Rook(69)

Sophia stared down at the hotelier. She didn’t even know his name. It was just coming home to her that if she hadn’t stepped into the hall, it would have been René, not this man, lying dead on the floor planks. She looked to René, hands on knees, still catching his breath, and felt the pull she’d been resisting since that night in her bedroom become a tug, an ache so hard it made her put out a hand for the bedpost. What would have happened if she hadn’t thrown open that door? She turned to Benoit, and found that he’d been watching her.

“Is this the man you saw in the woods?” she asked him in Parisian. Benoit scratched through his wispy hair, once more assessing the hotelier’s dead body.

“It could be so,” he replied. “The shape is not unlike. I would say, yes, it is so.”

“This man needs to get off Spear’s land as soon as may be, while it’s still dark,” Orla said, her Commonwealth cutting harsh through the Parisian. “Unless somebody thinks we ought to bring out the militia?”

If they brought out the militia, they would never be boarding a ferry to the Sunken City at dawn.

“Does he have a wife?” Sophia asked. “Children?”

Spear shook his head. Orla crossed her arms, expression severe.

“Spear and Benoit, go make certain we don’t have any other uninvited guests in the house, and then Spear, go get a shovel. Two or three, if you have them. The other side of Graysin and over by the cliffs will do, I think. I’ll change clothes …” Sophia realized with a start that Orla was in her nightgown. “… and bring something to wrap his head in, so he won’t make a mess on the stairs. Sophie, take care of Monsieur’s neck. Monsieur can take first watch while the rest of us are gone, and I’ll get you a bucket and brush to be cleaning that hearth.”

Orla discovered that everyone was staring at her, making the lines of her face deepen.

“You thought we were going to lock the doors and have a long moon’s sleep?” she said. “Go!”

Spear and Benoit scurried, though Sophia wasn’t sure Benoit knew what he was supposed to do, Orla marching out right after them. René watched Orla leave, then met Sophia’s gaze.

“An excellent woman,” he said. Then he coughed.

Sophia walked quickly around the dead man to René’s washstand, poured water from the ewer into the bowl, and wet a cloth. She wrung it out and went back to René, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She knelt down. “Show me your neck.”

“There is no …”

“Just show me your neck.”

He raised his chin. There was a red mark circling his skin, a burn almost, tiny pinpricks of blood where the rope had pulled hardest, already purpling along the edges. She sponged at it carefully, the little pulse at the base of his throat beating strong. She imagined what his throat would look like without that pulse, and struggled with a hot burst of fury. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

“Are you shaking?”

She paused, holding the wet cloth against the mark. “I’m angry. That’s all.”

“At who?”

She stared at him, incredulous. “At LeBlanc, of course!” René leapt up from the bed and began to pace.

“I do not think he was trying to kill me.”

“But you’re standing between him and a fortune!”

“No, no! I mean him.” He coughed again, waving a hand at the dead man on the floor. “He was not even trying! He is here, waiting, as soon as I climb through the window, he has me unawares, he knows not to get his feet knocked out from under him …”

“He did get his feet knocked out from under him!”

René turned, his smile wry. “You are the variable in every equation, Mademoiselle. But I am saying he knew how to keep his feet back so that I could not knock them out, and that he had the advantage of weight. And yet this man cannot throttle me properly? He lets us thrash about the room with my hand beneath the rope? No, no, no.”

He went to the pitcher and poured himself a glass of water, drinking slowly and apparently painfully. Sophia sat on her heels, cloth still in hand. “What do you mean you were climbing through the window?”

He set down the glass. “I mean that I have been on the roof, watching Sophia Bellamy come sneaking back into this house.”

She opened her mouth once, then closed it.

“You have spent much time on the roof these past days. Do you think no one notices when you are gone?”

“I went to see my …”

René threw up a hand, the perfect impression of a red rope across his palm. “I know where you went!” Now she saw where all that restless energy was coming from. She was not the only one angry. He was furious. With her. “You know there is someone …” His eyes darted to the body on the floor. “… you agree there will be no more climbing out of windows, and yet you go anyway, alone, without saying … That is madness. Reckless!”

Sophia bit her lip, still kneeling on the floor, breathing hard against her own temper. Then before she could react, René came across the room, sat again on the edge of the bed, and caught her head in his hands.

“Look at me. Do you trust me?”

She looked at him. He was angry and wild-headed and unshaven and beautiful. “Yes,” she whispered.