“Good God! Father . . . what happened?!”
Sir John’s eyes went cold, his conflict resolved into an icy control that Lawrence remembered from all those years ago. Sir John clasped his hands behind his back and stood ramrod stiff. If he had any compassion for what his words had just done to his son, not one flicker of it showed on his stern face.
“I assume you have something to wear to the funeral.”
Lawrence had no words. There was a soft sound behind him, a discreet clearing of the throat, and he turned to see a tall Sikh in a deep blue turban, loose jacket and trousers.
“Sir John, I heard Samson, is . . .” The Sikh stopped talking as he realized that the man in the doorway was not the master of the house. His eyes snapped wide and he smiled in delight. “Master Lawrence!”
“Singh!” cried Lawrence as he clapped the other man on the shoulders. “My God!”
Singh regarded him in a more fatherly way than had Sir John, looking him up and down and appearing to be greatly pleased at the tall, handsome man he saw before him. But then his face clouded.
“I’m so very sorry, Lawrence. We’re all shocked. This has been a terrible, terrible event.”
“Thank you, I—” as Lawrence fished for words Sir John gave the globe an irritable spin and stalked past him. His footsteps echoed with force and anger throughout the hall. Lawrence and Singh watched his stiff retreating back.
Singh met his eyes and then busied himself with taking Lawrence’s traveling cloak and hat. “It’s good that you’re here.”
“Is it?”
Singh hung the cloak and paused for a breath before turning to face him. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”
“Ben’s fiancée . . . Miss Conliffe?”
“She’s here,” said Singh. “Sleeping upstairs. Poor lass is in a very bad way.”
“She must be devastated,” Lawrence said, his eyes drifting toward the staircase.
“Her father arrives tomorrow. For the funeral.”
“That’s tomorrow as well?”
“Yes.”
“This has all happened so fast.” Lawrence shook his head. “Where . . . where’s Ben?”
“Being cared for,” said Singh.
“I want to see him.”
Singh shook his head. “It would be better if you did not—”
“Tell me,” said Lawrence.
CHAPTER SIX
Blackmoor Village
None of the horses Lawrence had ridden as a boy were still at the estate but there were several healthy animals stabled behind the house. Lawrence saddled a sturdy black gelding and as he rode away from the Hall he wished the horse could sprout wings like Pegasus and fly far and away, not back to London—no, he wanted to go home to America. Home was there, not here. This place had not been home for a long time, and he suspected it never would be again.
There were too many ghosts.
Ben. God almighty, Ben!
He had lived so long without Ben in his life that he should have been better prepared for such a catastrophe, but with every second the knife of grief drove deeper into his heart. Benjamin. He could not be dead.
Not now. Not when Lawrence was here, at home. It was so unfair, Lawrence wanted to scream at God.
He walked his horse as far as the stone arch and finally stopped and sagged against the wall, all of the power gone from his muscles. He clutched the reins with one hand and balled the other into a fist.
“Ben . . . ,” he whispered and beat the side of his fist on the ancient stones. “God damn it, Ben. . . . God damn you!”
Tears boiled in his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Lawrence pounded on the stones over and over again as sobs wracked his big frame. The horse nickered nervously and the ravens chattered in the trees like noisy mourners.
“Ben,” Lawrence said again, and this time his voice was choked and raw, “I’m sorry. . . .”
THE VILLAGE OF Blackmoor was small and rustic. Nothing seemed to have changed in the last thirty years, and probably not in the hundred before that. The thatched houses still sat at odd angles to the road as if the inhabitants didn’t want to be reminded that their neighbors were a short stone’s throw away. Gardens were well tended and embowered by low stone walls overgrown with creeping vine, and smoke drifted prosaically from each chimney. As the gelding followed the road into town Lawrence caught the eye of several villagers, some of whom tapped their companions to notice the stranger passing among them.
Lawrence tried hoisting a genial smile onto his face, but the scaffolding of grief wouldn’t support it and each grin collapsed into a brooding scowl. It was all the same to the villagers, who gave him only calculating stares and suspicion.
He rode into the town square, which was anchored on one side by the gray pile of the Presbyterian church whose stained glass windows depicted scenes of righteous fury and harsh celestial judgment. Never a cheery place, and Lawrence could not imagine his brother—his lighthearted and smiling brother Ben—getting married in such a temple to gloom and damnation. But was it any more fitting a place for a burial? Lawrence wavered on the edge of not caring and feeling that the murkiness of the church matched his own mood.
The other anchor to the square was the tavern, and Lawrence knew that it saw a more religious attention from its devoted followers than did the church.
But he passed both and headed down a side street to a massive wooden structure with the ill-chosen name of Black Ice. The icehouse was a major employer in the town and many of the men of Blackmoor started their working lives there as boys and ended them there, as Ben did now, as bodies laid out on slabs of ice awaiting burial.
Lawrence nearly gagged at the thought, but he steeled himself. He dismounted and tied his horse to a post. He walked to the big barn doors, which stood slightly ajar. A waft of chilled air brushed his face as he stood there, and he knew that going inside was going to cost him.
If Ben can endure it, then so can I.
With that he pushed the doors wider and stepped inside.
THE ICEHOUSE FELT colder than any place he had ever been. The air was thick and damp and the lanterns did nothing to dispel the oppressive murk. He moved down the main aisle, past empty wooden bins for shaping the ice, past the great saws that cut it into slabs or cubes, past long blocks of ice covered with straw to slow their melting, past side rooms where butchers stored and cut their meats.
Ben Talbot lay on the last block of ice at the end of the row, deep inside the building by a back wall. Someone had draped him with a sheet and though the color had faded to a muddy brown, Lawrence could tell that the stains on the sheet had once been bright red. It hurt him to see his brother laid out in such a place, displayed on ice like a choice cut of beef. Defenseless and vulnerable, without dignity.
And alone.
Alone in this cold and terrible place.
Lawrence reached out an unsteady hand and pulled the sheet down. At first he just uncovered his brother’s face, and for a long moment Lawrence stood there and tried to impose the memory of his brother’s boyhood features over the landscape of this dead man’s face. Ben’s eyes were closed, and though that was a mercy it also removed the element of personality. This was a man he did not know who had been the boy—the brother—he had loved.
Ben’s face was turned away, the exposed cheek smooth, but when Lawrence bent over to examine the landscape of his brother’s features he saw with horror that the opposite cheek had been slashed from temple to jawline. Four long, deep wounds.
With trembling hands, Lawrence pulled the sheet down to Ben’s waist.
“Dear God!” The cry was torn from him and he staggered back, hand to his mouth. There did not seem to be enough air as the whole room spun crazily around him. He staggered forward until his thighs bumped against the unyielding ice of the slab. “What . . . what . . . did this?” he demanded, but his only answer was his own echo.
Ben Talbot had been eviscerated by some terrible and savage claw. The flesh of his muscular abdomen had been slashed as if by
swords, but the tears were too jagged to have been made by edged steel. These were definitely claw marks, but nothing short of a tiger or a bear could do such horrible damage. Ben’s skin was bloodless and white and hung like strips of stage canvas, and in the gaps of the wound Lawrence could see striated muscle, yellow globules of subcutaneous fat, coils of purple intestine, and the jagged ends of shattered ribs.
He sensed movement behind him and turned to see a grim-faced butcher in a stained leather apron standing near. The man knuckled his forehead.
“You’d be Mr. Lawrence I expect?” he said, his breath steaming in the frigid air. “Mr. Benjamin’s brother?”
Lawrence nodded, unable to speak.
The butcher reached past him and pulled the sheet up until it covered everything except Ben’s face. It was a merciful act and Lawrence nodded his mute thanks. He turned away to blink tears from his eyes. Lawrence leaned on the wooden wall and breathed with great care until he was sure that he would not disintegrate into tears.
After a few moments, the butcher cleared his throat. “We were all sorry about your brother. He were a good man.”
“Was he?” Lawrence said distantly. He turned and looked down at Ben. For just a moment it seemed as if his brother were merely sleeping. “I missed his whole life . . .”
The butcher shifted uncomfortably. “Sir . . . I might be overstepping meself . . .”
Lawrence turned to him. “Speak your mind.”
“Well, sir . . . your father instructed me to bury your brother’s effects with him.” He dug into a large pocket and removed a small leather bag. “But it seems a shame, though. Especially you being his brother an’ all.”
He offered the bag, and Lawrence hesitated only a moment then took it from the butcher’s bloodstained fingers. Lawrence mumbled a disjointed thanks, and the butcher nodded and vanished back into the gloom of the icehouse. Lawrence lingered for ten minutes longer, staring at Ben’s face and holding the bag of his possessions to his chest. He could feel his heart beating against the clenched fist that held the last things Ben had touched before he died.
Then Lawrence stumbled out of the icehouse and into the light.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lawrence brooded into his whiskey, thinking some of the darkest thoughts he owned. The tavern was nearly as dark as his temper. A haze of pipe smoke and burning peat hung like a cloudbank beneath the creosote-soaked wooden rafters. The voices of fifty men and a handful of women filled the air with a constant din that nearly drowned out the off-key tinkle of the piano and the tone-deaf voice of the drunk singing the wrong lyrics to the song the pianist was playing. An eight-year-old boy walked backward through the room, scattering sawdust on the floor that he scooped from an old leather ship’s bucket. Portraits on the walls showed the haughty faces of landed gentry who had sponsored the tavern at different times in its long history. A two hundred-year-old blunderbuss was hung on pegs over the bar, and the barman—an evil-faced exsailor with a knife scar that made him look like a pirate—tugged on animal-headed beer taps to fill pewter tankards with dark local beer.
Lawrence saw all of this when he’d come in but little of it registered. He found a table in a corner and had settled down to examine Ben’s belongings and lose himself in the strong whiskey of the region. It was rough and raw and nasty and suited his mood to a tee.
He sipped his whiskey and used one finger to push the items into an uneven line on the table. Ben’s reading glasses were bent and scratched, showing much wear, and Lawrence wondered if Ben had become a scholar. He’d always loved stories as a boy. What would he have read as a man? Lawrence did not think that Ben would tend toward the scientific—natural philosophy was their father’s passion; Ben had always seemed more of a dreamer. Novels, perhaps? Or poetry. Lawrence decided that he would find out. Gwen Conliffe would know, and might perhaps enjoy talking about the things that fascinated Ben. Singh would know, too.
Lawrence would not ask his father.
There had been a pocket watch among Ben’s things, and Lawrence recognized it as the one that had belonged to their maternal grandfather—someone they’d never met but whose belongings had been shared out among the boys by their mother. Lawrence had owned a silver cigar case as a boy and he’d used it to keep crickets and other bugs that he could catch. Thinking of it nearly carved a smile into the harsh frown that was etched onto his mouth, but then he thought about its loss, along with everything else he’d owned, after his mother’s death, and his frown deepened.
Two items were of particular interest to Lawrence and he picked each of them up several times. One was a daguerreotype of Gwen Conliffe. Lawrence had never met her and he studied the picture with great interest. She was quite a beautiful woman. Quite extraordinarily beautiful, he decided, with intelligent eyes that—in this picture at least—showed a great depth of kindness, perhaps of insight. And despite the tradition of austerity when posing, there was a hint of a smile to quicken the pulse. Though her manner of dress was the height of propriety, there was no hiding the lushness of her womanly curves. Even moody and in his cups Lawrence was self-aware enough to be wryly amused that his animal instincts were drawn more powerfully by this woman in her proper dress than from the oceans of naked flesh that had been available to him for the asking over the last few years. And for that insight a tiny smile did touch his mouth, just for a moment.
He held her photograph and wondered what kind of woman she was. His mother had been brilliant and sad and funny and complex. Few of the women he had met in the theater—whether as fellow actors or among the legions of theatergoers who flung convention to the wind to dally with a “star”—had half of her wit and charm, and none of her grace. He studied Gwen Conliffe’s smile and the lift of her chin and the expression in her eyes and thought that he saw in those features a woman of more complexity than he would have credited for the fiancée of a country gentleman. If, indeed, that was what Ben had aspired to be. And somehow this insight into Gwen jabbed him because it suggested so many things about Ben. If Ben had wooed and won such a woman then he must have been a remarkable person, and Lawrence felt guilty for not having worked to cultivate Ben’s acquaintanceship beyond letters. And he felt anger for having the opportunity stolen from him forever.
He set down the photograph and picked up the oddest item among Ben’s meager possessions. It was a medallion on a silver chain. Lawrence held it up to the lamplight to study the image stamped onto the metal disk: a monk in medieval robes surrounded on all sides by snarling wolves. How odd, he thought, and he could not determine if the monk was in peril of being devoured or if some celestial power was holding the wolves at bay. The carving was too crude to clearly present the meaning of the scene. In either case the medallion unnerved Lawrence in ways he could not clearly define. Doom or salvation? Why would Ben carry it? What did it signify to his brother? The butcher had said that it was among his possessions, not on his person. Something carried rather than worn.
A shadow fell across the medallion and Lawrence looked up to see the middle-aged publican who owned the tavern. The barman nodded at the empty glass at Lawrence’s elbow and gestured with the whiskey bottle he carried.
“Another, sir?”
Lawrence nodded and watched distractedly as the man poured a hefty slug and moved off. Lawrence glanced at him as he passed and saw a look of faint recognition on the man’s face. Putting two and two together, perhaps.
A noisy group of men called for fresh drinks and the publican and his assistant hurried over to pour whiskey and beer. They sat in a loose circle around a large table on which sat their hats—bowlers, cloth caps and top hats—and an assortment of tankards and wineglasses. Lawrence idly took the measure of this group as they were the centerpiece of the whole room, the kind of group who felt themselves to be of sufficient importance to speak louder and with less circumspection than anyone else. One of them was dressed in severe black with a Roman collar and Lawrence marked him as the village vicar. There was a very well-dressed m
an wearing expensive clothes. Local squire, Lawrence determined, and next to him was a ramrod-straight man with thick salt-and-pepper hair that Lawrence would have wagered was exmilitary, and from his patrician features probably an officer. Next to him was a fellow with a fierce Lord Kitchener mustache and suspicious eyes who was almost certainly the local constable—he was in shirtsleeves but there was an official-looking tunic draped over the back of his chair. The bald man with spectacles had an educated look, and Lawrence figured him for a scholar or a doctor, and the broad-shouldered man with the weathered face and piercing hunter’s eyes looked like a farmer or gamekeeper—but definitely an earthier man than the others.
This was a game Lawrence often played when he was out and about, and now he did it to distract himself from the heartbreak that threatened to unman him. Like most trained actors, Lawrence was well practiced at guessing professions from dress, mannerisms and patterns of speech. Observation of real people in such situations was part of what made him so good at his craft. If he listened for ten minutes he could play each of these men convincingly on stage.
The men jabbered, each of them trying to dominate the conversation so that their remarks overlapped and commingled.
“It’s going to be hard to replace young Toland,” said the squire. “One of my best men. Widow and five little ones now on my rolls. Not to mention I’m down two hundred pound on that flock. I’d put another two hundred on the head of the beast that did this if I had it in hand.” He shook his head. “A widow and five little ones . . .”
“I feel for Sir John,” rumbled the constable. “Poor sod. Losing his son like that. ’Course he always was a bit on the edge of mad in my opinion. If anything puts him over, this will.”
The squire sniffed. “What becomes of Talbot Hall when the old man passes, I wonder.”
Lawrence’s hand tightened around his whiskey glass. Were they talking about my family?
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