by Decca Price
He watched Montfort impassively as the stricken man groaned and raised himself on his forearms, forehead nearly touching the ground. Montfort crawled slowly away from him, dragging his legs along with the strength of his upper body. As he labored to put distance between them, Latimer wondered whether a second blow would be necessary.
Nevertheless, in two strides he caught up and poised himself to smash Montfort’s skull. At the zenith of his swing, he hesitated.
“Edward, for the love of God!” Montfort struggled for breath. “Help me up. I’ll give you what you want.”
Latimer lowered his arms and stepped closer. “What do you have I would want now?”
Montfort drew a wheezing breath and choked. “The land, I’ll give you the land.” He collapsed onto the muddy ground and moaned. His body curled in on itself, fists close to his chest.
Latimer stood close enough to kick him now if he wanted to. He bent to hear Montfort gasp, “Shouldn’t have tried to fool you... of all people... I...” More words were lost in a fit of racking coughs. “The manuscript... yes...”
Latimer’s heart thudded. He threw the rock aside and reached down to push Montfort over onto his back and assess his injury. Too late he saw Montfort’s eyes fly open as the man’s hands shot out to grasp his ankle. Latimer flailed and went down.
The soft earth cushioned this fall but he barely had time to recover before Montfort was on him.
Claire’s mind shut down and she ran through the narrow passage, stumbling over the uneven stones and crashing off the rough, turfy walls. She gulped in cold, damp air as she fought to suppress the bile surging into her throat. She didn’t notice the gradual rise of the ground until she shot into the clearing.
The night was deathly quiet except for her harsh pants. The silence was the silence of alarm, the wild things of the land quivering in dread as they waited, hidden, for the hunter to pass. It was the hour when the world teetered between death and birth. She remembered the hare and shuddered.
To her right stood the dense crepitate curtain of the wood. To her left, ragged spikes of absolute black thrust upward—the fractured walls of the chapel. Farther left she sensed more than saw the ruined tower. Her flight had brought her around to her goal.
The blank dome of the sky pressed down on the edges of the earth, trapping Claire and every other living thing like specimens in a bell jar. She gasped for breath and prayed for strength as even the stars seemed to be dying.
But as a cool breeze freshened from the east and plucked at her hem, Claire spirits rose irrationally. The stars would not go out. The night would not win. Sunrise was creeping closer, and at the edges of the world, the first tinge of dawn bled into the sky, flattening the deep obsidian into a thousand variants of raven, jet, sable and deepest indigo.
Like a match flaring in the darkness, Claire’s heart revealed its secret at last. Finding Montfort safe and alive mattered more than anything ever would in her life. She would be allowed to atone for her mistakes. The future beckoned with a stingy hand. But what happened now would determine the difference between a life merely bleak or entirely without joy. The world without Montfort in it somewhere would be a world with no light for her.
Gathering her skirts, ready to spring across the sodden meadow, she heard a faint shout and recognized Montfort’s voice. Ragged grunts and oaths led her directly to the place where two men struggled. Both were on their feet, wrenching and grappling at something. She attempted to thrust herself between them and stop them, only to find herself rudely shoved onto the stony ground.
She heard a shout of triumph and the fight abruptly ended. A shadow loomed over her, blocking out the moon, then a hand reached down and pulled her to her feet. She knew him instantly, the feel of him and his scent.
“Thank God, you’re not hurt!” Clutching Montfort’s sleeve, she turned to face her husband, so relieved that she didn’t notice how still both men were. “I’ve left you, Edward,” she said, embarrassed at how feeble she sounded. “I think you’ll agree your behavior in all respects has been abominable and I expect no interference from you. Let me go and no more will be said.”
She felt Montfort shift his weight from one foot to the other as he cleared his throat.
“Mrs. Latimer,” he said dryly. “You probably can’t see it, but I happen to know that, thanks to your interference, your husband now has my pistol in his hand and is pointing it toward us.”
A ghost of a laugh came from Latimer’s direction. He stood about five feet away but stepped closer so Claire could see the small weapon he held.
“I have no desire to use this,” he said, “except to persuade you. A bullet hole in a corpse shouts murder, although I suppose if I had more time, I could make your deaths look like a crime of passion.”
Claire moved fractionally closer to Montfort.
“For the sake of argument, though, I’d like your opinion,” Latimer continued. “Is it more likely, Montfort, that you would kill my bride and then yourself or vice versa?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No, no one would believe you’d destroy yourself simply because you committed a crime. She, deranged by jealousy and shame, would have to shoot you.”
He paused, as though playing out the scenario in his mind. “A pity,” he said at last. “It could be perfect. My masterpiece.”
“Your masterpiece!” Montfort asked.
“He says he murdered Josiah,” Claire said. “With a stone.”
“Josiah, yes,” Latimer said, his voice so soft they could barely hear him. “No one questioned it. Accidents happen. Life goes on.”
“And his wife?”
“She persisted in lying to me. I tried to make her tell the truth and suddenly she was dead.”
“But why did you tell me so much?” Montfort asked.
“I needed your complicity. No, I needed your fear to bind you to me. I could never depend on love to hold anyone close. Even God requires his creatures to fear him. We don’t obey his commandments because we love him, we seek to avoid punishment. Ecclesiastes. Fear is the fountain of life. Praise spoils the child but the rod, the rod. You must learn to love the rod, my father always said.”
Latimer choked back a sob.
Claire released Montfort’s sleeve and gripped his arm, digging her fingers into the hard muscle to hold him still. Pitching her voice so that Latimer could hear her clearly, she said, “Edward punished Lucy, Rhys. He loved Lucy, so he punished her. Is that what you mean, Edward?”
“She was too trusting. I had to protect her.”
“How did you do that, Latimer?” Montfort said through clenched teeth. “What did you do to Lucy?”
“Don’t you dare speak her name, Rhys! It’s because of men like you that Lucy suffered. You, and Joss, and your preening brother George. She didn’t know how men use girls like her and throw them away. Leaving him in the cider house was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I had to protect my lamb!”
“What did you say?”
Claire wrapped both hands around Montfort’s arm as tightly as she could and pulled him back. “No, please. He’ll shoot you.”
“I should have let the flames take both of you, Rhys. As it was, I barely got you out of there after the roof collapsed. You were so drunk you didn’t remember going back for him, and that was the blank slate I needed. I was in complete control—until she, this woman who is now of my flesh, came along.” He spat on the ground.
“Where is Lucy, Latimer? Do you know?”
Latimer laughed like a drunken man. “Do I know? Is she in Heaven? In Hell?”
“I know,” Claire said, her clear tones ringing on the night air. “She ran away, didn’t she, Edward? She couldn’t wait to get away from you, because of the way you hurt her.”
“Stop!” Rage made Latimer’s command more a roar than human speech. “Not another word. This whore lies, Rhys, did you know that? My wife is a liar. She lied to me about her virtue, she lied about loving me. She’ll tell any lie now to save herself.”
Even the night seemed to hold its breath as Claire gathered the courage to speak aloud the horror.
“Lucy was carrying his child. She tried to run away, but I think Edward killed her, too. There’s something—something horrible down there in the ruins, half buried in the mud. I think it’s Lucy.”
With a low howl, Montfort wrenched free from Claire and lunged low. Latimer stumbled back when Montfort’s head connected with his solar plexus and a sharp crack split the air. Claire threw herself to the ground and waited, eyes squeezed shut, digging her nails into the earth.
The struggle ended almost as soon as it began. Afraid of what she would see in the pale, creeping dawn, she raised her head. Two men were on the ground, one kneeling over the other, but she couldn’t distinguish them.
“Come here quickly!”
“Rhys!”
Claire scrambled to her feet and stumbled over to find Montfort holding Latimer awkwardly. Her husband’s legs were bent sharply at the knees and his upper body lay limply across Montfort’s thighs and chest, cradled in his arms. She knelt beside them.
“He’s shot himself,” Montfort said. “It must have been an accident. He was aiming at me when I took him by surprise.”
“I’ll run to the house for help,” Claire said.
“No, stay. It’s a belly wound and it’s bad. The pain should have knocked him out, but the loss of blood will do for him in short order in any case.”
Latimer was trying to speak. “Lucy,” he said weakly. “Lucy. You lie. I couldn’t kill her. I did everything for her. Where you found her—she fell. She was going to Joss, to meet him at her tower, to run away. I waited there. We argued.” He grimaced.
“Oh, Lucy,” he wailed. “Your tears. I never stop hearing your tears! She cried all night and begged me to fetch help, to take her home. It was a night just like this one. The sun was just rising when her tears stopped.”
“For the love of God, Edward! Say you didn’t let her die here!”
“... in my arms. My angel died in my arms.”
Claire reached out and tentatively touched Edward Latimer’s hair, gently stroking it away from his face. She closed his staring eyes.
“I found a letter Lucy wrote,” she said levelly. “Josiah had hidden it in a book. It was terrible, what she wrote. Edward burned it so nobody would know. No one would believe me, he said.”
“Nobody will know, now.” Montfort eased Latimer’ to the ground. “I want you to go back to the house and summon my butler. Tell him there’s been an accident and don’t say anything else. But first, take me to what you found.”
Claire took Montfort’s hand and led him down into the yawning passage as the first rays of morning tipped the topmost stones with gold and left him beside Lucy Latimer’s shallow grave.
Montfort returned to Oakley Court to find Claire in the library where he and Latimer had shared so many conversations, liberally aided by cigars and fine malt whiskey. Already those times seemed like a dream of another life.
Claire was huddled under a wool throw on one end of a small leather sofa, Annie at her feet staring into the fire. Tea sat on a table within reach, untouched and stone cold. Neither spoke or looked up when he entered the room.
“Annie, is it?” he said softly. The girl stood and faced him, her eyes dark against her pale face.
“You’ll be wanting to speak to miss,” she said. “I’ll wait outside until she calls me back. She’ll be needing me.”
He nodded, but as he stood aside to let her pass, he took her arm. “Not a word to anyone.”
“I’m no fool,” the girl said, raising her eyes to meet his.
Once the door had closed behind her, he sat beside Claire and took her hand. It was stiff and icy.
“Claire,” he said. “I know you’re exhausted, but we must talk.”
“So much waste,” she said without looking at him. “Why? And for what?”
“Edward Latimer said it himself. Fear. He was so possessed by his own fear he couldn’t see what was real anymore.”
“But to destroy the very people he loved!” She shifted in the chair and drew the wrap more closely around her. “He was going to kill you tonight. Then he was going to come back to Oak Grove and kill me.”
“I wouldn’t have let that happen. I knew that message couldn’t have been from you. He said to meet at the queen’s tower. Only Lucy called it that.
Claire plucked at the loose weave of the wrap. “Lucy. What—?”
Montfort rose abruptly and went to the sideboard, where he poured a pale amber liquid into a stemmed glass. He knocked back half of it in a gulp and refilled the glass before seating himself on the sofa opposite her. Hunched forward, twisting the stem before him in both hands, he looked down into the bright liquid glowing in the firelight, but what he saw was mud and cowed men with shovels and rakes. Lanterns that burned feebly in the harsh daylight. Rotting cloth and stained bones. A small glittering comb with the entwined initials “LL” picked out in garnets and pearls, its twin revealed as the diggers gently pared the earth away from Lucy’s remains.
“There’s no doubt it was Lucy.” He grimaced. “Two years! It’s horrible to think of. Two years out there alone in the cold and rain. While we all thought of her, talked of her, worried about her, hoping she was well.”
He took another gulp, then set the glass aside as if repudiating it. “It seems so obvious now, the way he used to prowl those ruins at night. God! How much other peculiar behavior do we humor in our neighbors, laughing it off as harmless eccentricity! He was mad!”
He shot her a glance.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “He was your husband. You must have seen good in him or you wouldn’t have married him.”
“Edward.” She pronounced the name as though it were from alien tongue. “Edward didn’t know how to love. He wanted to, I could see that—he could be kind and thoughtful. But in the end he just didn’t know how. He saw life as though he were looking at it through a dirty windowpane. “
She looked at him finally, her face a mask of questioning pain. “Nothing was clear or clean to him. I think he hated himself and that loathing blackened everything else.”
“What you said about Lucy...”
“Yes. He didn’t deny it when I confronted him, but I don’t think he knew the worst of it. All these months, he’d been searching for anything—a journal entry, a note, a scrap of paper—that would give him away. He talked of how he tried to burn the house down as though it were the most rational idea in the world.”
“‘The Rector.’ He was hardly rational if he thought any publisher would have printed a story like that. It’s abominable. And I can’t believe Joss ever intended to expose him at the risk of hurting Lucy.”
“Whatever Josiah was planning, it cost him his life.”
“Joss wasn’t all bad, Claire.”
She looked up in surprise and watched as Montfort went to the desk and came back with a large softbound book.
“Joss did leave a manuscript,” he said before proffering the book to her.
She took it gingerly and, opening to the first page, the title written with Josiah’s unmistakable flourish. She brought it closer to the light and read, “Clarissa Barton; or, The Noble Heart.”
“Did you read it?” she asked softly.
“I did. You should, too. It will answer one question, at any rate—why Joss left you behind.”
She stroked her hand across the smooth page. “It hardly matters now. Mr. Carter and Miss Burton—neither of them was real. They were characters in the kind of story we like to tell to children. ‘And they lived happily ever after.’”
Claire slowly unwound herself from the sofa and gestured toward Montfort’s glass.
“Do you think I might have some?” While he busied himself with decanter and glass, she hugged herself, the plush Persian rug soft under her feet. He
handed her a glass and drank deeply. Fire fizzed down her throat and warmed her from her belly to the crown of her head.
“What is this?” she asked, looking into the depths of the glass, grateful for a distraction.
Montfort held his glass up to the light. “Cider. Our best. My mother often serves it here instead of champagne. In a good year, it’s difficult to tell the difference.”
Claire held her glass up next to his and examined the delicate pattern etched on the bowl. Moths dancing through a riot of apple blossoms. Tiny bubbles flew up in columns behind the figures and vanished when they reached the surface. She drank again.
“You can’t,” she said finally. “You can’t tell the difference about anything here until it’s too late. I thought Herefordshire would be like Surrey, only more picturesque. It tricks you, though. The same sun, the same rain, the same people, you think. Oh, the foods and the way people talk is a little strange at first. But it turns out everything is strange.” She emptied the glass and set it down carefully. “Did I say strange? Incomprehensible. Fey. I never should have come here. I don’t belong and I never will.”
“Don’t say that. None of this was your fault. The seeds were planted long before you’d ever heard of Josiah Carter or known there was such a place as this.”
“You’re saying it was fate, then? Destiny?”
“I don’t know what to call it. Is anything inevitable? Can we go back and put a finger on the place where, if we’d known, we’d make a different decision, take a different course, and alter the outcome? Do we even know the outcome would be better? We’re still alive, after all.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Claire. I ask myself constantly what I could have changed, could still change, about myself. If you’d known everything in the beginning, what would you have done differently? Refused Josiah? Given up on him? Listened to your father and sold Oak Grove?”
Her answer pierced his heart.
