“Robert Archer, by all that’s holy. Haven’t seen you in an age. You look wretched.”
He made me sit in his parlor while his manservant brought a bowl of brandy, water, and sugar.
“This is killing you, isn’t it?” Derek asked, his eyes narrowing in concern. “Do not shake your head at me; you are fading, my dear fellow. I saw your brother the other day. White as a ghost and thin as a lathe. This is what comes from this wretched drohner business. Thank God my ancestors weren’t titled and pedigreed and felt the need to have a drohner. The idea of putting all a dynasty’s strength and hope into a hunk of stone is nonsense. If you lose it, you lose everything. You are vulnerable. Look at you.”
“But with a drohner, we have the strength of giants,” I answered, sincerely believing it. History had proved it—the Archers had been powerful until this disaster. “Someone out there wants to destroy our strength. And when I find that someone, he will answer for it.”
I left him after another bowl of brandy to hunt Folkstone. As I popped in and out of every gaming hell in St. James’s, a lightskirt attached herself to me. She wore a tight green silk that showed off her pretty ankles, and a large bonnet that hid her face.
“I’m out at pocket tonight, love,” I told her. “And on a mad goose chase besides.”
She followed me a little while longer, then drifted away. I never discovered Folkstone, but I found comfort in a cellar gin shop—a short way to hell at a penny a glass.
I dragged myself out at a time respectable people were just beginning to stir. The cold dawn light hurt my eyes, and I walked, half-blind, toward the river.
They waited for me at a turning near Charing Cross, two men armed with cudgels and death in their eyes. I fought madly, drawing blood with my knuckles, but they battered me soundly.
I saw my lightskirt out of the corner of my eye. She ran toward one of the thugs, lifted him from me, and slammed him to the pavement. The other stared in stunned surprise, and died with her fingers in his chest.
I rolled to my feet and ran. Or tried to. My legs shook and buckled, and I could not breathe. In considerable pain, I sagged against a wall and watched the night-slayer murder two men. She ripped out their throats and fed on their blood, while I slid to the ground in terror.
She came to me. She’d removed her bonnet from her sun-yellow hair, and her dark eyes held mine.
“Who were they?” she demanded. “Why did they try to kill you?”
“I do not know,” I answered, trying to catch my breath.
“You do know.” Her green silk was wet with blood, and blood had spilled from her mouth to dry in rivulets on her white throat. “You know. Think.”
“I was looking high and low for Folkstone. Maybe someone does not want me to find him.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I told Derek.” Had he betrayed me? Had he stolen the drohner, for whatever reason, and tried to stop me finding it? “Please, God, not Derek.”
“Look at me,” my night-slayer said.
I tried to turn away, drunk and weeping. She took my face in her strong hand and forced it to her. I gazed into her bloody face and the cold evil in her eyes, and quailed.
“You have not found your drohner, have you?” she asked. “You have not looked. You have killed yourself instead.”
“What are you talking about?” I said wearily. “I’ve searched and searched. I’ve gone all over England—”
Her fingers dug into my jaw. “You have not looked hard enough. Else you would have found it. You have buried yourself because you fear the truth.”
I was alone, aching, and sick. What truth? “Why are you trying to save me?”
“I told you why.”
Because I’d saved her child. I was Androcles to her lion. I’d pulled the thorn from her paw when I’d taken the little girl to Lizzie. I wondered how long my parole would last.
“Your daughter is growing tall,” I said. The girl had become dear to me, and the thought of her brought a faint smile to my cracked lips. “Her hair is the color of sunshine.”
My night-slayer slid her hand to my aching chest, tracing a gentle curve over my ribs. “You have a good heart, Robert. I feel it, the goodness in you. It beats through your blood and your body. It is why you are dying.”
“I don’t . . . understand.”
She smiled, cruel and animal-like. “Do you fear me?”
“God, yes.”
“Good. Fear keeps you alive. Love and goodness will kill you.” She leaned closer, her breath touching me. “Let me find the drohner for you.”
I tried to shake my head “No...”
“I know where it lies, and why it lies there. You gave me a life. Let me give yours back to you.”
I had no idea what she was talking about—how could she know? If the drohner were so easy to obtain, I’d have found it by now. “You saved me twice already,” I pointed out. “Surely our bargain is finished.”
The night-slayer gave me a pitying look. “Robert, you believe that the difference between life and death is breathing and not breathing. The battlefield taught you that. But the difference is so much more. I will give you that understanding, if nothing else.”
My head ached and throbbed, and I knew I’d never stand up. “You give me riddles.”
“Let me teach you the answers to them, then.”
I roused my strength and shook off her hand. “No. You can’t understand what this is all about. Our bargain is finished—you have no need to come to my aid again.”
She dragged me to my feet with a power that terrified me. “Seek not to bargain with a night-slayer, Robert Archer. You will lose.”
My night-slayer threw me aside with easy strength and walked away into the darkness.
After that night I remained stone-cold sober. I took little more than a glass of port or brandy every day and turned my face from gin shops. The haze receded from my world, and I saw with sharp outlines for the first time in years.
I saw that my brother was no more than an idiotic brute who enjoyed tormenting his wife because the law gave him leave to. I saw that I had succumbed to self-pity and self-indulgence not only over losing the drohner, but because I was poor, lonely, struggling, and resented the fact that Freddy had inherited everything. I had a long climb to make out of the abandon to which I’d sunk.
And I saw that my brother was dying.
I saw it in his thin hands, the weary look in his eyes, the pale outline of his lips. His walk had slowed, his steps had become clumsy, his hair thin and lank. A wasting disease, some whispered. The absence of the drohner’s protective magic, my friends said. The loss of honor, I knew inside myself. He’d never had much honor to begin with—the loss of the collective honor of the family had broken his heart.
I finally ran Folkstone to ground and flattered him into showing me his drohner. It was not ours.
He had it enshrined in his front parlor, in a japanned cabinet with a tiny lock. The polished black cube rested on a cushion of velvet, surrounded by junk—pressed flowers, a cork from the first bottle of port he’d drunk at Carleton House, a diamond stud given him by a lady.
Folkstone did not understand the drohner in the least. It was not some memento, to be shut in a curio cabinet until shown to any who asked. Folkstone beamed over his treasure, but I knew it for what it was, an imitation that some artist had made for him, probably for a ridiculous price. A pretty thing, but it did not have the depth, the resonance of old magics beating from the ancient past. I politely admired it, hiding my disgust.
A few months passed. I mulled over what my night-slayer had said, that I knew where our drohner was but feared to look for it there. My thoughts darkened and I did not like them. Easier to comb the city, keeping an ear open for any rumors or tales of a stray drohner where it did not belong.
My brother slowly sickened, and he would no longer receive me at the house. Margery was belly-full again. I assumed she’d had the intelligence to drag old Frederick off to bed the same night she’d lain with me so t
hat he would not doubt the child was his.
Lizzie’s brood grew to include a little boy with hair the same shade of brown as mine. Her good-natured lout of a husband either did not notice or did not care.
On one visit, I told Lizzie I loved her.
“Don’t be daft,” she whispered as we lay entwined on the blanket in the cellar. “I’m thirty-five if I’m a day.”
I traced her cheek. “In all of the world, there is no woman with as good a heart as yours. Whatever happens to me, whatever happens to you—I love you as I love no other.”
Lizzie flushed, pleased, and hid her face in my shoulder.
Of the other woman in my life, I saw no sign. I did not forget about her this time, and I had stopped drinking until she receded into the haze. I watched every shadow, every passage, every stray woman who passed me.
But I never saw the night-slayer ... until I went to Lizzie to pay what turned out to be my last visit.
Lizzie’s husband was out, and I lingered a little longer than usual. When I put on my clothes and went out to Lizzie’s front room, the little girl with sunshine hair came to me.
“Uncle Robbie,” she said. “I have your bit of stone.”
And she pulled out of her little apron the drohner, which had been missing for nearly three years.
I stared at it, dumbfounded. The tallow candlelight warmed its polished depths, and its underlying red streaks burned redder as I reached for it.
I felt its magics even before I touched it. I was an Archer, and generations of Archers great and ignoble had poured their magics and their hearts into it. They called to me across the years, and my fingers trembled as I pressed the stone to my own heart.
The drohner was smooth to the touch, almost soapy-feeling. It had a heat of its own, which warmed my numb fingers. It sang to me, possessed me, welcomed me home. I closed my eyes, letting the peace of the thing spill over me.
“Robbie, are ye all right?”
I opened my eyes to find Lizzie at my elbow. She smelt of candle grease and lovemaking, and she watched me with tender concern.
“Where did you get it?” I asked the little girl.
“A lady brought it to me. She said you were looking for it.”
I stared, alert. “What lady? Who was she?”
“She didn’t give no name,” the mite said. “She gave it to me and told me you needed it.”
I looked at Lizzie in great alarm. “You did not let this woman into your house, did you?”
Lizzie watched me with eyes that held only curiosity. “No, we saw her in the market. She was polite spoken—a lady. Do you know who she was?”
A night-slayer. Whose daughter you’ve had the keeping of these last four years.
“I must go. I must ... ” I trailed off, not certain what I had to do. I absently kissed Lizzie on the cheek. “God bless you, Lizzie,” I said and started away.
“Robbie.”
Lizzie’s voice sounded odd, and I turned back. She was twisting her plump hands in her apron. “Robbie, I think ye should not come back.”
I stopped, stricken.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s Jack, ye see.”
Her husband. I made for her, anger rising. “What has he done? Has he hurt you? Does he know ... ?”
Lizzie’s mouth softened into a fond smile. “He’s not done a blessed thing. He don’t say nothing, but ... He’s getting on a bit, Jack is. And he ain’t got no one but me.”
I stared at her, hurt in my heart and the drohner singing in my soul. “You love the lout.”
“That I do. I always have.”
Yet, she’d spared some little corner of her heart for me. I went to her and touched her cheek. “He’s lucky, is Jack.”
Lizzie kissed my fingers. “I’ll not forget ye, Robbie.”
And I would never love another woman as strongly as I loved her. For all Lizzie eked out existence in the back streets of London with eight children and no money, she had more sense than the most sophisticated city trader, more courage than any regimental commander, more compassion, more caring than any gentlewoman I knew.
I kissed her lightly on the lips, my eyes wet. I slid the drohner into my pocket, tousled the little girl’s sun-colored hair, and left Lizzie’s house forever.
***
I sensed the night-slayer before I saw her this time. My sobriety had led me to a heightened state of awareness, so I was not startled when she fell into step beside me in the rainy March darkness as I made my way from Lizzie’s street.
I did not ask her where she’d found the drohner. I thought I knew, and I feared the knowledge.
“If your brother dies,” the night-slayer said in her clear, even voice. “You inherit the lot.”
“His son does,” I corrected her. “If Margery is carrying a boy and it lives.”
“Likely you’d be appointed guardian, as his uncle. You’d have the care of Margery as well. She’d see you would not lose by it.”
I stopped in the street. The fog-shrouded darkness was mostly empty—only one person pushed past us, grunting in irritation. “Why do you want Freddy to die?” I asked. “Why should you care what happens to me?”
The night-slayer stared at me with fathomless eyes in the face of an ordinary, pretty young woman. “She is a beautiful child. You give your lover money for the keeping of her, don’t you?”
“What I can spare, yes. Lizzie and her husband have nothing.”
“And you have so little.” The night-slayer cocked her head. “Why should you give it, for the child of a creature like me?”
I shrugged, though my chest was tight. “It seems the thing to do.”
“You wish to keep her safe, so she will not end up prey for a night-slayer. So that one will not find her and make her like me. You want to give her a chance.”
“Yes.”
“And for that,” she said simply. “I want everything for you.” She paused. “What will you do with the drohner?”
I had it inside my coat, resting against my chest. “Return it where it belongs.”
She studied me a moment, eyes glittering in the dim light. “I will go with you.”
“No.” Dear God, I did not want her in my brother’s house, with Margery ... and my child.
She showed her teeth in a smile. “I will go anyway.”
***
My brother’s footman gave the night-slayer a disdainful look when we entered the house, clearly not understanding what she was. The night-slayer had dressed respectably enough this evening, but my brother leapt to the same conclusion his servant did.
Frederick entered the small sitting room and bathed us both in his sneer. “What are you doing here, Robert? With one of your doxies, no less?”
I took the drohner from my pocket and held it out to him.
Frederick’s face drained of color, his mouth dropping open. “Dear God. How did you—”
“Take it.”
I set it into his hands. Frederick stared at the drohner for one long moment, then he looked up at me, eyes burning in his white face. “You brought it back to me.” He whispered. He looked at the black stone with deep reverence. “Do you feel it? It knows it’s home. So long. It has been so long . . .”
“Reward him,” my night-slayer said sternly to my brother.
Frederick looked up from the drohner, blinked. “What?”
“Reward him. For returning it.”
Frederick’s face regained color, and with it his old obstinacy. “Devil take him. He lost the bloody thing in the first place.”
Frederick found himself against the wall with the night-slayer’s hand hard on his chest. She brought her face close to his and spoke in slow deliberation.
“You are an empty shell of a man,” she said, her voice low and fierce. “Your brother, Robert, keeps his word to a filthy night-slayer who can smell his blood and could kill him in a flash. His honor runs deep within him. You believe honor lies in a piece of polished stone. You are a fool.”
&nbs
p; The night-slayer’s fingers split the silk of Frederick’s waistcoat and tore into the flesh below. Freddy screamed.
I ran across the room and flung myself on the night-slayer, but my grip could no more move her than I could have moved a stone monolith. “Let him go.”
She turned to me, her eyes pools of night. “Without him, you can have everything. His house. His money. His wife. His life.”
“I don’t want them!” I shouted. “I don’t want them.”
The night-slayer’s fingers eased back from Frederick, but only a fraction. “You have nothing. Keep the drohner. You can have his riches, his power.”
“I don’t want it if it makes me like him. The drohner is all he has.”
The night-slayer regarded me a moment longer, then she wrenched her fingers from Frederick’s chest. His blood covered her fingertips to the first joint, and Frederick moaned piteously.
“You are a singular man, Robert Archer,” the night-slayer said. Her voice had quieted, her eyes suddenly looking almost human.
The door crashed open and Margery darted into the room. “What is happening? Frederick, what is the matter?”
“Get out,” her husband gasped at her. “Robert has brought his tame night-slayer to kill us.”
My night-slayer carefully sucked Frederick’s blood from her forefinger. “I am not tame.”
Margery did not appear to notice her. Her gaze fixed on the drohner that Frederick clutched in his shaking hands. “What is that?”
“The drohner,” I said quietly. “I brought it back.”
The color left Margery’s face. She pressed one hand to her abdomen and the other to her mouth, then she turned and fled.
I went after her. For a small woman, Margery moved quickly. I did not catch up to her until she’d reached a bedchamber, where I found her vomiting into a basin.
“Margery,” I asked in alarm. “What is wrong?” I touched her shaking back. “Is it the child?”
Margery did not answer. She lifted away from the basin, her face wet with tears and spittle. She reached for a towel and hid her face in it.
Murder Most Historical: A Collection of Short Mysteries Page 12
