The creak of wheels on the stones.
Leave,
Milada urged them in her mind,
and leave us alone.

Just as suddenly, the storm subsided.

She waited until she believed they had gone for good, until she believed her plan had worked. She stood to return to the hall just as a man walked into the quiet house. He was different from the others. He wore the colors of some official rank. He stepped carefully over the fallen door and surveyed the damage.

“M’lord?” A constable bearing a lantern joined him. “Shall we search the house, sir?”

The man shook his head. “On the morrow. A devil such as this—this
Rakosi
—he might have lain traps for us to stumble upon in all this darkness.” He reassured the man with a friendly push on the shoulder.

The constable was only too eager to agree. He departed, leaving the man once again alone in the dark.

The man made ready to leave as well. But he hesitated. He glanced back over his shoulder, eyes focused on the stair head, then to the left. For an infinite, horrifying second, his eyes met hers. He was the man from the White Hart. She knew at once that he’d recognized her, even in the dark.

Milada shrank back from the balustrade and pushed herself across the floor to the opposite wall. The man approached the staircase. His boot heels clicked on the worn steps. He did not rush. Milada finally picked herself up and fled down the hall. Kammy stood outside the bedroom door. “What’s going on?” she demanded. Her eyes narrowed. “What have you done?”

Milada shook her head—in despair, not in denial. “Someone is coming.” Kammy lunged forward. Milada caught hold of her and dragged her into the room and shut the door behind them. She sat on the bed. She could think of nothing else to do. Zoë clutched her arm. Back then, Zoë always stayed close of her own accord. Milada closed her eyes. This she had not counted on. She only
suspected
what he was, only
knew
that he was the law. She had not dreamt of rescue. She had dreamt of freedom, the freedom to rule their lives as
she
saw fit.

The iambic rhythm of his footsteps came closer. The knob turned. The door opened. The three sisters drew breath simultaneously.

The man stepped into the room.

The glow of the moon glinted on the shrouded windows. Yet they saw him plain as day. He removed his hat, a strange courtesy to them. He stepped forward. He was young, yet his hair was a silken mane of silver and white. His eyes clear as glass. His skin like porcelain.