The Sea Peoples(46)

“No,” dream-Castaigne said carelessly; inwardly he was snarling like a rabid wolf.

That’s very odd. He’s almost ready to murder her because she loves his cousin, but there’s no . . . he doesn’t want her himself, but the thought enrages him utterly. What a strange man!

He’d seen people willing to kill over jealousy, and ones who’d done it—Boise was a fairly law-abiding sort of place even in the rough remote parts he’d lived in, but people were people. This was different.

“Louis’ regiment is maneuvering out in Westchester County,” Hildred said.

Castaigne rose and picked up his hat and cane. There was a flash of disturbing images; holding Constance by the throat and smashing the silver hilt of the cane into her face again and again, blood spattering into his mouth and eyes as the fragile bones crunched and an eye popped out of its socket. . . .

“Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?” Constance’s father said with a laugh.

At the word lunatic a flash of white fire went through Alan’s mind, or rather that of the man whose body he shared. The thoughts that followed made his desire to beat the young woman’s face in look like a gentle caress, and they started with a red-hot knife-blade. Alan tried to pull away. He wasn’t a squeamish young man, and he’d grown up around the normal accidents of herding and logging and hunting dangerous beasts, with a couple of brief brushes with bandits. He hadn’t flinched when the only thing to do was give the mercy-stroke to a man who’d had a horse stumble and fall and catch his pelvis between the saddle and a boulder.

But there were things you didn’t want to know human beings were capable of, even in imagination. The dream held him, in bonds that were no less unpleasant for being imperceptible. Hildred Castaigne didn’t just want to kill, he wanted screams and begging and pleading and to gloat over despair. The agonies of a continent wouldn’t satisfy his lust for revenge.

“I think I shall drop in and see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two,” Castaigne said quietly.

How can they not know? Alan thought. How can they listen to him and not know what he is?

“Poor fellow,” Constance said compassionately, with a shake of the head. “It must be hard to live alone year after year. Poor, crippled and almost demented. It is very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.”

“I think he is vicious,” her father said, beginning again with his hammer.

“No, he is not vicious,” Castaigne said. “Nor is he in the least demented. No more than I.”

Alan’s dream-mind laughed aloud. That was rare enough in these dreams that he enjoyed the moment threefold, because Castaigne was demented; like a large barrel full of starving coyotes fed on locoweed and kicked downhill.

And vicious didn’t begin to cover it.

Hildred went on: “His mind is a wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would give years of our life to acquire.”

Hawberk laughed, and Alan felt a kinship with the bluff Englishman. Hildred amplified:

“He knows history as no one else could know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that such a man existed, the people could not honor him enough.”

“Nonsense,” muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

Where Alan came from the word would have been bullshit with an added horse-laugh.

“Is it nonsense,” Hildred said, suppressing another vivid image of the heel of his shoe crushing Hawberk’s jaw so that he choked to death on his own blood: “Is it nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissardes of the enameled suit of armor commonly known as the Prince’s Emblazoned can be found among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and ragpicker’s refuse in a garret in Pell Street?”

That hit, Alan thought, watching the shock on the middle-aged man’s face. That really hit.

“How . . . how did you know? Know that they were missing?”

“I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.”

“Nonsense,” Hawberk said again, but his hands trembled under the leather artisan’s apron.

“Is this nonsense too?” Castaigne said, with a smile that felt as if it could cut like a razor. “Is it nonsense when Mr. Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire, and of Miss Constance as . . .”

Constance leapt up, her face gone pale and sweating; the embroidery fallen unheeded to the floor. Hawberk smoothed his leathern apron; Alan saw his face settle into the mask of a brave man facing danger.

“That is impossible,” he said quietly. “Mr. Wilde may know a great many things—”

“About armor, for instance, and the Prince’s Emblazoned,” Castaigne said, grinning.

“Yes,” Hawberk continued, slowly. “About armor also, maybe. But he is wrong in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his wife’s traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long survive his wife.”

“Mr. Wilde is wrong,” murmured Constance.

Her lips were pale and her fingers clenched, but her voice was sweet and calm.

There’s a girl with nerve and grit, Alan thought admiringly. And we have something in common—she and her father are political exiles too. Maybe she’s an ancestor as well?