“Do you remember when we met?” Her little fingers had crept upon his hand now, and the intimacy of the touch surprised him. They rested, those gentle fingertips, upon his palm, just below the wrist. “The affair with the mecha, and the dragon.”
How on earth could I forget? He permitted himself a slight nod. His scorched hair moved against the pillow, crisp white linen charm-washed and smelling of freshness. His throat moved as he swallowed, dryly.
Her words came slowly and with some difficulty. “There was… during that rather trying episode, a certain artefact came into my possession. I bore it for a while afterward, but when the plague… Archibald.” Her tone dropped to a whisper. “I could not bear to lose you. And the weight of the artefact… the method of its acquisition… it wore upon me. I sought to expiate a measure of my sins, such as they are, by ensuring your survival. You are proof against Time’s wearing now, and your faculties will suffer no diminishing. You are immune to disease, and to all but the most extraordinary violence.”
He waited, but apparently she had finished.
His most immediate objection was at once the most pressing and the most illogical. “You should have told me.”
“I said I would.”
“In twenty years’ time. Had I known, Miss Bannon, I would have taken better care with Ludovico’s slightly more tender person.”
“No doubt.” Her hand retreated from his, stealing away. A thief in the night. “It is my doing, Clare. Perhaps I all but murdered him.”
What must it cost her, to admit as much? The tide of Feeling still threatened to crack him in two. “You should have told me.” Querulous, a whining child.
“I feared your reception of such news.”
Rightly so, madam. “Can it be reversed?”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you reverse it?”
“No.” Quickly, definitively. “I am loath to lose you, Archibald.”
“But Ludovico is expendable?” For a moment he could not believe he had said such a thing. It was brutish, ill mannered, illogical.
“We are all expendable, sir. Have I not often remarked as much?” She stood, and it was the brisk Miss Bannon again. “No doubt you are quite angry.”
I am a mentath. I do not anger. He closed his lips over the words. His body informed him that it had been held passive long enough, and it had a rather large desire to attend to some of its eliminatory needs. Anger is Feeling, it is illogical. It is beneath me. “Your Shield performed a miracle upon you as well, Miss Bannon. You lost nothing in that transaction.”
She became so still even his sharp ears could not find the sound of her breathing.
There was no crackle of live sorcery, no shuddering in the walls of her house as he had sometimes witnessed, her domicile responding to her mood as a dog responds to its master’s tension.
Finally, she let the pent breath out. “Nothing but Ludovico.” Each word polished, precise. “And, I suspect, your regard. I shall leave you to your rest, sir.”
Hot salt fluid dripped down Clare’s temples, soaked into the pillow and his scorched hair. He lay until she closed the door with a small deadly click; he slowly pushed back the covers and shuffled to the incongruously modern privy. There was a mirror above the sink-stand, but he did not glance into its watery clarity.
He did not wish to see the wetness upon his cheeks.
Chapter Six
Too Winsome And Winning A Place
She had never thought to be glad there were still Papists left in Londinium. As always, where there was Religion there was also a man whose palm was amenable to greasing. Consequently, even a wayward son of a Church such as Ludovico Valentinelli could be laid to rest in Rome-approved fashion. Emma paid for masses to be sung for his soul, too, though it was her private opinion that Heaven would bore him to a second death and Hell was entirely too winsome and winning a place to hold him for long, did he seek amusement elsewhere.
Yellow fog wreathed the gates of Kinsalgreene, elbowing uneasily with the incense puffing in clouds from swinging censors. There was a choir of small urchins, and the rolypoly Papist in his black cloth, scarlet-crossed stole, and long supercilious nose looked askance at her as she stood, clearly not willing to leave as a woman traditionally did before the coffin–the most comfortable that could be obtained, for he would not rest in a beggar’s box–was lowered and covered.
The Papist muttered something and glanced at Clare, who stood leaning upon Horace the footman’s proffered arm. Finch was there too, in his dusty black–appropriate despite himself, it seemed–and her housekeeper, Madame Noyon as well, dropping tears into a small, exquisitely wrought lace handkerchief. Even broad genial Cook, whom Ludo had tormented shamelessly, stood solemn and sedate. The footmen wore their best, indenture collars glowing softly, and the maids, both lady’s and common, scullery and all-work, sniffed and dabbed.
Of course he had been at the maids too, but they seemed to have forgiven him.
The hearse and attendants, not to mention the pallbearers, constituted quite a crowd. Pages, feathermen, coachmen, mutes, how he would have hated the attention.
If she raised his shade through the lead sleeve and oak covering, he would sneer and spit.
Or perhaps he would not. That was the trouble–how could one ever be sure what someone would do, could you restore them to a manner of breathing? Memory was an imperfect guide, and Ludo in all his changefulness could not be compassed.
It was, she suspected, why she had kept him so close.
Mikal was at her shoulder, and she denied herself the faint comfort of leaning against him. There was a toll exacted here, and she paid it as Madame Noyon and the maids retreated, as the coffin was lowered and the footmen clustered around Clare. She paid double when Clare did not so much as glance at her, staring at the coffin’s mellow polished gleam with his bright blue eyes narrowed and intent.
You should have told me. Of course, even a machine of logic trapped in flesh would feel disturbed, or even outright betrayed, at such a secret. Sometimes she wondered if other mentaths were as thin-skinned as her own. They had alarmingly sharp faculties of Perception and Deduction, and were said to have no Feeling whatsoever. Indeed, it was supposed to discommode them quite roundly.
Sometimes, though, she suspected that a lack of Feeling was not quite the condition Clare suffered.
Her mourning-cloth was not quite appropriate, for what proper lady would feel the need to mark the passing of a man who was, strictly speaking, a hireling?
Yet she chose to wear something close to a widow’s weeds for him, if only to silently tell Clare… what?
Black henrietta cloth, an unfashionably small bustle, a crêpe band holding tiny diamonds to her throat, long silver and jet earrings thrumming with Tideturn’s stored charge, matched silver cuff-bracelets ice-burning under her sleeves and gloves. She had not worn these earrings for years, not since the last time she had been in grief..
Thrent. Harry. Jourdain. Namal. Eli. Now another name to add to the list. Ludovico. A rosario, perhaps, like the one the Papist clutched as he mumbled his prayers, sealing the baptised body of one of his God’s children into eternity.
There were other matters to worry over, chief among them the richly appointed carriage that had lurked behind the cortège and even now squatted, toadlike, outside Kinsalgreene’s high, flung-open iron gates, their spikes wreathed with anti-corruption charms and deterrents most–but certainly not all–grave-robbers would hesitate to cross. She had paid to have the Neapolitan well armoured against the theft of his shed mortal cloak. Time and rot she could do little against now, but she could make certain nothing else interfered with his resting.