Sophia let her eyelids fall shut again. Her head, her side, everything hurt. She tried to move but there was a heavy blanket covering her, and something tight around her middle. And then she stopped any movement at all. There had been light. And she smelled fire. Her eyes flew open.
Flames were dancing in the little brick hearth just a few feet away, driving away the chill, and across the expanse of cracked and patched floor, a little farther down the tiled walls, there was a star of light flickering in the dimness. A man stood with his back to her, tall and lean, illuminated by a candle, white shirt untucked over brown breeches, boots to his knees, and hair loose to his shoulders. He was running a hand over the display shelves, where Tom stored the objects he’d dug up from the grounds around Bellamy House.
The man picked one up, such a vivid blue it could be seen from across the room, bat-shaped and the size of a hand, with some sort of knob on one side, a gray cross, and four small circles inlaid with yellow and unnatural red on the other. She’d watched Tom puzzling over this item many times. He thought the cross and brightly colored pieces were meant to be pushed, though for what purpose neither of them could imagine, and he’d had no success looking for the word “Nintendo” in the university archives. It was beautifully worked, though. Like a piece of art.
The man held up the artifact, examining it carefully from all sides and underneath. Then he looked over his shoulder.
“Bonjour.”
Sophia sucked in a breath. It was René. The René who was her almost-fiancé. The René who had come here to catch the Rook. And his hair, she saw, was indeed red. A dark russet in the candlelight. She hadn’t even recognized him. She turned her head on the pillow, making it ache. Some of her memories were clear, straight lines; others were blurred and smudged around the edges like cheek paint.
René laid the blue object back in its box and picked up the artifact next to it. He held up a round, flat disk, speared on his finger by the hole in its middle, flashing like a mirror as it caught the glow of flame. Sophia clutched harder at the blanket, torn between the desperate need to know what René knew, and hoping he was not about to break one of Tom’s precious things.
“Do you know what it is?” René asked without turning around.
“No,” she replied. Maybe she could get rid of him before he discovered she was hurt. She needed to get to Orla. And Tom. She struggled to sound more like herself. “But you should put it down. It’s made of plastic, and it’s delicate.”
“Yes, Mademoiselle. I am aware that this item is made of plastic.” She could hear that note of amusement in his voice. “I think I will tell you what my maman says about these disks. She says that her grand-mère told her that her grand-mère said there are messages hidden inside these, thousands upon thousands of pictures and words, so well concealed that we shall never find them.”
He glanced over his shoulder again. “Do you think that could be so? Do you think there are a thousand pictures inside this disk? Or were my ancestors only very imaginative?” He gazed at the artifact. “I think perhaps they were. My grand-mère was a terrible liar. She used to say …”
Maybe she should kill him first. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Ah.” He set the disk down in its nest of soft cloth. “It was very curious. I was walking your grounds, watching for the sun, and then I see there is someone coming across the lawn …”
Her fiancé wasn’t to have left the north wing; Spear and Tom were supposed to be watching him—she remembered that. So he couldn’t slip out to LeBlanc, like the dawn before.
“I thought it was your brother. I thought he was unwell, that he had been … what do you call it in the Commonwealth? ‘Out for a bender’?”
Sophia did not correct him. How was he moving in and out of Bellamy House?
“I watched him take a key and unlock a door. And so through the door and down the stairs I came, thinking to be a useful future brother, and who is it that I find?” He turned fully around then, a grin on one side of his mouth. “And how are you feeling, my love?”
Some of the more hazy recollections in Sophia’s mind were taking on their proper shapes. The rope coming down from the window. The man with a knife in his chest. She must have done that, though she didn’t remember. The strange, foggy journey on the horse. But the memory she was having the most difficulty reconciling was the man holding the candle on the other side of the sanctuary. The voice was different. Deeper, not as smooth, and not nearly as Parisian. As it had been for just a little while in the sitting room the night before. And that was the only thing about René Hasard that was anything like the night before.
She lifted a hand to touch the back of her head. A large knot had risen at the base of her skull, just inside the hairline. She said, “I took a fall, I’m afraid. From my horse. I think I’ve hit my head rather hard.”
“Yes.” René was moving across the room now, lithe, and with very little noise from his boots. He used his candle to light an oil lamp that was hanging from one of the exposed crossbeams. “And you also seem to have fallen on that knife you were carrying.”
Sophia reached down to her side. The sword cut. Who had the man with the sword been, and was he still alive? Surely not. And just how much had she bled? She looked beneath the blanket. Her vest was gone, her knife gone, and there was a gash in her shirt, the cloth around it soaking in a large, dark circle. Blood had also run down the side of the breeches, all the way to the knee. Then she saw that another strip of cloth had been tied tight over the wound beneath her shirt, circling her waist. She lifted her eyes to René.
“Did you bandage me?”
It was not an inquiry; it was an accusation. He had taken off her clothes. Or at least taken them off a little. The line of René’s jaw flickered as he bent over another candle, a grin lurking again in that corner of his mouth.
“Please don’t think me impertinent, my love. We are betrothed, after all. And Monsieur Hammond was not here to do the job this time.”
Sophia clutched the blanket, watching René closely. He lit more candles, flame to flame from the one in his hand. The words KINGS CROSS ST. PANCRAS spelled inside a circle of Ancient red leapt to visibility on the side wall. Even the way he held his body was unfamiliar, controlled, with no embellished movements.
She tried to think. The rope and hook would be found, and the glove. That was to plan. The wounded—or more likely dead—man was not. And neither was this living one. They would have the foxes following the scent on the glove, the scent Cartier was leaving in a zigzag trail across the Commonwealth. But it would not take long for news about the events at the Holiday to reach Bellamy House. The net had drawn tight, and now she was the one caught.
“It does seem careless of you, my love,” the different René said, still grinning as he moved toward the cot. “Riding alone, in the dark, with a knife out of its sheath. Will you make a habit of such things after we are married?”
She’d spotted her knife now. It was on the floor beside her vest. Well out of reach. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Do you often take walks before dawn?”
He stood over the bed. “I do not know. Do you often go riding past nethermoon?”
Sophia raised her eyes. René Hasard was dirty and mussed, with an open collar and stubble around his mouth, as unpredictable as his hair color. She raised one arm over her head, covering her eyes. The best shield she had at this moment was her charm, and, if he was anything like his cousin, the belief that a female would be incapable of climbing up a rope, sinking a knife into a strange man’s chest, and spiriting innocent souls out of the Tombs. But surely even René was not this stupid? She was beginning to be afraid that he wasn’t. She had to keep him distracted, at least long enough to find a way out of this room.