The Sea Peoples(64)

Then there was a slight commotion in the group of curious loiterers around the gates that captured Castaigne’s eye. A young man had entered, and was walking with quick nervous strides along the gravel to the bronze doors. He paused a moment before the “Fates,” and as he raised his head to those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his face, and then with an angry gesture sprang up the marble steps.

The bronze doors swung open to his touch and closed behind him with the ponderous silence of precise balance. The loiterers stared for a few moments, then slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the arms of Fate.

Again there was that surge of power. John found himself praying in silence; not the formal Latin he’d learned later, but the simple words Sister Agatha had taught him as a child.

Holy Mary pierced with sorrows, have mercy on us sinners!

After he finished his fruit and biscuits, Castaigne rose. He utterly ignored the pertly attractive maidservant, who had red hair and an accent a little like a Mackenzie. John didn’t think it was that he didn’t like women, judging by what he’d thought looking at a picture of a pillowy blond nude on the other side of the dining room; it was more as if nobody else was really real to him compared to the imaginings within his own brain.

He rose, put on his hat and went out into the park with nothing in his mind but a walk, which was a relief after most of what he thought about.

John felt as if he was going to sleep, somehow, and that was frightening. He made himself feel more awake, by imagining how his confessor was going to react to all this. What would he say?

That God is giving me His omnipotent view of what a bad man is like, so that I can guard against it? That this is one of the trials He bestows on those who are fortunate in their birth or who He especially loves?

He caught himself just before he thought that if this was proof of God’s love, he didn’t want it. You did not want to think that, even as a joke. He knew in his heart that God did have a sense of humor—his own mental image of the Wedding at Cana was of Jesus with a mug of the (excellent) wine He’d created in one hand, throwing back his head and laughing full-throated at one of the classic bawdy jokes that got thrown around at every wedding since time began. But there were limits.

When he was conscious of what Castaigne was doing again, he’d crossed the central driveway and a group of officers in those fancy uniforms were passing, reminding him of nothing so much as a group of young bucks at Court in Todenangst, senior squires peacocking about with time on their hands as their knights were at work, and nothing on their minds but horses, falcons, tournaments and flirtations.

Or their gambling debts, often enough, he thought with an aching nostalgia.

“Hello, Hildred,” one called out, and came back to shake hands with him.

This is Louis, his cousin, John thought.

John could see the resemblance in build and coloring, but there was nothing but easy good-nature in the man’s expression, and even in the tilt of his neatly trimmed mustache. He looked like a medium-good fighting man at least, with the slightly pigeon-toed swing to his walk that horse-soldiers got, and thick swordsman’s wrists.

He really is like a lot of brainless squires—boring when you talk anything but women and single-minded about even that, full of invincibly ignorant opinions about music, but brave and there’s no harm in them. And Hildred wants him dead—or is starting to.

“Just back from Westchester,” the cavalryman said. “Been doing the bucolic; milk and curds, you know, dairymaids in sunbonnets, who say ‘haeow’ and ‘I don’t think’ when you tell them they are pretty.”

John felt a flash of sympathy; he’d had the same experience, in his own knight training.

“I’m nearly dead for a square meal at Delmonico’s. What’s the news?”

“There is none,” Hildred replied. “I saw your regiment coming in this morning.”

“Did you? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”

“In Mr. Wilde’s window.”

“Oh, hell!” Louis began impatiently. “That man is stark mad! I don’t understand why you—”

A flash like white fire ran through Hildred Castaigne’s mind, and his cousin actually went a little pale.

“Really, old chap,” he said. “I don’t mean to run down a man you like, but for the life of me I can’t see what the deuce you find in common with Mr. Wilde. He’s not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know yourself he’s been in an asylum—”

“So have I,” Hildred said.

I’d have stepped back and put my hand to my sword-hilt if someone talked to me that way, John thought. Not the words, at the tone.

Louis did look startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and slapped him heartily on the shoulder. That made John confusingly sympathetic to Hildred, just for a moment; he hated being mauled that way too.

“You were completely cured,” Louis began.

“I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been insane.”

“Of course that . . . that’s what I meant,” he laughed.

Hildred knew the laugh was false; John thought only a deaf man wouldn’t notice. Whatever Louis Castaigne was, he was no actor—nor practitioner of any other trade that required getting up in front of an audience. His cousin was torn between contempt and hatred.