The God's Eye (Lancaster's Luck Book 3)

by Anna Butler

  Today he’d walked to his desk, but he’d had time to recover from the ordeal, his face a healthier shade of grey than usual and his sharp intelligence undulled by pain and lack of air. He held an envelope, the twin of mine.

  “I used to view letters from you with the same enthusiasm.” I reached for the letter opener.

  “You know better now.”

  “I do. I know better than to open anything from you.”

  He gave me his usual wolfish smile in return, choosing, I think, to believe me to be jesting. I forbore to disillusion him. Instead, I returned to my letter from the Cartomancer.

  Our alliance with him resembled many an unhappy marriage: characterised by strife and hurt feelings, with occasional forays into a species of distasteful marital congress intended to keep up appearances before the neighbours. Relations had been in the doldrums the previous year when I took up my new role, but William Lee, the Cartomancer, had since recollected that we rascally Stravaigors were the source of much of his wealth—indeed, of the Imperium’s wealth. The dealmakers, the traders, the ones who made risky adventuring and trading an art, we kept the nation’s coffers brimming. What’s more, at the old Queen’s funeral, the Cartomancer saw for himself the strong links I have with Convocation House Gallowglass, the richest and most powerful House in the Britannic Imperium. As a result, the Cartomancer needed and resented us in equal measure. It made for an uneasy alliance.

  The envelope held a summons to attend the Cartomancer’s birthday celebration to be held in September. Florid greetings and his earnest wish that I join him at a bal masqué on the last Saturday of the month, followed two days later, on his actual birthday, with a celebratory dinner for four dozen or so select guests.

  “An invitation to join him at a bash to celebrate his birthday next month.”

  “A bash? Knowing the Cartomancer, I doubt it will be much of a drunken spree.” The Sahara had nothing on my father’s tone when it came to desiccation. “You may expect an indifferent claret and an even less prestigious port. He has the palate of a costermonger and couldn’t distinguish a Lafite Rothschild from cooking sherry.”

  “I’ll insulate myself beforehand with something from our own cellars, then.” I nodded at the letter in his hand. “Your missive?”

  “An offhand enquiry about my health, with the condescending explanation that this year he invites you to represent Stravaigor in my place, given the uncertain nature of my recovery.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a sardonic little smile. “He fears to overexcite me, I fancy.”

  “Probably more fearful the indifferent claret would carry you off. A masked ball. Good grief.”

  “To give him his due, he does that sort of thing well. The fancy dress ball he held in the old Queen’s Jubilee year was the most brilliant event of the season.”

  “I saw the newspaper reports. The costumes they illustrated had more diamonds to the square inch than the De Beers’ mines in Kimberley.”

  The Stravaigor smiled. “I left the diamonds to Madame Stravaigor. I went as the Pope.”

  Not a statement calculated to counter my cynicism about religion. I quirked an eyebrow at the letter he held and fluttered mine at him. He nodded and we swapped. The tone of the Cartomancer’s letter to my father was condescending, as he’d said, and cool. The letter to me, by contrast, exuded a bonhomie I trusted not one whit.

  “It appears I am one of the elect, worthy of the great man’s notice and regard.” I put down the letter.

  “And I am not.” My father’s smirk, which he’d worn throughout this exchange, broadened into a true smile.

  I shrugged. “I’ve no doubt my attraction is my link to Gallowglass.” Not that anyone knew how strong and personal the link was, mind you. But since everyone wanted to stay on the Gallowglass’s good side, it increased my value.

  He inclined his head. “Indeed. Whatever his reasoning, his purpose seems clear. I’ve never regained more than an uneasy truce with him, but he sees which way the wind blows. He’s prepared, obviously, to give you your due when you succeed me. You can repair relations with our Major House, if you wish.”

  Ay, there was the rub. Did I so wish?

  Our family line is thick with pirates and buccaneers. And even in these less overtly freebooting days, a heady disregard for societal norms, coupled with a delight in grasping every advantage, is in our blood. The other Houses regard us with caution, aware they seldom get one over on us. We are rapscallions to our bootstraps. The Cartomancer didn’t object to our piratical ways until the late unlamented John, too incompetent to swab decks much less be allowed near the quarterdeck, had trodden on our liege lord’s financial corns and made off with profits the Cartomancer deemed his by right.

  With an unforgiving Convocation House ally, my father had scaled back efforts to repair the breach, managing it by seeking alliances elsewhere. He had married off his elder daughter, Emily, to the Plumassier’s heir in 1900, engineering a closer link to House Gallowglass to which the Plumassier was allied. He was casting about for a similar connection for Eleanor—Nell—the younger of my two half-sisters, who was almost twenty-two. He had exploited my knowing the Scrivener and the Jongleur, pleased to build closer ties with both. And, of course, he had tried to milk my friendship with Ned Winter to our House’s advantage. That was the golden link, the promise of stability and prosperity, and he had grasped at it with both hands.

  So, would I take the olive branch if it were offered me by the Cartomancer and arrange a return to the fold for my House, or follow my instincts and strike out for ourselves when I took the helm?

  No use asking me. I didn’t know.

  “Will you accept the invitation?” My father’s quiet voice broke into my thoughts. When I looked up, he was regarding me, wearing the neutral expression donned when he was negotiating a deal. It gave away less than would a steel trap.

  “I don’t see why not. It seems sensible to keep open the lines of communication.” I gave him a nod I hoped would reassure. “I didn’t want this job you’ve thrust on me, you know that. I still think the Houses pernicious. But whatever changes I make, I’ll do from within, and I’ll do nothing to endanger our House. I’d prefer to put our extended family into the “send cool greetings at Yuletide and restrain myself from delivering the cut direct” box, but they are still family. Their welfare is my responsibility. I’m not convinced, though, that our path lies in tight alliance with the Cartomancer or any other Convocation House. I’d rather we went our own way.”

  “Mmmphf” was all he said, at first. Then he raised one shoulder in a tired half-shrug. “It will be a more difficult course to chart. You’ll be shifting with every wind and current if you eschew being tied to a Convocation House.”

  “It will be more interesting.”

  “That it will.”

  “We’re in a class of our own at trading and dealmaking. We can treat with all the Houses from a position of strength if we aren’t beholden to any one of them in particular.”

  Even Gallowglass.

  “Not a hypothesis that appeals to me. Still, I won’t be here to worry about it, and I have faith in you.” And to drive the point home, he made a hissing intake of wheezing breath and clutched at his chest. His lips turned an alarming blueish shade. Somewhat anxious, since I was by no means prepared to take on his honours, I shook one of his powders into a glass of water and made him drink it. Mouth twisting at the taste, he sat silent for a moment until whatever pain he felt passed, resting his chin on his hand and turning his gaze to the window.

  Outside, the treetops in the garden tossed about in an unseasonable east wind, their leaves glinting where the bright sunshine caught them. At length he stirred, giving himself a little shake, and straightened in his chair. “We’ve dilly-dallied long enough. My doctor’s expression grows graver by the day. My heart is failing, Rafe. I think we can agree I am unlikely to live more than a few months. Time to grasp the nettle.” His gaze held mine, his eyes, a darker brown than my own, steady and
yet fierce. “You need an heir.”

  I know my mouth opened to respond, because I felt the air whistle over my teeth with the sharply indrawn breath I took. But I found myself mute. With horror.

  “You didn’t want to be First Heir or deal with the House at all.” He smiled then, the usual wolfish quality missing. “But as I said to you when John died, I know your sense of duty and honour won’t allow you to stand aside and see the House suffer. I’ll go easier to my grave if I know the succession is assured. That, my boy, is your greatest duty and responsibility.”

  I flapped my hands about in lieu of speech.

  “I have several candidates in mind. The Flegeoure’s youngest girl is a possibility. She’s seventeen, I believe, and considered quite a beauty.”

  Indignation restored my voice. “Seventeen? Almost half my age! Barely out of the schoolroom!”

  “All the better to train her up. Most of our leading Houses have ladies of marriageable age. The Gossoon has three, I believe—”

  “I refuse to countenance a father-in-law whose title is the Gossoon. Ridiculous name. Besides, he’s allied to House Pannifex, and that wouldn’t go down well with Gallowglass.”

  He smirked. The wily old devil lived and breathed the politics of House alliances and enmities, and he didn’t need me to tell him Gallowglass and Pannifex were in a state of polite enmity. I’d wager he’d mentioned the Gossoon’s girls to soften my defences.

  He laid a piece of foolscap onto the desktop, swivelling it around so I could read it. A long list of names in his neat script, broken into groups. “Every eligible lady available on the marriage mart. Consider them, please.” A thin smile. “Although I agree you may discount Pannifex allies.”

  The Houses were rich in daughters. Every Minor House—Houses Manstreler, Pargeter, Corvinor, to name but a few—had female offspring to spare. But they weren’t my father’s primary objectives. The ladies from the eight Major Houses, the Convocation Houses, headed the list. Sofia Winter’s name was first.

  Ned’s younger sister.

  I was acquainted with Ned’s siblings, of course. His brother, Theodoric, was in his late twenties, a serious young man devoted to the family business of managing the Imperium’s finances. Sofia was barely in her twenties, about my sister Eleanor’s age—a pretty, softer version of her brothers, with the same hazel eyes and flaxen hair. Their unusual Nordic names were in honour of Madame Gallowglass, I believe, who was descended from an aristocratic Swedish family. They had all inherited her blond Nordic looks, in any event.

  My father tapped a fingernail against Miss Winter’s name. “My preference, of course. No alliance could be more glittering or more strategic. Your close friendship with Ned Winter needs to be consolidated, and you could do no better for our House than to make a marriage alliance with Gallowglass. You could thumb your nose at the Cartomancer with impunity. At the entire Imperium, for that matter.

  “Mark me well, Rafe. I want you to escort Sofia Winter to the Cartomancer’s bal masqué and do your level best to win her. You need an heir before my time runs out.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ensuing argument was cataclysmic. Biblically so, if I may continue with my religious imagery—a calamity of the order of merrily tootling along the Euphrates and seeing a wall of water higher than the mountains thundering over the world and sweeping all before it into a maelstrom of grief, while Noah floats past on his ark, waving at you as you go under for the last time. The beast of the Revelation made less of a racket.

  It started with an explosive “Oh hell, no!” from me and deteriorated from there. We raked up every grievance as we argued, shaking them into bad-tempered life. The climax came after about ten minutes when my father, shaking visibly, lost some of his vaunted control and shouted at me, his face purpling, “I am your Princeps and the head of your House, boy! You owe me and your House everything you are! I require this of you as a matter of obedience, and you will do as you are told!”

  I stared. “And that approach has worked so well with me in the past.”

  At which juncture, he snatched up his inkstand and hurled it at me. Benares brass and heavy, the ugly thing could have done me an injury if I hadn’t ducked. It left a nasty dent in the wall and a fine spray of black India ink over the wallpaper.

  I think he was astonished at his own temper. He stared at me, his mouth dropping open, and the choler grumbled itself down to glares and huffed-out grunts. He sat with his mouth set in its hardest lines, the visual equivalent of the mousetrap snapping shut.

  Harper had rushed into the room at the first shout and was now shooting me reproachful glances as he flapped about trying to get my father to unclamp his jaw enough to swallow one of the restoratives prescribed by the doctors. My father shooed him away. At which point Harper turned the doe-eyed looks onto his lord and master, who waved a hand at him in unmistakable dismissal.

  “Leave us,” he said. And when Harper flapped a little more and made the mewling noises of a cat in intestinal distress, he added, “I will remain calm, and Mr Rafe will be careful not to stir things up. Won’t you, Rafe?”

  Right at that moment I’d have liked to stir the entire world with a steam-driven paddle. However, I did not wish to come into my inheritance any sooner than I had to. I gave him a jerky nod in answer.

  Harper trailed out of the room, his lugubrious face turned to us over his shoulder, all drooping jowls and large, hurt-filled eyes. When the door to the bedroom closed and we were alone again, my father turned to me, rubbing a hand over his face as if to clear the temper away.

  “It is seldom I can be provoked to such an extent. Very seldom.”

  In all likelihood, I was the first to witness it and live to tell the tale. I made a noncommittal noise, not quite real speech.

  He sighed, sagged in his chair, and made a concession of sorts. “Perhaps I was a little precipitate.”

  It was barely afternoon, but I felt the need for something stronger than my indignation to sustain me. The sun would be below the yardarm somewhere in the Imperium, leading me to give thanks, as I made my way to the decanters set on a table at the side of the room, that my nation’s imperialist achievements, however deplorable, supported my need for alcohol. I splashed a generous helping of Scotch into a glass, then held up the decanter in mute invitation. He nodded. I didn’t give him much, just enough that when I shook a heart powder into it from the box on his desk, it dissolved the fine white grains in a few swirls. He took it with a grimace. Apparently even a good Scotch couldn’t counter the apothecary’s loathsome concoctions.

  My father made another concession. “Better than his usual tinctures, I suppose.”

  It was another step away from bad temper and to more civilised normality. I nodded. He nursed the glass while I restored the balance of my own humours with an excellent Islay malt.

  We sat in sullen silence for several minutes, sipping the Scotch and not looking at each other. I turned my eyes anywhere rather than at him: at the richly decorated room, the papers strewn over the desk, the new ink-stain decoration on the wall. The sun shone full in through the window, its bright beams battering the brass eagle whose wings were spread over the top of the wall clock. As the clock’s whirrings and hiccups brought it to the point of striking the first hour after noon, my father broke the silence.

  “You can’t be surprised, Rafe. The continuance of the House is of paramount importance.”

  Of course it wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to all my responsibilities when I was catapulted into them with such unceremonious speed. I’d stewed over it for days before I’d accepted, grudgingly, that I couldn’t escape being First Heir. Not because I had discovered a hitherto unexpressed affection for my House and my family, but because—well, damn it, because who else could step up and take it on? As my father once said, over four hundred people depended on the good of the House for their welfare. I may not know all of them in person, and I disliked many of those I did
know, but I have never yet walked away from my responsibilities. I was a most unwilling First Heir, but I would steer my House as best as I could, and that included making plans for a successor. I had taken it all into account when first discussing this with Ned back in Abydos the previous year while we were reeling from the revelation of my parentage and John was stiffening in his coffin. My plans were still tentative, but I was adamant I wouldn’t follow Ned’s example of an arranged marriage with an ally’s daughter.

  My father’s approach had surprised me. More fool me, I’m sure, but I’d assumed he’d be more nuanced than a blunt “Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth!” This direct attack from a man whose preferred form of negotiation was as subtle as a serpent, left me wrong-footed.

  He continued before I had time to articulate any of this. “I had hoped to avoid this particular conversation. No, I am fooling myself. We need to address your reluctance to marry. I can’t overemphasise the importance to the House of securing the succession. So many people look to us to assure their futures.” He tapped the fingers of his right hand against the side of the whisky glass he still cradled within them. “Without that assurance, there’s a hollow place in the heart of the House, and it will wither from within. You’re thirty-two, Rafe. Time you were settled. Long past time.”

  How I wished I could just snort and tell him I was splendidly well settled, thank you, and couldn’t find a more loving relationship if I searched for a lifetime. Ned Winter, the First Heir of Convocation House Gallowglass, was everything my foolish heart could wish for. But to say so wasn’t a game worth the candle. First Heirhood would save neither of us from the public opprobrium cast at confirmed bachelors of our ilk—perhaps prosecution. And Ned had sons. Something in my chest pinched and twisted, spikier than a sea urchin; each heartbeat too hard and too pained at the thought of what discovery would do to Ned and his sons. No. I couldn’t take the risk of revealing our secret.