The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two

by Michele Jaffe

  Sophie shuddered as she read these words in the journal she had almost tripped over earlier, but she could not keep herself from turning the page.

  Passion for Beauty makes men weak.

  Passion for Beauty makes me women strong.

  Those were the last words in the book. The rest of it was equally strange, all about gold and beauty and blood, but more harrowing was the fact that Sophie knew the hand in which it was written, and knew that it belonged to the voice she had heard earlier, the voice she had thought was that of a friend, the voice of the murderer. Sophie remembered the shocked expressions on the dead faces of Tottle and Sweetson and imagined hers had been the same when she heard that voice, a voice from whom she thought she had nothing to fear, ordering her death. Setting the book aside, she stood up and began pacing the room. It had to be at least a quarter past one by now, leaving her only three quarters of an hour to live, or three quarters of an hour to make her escape. She could hear Kit in the hall outside the door, humming to himself while he sharpened his knife on a whetstone, getting ready for two o’clock.

  Her eyes scoured the room for the hundredth time seeking anything that she might use to escape. For the thirty-eighth time, she found herself staring at the large, brass candlestick standing on the table by the side of the bed, and for the thirty-eighth time she reminded herself that it was bolted down and that she could not budge it. Had it not been, it would have been a choice item to use on Kit’s head, if she could have convinced him to open the door. But as it was, she would have to somehow lure him all the way into the room and then make him bend down and help her pull it on top of him before she could put it to any use at all. All of which seemed highly unlikely.

  She continued her pacing and scouring, trying to focus her thoughts on her escape. Now, now that it was almost too late, she knew who the murderer was. She had heard the voice from the corridor calling for her death, and all the pieces clicked succinctly into place. Suddenly she had seen that Constantia had actually been covering up for someone else. Suddenly she had understood that there was another person who fit, as neatly as Crispin did, the profile of the murderer Constantia had drawn. Someone who would have been threatened by notes referring to the death of Constantia’s first husband, threatened enough to kill. Someone who had killed before out of love for Constantia, killed her first husband, and would kill again, kill Lord Grosgrain, and then kill Tottle and Sweetson for the threat their blackmail posed of revealing the crimes to the world. Each of these murders, Sophie saw, had been committed out of love, by someone whose love for Constantia was all powerful. Someone whose happiness was identical to Constantia’s.

  But even if that person was not Crispin, Sophie knew now that he did not—and would not—love her. There could be no contradicting Constantia’s evidence on that front, no way around the fact that Crispin had merely been repeating lines to Sophie to seduce her, lines from someone else’s love scene. Probably, Sophie surmised, he had done it to make Constantia jealous, but the motive was unimportant. The life she had dreamed of with Crispin was just that, Sophie knew now, a dream, and an impossible one. If she should manage to escape with her neck still attached to her body—which looked increasingly unlikely—she would not even go to Sandal Hall to burden Crispin with her presence or with the fact that she had won their bet, but would just see to it that the real murderer got what was coming to h—

  Sophie’s eye fell on the candlestick again, and suddenly she understood how she could use it. Not wasting a minute, she climbed on the bed and began screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Kit ran in, brandishing his knife in front of him. “Shut that,” he told her menacingly, gesturing in the direction of her mouth.

  But Sophie ignored him and continued with her screaming. “A caterpillar,” she screeched. “I saw a caterpillar. It went under the bed, it was huge, it went under the bed!”

  Kit shook his head at her. “You have more to be afraid of than a caterpillar, Miss Champion,” he told her with a glint in his eye. “Half an hour from now, you will be dead. If I were you, I would not spend too much of my remaining time thinking about vermin.”

  “Please,” Sophie begged him with tears in her eyes. “Please just kill it for me. As a last act of kindness for a condemned woman. Please kill the bug. It’s under the bed, I know it is.” When Kit still did not move, Sophie went on apologetically, “Unless—unless you are afraid of caterpillars too?”

  Kit looked at her with utter disdain. Without wasting a word on a response, he wrapped one strong hand around Sophie’s ankle to ensure that she could not escape and leaned over and looked under the bed. “Nothing,” he sneered, preparing to stand. “I can’t see—”

  The candlestick, table and all, fell heavily across his back, knocking him out and loosening his grip on her leg. “Leverage,” Sophie whispered under her breath with a small smile to the heavens, and then quickly fled through the open door.

  Two flights of stairs put her in the entrance hall, where she found the door unlocked. She opened it slowly, wary of guards, and peered into the street. It was completely empty, and the only sound that met her ears was the welcome noise of bees buzzing around the flowering tree she had seen through her window. Looking in both directions, she emerged from the shadows of the entrance into the bright sunlight of the street and turned right.

  “Stop the girl,” Kit shouted from a window above her, rending the tranquil summer silence. “Stop her, she’s getting away.”

  A dozen men leapt out of the doorways and windows of the surrounding houses and came toward her. They had been waiting for her, waiting for her to try something. Without thinking, Sophie took off, her feet pounding, running as fast as she could go. She turned right, then left, then left again, looking over her shoulder every three steps, her heart racing. They were right behind her, closing the gap, and she pushed herself forward harder. Her legs began to throb, but she did not stop running, right, left, right, right, left, winding around the alleys in this unknown part of London, until she was gasping for air and thought her chest would explode.

  They were still behind her but far enough now that she decided to take a chance. She made two quick turns, left and then right, and slid into the first narrow alleyway she found. She slowed her pace now, knowing that there was no way they could have seen her, but she did not stop running. She moved quickly down the alleyway, trying to muffle the sound of her footfalls so as not to give her location away. All she had to do was get to the next street, put that alley between her and her pursuers, and she knew she would be safe. With this single thought, she followed the alley as it wound around, continued down it as it became narrower, and darker, and then, abruptly, came to an end.

  “I’ve got her,” she heard one of the men say as she stared at the blank wall in front of her. She was about to try to climb it when a forceful pull on her shoulder dragged her down to earth.

  Crispin crossed the threshold of the back room of the warehouse without hesitation and cleared his throat. “Good afternoon,” he said amiably to the two people there.

  Constantia reacted first, grabbing her companion by the arm and screeching, “Lawrence, what is he doing here?”

  Lawrence swung around from the fireplace. In his hands were the papers and books with which he was feeding the fire, the last evidences of the largest counterfeiting ring to ever successfully operate on English soil. When his eyes met his friend’s, they were cold and menacing. “That is a very good question my darling asks. What are you doing here, Crispin?”

  “Arresting you in the name of the Queen,” Crispin explained without preamble.

  “The name of the Queen,” Lawrence repeated sarcastically. “That certainly sounds mighty. I suppose next you will tell me that you are the Phoenix.”

  “I am.”

  “Bah.” Lawrence dropped the papers he was holding onto the fire, pushing them in with an iron poker.
He spoke without turning. “The Phoenix has fought and vanquished better men than you, Crispin my friend.” Lawrence spun around, the poker in his hands, its tip red-hot and aimed at Crispin’s throat.

  Crispin ducked and passed under the poker, heading for the fireplace. He grabbed the other poker that was lying there with his left hand and had it up in time to parry Lawrence’s thrust from behind. Lawrence, wielding the poker like a sword with both hands on one end, ran at Crispin. Iron clanged against iron as the two men went through motions they had practiced together so many times as boys, never thinking they would end by using them against each other as men. The two men were fighting in front of the door now, and Constantia was forced to huddle in a corner as the duel waged on.

  They danced around each other, testing, jabbing, until Crispin decided the time had come. With a terrifying holler, Crispin threw himself on top of Lawrence, the poker pressing horizontally across his enemy’s chest, pinning him to the wall next to the door. They stayed locked like that, Crispin on top, the poker between them, Lawrence panting beneath it, until Lawrence opened his hand and let his weapon fall to the floor.

  “Nicely done,” Crispin commended his friend without lessening the pressure on the metal bar that imprisoned him. “But you are no match for me. You are finished, Lawrence. It is over. Your little experiment in counterfeiting is at an end.”

  “Counterfeiting?” Lawrence asked through his panting. “Look around you, Crispin. What do you see? An empty warehouse. And even that won’t be here for very long. Constantia and I are just trying to clear away all the debris left behind by her late husband, so we can begin afresh together. I am afraid I don’t know anything about counterfeiting.”

  Crispin smiled at him, a sad smile. “Why don’t I tell you about it, then. We have some time before the guards come to take you away, and we may as well spend it in pleasant conversation.”

  Lawrence’s only reply was a snort.

  “It was not just counterfeiting,” Crispin told him. “It was murder too. But all for a common reason. All for love.”

  Lawrence tried to push the poker off his chest, but Crispin was there, pressing him back. Crispin leaned into him, leaving less than a finger’s width between their faces, and the two men glared into each other’s eyes.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Crispin admonished him, holding his gaze. “I will tell you the story. It is actually quite interesting. It starts off two and a half years ago, when I broke up your counterfeiting scheme the first time and killed your alchemist, Damon Goldhawk. Of course, I did not know at the time that you were the mastermind behind it, or I would never have let you get away. But I was forced to leave for the continent, and during my absence, you decided to undertake a new operation, this one even more ambitious than the first. You needed a replacement for Damon, so you found the foremost alchemist in England, Milton Grosgrain, and gained a hold over him by using Constantia, the woman you loved. You knew he could not resist her charms—no man can—so you made him fall in love with her and marry her. Then you threatened that she would leave him if he refused to help you revive your counterfeiting operation. He agreed, he could not help himself, and for a time everything went smoothly. But then the blackmail began.

  “Lord Grosgrain probably did not see any real harm in the letters when they arrived, letters that raised questions about the death of Constantia’s first husband, because their accusations were vague. He was willing to pay the blackmail and be done with it. But not you. You could not be so sanguine. Because you actually had killed Constantia’s first husband, and the letters suggested a real peril to you. Only the person who had murdered Constantia’s husband would have been upset enough by the letters to kill the blackmailer, and you were the murderer. You planned to kill Richard Tottle, but you knew that you could not do so without arousing Lord Grosgrain’s suspicions. So, after making sure you had everything you needed from Lord Grosgrain, had benefited fully from his alchemical expertise, you killed him.”

  Crispin shook his head in mock sympathy, but his eyes never left Lawrence’s. “It must have been quite a shock to you when the blackmail continued even after Richard Tottle’s death. But you were committed, and would not be stopped. You killed Sweetson, your new blackmailer, just as you had killed Tottle. And then, finally, you were free to indulge your dual loves—your love of gold and your love for Constantia. You had killed to protect both of them, and now you planned to reap your rewards. But there was one small problem. The Phoenix.”

  Crispin went on, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “The Phoenix had destroyed your counterfeiting operation the first time around, two and a half years ago, and this time you did not want to take any chances. So you circulated rumors about the Phoenix, made suggestions about his behavior, said enough to make the Queen worry. By drumming him out of favor, you thought you would make him easier to identify, and easier to kill. Unfortunately, you forgot your mythology. The Phoenix never dies.”

  “This is all terribly interesting and dramatic,” Lawrence interjected impatiently, “but it has nothing to do with me. Nor can you prove that it does.”

  “That, my friend, is where you are wrong. Because there was an eyewitness to all of this. Someone who was there for every act of your macabre play.” Crispin turned to look at Constantia now. “You, Constantia, you know all about it.”

  Lawrence held his breath and watched Constantia, who was cowering in the corner. The expression on his face could have been either hope or fear.

  Constantia directed her gaze at Crispin, tears quivering at the corners of her eyes. “Can’t you see how he is looking at me?” she asked, trembling. “If I say anything, he will kill me.”

  “There is no need to be afraid,” Crispin told her, soothingly, without moving his body from Lawrence. “His threats will not work anymore. I know that he has manipulated you and made you bow to his will, to his wishes. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes!” Constantia sobbed, looking more like an angel now than ever. “Yes, oh, Crispin. It is all true.”

  Lawrence looked at her hopelessly. “Can’t you see that this is a trap, Constantia darling? He has nothing on you, nothing, so long as you do not say a word.”

  But Constantia ignored his warning. “You cannot hurt me anymore, you monster,” she told Lawrence through her tears. “You cannot make me bend to you. You told me that if I loved you, I would have to do what you said. You pretended to be testing my love, my loyalty. You tried to make me wretched, make me vile, make me into a criminal like you. But you couldn’t. Oh, Crispin”—she looked at him now—”you cannot imagine the fear, the terror under which I have been living. You were right, he did kill Milton.”

  “My god,” Lawrence cried, and the words seemed to have been wrenched from deep inside of him. “My god, Constantia, you are the counterfeiter.”

  “Stop, Lawrence,” Constantia said, rising and crossing the room toward the two men. “You have called me names for too long now. I will no longer submit to you. You killed Milton. And afterward you liked to make me think about it, about how you had hooked the horse’s leg from the alley, about how you had laughed in Milton’s face as he lay dying on the pavement, laughed when with his dying breath he said he still loved me.” Constantia was shaking, her hands clenched into fists, as she looked at Lawrence.

  Then she turned her eyes on Crispin. “You were right about the others as well. He killed them because of the blackmail. And after each of them he reveled in what he had done, reveled in remembering how they died, how surprised they looked. If I did not cooperate, I knew he would do the same thing to me. He put his filthy, low-life hands on me, Crispin. He made me call him my lord. He used my body. My body.” She began to tremble. “I hated him. I told him I hated him, that I wanted to see him dead, and that only made him want me more, made him—” She turned her head away.

  Lawrence had lost color as she spoke and was now an almost cha
lky white.

  Crispin was seething. “I will kill you for this, you bastard,” he told his former friend. “I will kill you for every way you hurt her.”

  “Wait, Crispin,” Constantia interjected. “It was not just me. He had people, servants, spying on you and Sophie in your chamber to hurt you, too. He made me go to Sophie and tell her about you, about us, tell her lies, use the words you had used with her and pretend you had said them to me, so she would hate you. He wanted to break her heart so that your heart would break. You have no idea what a monster he is, no idea—” She broke off, sobbing.

  “Is this true?” Crispin demanded of his friend.

  “Constantia,” Lawrence whispered in the tone of a man who has just been stabbed through the chest. “Constantia, how could you do this?” His eyes were staring sightlessly at the corner of the chamber where the object of his address was standing, wiping her tears. Soon, Crispin’s eyes moved there too.

  “Constantia,” Crispin told her. “You have already had enough pain for one day. I do not want you to have to see what will happen next. Will you go? Will you leave here if I promise to make sure he can never hurt you again?”

  Constantia swallowed hard. “I am so scared, Crispin.”

  “There is no need. Go outside and wait for me. I will be out soon. As soon as I have finished with him.”

  Constantia shrank as she neared the door next to which the two men were standing. She pressed herself as closely as she could against the far lintel, then, closing that door behind her, ran across the outer room.

  As soon as he heard the sound of the big door clanking shut, Crispin removed the poker from Lawrence’s chest. Lawrence did not move.

  “I am sorry,” Crispin said when the silence between them had stretched. “I wish there had been some other way to show you what Constantia was and what she was doing. I tried to warn you, but I guess there was no way for me to prepare you.”