The Prince of Midnight (48 page)

She lifted her head, the task completed. S.T. looked down at his bandaged
hand. Time seemed to be running past like water, unstoppable.

"Leigh," he said. "Where will you go now?"

She was only blackness against the fire; he couldn't see her face at all. "I
don't know," she said.

"You have family?"

"A cousin. In London."

"By what name?"

She turned a little, and the fire showed him the outline of her cheekbone and
her lips, smooth as marble, expressionless. "Clara Patton."

"Go there," he said. "I'll find you."

She looked back at him, a mysterious shadow again. "Why?" she asked.

Because I can't live without you. Because I love you. Because it can't
end like this.

All those things he could not say. All those lies he'd told in his life.

"I have to," he said fiercely.

"Foolish man," she said, barely audible above the fire.

"I have to find you again. I won't let you go—I can't . . . it's impossible,"
he said incoherently. "My leaving. Now. This way. I'll think of something."

"Think of what?" There was a strange note in her voice. "A secret signal? Two
candles in the window when 'tis safe to meet me in the garden?"

Like an abyss, that future opened before him. He felt drowned, helpless, as
shocked as if she'd tossed the bucket of icy water in his scorched face. He saw
it; he knew it so well, that garden tryst, but now the excitement of it tasted
bitter, the romance twisted into punishment.

"Not that," he said. "Never that way, not for us."

"What way, then?"

He closed his right fist, feeling the bum. "Sunshine-Sunshine—damn it all . .
."

A dense wave of smoke drifted toward them. S.T. squinted against the stinging
murk. Coughing doubled him over; when he found his breath and straightened, he
saw that a small fire engine had been maneuvered into position. A team of men
worked the pump, sending a wobbly arc of water into a window while the bucket
brigade toiled to refill the reservoir.

"Too late," Leigh said. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes: tears or smoke,
he couldn't tell.

"They might—save the wings." he managed to say, swallowing in his tortured
throat.

She shrugged. "It doesn't matter. It's all gone now."

"Leigh—"

She looked back at him. He could see her clearly now in the glare: she had
that expectant look again, a little upward tilt of her chin, a slight parting of
her lips.

"I love you," he said in his rusty voice. "Will you remember that?"

The expression faded. She smiled a little, sadly. "I'll remember that you
said it."

"I mean it." His voice cracked.

She picked up the water pail. She was going to walk away; he saw that, and
panic welled up in his chest. He caught her arm.

"You'll go to your cousin?"

Her eyes lifted to his. Not expectant or questioning or unhappy, but a glance
like a saber flash. "I'm not sure," she said deliberately.

He held steady under that challenge, refusing to surrender, to admit defeat,
to call this the end. "Where else will you go, then?"

"With you."

She said it simply. Quietly.

He stood there, breathing in his aching throat.

Amid the sound of fire and the haze of smoke; the heat and pungent smell, the
bitter taste, he found what had eluded him all his life. It came as a gift,
unadorned; unembellished by all the sweet ribbons and charms that disguised
lesser tokens.

She didn't say she loved him. She didn't need to say it. With two words she
humbled him.

Her eyes were intense as she watched him: proud and severe, a goddess with a
soul of flame. That look offered and demanded at once, asked for the truth,
commanded honesty.

It burned him all through, seared away the fantasies, left him with the
devastating face of reality.

He dropped his hand away from her arm. "I can't take you with me. Not now,
with MacWhorter and his bloodhounds upon me. How can I take you now?"

"I'm not afraid."

"Wait for me," he said. "I'll find you. I'll—think of a way for us."

She bent her head. He read contempt in that bending, and it shattered him,
broke him at his heart. He felt too ashamed to touch her. All of his past, all
of his folly—it came to this. She offered him a fortune and he had nothing to
give in return but dreams.

Dreams had always been enough, before. No one had ever asked for more.

"It won't be long," he said, his voice harsh. "This stir will settle soon
enough."

She looked up, looked through him. Without words, she mocked his promises.

"I'll think of a way, damn you!" He leaned his head back against the tree,
watching sparks fly up into the black sky, winking in and out of the bare
branches. "Believe me—just believe in me!"

"That isn't what I have to give you," she said, and suddenly her voice was no
longer so controlled. It trembled, the only betrayal of emotion in her. "I can't
be a maiden in distress for you always. I can't be your mirror. I can only go
with you if you ask me."

Anger seized him. He pushed himself away from the tree, oblivious of the pain
in his hand. "I'm asking you to wait!" Frustration and smoke destroyed his
shout, fractured it to a broken snarl. "To have some faith."

She stared at him, so beautiful, so distant, no trace of devotion or fondness
or acquiescence. He couldn't tell what she felt, what she thought.

"You should go now," she said at last.

"Will you wait?"

She looked at the house, at the conflagration that had been her home. "I've
nowhere to go, have I?"

"Your cousin's. Clara Patton, in London."

With a strange shake of her head, as if clearing it of some cobwebby mist,
she said, "I've let this happen. I've done this to myself. I knew. I knew. And I
let it happen."

His moment of wrath dissolved. He lifted both his hands, pressed his fingers
on her cheeks, the bandage a pale shape against the shadow at her throat. He
kissed her. "In London. I'll be there."

He felt the tears tumble down her face. They smeared on his burned fingers,
cold and stinging.

"Go," she said, pushing him away. "Just go."

He took a step, but she twisted and turned. She dropped the water pail and
strode down the hill, leaving him with only the wet trace of her tears on his
hands.

He watched her until she reached the fire engine. MacWhorter met her; the
magistrate looked at Leigh and then up the hill.

There was no reprieve there, only a cold stare that challenged S.T.'s
lingering.

He looked over at Chilton's body. A familiar unsheathed blade lay near it. He
limped down the slope and picked up his spadroon, found his silver-edged
tricorne cast in the shadows nearby. Then he pulled his cloak off Chilton's
body. They'd closed the preacher's eyes, but his white face was underlit by an
eerie copper blush from the reflected flames.

"You won't need any extra warmth where you're going," S.T. muttered, taking
his cloak as he turned away.

No one paid him any attention. He couldn't see Leigh anymore among the rush
of silhouettes and torches.

He turned back and hobbled up the hill into the dark.

Three months was enough. Three months of hunching over an open fire,
shivering through a Scottish winter while hidden in a cave at the head of a
steep and narrow glen—it was more than enough. Perhaps Bonnie Prince Charlie and
his barefooted highlanders had found this sort of thing diverting, but S.T. was
sufficiently poor spirited to be altogether wretched.

In former times, he would have made his way directly to London before any
alarm could spread quickly enough to ensare him, going to ground in the crowded
haunts of Covent Garden or St. Giles, where he knew whom to trust and whom to
avoid, and what accommodations his gold would buy. But he couldn't take Nemo so
far on a wounded leg—nor himself, not while his hands and face burned and the
sword cut flashed agony up his thigh with every step that Mistral took.

He didn't have the willpower anymore. He didn't even have the desire.

So he'd gone north instead of south. In a cleft of rock, mantled with snow
and fringed with dark pines, he and Nemo limped and groaned and curled together
to keep warm, poaching heathcock and white hares and the occasional sluggish
trout from a deep hole in the stream that belonged to some unknown landlord,
filling out supper with oatcakes. Forage for Mistral was even harder. Beyond the
oats S.T. had brought along, the horse had to nibble lichen and paw for grass
and bracken beneath the snow along the banks of the burn.

S.T. was cold. He was hungry. He was lonely. He was too old for this.

He spent his time thinking. And the more he thought, the more he despaired.
He couldn't have Leigh and stay in England. There was no hope of it. Aye, he'd
his safe houses, his real name, but there was always the hazard of exposure.
Especially now, when Luton had seen him, knew his face and name and mask. To
live a reckless life alone was one business: to live knowing that every moment
he spent with her put her at risk of hanging with him was another ordeal
entirely.

There was only exile—only the pointless life where she'd found him amid his
half-finished paintings—and when he tried to imagine asking her to give up all
her future and join him in oblivion, he knew the humiliation of it would
paralyze him.

So he delayed, failing his promise, freezing and moody. When the first thaw
came, he mounted Mistral and headed down the glen with Nemo trotting behind. The
wolf had healed, but S.T.'s injured thigh still ached. He didn't know where he
was going or why, particularly, but he was damned if he'd cower in some freezing
cave the same way he'd crawled off for safety to Col du Noir nearly four years
ago.

He felt lost; pointless and gloomy. He traveled slowly, avoiding towns,
crossing the border through the wild Cheviot Hills, in the country where the
cattle reivers made their nighttime raids and then vanished back into the mists.

Moving across country, stopping sometimes at a solitary farmhouse to
ascertain his direction or buy some food from some taciturn housewife, he
wandered as far south as the lakes of Westmoreland. He'd been traveling for a
week when he rode down out of the foggy bleakness of Shap Fells into a clear
twilight, saw the town of Kendal nestled in its fertile valley, and had a sudden
notion to spend the night in a bed.

No one knew him in Kendal. He'd ridden through once or twice, but never
stopped or used a name, his own or any other.

He whistled up Nemo, who was hunting mice in the heath. There were farms and
cultivation nearby; S.T. couldn't allow the wolf to roam free while he stayed in
town. He made a collar out his much-used cravat and tied Nemo to the lead rope
before he remounted.

In his black cloak and point-edged hat and sword, he'd looked gentlemanly
enough, so long as no one took serious exception to the grime on his linen
shirt. He pulled his lace cuffs down out of the protection of his coat sleeves,
changed his mitts for his silver-studded gauntlets, dusted off his hat as best
he could, and prepared to be eccentric.

Nemo displayed some reluctance to join the late straggle of traffic on the
road, but with a bit of firm coaxing, the wolf consented to trail alongside
Mistral on all four feet instead of being dragged on his haunches. After a half
mile, when no females approached to menace him, Nemo began to relax and trot
ahead as far as the lead allowed, swinging back and forth across Mistral's path
and necessitating numerous transfers of the lead rope over the horse's ears from
one side to the other.

No one among the sparse collection of pedestrians and broad-wheeled wagons
seemed to take any notice of S.T. and his companion, but when they neared the
outskirts of town, a stage coach came lurching along the road toward them. As
S.T. drew Mistral off to the side to let it pass, someone on the roof yelled at
him. All the passengers on top turned and stared through the twilight as the
coach rolled past, leaning out over the Lancaster-Kendal-Carlisle sign on the
vehicle's rear wall.

Nemo took exception to the attention, and made a quick snarling dash after
the receding wheels of the conveniency. S.T. spoke sharply and yanked him back,
but the wolf showed no sign of remorse, only turning around and resuming his
position ahead of Mistral with a satisfied air.

The neat town of Kendal was still busy, even as darkness approached. Windows
in the limestone and plaster houses shone with lights reflected back by the
river. Above it all, the black ruins of a castle brooded on a steep hill beyond
the town. S.T. rode beneath the post horn that hung from the sign of the King's
Arms and dismounted inside the stable yard, joining the crowd lingering around
the office to inquire after parcels that might have arrived on the departed
stage.

An officious youngster went striding about through the waiting group,
distributing a handbill and bawling, "Proclamation! Proclamation, here,
sirra—Proclamation!" He thrust one into S.T.'s hand, skipping back from Nemo's
warning growl with a good-humored grin. S.T. glanced down at the paper.

For Acts of Highway Robbery, Mayhem and Murder Sophocles Trafalgar Maitland
One Thousand Pounds The aforementioned Highwayman being Possessed of a Pale
Gray Gelded Horse and Large Dog, this Dog yellow-eyed, marked with cream and
black, being in Truth a Wolf—

S.T. didn't stop to read more. He swallowed the curse that sprang to his lips
and crumpled the paper in his hand. For an instant pure panic consumed him; he
stood there in the midst of a crowd where every third man was studiously engaged
in reading a detailed description of his person, from his hair to his
silver-trimmed gauntlets—one
thousand pounds—
Almighty God—
one
thousand pounds!