by Baird Wells
Nothing.
The bar had been simple, but the door was another matter entirely. It no longer fit square in its hole. If the hinges did not creak, the wood was going to grate. Olivia decided there was no finessing it. Grabbing the cross beam, she gave a sound yank. It only sounded with the pop of dry wood, not nearly the wall-jarring rattle she'd expected.
Another pause to listen.
Hearing nothing but night birds, she tiptoed outside.
Dropping her load of clothes at one corner, she began digging out a sock. Back against the rough boards, she bent and poked her toe into the wool.
“Olivia.”
She froze. The voice didn't come from the doorway behind her. It had come from the darkness, beyond an arbor of trees at the short edge of the clearing. Olivia turned in time to see Ty step out.
How long had he been out there waiting? It was an amateur trick, the stuffed shirt in the bed. Her pride stung at being duped by it.
“Going somewhere?” He was stalking her, moving in one step at a time.
She pulled her toes out of the stocking, threw it down and kept silent. Talking hadn't exactly kept her out of trouble.
“You know,” he drawled, sounding far more at ease than he looked, “I could almost be persuaded that you are up to no good.” There was a flinty edge to the accusation, and he moved one step closer. “You would slip off into the night, leaving both you and myself to face the woods alone? And then what, Olivia? With Fouche and DuFresne ready to set the dogs on us, you were just going to skip through the gates of Paris as though no one were watching?”
There was no answering the second part of his accusation, because it was absolutely correct. Olivia swallowed hard. “I'm not a turncoat. You know me better than that,” she pleaded.
“Do I? I don't believe that's an accurate statement anymore. You keep a great many secrets for someone who claims being known to me, Olivia.”
“I'm not betraying you.” She whispered it, with Ty just an arm’s length away now.
“Why did you ask to be recalled?”
He was relentless; she should have been prepared but she wasn’t. She was empty, exhausted, but not prepared. “It is personal. That’s all I can say.”
“Not good enough.” His words, and tone, were steely. She wasn’t getting out of this.
The truth, a voice demanded. She had to tell the truth now, or at least enough of it to be convincing. Did she even know what was true anymore? She couldn’t bear him thinking she had turned against him, but the words were still stuck, as buried now as they had been when she’d penned her letter to Ethan. Humiliation at her weakness strangled any explanation. There was no telling him the mess her feelings had made of things without admitting how she had managed to trap so many other things inside.
“Why did you do it, Olivia?”
“Philipe!” she blurted it out without thinking.
Ty hung before her, frozen, face contorted as though he'd been slapped.
“Philipe. He was so charming, and we spent so much time together. Everything became muddled. Real feelings and invented ones. And then, when I was at my most confused...”
“He was....” Ty nodded, unable to finish.
“Now you begin to understand.” The lie tasted awful, passing her lips. Even worse was the look on Ty’s face, the distance in his eyes. He was closing up, putting on a mask, as they were so apt to do.
“Olivia –”
She cut him off, snapping up a hand. “You're right. I have betrayed you, in a sense. I allowed my feelings to interfere with our mission, and it's made me a dangerous partner.”
“Olivia –”
Sighing, she shook her head, straightening away from the wall. “I'm going back in, and I'm going to sleep. In the morning, if we ever get out of these godforsaken woods, I'm going home to London.
She turned, but Ty grabbed a fistful of her sleeve, jerking her back. “Does Grayfield know?”
“He does.”
Ty seemed to forget the conversation at hand and screwed his face up, confused. “You never shared La Porte's bed. I know where you spend your nights. And where he spent his, whether I wished to or not.”
Olivia planted hands on her hips. “Grayfield doesn't know that.” She jerked her shirt free of his grip. “I'm going in, and I don't want to talk about this anymore tonight.”
She stomped back inside, chased by the anguish she’d caused him, annoyed that her throat ached with the need to cry, and too humiliated to do it in earshot of Ty.
Falling to the mattress, she turned away from the door, hating his footsteps right behind her.
“Olivia, can we –”
“No, Tyler!” She flipped to her back, crying in earnest despite every effort, not able to see his face through her tears in the dark. “I was not being coy when I said –”
“By God, woman, will you shut up a moment and hear me out!”
He dropped to his knees beside her on the mattress.
“You're not going back to London. I've already spoken to Grayfield. I told him it was all a mistake.”
“You did what?” How long had he known, and what had Ethan told him? “Never mind. It’s irrelevant now. What matters is that I cannot fulfill my duties. I'm an unfit partner.”
He pressed her arms hard against the mattress until her shoulders ached. “You'll have to give me a reason that's a damned sight better than that, Olivia. We’ve been through too much.”
She said nothing; nothing was all that came to her. Grinding out an oath, Ty let her go, falling beside her on the very edge of the rough mattress.
She was ashamed. It occurred finally, as she lay in the cold silence, staring at his back. She’d always had control, but her love for Ty was not rational or manageable, and the happiness she had earned was not a lasting thing. There was no admitting any of that to Ty without admitting her worst flaws: she was lonely and determined to be alone. Rolling away from him, she buried her face in the blanket's rough folds, tears wicking silently into the wool.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Not two words.
Since waking that morning, from the edge of the Verriere all the way to the outskirts of Paris proper, Ty wagered they had not spoken two words to each other.
Partly, it was pride. Since their falling out the night before, he didn't much feel like being the first to break the silence. The rest was confusion; he had no idea where to start. Why had she truly asked to be recalled, and why was she still lying to him now? What had happened to Thalia, and where did they go from here?
Only one thing was entirely certain: When they reached the city, Olivia was leaving him. Despite sitting close enough to him on the horse that he could smell her hair, her stiff back for most of the ride had made him feel miles away. No touching, no speaking. Olivia had put an ocean of distance between them in a day's time.
He suspected that she only sagged against him now because of the tell-tale way her head lolled from side to side. He envied her fitful moment of sleep until she cried out, muttering softly.
He steered their horse through the old town gate, now just a pile of timbers that hung like finger bones, their rusted hardware bolted tenuously into the crumbling stone wall. Houses stood tall on either side of the high street where it curved up the hill, dirty plaster battered away by wind and weather in patches, revealing the medieval stone beneath. They looked down with vacant black eyes onto a roadway whose cobblestones had been appropriated years before, leaving only a muddy path. Some of the houses were masked by boarded openings, doors and windows shored up to create a gentleman's agreement which no one remained to enforce. Ty could see no rhyme or reason to the efforts, why one structure had been protected and another, sometimes statelier one had been entirely neglected.
Whatever the case, their fates had common cause: The Reign of Terror. The more upper class residents may have fled, leaving holes in the fabric of trade and infrastructure. Or perhaps they had been taken in a purge, leaving their tenants joyously free of a
landlord until a leaking roof was not repaired, the rents went unpaid and the properties were confiscated by the State. The guillotine, directly or indirectly, had emptied the town one building at a time until only the rats and owls remained to rebel against the Empire.
At the top of the high street, above the silent decay, the road narrowed and became dustier, spared the pooling rainwater of winter's end by a river stone gutter cutting down its center. The road's brown line curved away to the left, nearly in a hairpin, disappearing behind thick stands of trees silvery and plush at the top with overburdened pussy willows. Their destination lay just beyond the elms, if he recalled the tunnel map correctly.
Whitehall's tomb map was old, tattooed onto a scrap of leather sometime just after the Terror had begun. Paris’s underground was riddled with limestone passages, some worn by water and time, others constructed for a secret purpose hundreds of years before. Affairs, assassinations, and rebellions had all shaped the hidden web, branching from the city’s infamous catacombs. He had studied it for months, memorizing routes in case he and Olivia were forced to slip back into the city. At the time, he couldn’t have foreseen them using it under such dire circumstances.
Behind the copses, the land rose again into more of a low knob than a hill. The chateau at its peak was nearly invisible, smudged into the silver and pewter sky behind it by the predawn light of a cloudy day. As they climbed the knoll and the sun moved farther up the horizon, he could more easily make out details of the abandoned mansion. It was ugly in its squareness, hardly more than a large cube of derelict stone. Its architect, a genius of a bygone era, had used that plain canvas to showcase his ornaments, lovely still in the midst of decay. A turret-like portico divided the face of the house, concluding in a baroque arch once set with a small window. The bell-shaped pediment clung to the last black-shingled remnants of a roof, the few pieces not having been claimed by rain or fire. It was nearly comical, hacked and rotting shutters still guarding the high windows, while the wide front entrance stood doorless. In the face of so much ruin, somehow a tenacious rosebush crept between the ground-floor windows, putting on eager buds in celebration of spring. The sight cheered him, and for no sound reason, he felt a shred of optimism about what lay ahead. Despite the guillotine’s harvest, years of war and suffering, he believed what he had told Olivia. Napoleon could be stopped and France could be saved.
They gained the last of the slope to an old circular drive now overgrown to a patchy green lawn. He wondered if Olivia would recognize the chateau. Had she ever been there? She would surely be aware of the place. Would she put the pieces together and identify it as her father's summer home?
When he brought their horse to a stop at the top of the drive, she slipped down without waiting for help, standing with her back to him, arms wrapped around her midsection. He pulled his coat free of the roll behind him and held it out to her on a hooked finger. “Cold?”
“No.” She didn't turn around, or even glance over her shoulder. There was no way to tell without seeing her face if she was upset about the previous night, the house, or both. Probably a combination of all of it. Hopping down beside her, he decided to let her be and collect their gear.
He unstrapped his haversack and slung it across his shoulders, wriggled into his coat, and stuffed Olivia's conscripted pistol into his trousers. The other sack he dropped at Olivia's feet, letting her decide whether to claim it. Finally, he unfastened the bridle from the horse and gave the beautiful chestnut's coat a deep scratch. “Lots to eat up here. You'll be king of the place.” He rubbed behind the horse's ears one last time and started for the house.
A high limestone wall stuck out on both sides like arms, still topped along most sections by wrought-iron work. The black metal arches twisted up into points like little fleur de lis, imposing enough to deter any scaling of the walls below, even after a hundred years.
They would have to pass through the crumbling house, an equally perilous endeavor.
He mounted the fan of front stairs, catching the sound of Olivia's footsteps behind him as he passed over the threshold into a once grand hall. It was nothing now; just a passage from the front of the chateau to the back, stretching to a bright rectangle where the rear doors had been torn free. Doves cooed from somewhere deeper inside the house, and a few drops of rain kissed his forehead through a hole in the floorboards above.
There was something infuriating about the house's chaos. It hadn’t been looted, just ransacked. The mahogany frame of a little sofa was upended, barring a doorway to the right. Among the wood shards and leaf litter, he could spy the rat-chewed leather spines of books and a silver candle stick. They hadn’t come here to steal, hadn’t come out of greed or hunger. It was hate. And ignorant hate, at that.
Ty lifted his boot over a splintered section of elaborately carved banister, but a hand on his shoulder gave him pause, surprise at her touching him with purpose. Her fingers curved to his sleeve, but her eyes were fixed on a shadowed doorway to their left. After a breath, she moved toward it, one slow step at a time, leaving him with the feeling that she was under an influence not her own. She was compelled, and he could not have stopped her had he tried. Instead, he followed behind Olivia, casting nervous glances at the beams creaking overhead.
It had been a drawing room, if he had to guess by what remained. Arms and legs of fine chairs, now silver and weathered like driftwood were scattered about the floor. Shreds of drapes, velvet weight still pulling at the rotted fabric, hung loosely about the window or littered the ground underneath. They might have been Bourbon blue or a rich vermillion once, now an ash gray.
Olivia picked her way across the room over heaps of detritus, not seeming aware of where she was, or that he was there. She knelt beside a cobweb strung fireplace, its plaster work impressively still intact under layers of dust, and ran her fingers along the top of a portrait. The gilt frame was gone, pilfered or destroyed. Only the rough wood strips to which the canvas had been fastened still remained. The fabric was torn from left to right a few inches from the top. The ragged flap hung to the floor, a sail fluttering a little in a breeze that whispered perpetually through the house's skeleton.
Olivia pinched the corner and raised it up.
He had expected the portrait to be pristine, intact, a face staring back at them across time. He wondered, watching Olivia smooth the canvas and align the tear, why he'd thought it. Time and weather had not been any kinder to the oil paint than it had been to the rest of the house. Around the edges, the brush strokes were chipped, and swaths of color crazed into little islands like an unfinished puzzle. The tear, however, had been a sort of boon, preserving enough of the work that he could perceive the heart of the painting. A sweep of chestnut hair framed a fine pair of blue eyes holding a seductive feminine challenge. He had seen the same look in Olivia's eyes often enough.
She grabbed a free edge of the canvas and began to pull, intent on saving what was left of the portrait. As she stretched the canvas out from the frame, dry, aged paint surrendered under the tension, crumbling to the floor in slow-drifting flakes.
“No, no!” Olivia pressed at the crumbling portrait with desperate fingers, but her efforts only made it worse. More bits of paint clung to her hands, floated like ashes to join the rest of the rubble beneath her knees. Her shoulders slumped, rolled forward, and Olivia hung her head. Never had he seen her so defeated, so crushed.
His heart broke. “Olivia? Is there something –”
“No.” She rubbed hands over her face, but there was no telling if she was crying or just tired.
“There's a knife in my pack. I could cut it.”
She stood and crossed the room impressively fast, given the obstacles, and pushed past him out into the hall. “I'm ready to go.”
He should say something, but he had no idea what. Swallowing down an ever-growing ache in his chest, he led Olivia through the house and into the remains of a garden. Old, matted grass and a few patches of gravel and tree branches were all that
remained. They passed through a rusted iron gate on the far side, its weathered cry serving as a warning that only the dead lay beyond.
It was modest as family plots went, only a few rows of headstones testifying to the legacy of a large and powerful family. Perhaps it was because no one could ever agree who should be buried there. Wives or mistresses, and the children of each created enough discomfort to drive the other off, even in death. Ty knew the dance well, had observed the same friction in his own family. His sister, whenever she died would be gloriously interred at Westminster without question, while even a hint of his joining her would cause half the family to brick up the cathedral doors. Time had got the last laugh here though, having reduced all but the newest headstones to a blank slate. Anonymous and forgotten.
The crowning centerpiece of the hallowed yard was a mausoleum. It was a miniature replica of a Roman temple, complete with arched doorways framed with Corinthian columns. He could imagine the shoulder-high urns that had flanked the steps once overflowing with well-tended flowers, but now they housed only clumps of moss and bony twigs.
Fishing a hand inside his pack, Ty produced an awl he'd taken from the cabin and a small pocket knife he'd found at the soldiers' camp. While Olivia wandered the yard behind him examining headstones, he knelt and went to work on the gate's heavy iron lock, feeling a momentary pang at his set of lock picks, lost somewhere amongst the insanity of the last few days. He’d had them a long time. Sighing, he took stock of the puzzle before him. There was little skill involved. He guessed it had kept people out more by looking imposing, driving looters to find easier booty, than by any real complication of the mechanism.
A moment later, with the protest of a quarter-century, wood and iron doors swung inward.
He had begun to wonder at Olivia's lack of interest regarding their destination until he turned and saw the slack, defeated manner in which she stood before one of the grave markers. She stared for long minutes, which would not have been strange, except that the stone was entirely blank. Ty began to worry that the last two days, their fight, and whatever had come before at the camp was taking a dangerous toll. He came down the steps, not close enough to intrude, but near enough that he wasn't forced to shout her name. “Olivia? Whenever you are done...”
