Paragon Walk (29 page)

Emily’s face was pale, her eyes shadowed.

“Do you think it really is black magic, devil worship, and that sort of thing?” She was struggling to disbelieve it herself, now that she actually saw it in its ugliness and absurdity.

“Yes,” Charlotte said quietly. She reached out and touched one of the hoods. “Can you think of any other reason for all this? And the pentacle, and the bitter herbs? That must be why Phoebe wears a cross and keeps going to church all the time, and why she thinks we can’t ever get rid of the evil now that it’s here.”

Emily started to say something, and it died on her tongue. They stood staring at each other.

“What can we do?” Emily said at last.

Before Charlotte could think of any answer, there was a sound at the door, and they both froze in horror. They had forgotten the possibility of someone else coming. There was no conceivable explanation they could make. They had unlocked the door in the hedge deliberately. There was no way they could have lost their way. And no one would believe they did not know or understand what they had found!

Very slowly they turned to face the door.

Paul Alaric stood there, black outlined against the sun.

“Well!” he said softly, stepping in and smiling.

Charlotte and Emily stood so close together their bodies touched. Emily was gripping hard, fingers digging in like claws.

“So you’ve found it,” Alaric observed. “A little foolhardy, wasn’t it—to come looking for such a thing, and alone?” He seemed amused.

At the back of her mind Charlotte had always known it was foolish, but curiosity had driven out awareness of danger and silenced warning in her brain. Now she stared at Alaric and felt for Emily’s hand beside her. Was he the head of them, the warlock? Was that why Selena found it credible that he should have attacked her—or was it why Jessamyn knew he had not? Or could it be that the head was a woman—Jessamyn herself? Her mind whirled around all kinds of ugly thoughts.

Alaric was coming toward them, still smiling, but with a slight furrow between his brows.

“I think we had better get out of this room,” he said gently. “It’s an extraordinarily unpleasant place, and I, for one, do not wish to be found here if one of its regular users should chance to come.”

“R—regular?” she stammered.

His smile broadened into a harsh laugh.

“Good heavens, you think I’m one of them! I’m disappointed in you, Charlotte.”

For one idiotic moment she blushed.

“Then who is?” she demanded defensively. “Afton Nash?”

He took her by the arm and led her into the sun, Emily only inches behind her. He pushed the door closed and continued along the path between the bitter herbs.

“No, Afton is far too bloodless for anything of that sort. His form of hypocrisy is much subtler than that.”

“Then who?” Charlotte was sure enough it was not George to be unafraid of his answer.

“Oh, Freddie Dilbridge,” he said confidently. “And poor Grace studiously turns a blind eye, pretending it is just a normal excess of the flesh.”

“Who else?” Charlotte kept up with him, leaving Emily behind on the narrow path.

“Selena, certainly,” he replied. “And I should think, Algernon. Poor little Fanny, before she died—at least, I would guess so. Phoebe knows about it, of course—she is not as innocent of nature or people as she seems—and Hallam without doubt. And naturally Fulbert knew, from what he said, even though he was never invited.”

It all fitted into place.

“What do they do?” she asked.

His mouth turned down at the corners, rueful, a little contemptuous.

“Nothing very much, play at a little wickedness, imagine they conjure demons.”

“You don’t think it could be—real?” She hesitated to ask such a question outside in the summer garden with the beach hedge fluttering green above them. It was getting hotter and stiller, and there was a faint overcast across the sky. The thunderflies were worse.

“No, my dear,” he said, looking straight at her. “I don’t.”

“Pheobe thinks so.”

“Yes, I know. She imagines a foolish and rather sordid game that has suddenly summoned up real spirits, and set them loose in the Walk, to bring murder and insanity up from the dark regions of the damned.” His face was wry, utterly reasonable, dismissing such things to the realms of hysteria.

She frowned.

“Is there no such thing as black magic?”

“Oh, yes.” He pushed the door open in the hedge and stood back for them to go through. “Most certainly there is. But this is not it.”

They emerged into the color and normality of the garden party again. No one had seen them leave the beach hedge and pass along the herbaceous walk. Miss Laetitia was listening dutifully to Lady Tamworth expounding on the evils of marrying beneath one’s station, and Selena was having what appeared to be heated words with Grace Dilbridge. Everything was as usual; they might only have been gone for moments. Charlotte had to shake herself to remember what she had seen. Freddie Dilbridge, standing so casually with a glass in his hand, next to the pink roses, dressed up in robes with a hood over his head and holding night parties inside a pentacle, pretending to summon devils, perhaps holding a black mass, stripping the virgin Fanny and branding her body with the crooked scar. How little one knew of the thoughts writhing behind the facile mask. She must make a supreme effort to be civil to him now.

“Don’t say anything,” Emily warned.

“I’m not going to!” Charlotte snapped back. “There isn’t anything to say.”

“I was afraid you might try to point out how wicked it is.”

“I presume that that is why they like it!” Charlotte picked up her skirts and swirled over toward Phoebe and Diggory Nash. Afton was standing just beyond them. Before she got there, she realized that, although he had his back to them, they were in the middle of a rather unpleasant conversation.

“—damn silly woman with an overheated mind,” Afton said waspishly. “Ought to stay at home and find something useful to do.”

“That’s easy to say when it isn’t you.” Diggory’s mouth turned down in contempt.

“It’s hardly likely to be me!” Afton’s eyebrows went up in a sarcastic arch. “It would be a clever rapist who tackled me!”

Diggory raked him with a look of infinite distaste.

“It would be a damn desperate one! Personally, I would sooner try the dog!”

“Then if the dog is raped, we shall know where to look,” Afton said coldly, but without apparent surprise. “You keep some peculiar company, Diggory. Your tastes are becoming depraved.”

“At least, I have tastes,” Diggory snapped back. “I sometimes think you are so withered up you have no passions left for anything. I wouldn’t find it hard to believe that all signs of life are repulsive to you, and anything that reminds you you have a body is unclean to your mind.”

Afton moved fractionally away from him.

“There is nothing unclean in my mind, nothing I need to look away from.”

“Then you’ve a stronger stomach than I have. What goes on in your brain terrifies me! Looking at you, I could believe in those fantasies of the ‘undead’ that are so popular these days, corpses that won’t stay buried.”

Afton held out his hands, palms up, as though weighing the sunlight.

“As usual you are not very thorough, Diggory. If I were one of your ‘undead,’ the sun would shrivel me.” He smiled with slow derision. “Or didn’t you read that far?”

“Don’t be so obvious,” Diggory’s voice was weary and irritated. “I was talking about your soul, not your flesh. I don’t know whether it was the sunlight that shriveled you, or just life. But, sure as hell waits, something did!” He moved away, heading toward a tray of peaches and sherbet. Phoebe dithered for a moment and then followed, leaving Afton to notice Charlotte at last. His cold eyes looked through her.

“Has your over-frank tongue placed you all by yourself again, Mrs. Pitt?” he inquired.

“Possibly,” she replied with equal chill. “But if so, no one else has been blunt enough to tell me so. But then to be alone is not always displeasing.”

“You seem to be visiting us in the Walk rather frequently. You did not bother with us before the rapist. Does it still hold some fascination for you, perhaps? A titillation, an extravagance, a wallowing in emotions, hot dreams of violence and surrender without guilt?” His eyes traveled from her bosom down to her thighs.

Charlotte shivered, as if his hands had touched her. She looked at him with total loathing.

“You seem to imagine that women like to be raped, Mr. Nash. It is a monstrous piece of arrogance, a delusion to feed your vanity and excuse your behavior, and it is quite untrue. Rapists are not magnificent. They are pathetic men who are reduced to taking by force that which others can win for themselves. If they did not hurt others so much, one could pity such a creature. It’s—it’s a kind of impotence!”

His face froze, but there was raw, scalding hatred in his eyes, as primal as birth and death. If they had not been in this civilized garden, with its ritual conversations, the chink of glasses, and polite laughter, she felt he would have torn her open, hacked at her with the sharp blade of a knife, plunged it in hilt deep, and torn her open—

She turned away, sick with the taste of fear, but not before she knew he had seen the understanding in her eyes. No wonder poor Phoebe had never even considered him the rapist. And now Charlotte knew, too, and that was something for which he would have no forgiveness this side of the grave.

She moved away, unseeing, consumed with her knowledge. Silks hung limp in the still air. Flawless skins were blackspotted with minuscule thunder flies, and it was getting hotter all the time. Conversation flittered past her, and she heard its sound but not its words.

“You let it upset you too much. It’s foolish, and I dare say ugly, but it need not touch you, or your sister.”

It was Paul Alaric, holding out a glass of lemonade for her, his eyes concerned, but with the same inward gleam of humor as always.

She remembered the garden room.

“It has nothing to do with that,” she shook her head. “I was thinking of something else, something real.”

He offered her the lemonade and, with his other hand, brushed a thunder fly away from her cheek.

She took the glass, glad of it, and as she turned slightly, her eye caught Jessamyn Nash with a look of malevolence on her face. This time she knew almost beforehand what it was—nothing complex, just ordinary jealousy, because Paul Alaric had touched her, because his concern was for her, and she knew it was real.

Overwhelmingly, Charlotte wanted to escape from it all, the politeness masking the envies, the airless garden, the silly conversations and the hatreds underneath.

“Where is Hallam Cayley buried?” she asked suddenly.

Alaric’s eyes widened in surprise.

“In the same graveyard as Fulbert and Fanny, about a mile away. Or to be accurate, just outside it—unhallowed ground for a suicide.”

“I think I’ll go and visit it. Do you suppose anyone will notice if I pick a few flowers from the front as I go?”

“I doubt it. But do you care?”

“Not at all.” She smiled at him, grateful for his not saying the expected, and not criticizing her.

She broke off some daisies, some sweet William, and a few long heads of lupines, already seeding a little at the bottom but still bright, and set out along the Walk toward the road at the end and the church. It was not as far as she had expected, but the heat was getting more oppressive all the time. The clouds overhead were heavier, and the flies were everywhere.

There was no one else in the graveyard, and she passed unnoticed through the lych-gate and down the path, past the graves with their carved angels and their memories, and beyond the yews to the small plot kept for those without the blessing of the church. Hallam’s grave was very new, the ground still bearing the scars of disturbance.

She stood looking at it for several minutes before she laid the flowers down. She had not thought to bring any kind of container, and there was nothing already here. Maybe they thought no one would want to bring flowers for such a person.

She stared down at the clay, still dry and hard, and thought about the Walk, all the stupidity and the unnecessary pain, and the loneliness.

She was still thinking when she heard another step and looked up. Jessamyn Nash was coming out of the shade of the yew trees, carrying lilies. When she recognized Charlotte, she hesitated, her face pinched and hard, her eyes almost black.

“What did you come here for?” she said very quietly, coming toward Charlotte now. She held the lilies and their leaves upright, and there was a silver gleam of scissors in her hand.

Without knowing why, Charlotte was afraid, as if the thunder and the electricity in the air had ripped through her. Jessamyn was standing opposite her, the grave between them.

Charlotte looked down at the flowers.

“Just—just to put these here.”

Jessamyn stared at them, then slowly raised her foot and trod on them, grinding them with the weight of her body, till they were crushed and smeared on the stone-hard clay. She lifted her head and faced Charlotte, then calmly dropped her own lilies on the same spot.

Above them there was a slow crackle of thunder, and the first drops of rain fell huge and wet through their dresses to the skin.

Charlotte wanted to ask her why she had done that. The words were quite clear inside her head, but her voice remained silent.

“You didn’t even know him!” Jessamyn said between her teeth. “How dare you come here with flowers? You are an intruder. Get out!”

Thoughts whirled in Charlotte’s mind, wild and amazing like flashes of light. She looked at the lilies on the ground and remembered that Emily had said Jessamyn never gave anything away, even when she did not want it anymore herself. If she was finished with it, she destroyed it, but she never let anyone else have it. Emily had been speaking of dresses.

“What difference does it make to you if I put flowers on his grave?” she asked as levelly as she could. “He’s dead.”

“That doesn’t give you any rights,” Jessamyn’s face was getting whiter, and she did not even seem aware of the heavy drops now falling. “You don’t belong in the Walk. Go back to your own Society, whatever that is. Don’t try to force yourself in here.”