A Temptation of Angels

by Michelle Zink

  She had to suppress the urge to protest. She did not want to work with something so sharp and dangerous. Now, as they made their way through the kitchen, she wanted to apologize in advance for the fiasco that would surely be her training with the sickle.

  “I’m not very good with anything physical…” she began as they turned down a hallway she had never seen.

  He flashed her a grin as they walked. “I find that hard to believe.”

  She caught the innuendo in his voice and felt a blush creep to her cheeks. “You know what I mean.”

  His laughter was slightly less self-conscious than it had been even the day before. “Yes. But there’s no need to worry. I’ve found the training sickles that Darius and I used when we were younger. They’re made of wood.”

  She could not keep the breath from leaving her body in a rush of relief. She thought Griffin might laugh at her again, but instead, he touched her arm. She stopped beside him in the darkness of the hall.

  “Helen.” His voice was low, his words, a secret between them. “You don’t have to be afraid while you’re in my company. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded around the words stuck in her throat.

  “Good.” He started walking again. “But even so, it’s best to be prepared for anything.”

  They traversed a long hallway. It was richly carpeted, polished bronze sconces gleaming every few feet.

  Helen looked up at Griffin as they walked. “May I ask you something strange?”

  He looked startled. “Of course.”

  She hesitated, slightly embarrassed at the question in her mind. “Is the house… enchanted?”

  “Enchanted?”

  “Yes. Everything is so perfectly maintained and attended, yet I haven’t seen anyone but you and Darius. I thought perhaps it was… magic or something.”

  He chuckled, his gaze tender as he looked down at her. “We have a houseboy—an orphan, actually—who sees to things. He’s quite skittish. We rarely see him ourselves, but I’m glad your needs are being attended with such efficiency.”

  She nodded, feeling foolish and naive. A moment later, they rounded a corner into an enormous, nearly empty room. Sunlight streamed in through windows that rose to the ceiling and dust motes hung in the air like a veil as Helen stepped onto the parquet floor.

  “It’s lovely.” She turned in a circle, admiring the chandeliers overhead, the gilt-framed art on the walls.

  “It hasn’t been in use for some time.” Griffin crossed to a small table against one wall. “I wasn’t even old enough to attend the last ball that was held here.”

  Helen nodded, her mind touching on the experiences she always assumed would be hers before the murder of her family and the ruin of her home.

  “I’ll bet it was wonderful, though.” She smiled at him as he came back toward her, holding something in his hands. “When it was all lit up, I mean.”

  He nodded. When their eyes met, his loss mirrored her own.

  He held something out to her. Helen took it, closing her hand around the smooth wood of the V-shaped training sickle.

  “It won’t hurt you while you learn, but it will give you a feel for the advantages and challenges of such a strangely shaped weapon. I assume you’ve taken fencing?”

  Helen couldn’t hide her surprise. “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “It was part of the curriculum for most of us. All the usual studies plus Latin, religious history, intelligent defense, fencing.”

  “Intelligent defense?” She remembered Father’s lessons on Latin and religious history and the more recent addition of fencing, but she didn’t recall anything approximating intelligent defense.

  “It might not have been presented as an actual lesson. Our parents were killed before we could study it outright. But when we were small, the lessons came in the form of games.”

  “What kind of games?” But Helen already knew what he would say.

  “Games like Find the Way Out and What Would You Do If…” He tipped his head. “You did play them, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, the pieces of the puzzle clicking together in her mind. “I didn’t realize they were more than games until I escaped from the tunnel under my house the night of the fire. I emerged in front of Claridge’s.”

  Griffin raised his eyebrows. “I take it you were familiar?”

  “My father took me there for tea every week. We often walked the streets afterward. Right by this very house, I’m sure.”

  “It must have been difficult to prepare us without actually telling us anything. It cannot have been easy to teach children such things,” he said. “As time passes, you’ll discover a lot of things you didn’t realize you knew.”

  She heard her mother’s frantic voice the night of the fire. You know more than you think, Helen.

  “Now, when you hold the sickle…” Griffin backed up, looking at her more closely, his eyes traveling to the hem of her skirts. “I do like your new clothing, Helen, but… well, your skirt seems shorter than normal.”

  She had wondered if Griffin would even notice the eccentricities of her attire.

  Sighing, she reached down with her free hand, pulling the fabric away from her legs so he could see the cut of the design. “It isn’t a skirt. Not really.”

  His bewilderment turned to shock. “You’re wearing trousers?”

  “They’re not trousers!” she protested. “It is a slightly shorter skirt sewn in the middle so I can move about more freely.”

  “Yes,” Griffin agreed, laughing. “Pants! Like I said.”

  She slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Gowns are made for strolling and sewing. I cannot hope to defend myself with all that fabric weighing on my legs. This can pass as a slightly short skirt while still allowing me some freedom of movement. Besides,” she looked down at herself, feeling a twinge of pride, “I think I did quite well designing them on a moment’s notice, and Andrew did brilliantly with creating them.”

  “All right.” Griffin rubbed the stubble, faintly visible on his chin. “I see your point.”

  He backed up a few more feet, beginning to explain the use of the sickle. Helen listened intently, for though they were practicing with wood, she might well be holding the razor-sharp edge of a real sickle someday soon. And her life might depend on her ability to use it.

  It was not very different from fencing in stance, Griffin explained. He reminded her to place her weight on her back foot when gauging the situation and to transfer it to her front when taking the offensive.

  “It’s trickier than fencing, though, because you don’t have the length of the blade between you and your opponent.” He demonstrated, moving closer to her. He held out the training sickle as if attacking her with its sharp edge. “You have to get close enough to do damage, but that places you near enough to be injured as well.”

  “How do I avoid that?” Helen asked, her mind already working to come up with a solution.

  He smiled. “By keeping them too busy to go on the offensive or by knocking their own weapon out of their hand.”

  She nodded, storing the information for later as he stepped forward, tapping his sickle against hers. “The other thing you have to watch out for is the lock.” He slipped the edge of his weapon into the hook of hers so that they were intertwined in the center of the V. “If someone gets a lock on you, it’s tough to extricate yourself without injury. That’s the bad news.”

  “What’s the good news?” she asked, her sickle still intertwined with his.

  “That you can do the same to them.” He gave his sickle a good yank, and the piece of wood in her hand clattered to the ballroom floor.

  She bent to pick it up. “I think I’m beginning to understand,” she said. “It’s not a physical problem. Well, not really. It seems like it is, because we’re moving around. But it’s really more mathematical. More scientific.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Scientific?”

  She liked the way he looked into her eyes
when she spoke. As if he truly wanted to hear what she had to say and was not just being courteous by asking.

  “Yes. Probability, cause and effect, that kind of thing.”

  His brow wrinkled a little. “Go on.”

  She studied the sickle. “Using this as an example, if my opponent comes closer than two feet, the probability of his using greater strength to injure me is great. But if I can hook my sickle with his before that point or right as he reaches it, I have a better chance of disarming him altogether.”

  Griffin shook his head. “You wouldn’t have the strength to disarm him.”

  “Strength isn’t a requirement.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that.”

  She raised her sickle. “I’ll show you.”

  He lifted his arm, holding the wooden sickle in front of him, waiting to see what Helen would do. A split second later, she whipped her weapon around his, trapping it in the V.

  “This is what I mean, Helen. Now you’re trapped.”

  She could feel the pull of strength on his side of their battle. Their sickles were taut, and it took all of Helen’s strength to hold her ground. She let a couple of seconds pass while Griffin became used to the idea of disarming her.

  Then she released the tension in her arm just enough to cause him to stumble back. Before he could regain his balance, she tapped his sickle hard, sending it skidding across the parquet floor.

  He nodded, his expression turned from one of surprise to admiration. “Nicely done.”

  She smiled, her cheeks warm. “Thank you.”

  He bent to pick up his sickle before once again facing her.

  “Again,” he said.

  They practiced for the remainder of the hour, Helen slowly becoming more adept with the wooden sickle. Her mind began to see practical solutions to her weaknesses. She was smaller than Griffin—smaller than most men. It allowed her to duck and dodge blows when there was no other way out. If she was patient and didn’t allow fear to overtake her, she could find an opportunity where luck and logic had a bigger part than strength and experience.

  Of course, it would be different with a real sickle, but she was beginning to think that with a lot of thought, and a little luck, she might be able to defend herself if the need arose.

  SIXTEEN

  They walked toward the front of the house, making plans to meet later for dinner with Darius. Griffin had business to attend in the meantime and was halfway out the front door when Helen thought of something.

  “Griffin?”

  He looked back, the sun behind him lighting his hair gold. “Yes?”

  “What about the sickle?” she asked. “Can I have one now? To defend myself if the need arises.”

  He paused, his eyes holding hers. Finally, he nodded. “I’ll speak to Darius.”

  He closed the door quietly behind him. Helen stood at the bottom of the staircase, wondering if Griffin’s hesitation was due to worry for her safety or fear of her incompetence with the sickle. She sighed. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

  She paced the foyer, running a hand along the gleaming banister, the polished mahogany table. It was nearly impossible to reconcile a world where the unfamiliar house around her was the closest thing she had to home. A world where her own home, imposing and solid against the London sky, wasn’t filled with light and laughter and fevered discussion almost every night.

  There was a faint burning in her eyes, a distant exhaustion in her bones, but her nerves bristled at the thought of going to her room. Her mind would never allow her to rest.

  Not until she saw it for herself.

  She hesitated only a moment before unlocking the door. Then, she was out in the cool afternoon air, the wind whipping her hair, the clatter of the city all around her.

  She walked first toward Claridge’s, retracing her steps from the night she had escaped while trying not to remember the horrific moments that had required her to take them. Once she passed the hotel, it was not difficult to find the way home. Less than twenty minutes after she’d left the Channing house, she passed the apothecary on the street corner, followed by the sweet shop at the end of the block. It was all achingly familiar, and yet, it looked different through the lens of everything that had happened since she’d last walked these streets.

  Her footsteps unintentionally slowed as Helen began to wonder at the wisdom of her destination. She knew what had happened. How it had ended.

  Didn’t she?

  Or maybe it was not enough to be told that her parents were dead. That her home had burned to the ground with her mother and father inside it. Maybe she had to see for herself, however horrifying the discovery. She continued slowly down the walk, steeling her resolve.

  The smell drifted to her first. It was only the faintest of memories from her time inside the chamber walls, a more acrid undertone to the ever-present residual smoke from London’s streetlamps. The odor became stronger as she made her way down the street.

  She felt the altered landscape ahead of her before she saw it, as if the very air around the house had changed through the disintegration of the wood, paint, and furnishings that had once occupied it.

  Despite her state of preparedness, Helen sucked in her breath when the house finally came into view. Her mind rejected the image. The blackened shell of stone and brick. The windows staring like vacant eyes as she approached.

  This was not her home. It couldn’t be.

  Not the richly carpeted floors where she had learned to crawl and walk or the dining room in which she and Father, eyes glinting playfully behind his spectacles, had debated all manner of politics. This desolate landscape could not have been home to the lush garden where she had taken tea with Wren—Raum—when she was a child. Not the place her mother had knelt, a wide-brimmed hat shielding her delicate skin from the sun, to clip the extravagant roses from their stems.

  Yet it was. She knew it was. She recognized the shape of it, like the daguerreotypes of her mother as a girl in which Helen could more sense the familiar lines of her mother’s face than see the resemblance.

  She approached the house cautiously, resisting the urge to cover her nose and mouth against the stench. Resisting the meandering of her mind that wanted to know what it was.

  Finally, she came to a stop in front of the iron gate, which stood slightly askew on its hinges. Staring up at the soot-stained facade of the house, Helen found it almost possible to believe the fire had been minor. Aside from the blackened brick surrounding the window frames and empty doorway, the front of the house was intact. It was only when she allowed her eyes to drift that she saw the extent of the damage.

  The library, once sheltered by brick along one side of the house, was now exposed to the world. She could only dimly make out the shelves behind a pile of rubble that appeared to be the fallen second story. Father’s many books—books from which she had taken lessons—were likely nothing but ash. It was somehow obscene that passersby should glance up to see the rooms that had sheltered her since she was born. She felt suddenly vulnerable, as if she were standing outside in only her corset.

  Smoke rose from the rubble, a bitter fog that muted the edges of the destruction. She hardly registered the creaking of the gate as she pushed it open. Stepping through it was instinctual. She had to see for herself. Too much was left undone, the night of the fire nothing but a hazy imprint of memory. It had all happened too fast. She needed to reconcile the things she remembered with the things that had actually happened while she hid in the walls of her chamber. While she escaped through the tunnels under the house.

  Like a coward, an angry voice whispered in her head. She did her best to ignore it. Making her way up the walk, she lifted her chin to get a view of the roof. It had fallen on one side, leaving a gaping hole open to the sky. Through it, Helen could make out blackened plaster, the looking glass still on the wall of her mother’s chamber.

  She continued up the walk, surprised to see the steps leading to the front of the house still intact. Someone sho
uld stop her, tell her it wasn’t safe.

  No one did.

  The people passing on the walk below seemed very far away, the noises of the street and its occupants from another world entirely. She stopped at the threshold of the house, remembering the carved wooden door that had once stood in its frame. There was no sign of it. No burned remains at her feet. It was as if it had disappeared into thin air or had never existed at all.

  She stepped into the darkness beyond, testing her weight on the floorboards as she made her way through the front hall. The staircase, once grand and curving on two sides to meet in the center, was now impassable. Helen assumed the pile of smoking wood directly in front of her represented some of it, but there was no way to be sure. In any case, there would be no last look at her childhood chamber. No scavenging for salvageable mementos. Not on the upper floors at least.

  Continuing down the hall, she turned into the parlor. She knew it for the parlor because of its location, but it was so charred and damaged she would not have recognized it otherwise. The floor was a murky river of soot, strange objects bobbing in the water that must have been used to squelch the flames. On the exterior wall, black with smoke, trees and vines outside were visible through intermittent holes in the plaster and lath.

  There was nothing recognizable in this place. The furniture was all gone, as surely as if a contingent of movers had come and carted everything away. They hadn’t, of course. The fire had done that all by itself.

  She was weighing the wisdom of making her way to the kitchen when a floorboard creaked behind her. The sound stopped her in her tracks. For a moment, she was too paralyzed by fear to do anything but stand, perfectly still, in the middle of the room, hoping she was mistaken. When it came again, she spun around, backing instinctively toward the wall.

  For a moment, she was in another room from another time. A crowded party in which she was at least a foot shorter than everyone else in attendance. People in gowns, holding glasses and laughing too loudly. Her father’s voice in her ear.