A Lily Among Thorns, page 23
Elijah read it and passed it back. “Proverbs Seventeen: Seventeen,” he said wryly. Their eyes met, and for a second Solomon could feel Elijah’s terror beating against his own ribs like a trapped bird. Then Elijah looked away and said, “I wouldn’t have thought Lady Serena even owned a Bible.”
“I said it to her father, actually,” Solomon said.
“Really?”
He nodded. “It was the best impression of Father I’ve ever done, you would have died—” He cut off abruptly. “I’ll do an encore for you sometime.”
Elijah raised his head hopefully. Solomon thought of the look in Elijah’s eyes when he’d sat up in Sacreval’s bed and seen Solomon. It was a look Solomon had seen in the mirror countless times over the last year and a half. The look of someone who has wakened into his own nightmare.
He watched Elijah now. His guilty air and the mutinous set of his mouth were familiar to Solomon from countless confrontations with their parents. The black despair in his eyes was not. If anyone else had brought that look to Elijah’s face, Solomon would have wanted to rip his throat out.
He tore up the note. Elijah stared at the pieces as if they’d been his last breath of air. “For God’s sake, Li, take that look off your face,” Solomon said. “I don’t need this note to remind me that you’re my brother. You don’t need to worry that you’ll lose me. You never did. There is no wretched thing you could ever do that would make me want to be without you.” It was true, and at that moment Solomon resented it furiously—resented that Elijah could have killed a man and Solomon would have burned him and dissolved his bones in vitriol to keep Elijah from the noose. And Elijah still didn’t trust him. Had never trusted him. Solomon had paid a heavy price for that lack of trust, this past year and a half, and yet he’d let it go by the board, had welcomed his brother back without question—and this was his reward.
“‘A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city,’” Elijah whispered.
“I can’t do without you and you know it,” he said curtly. “You knew it a year and a half ago when you gallivanted off to France.”
“I told you, I thought you would know.”
“I didn’t know this.”
“I wanted you never to know. I tried so hard—I can’t do without you either, Sol,” Elijah said desperately. “I was so afraid I’d lose you. I’m losing you right now. That look on your face, like I’m some leper you’ve never seen before—”
Solomon tried to clear the anger from his expression. “We’ll—we’ll figure this thing out,” he offered.
The blood rushed into Elijah’s face. “There’s nothing to figure out. I like men. I always have and I can’t stop, not even for you. I’m not diseased, or mad, or wretched, and neither was what happened between me and René tonight. It was—” He looked at the mussed bed. “Well, I expect you know what it was like.”
Solomon’s eyes narrowed. How dare he make the comparison? “Sacreval is a—” Elijah shot a warning look at the door, and spy died in Solomon’s throat. “Why did you go?” he asked instead.
Elijah sighed. “Remember Alan?”
“The blacksmith’s apprentice? Of course. You lived in each other’s pockets for—” He blinked. “Wait a minute, you and he—you—?”
“Yes,” Elijah said defiantly. “We were. For years. And then he let his father marry him off, and he told me it wouldn’t change anything.”
Solomon scrubbed at his face. “He’s a drunk now, you know.”
Elijah stared at him. “Really?”
Solomon nodded. “His wife has to take in boarders because people don’t want to go to the smithy.”
Elijah’s mouth twisted. “Poor girl.”
“So—you’re not interested in Serena, then?”
Elijah laughed incredulously. “Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, it’s plain as a pikestaff she’s only got eyes for you.”
Solomon swallowed and looked away. “I need to think about this,” he said abruptly. He stood up. “I need to sleep.”
Elijah nodded and went out silently. Solomon lifted the lid on Serena’s pot and saw that it contained chocolate. It was rapidly cooling, but he poured himself a cup anyway, not bothering to add sugar. He’d just taken his first bitter sip when Sacreval walked in. His jaw was set and he was very pale.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you about your brother.”
“You ought to be ashamed to speak of him,” Solomon said viciously. Dissolute Frenchman.
A muscle jumped in Sacreval’s jaw. “You ought to be ashamed to say so,” he said quietly. “You want your brother to repent of what he is? You want him to crawl through life apologizing for existing?”
“Why couldn’t you leave him alone?” Solomon was embarrassed by the childishness of it the moment it left his mouth, but he couldn’t help wanting to blame the whole mess on Sacreval. He turned everything he touched to ashes. Look what he had done to Serena—what would he take from Elijah when he was through with him? What had he already taken?
The marquis smiled crookedly, something sparking in his eyes that Solomon told himself was just lust. “Because he shone,” Sacreval said. “From the first moment I saw him, there was a glow around him like our Savior in a painting.”
“How dare you speak our Lord’s name, you filthy—” The marquis sucked in his breath sharply, and Solomon shut his lips on the slur.
“You English,” Sacreval said furiously. “As if speaking it were the crime. You were happy for him to sin as much as he liked so long as he did not speak of it to you. So long as he felt properly ashamed and you did not have to hear it, you did not care.”
Solomon surged to his feet. “That’s not true,” he bit out. “I didn’t know! He never told me. He never told me anything.”
“Because he knew that you would do exactly as you are doing. Last week he said to me, ‘René, we cannot ever again, because it would kill me if he knew.’ And his voice was shaking.”
That was a lie, Solomon thought. Because he couldn’t say, ‘You’re a spy and I must kill you.’ But Elijah had said, not three minutes ago, The best lie is a half-truth.
“The other reason I did not leave him alone,” the marquis continued, “is because if I had, they would have killed him.”
Solomon’s head snapped up. “Who?”
The marquis shrugged. “The police, who else? They raided the house we were in, in Paris. Your brother should have fled, but no, he is an Englishman, he faces three men down so that a fifteen-year-old whore can escape. By the time I reached him they were kicking in his ribs.”
Bile rose in Solomon’s throat, swamping his anger. “Christ,” he said thickly.
Sacreval shrugged again. “They thought we ought to be ashamed. It was not a barroom brawl, but it was true what I said before. He could barely walk.”
“Christ,” Solomon repeated. He looked at the marquis almost pleadingly. “Is that going to be Elijah’s life? Skulking around? Consorting with fifteen-year-old whores and their clients? Being beaten in disreputable houses? What kind of life is that?”
There was something wistful in the marquis’s smile. “As odd as it may seem, an honest one.”
Solomon laughed weakly.
“It is not all bad. I like disreputable houses. And the time I spent with your brother in Paris was the happiest of my life.”
“You’re not going to tell me you love him,” Solomon said incredulously.
“Not if you don’t wish me to. But that does not change the fact that it is true.” He laughed softly at Solomon’s expression. “What, did you think it was all unnatural lusts and depravity? Perhaps you should have read the sonnets of your Shakespeare more carefully.” He stood there a moment longer, but when Solomon said nothing, he shrugged and walked out of the room.
Solomon thought about booted feet in Elijah’s ribs. He thought about the tight knot of revulsion in his chest, and about anybody else looking at Elijah and feeling it.
Solomon vomited chocolate into his basin. He wanted more than anything else in the world to talk to Serena. But she’d looked so scared, so trapped. He’d told her he wasn’t asking her for anything. He couldn’t go running to her now.
Besides, even though he thought he understood, he was angry. Angry that he’d told her he loved her and she’d all but chewed off her own arm to get away. He gargled water until he could no longer taste the tainted acidic sweetness on his tongue.
Serena opened her eyes. Sunlight was streaming cheerily in through her window. She groaned and glanced at the clock. Quarter to eight. She sat bolt upright. How had she slept so late? Why had Sophy let her? She swung her legs over the side of the bed—and froze mid-stretch, paralyzed by the soft sound of water lapping against a metal hipbath.
Solomon was taking a bath.
Just a few inches of oak away.
Naked.
Hellfire and damnation. She had worked to avoid exactly this eventuality. It hadn’t been difficult, precisely, because he usually rose at seven, and she rose at five. But she had made sure to know that when he had water brought up for his bath it was invariably at half-past seven, and had taken pains never to be in her room before the tub was carried back down the stairs and the water thrown in the rear courtyard. It was bad enough that she herself struggled to be perfectly silent as she took her own baths, so that she would not wake him, so that he would not come through the door that no longer locked and find her naked. It was bad enough that every inch of her skin burned at the knowledge that he could.
She did not want to listen to the faint lap of water against a metal tub in the next room, or hear a splash and picture Solomon pouring water over his shoulders and arms or, God forbid, lathering his chest, or brushing wet hair back from his forehead—
Memories flooded her, memories of Solomon’s hands on her breasts and Solomon’s mouth on her skin, of his darkened hazel eyes fixed on her face. Memories of him inside her. Memories of feeling so intimately connected to Solomon that being separated from him by the space of an inch would have killed her.
With the memories came the panic. Sheer, overpowering, throat-closing fear at the strength of her own emotions. She was drowning in him.
Moving in desperate haste and equally desperate silence, Serena washed her face and neck and ran a comb through her hair. She heard the rush of water when Solomon stood, and she heard the creaking of the floor when he stepped out of the tub. She dressed with trembling hands, putting on her short corset and a gown that buttoned in the front so she wouldn’t need help.
She slipped out of her room and hurried down the hallway, but she was too late. As she passed Solomon’s door, it opened.
Serena stopped and turned to look. She stood there, rooted to the spot.
His pale hair was wet, and he was running one hand through it. The indigo stain on his finger that she’d noticed the night before had faded to a faint powder blue.
He was back in the Arms livery. He looked as delicious as the Italian sweets they’d ordered for the Brendans’ Venetian breakfast. And he was staring at her every bit as hungrily as she was staring at him.
He said he loved me. All I have to do is say I’m sorry, and he’d let me— She couldn’t form a coherent thought. Her tongue was cloven to the roof of her mouth.
Solomon watched her, his eyes gold in the morning light. “Good morning,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
His eyes narrowed. “I still love you,” he said evenly. Then he brushed past her and went down the hall. Her heart pounded in rhythm with his boot heels on the stairs.
Chapter 22
The beginning of the Brendans’ party, René reflected, was hideously different from the beginning of the Pursleighs’. Not that he had been precisely at ease on that occasion, either, but now poor Elijah could not even look at him. The boy didn’t look at his brother either, and Solomon was keeping his eyes studiously on the middle distance. René, seeing the circles under Elijah’s eyes, would have liked to wring Solomon’s puritanical little neck. The pair were both fidgeting like mad, and René didn’t dare speak to either, even to give a simple order, for fear of provoking a confrontation.
It seemed like years, but was probably only twenty minutes, before he judged he might safely leave the kitchen to its own devices and supervise the arrangement of the tables in the courtyard. He escaped outside with a sense of profound relief.
So it was with a doubly sinking feeling that he realized they might have left the Italian pastries at the Arms. There is no point going to see. Even if you find that you have, Hampstead is too far from London to retrieve them in time, he told himself hopefully. But there was no help for it. He turned back to the house.
Of course, Lady Brendan chose that moment to become very concerned about the arrangement of the ice buckets for champagne and actually followed him to the kitchen demanding he return to give his opinion. He had forgotten how difficult les aristos could be about any service one provided them. At least the customers in his family’s bakery were not quite so used to getting their own way every moment.
“Madame, I assure you there will be no trouble with the buckets,” he said as patiently as he could, trying to meet her eyes deferentially without breaking his neck on the narrow back stairs. “We will arrange them together l’instant même that I assure myself we have not left your exquisite pastries behind at the Arms.” On this last word René reached the kitchen.
Lord Brendan stood in the middle of the room, being gaped at by Arms staff and the Hathaway twins. His wrists were manacled behind his back, and extremely official-looking men stood on each side of him. One of them, René saw with a chill, held a deck of cards in one hand. France had so needed that information about the state of communications between the English and the Prussians.
Lady Brendan, several steps behind him, continued over the absolute silence in the kitchen, “I assure you, monsieur, it makes no odds. The crème brûlée will be quite—” She reached the door and stopped abruptly. “Ah, merde.”
It would have greatly relieved René’s feelings to say the same, and a deal more besides. It took all his will to merely glance at Lady Brendan in mild perplexity. “Why is your husband in irons in the middle of your kitchen, madame?”
“I—I—” she floundered.
Oh, merde. First Elbourn, then Sir Nigel, and now this? Brendan figured it out a second after René did. “You knew about this?” he asked his wife in helpless disbelief.
“N—no—”
“Amélie?” The man looked suddenly defeated. Defeated and old.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was my duty, but it was not easy.”
Brendan’s lips twisted unpleasantly. “And you always do your duty, don’t you, Amélie?”
“Please, my lord,” she whispered, trembling.
“Your duty is to me.”
“My duty is to my king.” Her voice was barely a thread. René thought she would be in hysterics before too long. She had always struck him as nervy as a thoroughbred—an aristo to the core. “And—how could you risk James, my lord?” she added, louder.
Brendan turned red as a lobster. “James! It’s always James with you! You think I don’t see? You married me for my money, you little slut, and now you want to get rid of me so you can be free to play the whore with my own son?”
Lady Brendan’s eyes widened. “How dare you suggest such a thing?” she demanded, her voice high. “James is like a son to me, you filthy old lecher! Of course I married you for your money—why else would a sixteen-year-old girl marry an old man like you? But I was a wife to you for twelve years and I was fond of you. I cried when I knew you would be executed!” A couple of the kitchen boys gawked openly at her splendidly heaving bosom. If he stayed at the Arms long enough, he would have to talk to them about that later.
“I only turned to this to buy you the things you wanted. Where did you think the money was coming from to pay for all your damned hats?”
Since René happened to know that most of the money went to pay Brendan’s gaming debts, this struck him as rather unfair.
“I hope you drown in your crocodile tears!” Brendan concluded with a flourish.
“Even if I did, I would outlive you!” She looked shocked by her own effrontery, but continued headlong, “You talk about doing my duty! You are only angry that I did not meekly take the blame as you’ve been setting me up to do for years! I was so blind—I didn’t even see it until she told me how you’d been using me, always had been, just like he used her—” She stopped suddenly in horror, her hand flying to her mouth and her eyes flying to René.
He felt all the blood slowly drain from his face. Serena. His sirène had been talking to Lady Brendan, and now Lady Brendan had helped the Foreign Office arrest her husband. Serena was working against him. He had wondered, when she went to that party at the Elbourns’, but he had dismissed the idea as impossible. He’d thought she was trying to please Elijah’s idiot of a respectable brother.
Serena was closer to him than anyone. He knew she must have guessed who nearly all his people were, and he had let this happen. Mon Dieu, it was his fault, all of it, nearly all his people bound for the gallows because he was a fool.
His only excuse was that he hadn’t understood until that moment just how Serena must have felt. How the years of friendship and intimacy and shared laughter must have been transformed in an instant into a humiliating mockery. He had felt guilty—of course he had—but it had never occurred to him to compare himself to Lord Brendan.
That it had occurred to Serena—that she thought he had used her like this vieux traître méprisable had used his pretty young French wife—how blind he had been, to think that the risk to the Arms would be enough to stay her hand! It was a miracle she hadn’t already shot him.
He had never intended to use the marriage lines. They had been a sensible precaution, that was all. But she had forced his hand when she gave his room to that puling preacher’s son.
