Rook(34)

René said something that Sophia had heard only in the back alleys of the Lower City, grabbed a flickering taper from the wall sconce, sprang up three stairs, and held out his hand. “Come!” he said, and then again. “Come!”

She went. Up the stairs, painfully, leaving the sounds of a full-blown argument behind them, and then René turned left down an unlit corridor ending in a large window, where another stairwell led to an upper floor. “What is in here?” he asked, throwing open a door opposite the stairs. He pulled her inside and shut the door.

It was a bedroom, one of its corners a small, round tower that looked over the cliffs to the sea. There’d been a time when all these bedrooms were in use, when an entire clan of Bellamys had lived under one roof, adding the rooms as they added the children. They’d been doing the opposite the past century. Closing the doors as they closed the coffins. The door to this room had been closed for a long time.

René was looking for another candle, but there wasn’t one, only an empty, rusting iron holder. He shoved the candle he had into it, doing little to illuminate the gloom of coming dusk and dark-papered walls. He picked up a blanket folded across the bed and shook it, making a dingy cloud before he held it out.

“Take the blanket, Mademoiselle. You are not dressed, and the room is cold.”


She was “Mademoiselle” and “Miss Bellamy” now, she’d noted, never “my love.” She wondered if this meant they weren’t playing games. She laid the maps and the money bag on a dusty table, took the blanket he offered without meeting the blue of his eyes, and went to stand in the round-walled tower. Outside the windows, the lower roofs of the house slanted downward to the lawns, and beyond that were the cliffs and the sea, a gray dark coming down on the whitecaps. She hardly recognized the view from this room. She hardly recognized herself. Tom was gone, and here she stood, hiding in her own house from a member of Parliament, half dressed in the half dark with a half-wild Parisian with red hair and almost all her secrets.

“You should stop moving,” René said after a moment. He’d chosen the floor instead of a chair, resting his back against the wall, elbows on his knees. “Or perhaps you would like for me to sew you up again?” A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I would not mind.”

Sophia turned back to the window, hoping it was dim enough that he could not see her flush. It had not escaped her that if René Hasard had never drunk Mr. Lostchild’s brew, then he had never been drugged. And that meant he had known exactly what he was doing in Tom’s sanctuary. Saying those things in her ear, making her think he wanted to kiss her. Making her wish he had. He was good. Very good. She vowed to look only out the window. Looking at René was not safe.

“Is it canceled, then?” she asked, eyes on the sea.

“Tell me about this Mr. Halflife,” René said instead of answering. The tease was gone from his voice. “Are you certain he is not here to help your brother?”

“Very certain. Parliament wants the land. There is a bay just down the coast, with a tidal river. They want a new port. Tom thinks it was Mr. Halflife who made sure the printing license was taken, to drive us into debt. He’d be more likely to put Tom on the boat than take him off, I think.”

“And what about Hammond? He has been a colleague of the Rook, yes? Is it possible that he will not let your brother leave these shores?”

She shook her head. “He won’t risk twenty gendarmes. He can’t call the militia without Mr. Halflife or the sheriff, and the Commonwealth would say it’s your own business to make sure you can’t be carted off, anyway. So says our doctrine of self-reliance.” She smiled slightly. “A convenient excuse for Parliament to be weak, that’s what Tom says about the doctrines.”

“Tom was militia?”

“Until he broke his leg. He still is, officially.”

“And is that where you got your training, Mademoiselle?”

“He brought most of it home, yes.” Tom had been training her regularly since she was twelve years old. And if LeBlanc thought she had worked her parry on the Bellamy beach for the last time, he was sorely mistaken. She looked back over her shoulder. “How do you know I have training?” Waving that sword around in the north wing definitely did not count.

“I notice things. That is all.”

Sophia ran a hand through her hair, which was sticking out in all directions. What else had René Hasard seen that she was unaware of? “So, is it canceled, then?”

“What? Our wedding?” His face took on an expression of mock hurt. “How could you think me so ungallant?”

“You don’t consider lying ungallant?”

“But I am so good at it, Mademoiselle.”

“And you wonder why no one trusts you.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you have a dagger in the inside pocket of your jacket.” He smiled with that same corner of his mouth, the corner she really shouldn’t find so interesting. She’d forgotten she wasn’t supposed to be looking. “And I would hate to suffer and die from that curiosity you warned me of.”

René leaned his tousled head back against the wall, fire-blue eyes a little sly. “You are curious, Mademoiselle? Tell me what you are curious about.”