A Trail of Fire (39 page)

It wasn’t until the maids had hauled her, pink and steaming, out of the bath and wrapped her in a most remarkable huge fuzzy kind of towel, that she emerged abruptly from her sensual trance. The cold air coalesced in her stomach, reminding her that all this luxury was indeed a lure of the devil – for lost in gluttony and sinful bathing, she’d forgot entirely about the poor young man on the ship, the poor, despairing sinner who had thrown himself into the sea.

The maids had gone for the moment. She dropped at once to her knees on the stone floor and threw off the coddling towels, exposing her bare skin to the full chill of the air in penance.

‘
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
,’ she breathed, knocking a fist against her bosom in a paroxysm of sorrow and regret. The sight of the drowned young man was in her mind, soft brown hair fanned across his cheek, young eyes half-closed, seeing nothing – and what terrible thing was it that he’d seen before he jumped, or thought of, that he’d screamed so?

She thought briefly of Michael, the look on his face when he spoke of his poor wife – perhaps the young brown-haired man had lost someone dear, and couldn’t face his life alone?

She should have spoken to him. That was the undeniable, terrible truth. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what to say. She should have trusted God to give her words, as He had when she’d spoken to Michael.

‘Forgive me, Father!’ she said urgently, out loud. ‘Please – forgive me, give me strength!’

She’d betrayed that poor young man. And herself.
And
God, who’d given her the terrible gift of Sight for a reason. And the voices . . .

‘Why did ye not tell me?’ she cried. ‘Have ye nothing to say for yourselves?’ Here she’d thought the voices those of angels, and they weren’t – just drifting bits of bog-mist, getting into her head, pointless, useless . . . useless as she was, oh, Lord Jesus . . .

She didn’t know how long she knelt there, naked, half-drunk, and in tears. She heard the muffled squeaks of dismay from the French maids who poked their heads in, and just as quickly withdrew them, but paid no attention. She didn’t know if it was right even to pray for the poor young man – for suicide was a mortal sin, and surely he’d gone straight to Hell. But she couldn’t give him up; she couldn’t. She felt somehow that he’d been her charge, that she’d carelessly let him fall, and surely God would not hold the young man entirely responsible, when it was her who should have been watching out for him?

And so she prayed, with all the energy of body and mind and spirit, asking mercy. Mercy for the young man, for wee Ronnie and wretched auld Angus – mercy for poor Michael, and for the soul of Lillie, his dear wife, and their babe unborn. And mercy for herself, this unworthy vessel of God’s service.

‘I’ll do better!’ she promised, sniffing and wiping her nose on the fluffy towel. ‘Truly, I will. I’ll be braver. I will.’

Michael took the candlestick from the footman, said goodnight, and shut the door. He hoped Sister Joan-Gregory was comfortable; he’d told the staff to put her in the main guest-room. He was fairly sure she’d sleep well. He smiled wryly to himself; unaccustomed to wine, and obviously nervous in company, she’d sipped her way through most of a decanter of Jerez sherry before he noticed, and was sitting in the corner with unfocused eyes and a small inward smile that reminded him of a painting he had seen at Versailles, a thing the steward had called
La Gioconda
.

He couldn’t very well deliver her to the convent in such a condition, and had gently escorted her upstairs and given her into the hands of the chambermaids, both of whom regarded her with some wariness, as though a tipsy nun was a particularly dangerous commodity.

He’d drunk a fair amount himself in the course of the afternoon, and more at dinner. He and Charles had sat up late, talking and drinking rum-punch. Not talking of anything in particular; he had just wanted not to be alone. Charles had invited him to go to the gaming rooms – Charles was an inveterate gambler – but was kind enough to accept his refusal and simply bear him company.

The candle flame blurred briefly at thought of Charles’s kindness. He blinked and shook his head, which proved a mistake; the contents shifted abruptly, and his stomach rose in protest at the sudden movement. He barely made it to the chamber-pot in time, and once evacuated, lay numbly on the floor, cheek pressed to the cold boards.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t get up and go to bed. It was that he couldn’t face the thought of the cold white sheets, the pillows round and smooth, as though Lillie’s head had never dented them, the bed never known the heat of her body.

Tears ran sideways over the bridge of his nose and dripped on the floor. There was a snuffling noise, and Plonplon came squirming out from under the bed and licked his face, whining anxiously. After a little while, he sat up, and leaning against the side of the bed with the dog in one arm, reached for the decanter of port that the butler had left – by instruction – on the table beside it.

The smell was appalling. Rakoczy had wrapped a woollen comforter about his lower face, but the odour seeped in, putrid and cloying, clinging to the back of the throat, so that even breathing through the mouth didn’t preserve you from the stench. He breathed as shallowly as he could, though, picking his way carefully past the edge of the cemetery by the narrow beam of a dark-lantern. The mine lay well beyond it, but the stench carried amazingly, when the wind lay in the east.

The chalk mine had been abandoned for years; it was rumoured to be haunted. It was. Rakoczy knew what haunted it. Never religious – he was a philosopher and a natural scientist, a rationalist – he still crossed himself by reflex at the head of the ladder that led down the shaft into those spectral depths.

At least the rumours of ghosts and earth-demons and the walking dead would keep anyone from coming to investigate strange light glowing from the subterranean tunnels of the workings, if it was noticed at all. Though just in case . . . he opened the burlap bag, still redolent of rats, and fished out a bundle of pitchblende torches and the oiled-silk packet that held several lengths of cloth saturated with
salpêtre
, salts of potash, blue vitriol, verdigris, butter of antimony, and a few other interesting compounds from his laboratory.

He found the blue vitriol by smell, and wrapped the cloth tightly around the head of one torch, then – whistling under his breath – did three more, impregnated with different salts. He loved this part. It was so simple, and so astonishingly beautiful.

He paused for a minute to listen, but it was well past dark and the only sounds were those of the night itself – frogs chirping and bellowing in the distant marshes by the cemetery, wind stirring the leaves of summer. A few hovels a half-mile away, only one with firelight glowing dully from a smoke-hole in the roof.

Almost a pity there’s no one but me to see this
. He took the little clay firepot from its wrappings and touched a coal to the cloth-wrapped torch. A tiny green flame flickered like a serpent’s tongue, then burst into life in a brilliant globe of ghostly colour.

He grinned at the sight, but there was no time to lose; the torches wouldn’t last for ever, and there was work to be done. He tied the bag to his belt and with the green fire crackling softly in one hand, climbed down into darkness.

He paused at the bottom, breathing deep. The air was clear, the dust long-settled. No one had been down here recently. The dull white walls glowed soft, eerie under the green light, and the passage yawned before him, black as a murderer’s soul. Even knowing the place as well as he did, and with light in his hand, it gave him a qualm to walk into it.

Is that what death is like
? he wondered. A black void, that you walked into with no more than a feeble glimmer of faith in your hand? His lips compressed. Well, he’d done
that
before, if less permanently. But he disliked the way that the notion of death seemed always to be lurking in the back of his mind these days.

The main tunnel was large, big enough for two men to walk side by side, and the roof was high enough above him that the roughly excavated chalk lay in shadow, barely touched by his torch. The side-tunnels were smaller, though. He counted the ones on the left, and despite himself, hurried his step a little as he passed the fourth. That was where
it
lay, down the side-tunnel, a turn to the left, another to the left – was it ‘widdershins’ the English called it, turning against the direction of the sun? He thought that was what Mélisande had called it when she’d brought him here . . .

The sixth. His torch had begun to gutter already, and he pulled another from the bag and lit it from the remains of the first, which he dropped on the floor at the entrance to the side-tunnel, leaving it to flare and smoulder behind him, the smoke catching at his throat. He knew his way, but even so, it was as well to leave landmarks, here in the realm of everlasting night. The mine had deep rooms, one far back that showed strange paintings on the wall, of animals that didn’t exist, but had an astonishing vividness, as though they would leap from the wall and stampede down the passages. Sometimes – rarely – he went all the way down into the bowels of the earth, just to look at them.

The fresh torch burned with the warm light of natural fire, and the white walls took on a rosy glow. So did the painting at the end of the corridor, this one different: a crude but effective rendering of the Annunciation. He didn’t know who had made the paintings that appeared unexpectedly here and there in the mines – most were of religious subjects, a few most emphatically
not
– but they were useful. There was an iron ring in the wall by the picture, and he set his torch into it.

Turn back at the Annunciation, then three paces . . . he stamped his foot, listening for the faint echo, and found it. He’d brought a trowel in his bag, and it was the work of a few moments to uncover the sheet of tin that covered his cache.

The cache itself was three feet deep and three feet square – he found satisfaction in the knowledge of its perfect cubicity whenever he saw it; any alchemist was by profession a numerologist as well. It was half-full, the contents wrapped in burlap or canvas – not things he wanted to carry openly through the streets. It took some prodding and unwrapping to find the pieces he wanted. Madame Fabienne had driven a hard bargain, but a fair one: two hundred écus a month times four months, for the guaranteed exclusive use of Madeleine’s services.

Four months would surely be enough, he thought, feeling a rounded shape through its wrappings. In fact, he thought one night would be enough, but his man’s pride was restrained by a scientist’s prudence. And even if . . . there was always some chance of early miscarriage; he wanted to be sure of the child before he undertook any more personal experiments with the space between times. If he knew that something of himself – someone with his peculiar abilities – might be left, just in case
this
time . . .

He could feel
it
there, somewhere in the smothered dark behind him. He knew he couldn’t hear it now; it was silent, save on the days of solstice and equinox, or when you actually walked into it . . . but he felt the sound of it in his bones, and it made his hands tremble on the wrappings.

The gleam of silver, of gold. He chose two gold snuffboxes, a filigreed necklace, and – with some hesitation – a small silver salver. Why did the void not affect metal? he wondered, for the thousandth time. In fact, carrying gold or silver eased the passage – or at least he thought so. Mélisande had told him it did. But jewels were always destroyed by the passage, though they gave the most control and protection.

That made some sense; everyone knew that gemstones had a specific vibration that corresponded to the heavenly spheres, and the spheres themselves of course affected the earth – ‘As above, so below.’ He still had no idea exactly
how
the vibrations should affect the space, the portal . . .
it
. But thinking about it gave him a need to touch them, to reassure himself, and he moved wrapped bundles out of the way, digging down to the left-hand corner of the wood-lined cache, where pressing on a particular nail-head caused one of the boards to loosen and turn sideways, rotating smoothly on spindles. He reached into the dark space thus revealed and found the small wash-leather bag, feeling his sense of unease dissipate at once when he touched it.