Seven for a Secret (5 page)

Abby Irene had observed that wampyr learned quickly not to nibble their lips, the way a human might, but
from the expression on Sebastien’s face he was wishing for something thoughtful to do with his mouth. “I am avoiding the topic,” he admitted.

“I noticed.” She had had as much cold egg and toast as she could stomach. It didn’t take much to surfeit her these days. “According to Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus, berserkers served as the hired guards of kings. They were renowned for their ferocity and dauntlessness, and those who would not serve lords were dreaded mightily. Some took the wolf as their patron. Those dressed in wolfskins and dined on smoking wolf-blood. It was said weapons blunted themselves on their hides, that no arrow could pierce their hearts, that they would fight without armor and tear the throats from the mightiest warriors with their teeth.”

If he were human, she thought his face might pale. As it was, he unfolded his hands and rubbed them across his cheeks, eyes, and eventually—vehemently—through his hair. “I remember.”

“And yet you’ve never heard of an Ulfhethinn.” Maturity brought some wisdom. She kept the archness from her voice when she said it, and was actually rather proud of her level tone.

“Never.” When he looked at her between the columns of his forearms, she saw the rumple at the corners of his eyes and knew it was the closest he could come to a smile just then. “But I have met my share of werewolves, of the moon-cursed sort who pass their sickness on a bite, like hydrophobia. And you should know, Abby Irene, that they are terrible.”

“The stories endure—”

“The stories do not begin to do them justice.” He glanced over his shoulder, while Abby Irene did him the dignity of not presuming he was checking for Phoebe, but rather making a point of not shocking the servants. “Do you recollect the Beast of Paris?”

She had not heard him speak on it since Jack’s death. By his drawn expression, he would have preferred not to speak on it now. She reached out and laid the back of her left hand against his hip where it touched the small table, and thought by the twist of his mouth that he drew some strength from the contact.

A dying sorcerer comforting a wampyr by the laying on of hands. In all the wide world, would wonders never cease?

When his hand fell to his side, it fell over hers and clasped it, as if by accident. Would it be easier for him when she was gone, and so was Phoebe, and all of them who had known Jack passed from his existence, into the realm of memories where Sebastien so reluctantly delved?

It is the secret to his survival.

If she could forget everything she had lost—Richard, Henry, two homelands, her life’s work—would she become immortal, too? Sorcerers lived a long time, by habit and preference, but now at the end of her life, she rather thought ninety years or so would suit her. If she could set right some of the things that had not developed as she would have preferred them.

There are always unintended consequences. Something Sebastien had tried to explain to her and Jack both, so many years before.

She did not think she wanted to live forever. Not now that King Phillip was dead, and Prince Henry with him, and all of England’s royal family that remained was in exile with the new Phillip, the old Phillip’s son. In New Amsterdam, for bitter irony.

She supposed it was a kind of ironic justice, that her own treachery had created the safe haven that now sheltered her dead lover’s nephew, England’s King-in-Exile.

She swallowed all that and said, “How could I forget?”

He grimaced. “Then imagine if you will the twin of it for destructiveness, a wolf which may be harmed by no mortal weapon. With the size and cunning of a man and a lust for human flesh that will not be assuaged. Have you ever seen a flock of sheep when the wolves have run among them?”

She shook her head and squeezed his cold, firm hand. “I’ve never lived anywhere where the wolves were anything but a memory. I’ve seen what a dog can do to a rabbit hutch, however. And I’ve seen human carnage.”

“There is no slaughter like the slaughter we wreak on our own,” he said. He placed her hand gently on the table and stepped away. Walking around her, he took the handles of her chair again. This time she allowed it. He finished, dripping irony, “If I may be permitted for the moment to include myself in the human race.”

You only do so when the comparison is unflattering.
The wheels bumped on the edge of the carpet as he brought her into the hall. Her bedroom was on the other side, also in the back of the house. Once it had been a sitting room, and if Abby Irene were young again, she would have converted it into a laboratory.

She said, “The irony of a wampyr in awed discussion of the destruction wrought by another supernatural creature is not lost on me, you know.”

“I didn’t think it would be,” Sebastien said. In her room, he shut the door, and turned to open her wardrobe. “Will you let me help you put your nightgown on, Abby Irene?”

Outside, because this was London, Abby Irene heard the rain begin. She had missed the sound in America. Not that it didn’t rain there, certainly. But it did not often rain the way it rained in England. “Fill the basin so I can wash my face? If I have my cane, I can walk that far.”

The blue flannel gown over his arm, he silently folded aside her lap robe, handed her the thick briar walking stick, and—once she had wrapped her hands around it—helped lift her to her feet. She set her spectacles down and steadied herself against the side of the basin while he poured water from the ewer that had grown too heavy for her to lift, and dabbed a flannel in it. As he handed her the cloth she said, “I think you are speaking from personal experience, Sebastien.”

He began to unbutton her cardigan—his own knitting—from the bottom while she scrubbed at her face, and when she had set the cloth down he slid it off her shoulders and hung it on the bedpost, in case she should be cold. “I have hunted werewolves in my time.”

She had been with Sebastien nearly half her life. She knew the ghosts buried in that simple statement as if he had spoken them aloud. As he helped her raise her arms to slide the nightgown over her head, she decided it would not be a kindness to suggest that she understood that he had not merely hunted them, but perhaps also had been acquainted with one or two.

It wasn’t as if she really needed to hear his answer.

3.

By the time Sebastien had called Mrs. Moyer to draw the curtains on a rainy English morning and so darken Abby Irene’s bedroom, the old sorceress was already dozing. Sebastien, like so many of the Blood, had the trick when he so pleased of almost-vanishing. There was no magic in it, just the silence of a weightless presence: the unbeating heart, the lungs that stirred no breath. Now, he allowed himself to fade into the shadows of the bedroom, watching Mrs. Moyer adjust the drapes and Abby Irene drift into sleep.

She lay composed upon the pillow, arms crossed over a breast that rose and fell in patient rhythm. It seemed wrong to him that there was no small dog curled at the foot of the bed, chin resting on Abby Irene’s ankle, eying him mistrustfully. Since he’d known her, she’d kept a succession of nondescript dust-mops with prickle-sharp teeth. Upon the demise of the previous one, she had declared it “unfair” to adopt a replacement, and had refused to be swayed.

She seemed somehow incomplete to Sebastien without a terrier. But it was her decision, and one he must respect.

Mrs. Moyer walked out past him and shut the door without a sideways glance. She hadn’t noticed him, and must have assumed he’d slipped out while she was busy at the window. Because he was alone, Sebastien allowed himself to smile. If he were just a little less material, he would pass through husk and into spectre.

He didn’t think it would be so bad, if that was what became of him. And it might be; he had already grown into the oldest creature he had ever heard of. And he knew he grew stranger, more disconnected, stronger and yet more adrift, with every passing decade. They flitted by like weeks—he could recall, dimly, when a decade had seemed like a significant stretch of time, but now it was nothing, fluff blown from the hand. A mortal’s lifetime, be it fifteen years or fifty, was over almost before he felt he’d begun to know them.

But there was Abby Irene, eyelashes fluttering on her crepe-paper cheek, lovely as a faded flower, lying alone in her narrow white bed. And perhaps the wampyr could still learn from the example of a mortal courtier.

Or perhaps for his kind, letting go was simply another path to burn.

Maybe that was where all roads led in the end.

She did not awaken when he slipped from the room.

Back in the library, Sebastien found Phoebe sorting books and frowning. He slipped up behind and kissed her nape beneath the gray-spiked spiral of her bun. She jumped, but not too high, and by the time she came down off her toes again she chuckled. It sounded strained, but her voice stayed soft and welcoming. “Werewolves, Sebastien?”

“Prussians,” he replied, as if that answered everything.

She grimaced. “What would delight them more than a cadre of lycanthrope shock troops, hearkening back to the pure Teutonic roots of the Germanic Empire? What could be more glorious proof of their divine right of conquest?”

“Nothing,” he spat, jamming his hands into his pockets.

She might be able to maintain a voice of sweet reason. The bitterness in his made up for it. She drew back, studying his face until he couldn’t bear to think what she might see there, and turned away. He needed to move. He knew very well that she followed him down the hall to the front parlor, farther from Abby Irene’s bedroom door. In truth, he welcomed her persistence.

The curtains in the front window stood wide, the shade thrown up. He leaned a hand on either side of the sash, and stared out at the rain. The glass cast back no image of himself nor ever would, but after a moment, he saw from Phoebe’s reflection that she had come up behind him. She touched his shoulder. For a moment, he could not think what he should do to react, and so he did nothing at all.

“What are we doing here, Sebastien?”

“Letting Abby Irene die in London. Didn’t you read the papers?”

“Law of unintended consequences,” she said. “We did what we felt we had to do. As much as you like to assume responsibility, you are not personally liable for the fall of British Empire, and neither is Abby Irene.”

“Jack would not have approved of the Prussians. And neither does Abby Irene.” He shrugged, which made him able to feel the weight and warmth of her hand on his shoulder. He should feed soon, he thought, though his appetite no longer troubled him except in extremes of need or injury. “Human memory is too short. Every generation must fight the same wars over again as if they were new ones.”

She smirked. “Perhaps we need wampyr to run the world for us.”

“Oh, yes,” he said archly. “That would no doubt provoke innovation. We have had some positive effect before, Phoebe. We freed the colonies.”

“We helped, at least.” Phoebe stepped close enough that Sebastien could feel her heat through the fine cloth of her blouse. Fashions for women were much improved by the retirement of the whalebone corset, he thought, and certainly the ladies of his acquaintance seemed much relieved by modern undergarments. Progress occurred. Just not always in the manner one would prefer.

She said, “Having been instrumental in freeing the colonies—if we were, if it would not have happened just as inevitably without us—does not make you responsible for England and France exhausting themselves in war, Amédée Gosselin.”

An even older name than Sebastien, and one just as abandoned. She used it now for a reason, as a reminder. No matter how the romances are written in later centuries, revolution was never the work of one man. If Germany, France, and New England could each be democratized to such variance of effect, what chance was there of working any kind of prediction at all? Well, none, and he had long known it. “No,” he said. “But it does make it seem possible that perhaps we could prove of some utility in overthrowing another conqueror, does it not?”

“And if there are consequences?”

He stepped back from the window, so her arm bent from the elbow until their shoulders touched. “Then there are consequences.”

Her fingers squeezed. In the glass, he saw her hand tighten on nothing, then drop to her side. “You are the
Scarlet Pimpernel.”

It was perfect and unexpected, the sharpness that he admired. “Amédée Gosselin,” he corrected. He turned to her, and in his dressing gown he swept a mocking bow. “At your service.”

She should have laughed. Instead, she watched with a frown, touched her lips with one finger, and said reluctantly, “You’re like a stone sometimes.”

He straightened and nodded, venturing a smile. “From the inside, too.”

England’s ceaseless rain meant freedom for Sebastien, though that freedom did not come without risk. He asked Mrs. Moyer to have Jason bring the car around, swathed himself in rain cape and overcoat and hat, chose an umbrella from the stand beside the door, and stepped out into the rain.

Umbrellas blossomed like a mourning garland along the pavement. As the Mercedes purred up to the curb, its black hide glossy in the rain, Sebastien added his own bloom to the bouquet and stepped from under the door-awning and down the puddled walk. Jason trotted around the car to hold the door, and Sebastien ducked down to enter. Strange to step down into a vehicle rather than up to one, but he had grown accustomed to stranger things. Before allowing Jason to close the door, he folded the umbrella behind him and gave it a useless shake, sending droplets flying. The rain hammered down with enough authority that it grew wet again before it was dry.