Heart and Soul (11 page)

His stomach sinking, as though a very cold, leaden weight had been placed upon it, Nigel gnashed his teeth together. He would have preferred to be dead and about to face eternal punishment than to be back at home in his sickly young body, with no guarantee ever that he would be able to leave the estate and go as far as boarding school—or as far as Cambridge and London—much less as far as Africa and India or to travel half the world as a carpetship magician.

As if to confirm his suspicions, he felt a man lift him up, and a woman’s hands turn the pillows under his head, so that they felt cooler now. He struggled desperately to open his eyes, against which a great light seemed to shine, far greater than had ever come through the window of his childhood room.

His eyes wouldn’t obey him, but his lips did, and one word escaped, made emphatic—despite his weakness—by his desperate need to convey his annoyance. “Mother!”

“Aye, the poor gentleman,” a woman’s voice said, as the cool female hands withdrew. “He calls for his mother, and no wonder, for he’s come as close to meeting his maker as any man ever should.” It was a voice he’d never heard, and while Nigel allowed his mouth to drop open in shock, he heard something much like a man’s chuckle from the other side.

Following the chuckle came a man’s voice that Nigel felt should be familiar. Or at least he felt he’d heard it often enough before—but it was not the voice of any of his family retainers when he’d been young, not the voice of his father, or his uncle, or even Carew, though it would be like Carew to chuckle at Nigel’s illness. “I don’t think he was calling for his mother, Hettie, so much as he thought you were her and was telling you to leave him be.”

A female gasp and the voice again. “Why, the poor gentleman. For I’m sure I’ve never been old enough to be anyone’s mother, and he could plainly see that.”

“He’s not been in his own mind, Hettie, and that’s the truth,” the man’s voice said, and Nigel now placed it somewhere in the carpetship of which he’d just dreamed, on the flight deck. It was someone there, someone with whom he’d spoken just before the attack. Did this mean that the carpetship hadn’t been a dream, after all? “But I think, from that frown on his face, that he hears us and understands us now. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

Mr. Jones? What could the man be about? Nigel was not and had never been Mr. Jones. “Not—” he managed to whisper, and then remembered that he’d called himself Enoch Jones as a carpetship flight magician. At least on some of the trips he had. On others he’d used other names, to try to make it as hard as possible for anyone to trace his movements.

And then he remembered the fight with the Chinese man—Chinese dragon—and his picking up the gem. The ruby!

Spurred by sudden panic, his eyes flew open, and Nigel sat bolt upright on the bed. “The ruby!” he cried, in extreme distress, before he realized that he was looking at a room he’d never seen and which was far smaller than his room at his parents’ estate. In fact, at his parents’ estate, it might very well have been a servant’s room, one of the ones accessible only from the back stairs. Like a servant’s room, it contained a plain, almost institutional bed; a very tall, very dark and somewhat dingy wardrobe with a spotted mirror hung upon it…and nothing else. No desk, no books, not even that modicum of luxury that he was used to seeing in carpetship flight-magicians’ rooms.

He looked to his right and saw, standing very close to the bed, a girl of maybe fifteen, with pale blond hair and very round blue eyes. Though she was unremarkable, she was not ugly—though no one would call her pretty—and her simple muslin dress was just what one would expect from such a young girl not yet out.

She was staring at him in horror, and slowly raised a hand to cover her mouth, even as a delicate peach color suffused her features. Looking down, Nigel realized that he was wearing nothing save his underwear, and that his sheet had fallen to puddle in his lap.

“Nothing wrong, there, old chap,” the man said, and gently pushed Nigel down, while pulling the sheet up to cover his bare chest. “Hettie, I think I hear your mum calling? Perhaps you should go. And tell her next time she should assist me.”

Nigel, blinking, looked at the man, a weathered creature, probably forty or maybe fifty, with white hair threaded through a receding curly thatch. His eyes had that slightly squinting expression of someone who has lived in tropical climates and become used to half closing his lids against overpowering light—and around them was a network of lines that spoke of a long time in such harsh latitudes.

Nigel heard the door close, and the man smiled, reassuring him. “There, my lord,” he said, softly. “Nothing to fear. The ruby is safe.” And then, to Nigel’s still-blank look, “It’s Joseph Perigord, my lord. The first mate on the
Indian Star.
”

“Oh,” Nigel said, embarrassed not to have recognized the man before. Once he imagined him in the uniform and cap of the first mate, it was easy enough. Now attired only in a loose linen shirt and what seemed to be breeches of some very pale cloth, he didn’t look like the same man. “Oh, of course.” And then rallying, he added, “The rubies are safe?”

Perigord sighed. “One of them is, my lord,” he said, as he fumbled with a bottle on the bedside table and poured a measure of some evil-smelling dose onto a spoon. “At least, when you were brought in and undressed, I found it among your clothes, and I have kept it safe for you. The other…”

“The Chinese pirate took it,” Nigel said, bitterly, remembering the fight, and then the angel demanding of him whether the dragon had taken one jewel or both.

Joseph Perigord nodded. “That was the strangest thing anyone has ever seen, and it will be much talked about in Africa. And indeed, all over the world, I imagine. Already the reporters for the
Cape Town News
have been by twice, with an artist, wanting to draw your likeness for their paper. There is even talk here in town that the queen herself should recognize you and give you a medal, for you saved everyone aboard that carpetship. With such heroism did you clutch on to the magic to keep the carpet flying, after you were brought here, it took two healing magicians to make you let go of it. You gave yourself a fever, of course.” He approached the bed with the spoon in hand. “Which is why the doctor has prescribed this, which if you would be so obliging as to drink and not make me fight you over it, as you did while you were feverish…”

Nigel, less concerned with being feverish or, indeed, with his state of health at all, than with the horrible news of his misadventure being reported abroad, opened his mouth, only to find the spoon pushed into it. He resisted the urge to splutter and swallowed, hastily, as the bitter liquid made its way down his throat. “Good God!” he said. “You cannot have allowed reporters—”

“No, milord,” Perigord said. “I can’t say as I know what you are about, but I much suspect it is something that wouldn’t be helped by publicity. And owing you my life and the life of most of our passengers…” He shrugged. “I told the newspaper gentlemen that you were too sick to permit strangers in your room, that it would disturb you and possibly cause you to relapse.”

Nigel swallowed at the bitterness in his mouth, and made a face. “What is in that medicine? It tastes—”

“Like ground-up stink bugs? Leastwise, that is what it smells like, and so I told my wife, and Hettie, too.” He poured something from a pitcher to the glass and brought the glass to Nigel’s lips. “Nothing to fear, my lord. This is lemonade. As far as I am concerned, I’d rather be giving you brandy—because if it were me lying there, well near death, I’d rather have brandy—but the doctor said it was the last thing you needed.”

Nigel swallowed the lemonade, very much wishing it was brandy as well. What a hash he’d made of things. He’d let one of the jewels be stolen. It would never have happened if he’d allowed the two jewels to be fully activated and their power to shine through. He had reason to suspect that, in such a case, the jewels had their own means of defense and a way of searing through the heart of the evildoers.

The problem was, of course, that if you left them fully activated and shining, they were also as a beacon calling out to the entire world. And, as he knew, sooner or later they would call someone so lost to all decency, restraint and remorse that their magic, which called forth the best in men and used it to punish their evil, would fail. He hadn’t been able to risk holding them openly, and so he’d let them get stolen. Or one of them. And now he must recover it, so that he could complete his original mission.

A thought occurred to him and he looked to Perigord. “You called me
milord.
Is it because most carpetship magicians are, or…”

Perigord shrugged, replacing the glass on the bedside table. “It is the thing with fevers, my lord, that people often talk when they have them. Which can be fortunate. It was only your talking that caused me to lie to the trooper.”

“The trooper?” Nigel said.

“Some soldier. A Red Coat. He came to the door, and speaking very fair and meek, he tells us that you would have a ruby about your person and says that if I’d found it, I should give it to him for safekeeping, as you were on a secret mission for Her Majesty the Queen.”

“A mission?”

“Yes, indeed,” Perigord said, calmly. “And I knew, from your ravings, begging your pardon, that you were indeed on a mission, but that you’d found it wicked, and that if I were to give that jewel to the trooper, there was a good chance that I’d be doing something wicked and evil myself. So I kept my council and told him no jewel was found. At which point he stormed off, no doubt to search for it elsewhere.”

“But if they know of the jewel…then they must know who I really am!” Nigel exclaimed. “And that means…” A panoply of horrors opened up before him. Public recognition was the least of it. There would be the queen demanding to know what had happened and why he’d abjured the notion of ever completing the mission she had given him. And there would be his parents, doubtless wanting to know what had happened to Emily, his bride, whom he had married the very morning he’d set off on his mission. And why his honeymoon in Cairo had somehow extended to a trample over all the continents. And what had happened to Carew.

Perigord shrugged. “That’s as may be. He came yesterday, a day and a half after you were carried to my house, delirious out of your mind, and I told him as in your delirium you’d given a name, many times. He asked if your name was perhaps Nigel Oldhall. I told him as no, not at all, and I had reason to think your first name was Gervase and your family name Southerton.”

“Gervase Southerton?” Nigel frowned slightly. The second son of the Duke of Ulston was a notorious rake, whose name had been bandied all over town. Then after murdering a man over a game of cards—or some said the love of a lightskirt—he had disappeared. Some said he had gone to Australia, and some to America, but Nigel imagined there would be no reason at all he might not have become a carpetship magician. And now Nigel thought about it, though the two of them were very different in features, there was nothing at all in a casual description to alert anyone that he might not be Ger Southerton. He squinted at Perigord. “You know your nobility very well, Mr. Perigord.”

“As to that,” Mr. Perigord said, “let’s say it’s not just flight magicians who escape their past sometime.” His accent became notably more cultured as he spoke.

Nigel raised his eyebrows at him, and Perigord smiled. “Oh, it was nothing like Ger Southerton. I was never in that set. I fell in love with the third undermaid and…well…my father wished to pay her off and marry her to the gardener. Instead, we eloped and jumped a carpetship to Africa. Best thing I’ve ever done, and it suits me more than being the second son of a family with more pretensions than money would have done.” He smiled. “I took my new family name from a bottle of my favorite wine.”

Nigel laughed, surprised to hear a wheezy, weak sound in his own voice. “I took my carpetship magician’s first name from the family dog’s.”

“Enoch? You have an unusual family, milord.”

He shrugged. “My mother is very fond of improving reading, and there was a book about Enoch she read about that time.” He looked up at the man’s face. “But you should not call me
milord.
First, because it will only call attention to me. And second, because you know and I know we are equals.”

“Very well, then,” Perigord said. “I shall call you the dog’s name, and since you are in my home, and cared for by my family—just wait until you’re well enough to taste my Charlotte’s excellent cooking—you might as well call me Joe. We’ll make like we’re old acquaintances, which will further muddy the water.”

“And the ruby is…?”

“Ah, there’s a trick to this. Let me show you.” Joe touched what looked like an ornamental metal rosette in the wood headboard, then carefully unscrewed a round finial. “See, in there, my lor—Enoch? As snug as a bug.” His accent had reversed again to a broad, generic lower-class tone, as it had been when Nigel first met him. “And there it will stay, until you recover yourself and are on your feet again.”

Nigel groaned, deep in his throat. “I should leave now. I am a danger to you while I’m here.”

“As to that,” Joe said, and shrugged, “we would none of us be here if it weren’t for you—at least none of us who survived the sabers and the fire aboard that carpetship.”

“How many are there?” Nigel asked, somewhat hesitant to hear it.

“Well over two hundred. Only twenty crew members perished and none at all in the upper decks, though much was stolen. So you saved all the passengers and most of the crew. Though the captain, poor man, died. At least he went out fighting, as he should, and as he was due to retire soon, I’d like to believe he’d have preferred to go out with his boots on. Not that it isn’t a sad waste.”