The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death (25 page)

“I really wanted to stab him with it,”
Valentino told her and then lowered her voice. “I wanted to cut him
in little pieces. He called you Isis. I heard him. I wanted to make
him like Osiris. Missing a few vital parts.” She held up her hand
with her thumb and forefinger held very close together. “Especially
when he launched himself at me. I couldn’t believe it. He knows
everything and he refuses to tell it. He makes me so mad. Why won’t
he just tell me what I want to know?”

She went to the book case and pulled a heavy
tome from one of the shelves. Her face took on a fierce look as she
thumbed through its worn pages.

“I have to look up all that stuff about the
temple and the tree and flaming sword. In the meantime, I guess
we’re back to plan A,” she muttered as she thumbed through the
dog-eared pages. “I’ll go ahead and send John up after supper and
we’ll try again. There must be a way to get through to him. I
thought he cared more for you, Merry, but I see that it was just
sex after all. He certainly wouldn’t stick his neck out for
you.”

Merry turned her face to the window again in
disgust. That was not what Mark had said and he’d said it under the
influence of the horrible drugs that Cecile had used on him. He had
said that he would die with her. With her. What a morbid
thought.

“I think we ought to get rid of him before
there’s real trouble,” Maxie put in his opinion somewhat
hesitantly. “He’s awful violent and damned hard to kill.”

“Violent?” Valentino spun on the man, finally
loosing her patience with him. “You haven’t seen violence,
Sturgeon! You haven’t seen people burned at the stake and gutted on
the battlefield. You’ve never seen the Templars riding over a
hilltop, coming at you with their banners flying. You’ve never had
everything taken away from you by an invading army. You haven’t
seen anything. In the old days, they did horrible things to people
accused of heresy and they almost killed all the Templars back when
the Church decided they were too powerful. Money talks. What if you
could get arrested just for having too much money? And what if you
got accused of witchcraft and they burned you alive? Then you might
be able to understand something. You can’t imagine what that guy
has been through. He’s real, Maxie. You’re nothing in comparison.
You don’t know what violence is.”

She was simply repeating, more or less, what
Mark Andrew had said to her in the gazebo. His words had conjured
great, heroic images in her demented mind and she had spent the
last few days going over Gavin Nash’s collection of books about the
Crusades and the Templar Order.

“Oh? And you do?” Merry asked her, wondering
at her words. Certainly she was right about Maxie. But she had
never known Valentino to give a damn about anything that didn’t
directly affect her comfortable little world. “What do you know
about it?”

“I know enough. I know our friend up there
would kill us without blinking. I know he’s seen enough in the past
that he’s not really concerned with us one way or the other,”
Valentino snorted. “We just have to make him think we are going to
let him go. Or else we’ll be in serious trouble. Did you know that
the last official Grand Master of the Order was roasted over a slow
fire? Can you imagine it? Not just burned at the stake, but roasted
alive? It’s no wonder he put curses on everybody. Think about
it.”

Merry said nothing. She was sick to death of
the game. She just wanted to get her life back to normal and she
really didn’t want anything bad to happen to Mark Andrew. In a
strange sort of inexplicable way, she really did care about him,
but she didn’t want to go to jail. The situation was not funny or
adventurous any more. It was deadly serious and dangerous. She had
been accused of being an airhead, being irresponsible and immature
often enough that it had to be true, but regardless of her part in
this thing, she really did like him. More than she should. Perhaps
she even loved him.

It was almost as if love at first sight were
truly possible. The romance novels that she kept stashed under the
stairs said that it was possible, but she’d never believed such
fairytales. Cecile would have killed her if she found her reading
such ‘drivel’ as she called it, but Merry dreamed of things. All
sorts of things. Things she didn’t understand. In her dreams she
lived an entirely different life that she dared not tell Cecile
about. And this fellow, this Ramsay character seemed to embody
traits from every romance novel hero she had ever read about in her
books. It didn’t seem possible that such a real person could exist.
He did have his drawbacks. He was arrogant and bitchy and crude
when he wanted to be. His idea of a playful roll in the hay was a
bit on the rough side and could use a bit of polish. And he seemed
sort of wishy-washy, like he wanted to do something, but could
never quite follow through. Merry could only believe that he had a
number of unresolved issues concerning sex in general, but perhaps
she could help him resolve them, given a bit of time.

Mark Andrew was different from everyone she
had ever met and a far cry more interesting than any of Cecile’s
friends. One moment he was all-knowing and arrogant and the next,
he was confused even more so than herself. Dangerous was the best
word to describe him in general, but there was much more to Mark
Andrew Ramsay than even the 'wise' Cecile could know and Merry
wanted to know what it was that made him different. What made his
faults more severe than an ordinary man’s faults? What made his
good points better than other men’s good points? He was certainly
better looking than most, but he didn’t seem to know it or
acknowledge it. Even the incredibly handsome Anthony was just
another one of the ‘girls’. He had been Italian or Sicilian, which
had certainly added another dimension to his romantic mystique, but
he would never come close to Mark Ramsay. Not in a hundred years…
She paused. Not in a thousand years… Perhaps that was it. Anthony
was young. Too young for her.

She was irresistibly drawn to Mark, danger or
no, as if fate had ordained it. Add to that the preposterous, but
undeniable truth that Mark actually cared for her as well. In her
heart, she knew that eventually something awful was going to happen
to all of them, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She felt
she had betrayed him dreadfully by helping Valentino and she was
afraid of Maxie. Cecile had committed a terrible series of crimes
and eventually she would have to pay. What about herself? She was,
after all, an accomplice to kidnapping and possibly attempted
murder. The only one in the house that she was not afraid of was
the one that should have terrified her most and that was the
so-called Knight of Death imprisoned on the third floor. There had
to be some way to fix things…

((((((((((((()))))))))))))

Mark stopped pacing and stretched out on the
bed. He would have to play it one minute at a time. One thing he
knew for sure was that he was not going anywhere with John Tellman.
He thought about the Pixie and wondered where she had come from.
How she had become mixed up with Cecile Valentino. There had to be
a whopper of a story behind their ‘relationship’ and he wanted to
hear it. From Merry. The fact that he wanted to hear it made him
pause. One of his returning memories told him plainly that he had
always gone to great lengths to avoid becoming involved in other
people’s lives. Other people. People outside the Order. Especially
women. The company of women is a dangerous thing. Pleasant
sometimes, but dangerous at all times. Dangerous in the sense that
men simply did not know how to deal with them. They had the uncanny
knack of causing reason and logic to melt at the exact wrong
moments. Wrong moments that turned into lifetimes of suffering from
the consequences. His own actions belied the fact that he had quite
a bit of physical experience with them. There was nothing innocent
or faltering about his actions once the passion entered his mind
and nothing could stop him from taking what he wanted…

He sat up suddenly in the bed. There it was
again. He was a criminal. No wonder no women of interest came to
his mind. There were none other than a few fleeting names. He tried
to stay awake by conjuring up more ghosts from his past, but when
Maxie came to escort him down to dinner, he was asleep.

Only Valentino and Merry were at the big
table when he arrived in the dining room. Maxie took a chair at the
far end of the table carefully out of Mark’s reach. The guard dog
would apparently not be eating with them and was only there to keep
him at bay and the rude awakening prod with the shotgun he had
given Mark cried out for vengeance. Mark deliberately sat next to
Merry rather than across from her. He did not want a repeat
performance of the ‘dessert’ from the night before. But had that
been last night? It seemed ages ago.

“No guests other than our friend
Maximillian?” he asked Cecile when the cook arrived with their
plates on a wooden cart.

“Not tonight,” Valentino said pleasantly. She
seemed absorbed in some sort of trade paper. She reached around the
book and picked up her water, sipping it only after smelling it
twice.

French fries and hamburgers. Mark looked down
at his plate and wrinkled his nose. He had hoped for another steak
or maybe some roasted chicken. He really liked chicken, cooked any
way as long as it was cooked. Or fish. Salmon, in particular. Beef
was something he felt sure he rarely ate. He smiled at the mental
pun.

Merry watched him from the corner of her eye,
but did not speak. He deliberately looked away from her. He felt
that she had somehow betrayed him in the dream or whatever it had
been. What was it with him anyway? This woman was a complete
stranger on top of being a woman. Why would he expect any help from
her? All the same, he felt that she might have done something.

He picked up the top of the hamburger bun and
stacked the fries on top of the meat patty, trying to dilute the
huge patty of overcooked beef a bit. He bit into it and it exploded
on the plate. Merry sighed as she took his plate and set it in
front of her. She spread the bread with mustard and squirted some
catsup on the fries, put it back together and set the plate in
front of him again with a small smile. Revolting. What was it with
the Americans that they put catsup on everything? The meat was
greasy and the pickle slices made his eyes water. And the potatoes
were lukewarm.

American food! He’d tried it in Edinburgh at
Christopher’s insistence. Christopher Stewart. He smiled at the
comfort that the small, insignificant memory brought him.
Edinburgh. Christopher. MacDonald’s. Fries and shakes. Chocolate.
Drinkable ice cream. What was the point? Forget the special sauce.
No special orders here. Just special sauce and buns with seeds on
them. Wilted lettuce. Where’s the beef? Where’s the beef?
Christopher liked American television, but that was because
Christopher was an American.

“You will stay a while?” Valentino looked
around the paper at him and he nodded.

She went back to her magazine and continued
to read, reaching around it to pick at her food. An
improvement.

Merry sat glumly nibbling at her fries and
grilled cheese and avacado on wheat. She eventually gave up on
them, leaned one elbow on the table and put her chin in her hand.
She sat watching him eat while he choked down the food. His stomach
demanded that he eat it and his brain demanded that he avoid
looking at her. When he had finished his burger, Merry glanced at
Valentino and switched Cecile’s plate with his. He looked at her
carefully before taking it. Was this her way of apologizing? But he
owed her one as well. He smiled at the burger with one bite missing
and then ate the stuff without tasting it until it was all gone. He
picked up his tea and smelled it. He was beginning to act like
Valentino. Maybe it was poison she was constantly sniffing for.
Certainly, if he had the opportunity, he would have poisoned her
himself. He set the glass away from him and took Merry’s glass.
Maxie cleared his throat loudly and Mark made a face at him before
drinking down the Pixie’s tea.

“Tomorrow is a special occasion,” Valentino
said finally and laid aside the paper. She frowned at the near
empty plate in front of her. She cleared her throat and smoothed
down her blouse before continuing. “We are going to induct two new
members.”

“I see,” Mark said for lack of anything else
to say. “Will I be there?” He imagined them sacrificing several
goats and chickens along with himself on the marble altar in the
garden under the watchful eye of the Virgin.

“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “You
are not initiated.”

Mark nodded and then laughed. Initiated. A
joke. He had invented initiation. No, he hadn’t. Had he? The last
thing he wanted to do was go to one of their initiations and watch
them profane the Cross. He was impatiently waiting for dinner to be
over so he could find out what John Tellman was up to and try to
make his move while he still could, before he did get a real sword
run through him or worse. “Oh, and how does one come to be
initiated? In your Order, I mean,” he asked, attempting to sound
interested.

“You laugh, sir, but it is a serious matter,”
Valentino sniffed.

“You have to be recommended,” Merry
answered.

“Interviewed. Checked out,” Valentino added.
“All that.”

“Do you have an opening for an assassin?” he
asked sarcastically, unable to help himself.

“We do have a degree for an assassin, but it
is merely symbolic. His title is the Knight of Truth. His duty is
to assassinate prejudice, superstition and ignorance. Why do you
ask?”

“You accused me of being an assassin and
worse,” he told her nonchalantly. “This fellow you are looking for.
He is really an assassin? A rapist?” He pushed the envelope a bit.
It was incredible that she could simply expect him to ignore the
fact that the last time he’d spoken to her, she’d drugged him.
Expect him to overlook the fact that Maxie sat at the foot of the
table most likely concealing a weapon of some sort in his pocket.
Worse yet, he noticed the date on the paper she had been reading.
Almost three days had passed since their talk in the garden.
Monday. She had told him it was Friday in the gazebo. Where had he
been for three days?