Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (77 page)

Much of what was said was in the form of double talk, the way it always was when any of the shadow forces were involved.

“We need more time,” said the grey-suited man. “It’s a delicate situation and with the people involved everything must be done carefully.”

The Irish priest next to her sighed. There were few people in the world better versed in the uses of double talk than Jesuits, but Jesuits didn’t care for it when it was directed at them.

“There is more at stake than we can discuss here tonight.”

“We’ve come about James Kirkpatrick, not about whomever you’re intent on protecting or whatever information you’re attempting to drown,” Father Lawrence said mildly, though there was nothing mild in the man’s demeanor. She remembered suddenly that it was he, in part, who had introduced Jamie to the world of boxing.

“It is about the security of nations, not simply the life of one individual.”

“Is he inside the Soviet Union?” The priest wasn’t going to back down and the grey-suited man was losing patience.

“I can’t tell you that. It could compromise other situations that are ongoing.”

“Are you saying Jamie is dead?”

She had to admire the priest’s pugnacity. He wasn’t leaving this place without an answer.

“So quick to throw him to the wolves, my friends?” said a new voice golden as honey. But it was winter honey, frosted along the sharp comb edge.

All heads turned toward the open doorway. Below its ornately carved lintel stood a man who had not been expected to attend this evening, a man who wielded more power in his rough peasant’s hands than all the rest of them combined. Suddenly the empty chair on the other side of the Irish priest made sense. For in the doorway, as wide as the doorframe itself, stood the Black Pope, the Father General of the Society of Jesus upon this earth—Giacomo Brandisi, rumored to be the next man to be appointed to the College of Cardinals. Trying to imagine that girth swathed in scarlet was more than a bit overwhelming, the woman thought, as the priest beside her stood to acknowledge the man who had been both friend and confessor for four decades. What might be even harder to digest, for the Pope at least, was how even in a Society famed for its subversiveness, Giacomo had been from time to time considered a rebellious outsider. Yet none who knew him were surprised when he was appointed Superior General of the Order.

“We’re hardly throwing him to the wolves. We’ve met here tonight to see what we can do about extracting him.”

“Really? Because it sounded to me like you were justifying leaving him to rot inside the Soviet Union. I suspect you are protecting someone else at Jamie’s expense, and I believe that Jamie will have realized that. This man whom you all feel you have some claim upon is not without his own resources. In fact, I would back him in any fight you can name. Do not be so eager to declare him a lost cause. He is a man uncommon in both his virtues and his faults.”

A silence greeted Giacomo’s words and the woman suppressed a smile. Everyone here knew, whether they liked it or not, what sort of power this man wielded and that he also had the ear of the Pope who in turn had the ear of two thirds of the world. It would not do to upset either. The message could not have been clearer had it been carved in stone.

The conversation changed markedly in tone after that, to practicalities about how to locate one man within an area as vast as Russia. One man, whose various guises made his position that much more precarious, one man—the woman was very aware—who might be far more convenient dead than alive.

She did not linger afterwards
. She had kept this evening as private as she could since she had something to lose by her attendance, the rest something to gain. There had been no one there that could report her presence back to her husband, for they would not want to admit to having been there themselves.

The meeting had become emotional towards the end, as she had expected it would. It was simply how things were with James Stuart Kirkpatrick. He had always inspired an extreme of emotion in both sexes. Such an extreme in her own case that she had tried to kill herself. In retrospect, she realized that such an act of desperation was an effort to draw him back to her, though had he come it would have been from pity, not love, and that she could not have borne. At the time she had not cared, for she had lost all reason in his absence.

She met him because she had been lost. She had been at one of those country house weekends alone, because Neil, her husband, as always, had business in London that could not keep until Monday. If she suspected that the business concerned a certain bosomy blonde, she did not let on.

Diane Landel, for that was her name, had married well as had been expected of her. She brought to her husband both money and the blue blood that went back to a remote branch of the Plantagenet family. Neil had been a rising young star in Parliament at the time, and the sole heir of a grandmother who doted upon him. Diane had loved him, she was certain, even if she had been raised not to expect grand passion in a marriage. Marriage was about connections and fulfilling one’s role in the grand scheme of life. Except that she had been young when she married and not yet asking herself what life ought to be about.

Then there had been the inability to have children. Doctor after doctor said to be patient and to relax, which after the fourth year of hoping for a pregnancy had been next to impossible. Neil refused to be tested, saying there had never been any infertility issues in his family and therefore the fault—implied though not spoken aloud—must lie with her.

She had been mulling over a variety of thoughts when she entered the forest, and not paying attention to the pathways her feet followed. She felt like a princess lost in a fairytale forest, never knowing what adventure lay just around the next turn in the path, the next crooked tree trunk. The adventure of it wore off an hour later, though, when she realized she was truly lost. She was flustered at that point, for it was one of those hot, still days that are slightly breathless, and wondered if she would ever find the end of this forest. She no longer felt like a lost princess, but rather an overheated and panicked woman.

She heard them before she saw them, for there was a great deal of laughter, voices rising and falling in what sounded like very high spirits. She came out of the wood suddenly, to find a pond sparkling in the bright sunlight and a group of people, some lying in the grass on picnic blankets, and some running in and out of the water where three boats bobbed on the wavelets. Her eyes were drawn immediately to the two young men playing some strange version of cricket that included the pond and some rather insane maneuvers with stick in hand. After watching for a few more moments, she realized why no one else was playing, for the main aim of the game seemed to be how much bodily harm they could inflict upon one another.

She realized later that it was impossible not to see them, impossible to look away, and knew everyone present was as riveted as she was. For they were both beautiful, in that stage of young manhood where they were godlike: golden, perfect and dazzling in their athletic display, their manic high spirits and their sheer joy in the mere fact of being. Even then, her eye had been riveted first and foremost by one in particular. He had been standing on the branch of an oak that overhung the pond, his shirt plastered to his skin, his pants streaked with mud and grass and dripping with water, explaining in rhyming couplets how he proposed to ricochet the ball off his friend’s head before hitting it across the pond and neatly onto the green. The friend, meanwhile, was lining up his own shot and shouting insults back. The man in the tree had looked up, seen her standing on the edge of the wood, and had grinned at her, thus distracting him enough that he was hit by his friend’s well-aimed shot—right in the temple. He dropped off the branch like a stone into the water, the friend already splashing in amidst a flurry of expletives that sounded Eastern in tone and none of which was flattering to his drowning compatriot.

She ran with everyone else to the edge of the pond, frightened that he had been killed and that it was, at least in some respects, her fault.

The gilt-headed Russian dragged him to the shore and none too gently slapped his face. A pause, and then a rather rude but very witty couplet finished off the verses the young man had begun on the branch. The Russian swore and laughed.

Diane had found herself equal parts relieved and awkward, hovering near while he lay supine and streaming on the shore. Close to, he took her breath away. He was absurdly young, with the fine skin and gleaming health of one barely past his teens. He peered up at her, shading his eyes with one long, finely-boned hand.

“I might have been killed, and the guilt of it would be on your head.”

She began to protest, then saw he was teasing and closed her mouth.

“You will have to stay now, you know. Entertain me, nurse my wound. Besides we have far too much champagne for our own good. You have to stay and drink some.”

And so she had, because it was impossible to say ‘no’ to him that day, and any day after. They had eaten strawberries and drunk champagne chilled in the pond’s mossy bottom. He had made her laugh—a lot—something that her husband had never done.

At dinner that night, they were expecting guests, a party of people who were staying at a neighboring estate. Inevitably, for so it seemed at that point, it was the party from the pond. And there he was, lagging in last, dressed impeccably in a summer-weight suit and crisp white shirt. It hurt to look at him, as though it might burn one’s eyes and soul to gaze overmuch. In the end, she had looked too long, and paid the price of falling to earth with all the damage that entailed.

But that night had been simply glorious. He had managed to get himself seated next to her at dinner and told her scandalous stories about each person at the table, some she knew to be true, some at which she wondered. She had laughed and drunk too much wine, for he filled her glass each time the bottle passed down the table, or up for that matter.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked at one point, and he had merely smiled, an expression that went directly to her knees and points somewhat higher.

She had seen the Russian, who was busy enchanting a beautiful redhead further down the table, flick him a look once or twice that seemed to be communicating volumes. Was he warning this beautiful boy off or encouraging him? She rather hoped it was the latter, and yet that was a form of madness that could only bring her trouble.

After dinner, too restless to join the other women in the drawing room, she had gone outside, walking off across the velvet lawn to the shadows that gathered thick and fragrant in the gardens. She drew in the night air, filled sweetly with roses and jasmine. There was music drifting from the open French doors, spilling over the balcony—plaintive, yearning notes, and she wished she were deaf to it. She wished she were deaf to all her senses right now. She wished she were younger and not married. She wished she could run away from her life, her world, herself.

That was where she found him. She had half hoped she would not and prayed that she would, because she understood very well that it did not matter what he asked of her, she would give it happily.

In the end, it wasn’t he who asked. He had been, rather infuriatingly despite his slight intoxication and the knot on his head, a gentleman. He was lying on a stone wall lushly bedded with ivy, gold hair filaments of light in the deep shadows of the garden.

“Are we going to sleep together?” she asked, because the dark and the scent of jasmine seemed to allow for such bold questions.

“You’re married,” he said quietly. “Beautiful and desirable, but married.”

“Married and unhappy. Does that help?” she said tartly, angry at him.

He raised one eyebrow. “A little, but I don’t sleep with married women, generally speaking.”

“Generally speaking? That rather sounds like you have occasionally made exceptions.”

He had looked at her quite seriously then, green eyes dark in the night, profile tipped in starlight.

“I think if I take you to bed, it won’t be a mere matter of one night for us. That’s why I hesitate. Should you ask about me in the circles in which you travel, you’re going to hear a great deal to give you pause. Some of it might actually be true, but a great deal won’t be. I seem to come with scandal attached to my wings. That’s dangerous for a married woman. I will be honest and tell you I don’t take responsibility for someone else’s vows, but at the same time, I’ve no wish to be a respondent in divorce proceedings. Still….” He grinned and let the thought linger in the air between them.

And that, as they say, had been that.

The bed had been a revelation, for he was remarkably skilled for a man of his tender years and coupled it with a passion that precluded any artifice. It did not take long to fall from lust to love and, she was honest enough to admit, she had known the tumble to be inevitable from the moment she had seen him balanced on that branch.

He had given her many things, the absence of which, later, were extremely hard to bear. In the end, they had waited too long to cut the ties even if she had no desire at all to sever what had grown between them. It had been a fool’s game and she ought to have known better.