Rook (23 page)

“But it is not only the papers that should concern us. We must assume we are being watched,” René continued. “LeBlanc will be watching. On the ferry, on the road, every step we take in the city. No one must doubt my relationship with Miss Bellamy, not until the fight we have planned. To do otherwise would endanger the Rook and those that wait for her in the Tombs. So I cannot afford to have my behavior questioned.”

“You are not to kiss her,” Spear said. Sophia’s head whipped around.

René was slouched into the chair now, his grin a little wicked. “As chaperone, you must feel it your proper duty to make such rules. But I wonder, Hammond, just how good you will be at enforcing them?”

Spear and René glared at each other like two boys with one cake between them. It woke her temper. Sophia left the window, snatching up her fluffy white underskirt from the laundry basket on the way, and sat herself down before the low table in a cloud of white cloth.

“I’ll be the one making my own rules, thank you,” she said, pulling out a knife. “And I think you both know I’m perfectly capable of enforcing them.” What was wrong with them? What was wrong with her? Since when had she ever wanted to marry anybody? “Spear, I’ll die happy if I never hear your opinion on this again,” she said, mentally gauging the size of the firelighter. “And as for you, Monsieur …” The cloth of the underskirt made a soft ripping sound as she slid the knife through the seam. “Tomorrow we will be exactly as engaged as I say we are.”

LeBlanc set down a goblet of wine and cut a slit beneath the seal of a small invitation. His desk was littered with reports of insurrection and red feathers, but his interview with the Upper City commandant had left him in a good mood. He read the invitation’s neat Parisian, drumming his fingers on the top of the plain, polished desk.

“Well, Renaud. It appears the marriage with Miss Bellamy goes forward. Isn’t that charming?”

Renaud was on his knees on the other side of the desk, scouring blood from the floor.

LeBlanc read through the invitation again, drumming harder on the desk. “They are to give an engagement party, on the eve of Tom Bellamy’s execution, and we are invited. How kind of them.” He chuckled. “I don’t think we need to attend such a farce, do you? And what funds does my young cousin think to use for this marriage?” His pale eyes became slits. “Exactly whose side is he playing on, Renaud?”

Renaud always kept his opinions to himself. It’s why he was alive.

After a time LeBlanc sighed. “It is unwise to tempt Fate, and I admit I am curious. We will have the landover road to the city watched, and a personal search at each gate, I think. The Goddess may have declared life for the Rook for three more nights, but there is no need to make that time easy for her, Renaud. And perhaps it is also time to have another talk with Madame Hasard. She may be very interested to hear this happy news about her son.” LeBlanc’s smile curled as he looked at René’s looping script. “The love of a parent often affects good judgment.”

Sophia lifted the trapdoor to her father’s room and silently pushed aside the rug. It had been a difficult trip to negotiate. She’d had to go out the farmhouse window, onto the roof, across and down the outside of the chimney stones. And then she’d taken to the woods and fields instead of the road, ways that were almost as familiar, all of it armed to the teeth. For all she knew Mr. Halflife was still lurking about, hoping for that breakfast meeting with signatures and scones. But she would not leave the Commonwealth without seeing her father, and she wasn’t in any mood to ask permission, or make the trip with fanfare and an escort.

Bellamy sat much as he had the last time she’d come, in his chair looking out the window. Dying firelight flickered on the walls, and the room was stifling. Just how many times a night was Nancy tiptoeing in here to build up the fire? She was glad Orla was coming to help her. Bellamy’s eyes were open, hair combed, pajamas and robe clean, but he seemed to have shrunk beneath his blankets. Sophia put a tentative hand on his chair.

“Father? It’s Sophia.”

Bellamy blinked once, but did not change his stare.

“I’m leaving now,” she whispered. “I’m going to get Tom. He’ll come back to you in just a few days. I promise you that.” She did not promise him that she would come back. She waited. “Do you understand, Father?”

The boom of the ocean was an undercurrent in the thick, stagnant silence. Sophia waited for ten of Bellamy’s breaths, then laid a red-tipped feather in her father’s open hand. She left the way she’d come, the stifling dark of the room settled deep in her lungs. The feeling didn’t fully clear away until she was back at Spear’s farm, up the chimney stones, across the roof, and in through her bedroom window.

Sophia turned the latch and threw her jacket on the bed. She was cold, but it was a clean cold, so much better than the horrible warmth of her father’s room. St. Just cracked open an eye from his basket, then went right to sleep again, as if girls crawled through his window all the time. She supposed they did.

Sophia unbuckled the short sword she was wearing, the knife on the other side, pulled the smaller knife from her boot and the cheesewire from around her laces, making a pile of metal on the mattress. She kicked off her boots, and then paused, listening. She had heard one hard thump from outside her locked door.

She stole softly across the room, avoiding the third and fifth floorboards, where the creaks were hiding, turned the lock, and peered into the hallway. It was empty, dimly lit by the overhead lantern. And then there was another soft bump, as if someone had stomped, just once. The noise had come from René’s room.

Sophia ventured into the hall and put her hand on the doorknob. She thought better of that, and was going to lift it away to knock when the door suddenly shook, an impact she could feel through the metal against her palm. And she knew exactly what that had been. A body hitting oak wood. She threw open the door.

A man in dark cloth, big, balding, and with bulging arms, had a rope around René’s neck from behind, and they were staggering backward, struggling in a macabre sort of dance. René had managed to get a hand between the rope and his neck on one side, and he was trying unsuccessfully to get a foot behind to knock the man’s feet out from under him. Sophia made a lightning scan of the room. No weapons she could see, no time to go for the pile on her bed. The two men lurched around again, and she did the only thing that occurred to her. She threw her body at the back of the stranger’s legs, aiming low and behind his knees.

The man’s feet flew over her side, a boot heel catching her hard in the ribs, and both men went down backward, slamming the floor with René on top. Furniture rattled, the man lost his grip on the rope, and as Sophia was rolling free from the tangle of feet, René flipped around, gasping in a breath as he got a knee on the stranger’s arm. He brought up an arm to hit the man in the face, the rope now dangling from his hand, but then he hesitated, and so did Sophia, midscramble to get herself upright.

The stranger had gone still, his eyes open and unblinking, staring at the ceiling, the bald head raised slightly from the floor. He had landed on the iron grate surrounding the fireplace, a small pool of blood forming below it on the hearthstone. René put a hand first on the open mouth to feel for breath, then on the man’s neck, searching for a pulse. He dropped the rope and climbed off the thick chest, coughing, looking around until he found Sophia. He shook his head.

Sophia let a small shock wave pass through her. It wasn’t as if death was something unfamiliar. She wished it was. But she hadn’t expected to encounter it here, tonight, on the floor of Spear’s spare bedroom.

Instead of standing, René stayed on his knees, coughing spasmodically, and stuck a hand in the man’s pocket. Sophia saw what he was doing and quickly did the same to the other side. Empty. She looked more closely at the clothes, the dark cloth, examined the bald head, shaved to remove any telltale sign of a hairstyle. He could have been from anywhere. He could have been from anywhere so deliberately that he must have come from somewhere significant.

“Do you know him?” Sophia whispered. St. Just was barking full force, clawing from the inside of Sophia’s room, and footsteps were coming up the stairs.

“No,” said René, voice gruff. “He was in the room, waiting …”

Then Benoit was through the doorway, candle in hand. He looked at the dead man’s eyes, then spotted the reddening mark on René’s neck. He turned to Sophia.
“Êtes-vous bien?”

“I’m fine,” she replied as Spear came at a run to the door. He stopped, Orla moving around him and into the room from behind. Sophia saw Spear’s eyes widen at the sight of the dead man, his hand grab the doorjamb, and for a moment she couldn’t decide why he looked so odd. Then she realized it was because his hair was mussed. Orla pulled her to her feet, lifting and pinching her arms, checking for injuries without comment.

“What happened?” Spear asked. He sounded dazed.

“A man has attacked me.” René stood up. He was a little breathless, voice full of sand, but very calm, so much so that Sophia was not fooled. “We fell …” His gaze darted once toward Sophia. “… as you can see.”

Spear did not miss where René’s look had gone, and then he took in Orla, brushing off Sophia’s clothes and checking her limbs. “Sophie?” he said. Now he had both hands on the door frame, as if he might push the opening apart. “Were you in here?”

She narrowed her eyes at Spear’s tone. “I heard a noise and came to see what was wrong.” She glared back, defying him to ask her more. When he didn’t, she turned to René. “Is he Parisian?”

But before he could answer, Orla said, “No.” She stood looking over Sophia’s shoulder. “He’s shaved off his beard and what little hair he had, but that’s the hotelier of the Holiday.”

Benoit asked René for a translation, then knelt down, studied the man again, and nodded his agreement. Sophia turned to Spear. “Are they right?”

“Yes,” he said, ducking beneath the door. “He looks so … I didn’t recognize him. But …” Spear looked around at them all. “Why would he try to kill Hasard?”

Sophia stared down at the hotelier. She didn’t even know his name. It was just coming home to her that if she hadn’t stepped into the hall, it would have been René, not this man, lying dead on the floor planks. She looked to René, hands on knees, still catching his breath, and felt the pull she’d been resisting since that night in her bedroom become a tug, an ache so hard it made her put out a hand for the bedpost. What would have happened if she hadn’t thrown open that door? She turned to Benoit, and found that he’d been watching her.

“Is this the man you saw in the woods?” she asked him in Parisian. Benoit scratched through his wispy hair, once more assessing the hotelier’s dead body.

“It could be so,” he replied. “The shape is not unlike. I would say, yes, it is so.”

“This man needs to get off Spear’s land as soon as may be, while it’s still dark,” Orla said, her Commonwealth cutting harsh through the Parisian. “Unless somebody thinks we ought to bring out the militia?”

If they brought out the militia, they would never be boarding a ferry to the Sunken City at dawn.

“Does he have a wife?” Sophia asked. “Children?”

Spear shook his head. Orla crossed her arms, expression severe.

“Spear and Benoit, go make certain we don’t have any other uninvited guests in the house, and then Spear, go get a shovel. Two or three, if you have them. The other side of Graysin and over by the cliffs will do, I think. I’ll change clothes …” Sophia realized with a start that Orla was in her nightgown. “… and bring something to wrap his head in, so he won’t make a mess on the stairs. Sophie, take care of Monsieur’s neck. Monsieur can take first watch while the rest of us are gone, and I’ll get you a bucket and brush to be cleaning that hearth.”

Orla discovered that everyone was staring at her, making the lines of her face deepen.

“You thought we were going to lock the doors and have a long moon’s sleep?” she said. “Go!”

Spear and Benoit scurried, though Sophia wasn’t sure Benoit knew what he was supposed to do, Orla marching out right after them. René watched Orla leave, then met Sophia’s gaze.