“Forget the bed,” Lord Ashland muttered. “Let’s be barbaric in the ballroom.”
He was certainly applying himself to that. Leda squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, to find that it was perfectly true, he was verifiably unbuttoning his wife’s bodice.
“Gryf,” Lady Ashland protested, not very convincingly. “The doors…”
Leda sank instantly down to the level of her chair behind the solid part of the screen as she heard his purposeful footsteps come toward the library door. It boomed shut, and a moment later she heard a key in the lock. She put her fingers over her mouth. From the open door to the hall came the sound of another slam—the other portal into the ballroom locked.
Leda sat still, utterly shocked and burning with benign curiosity.
She was still sitting there, slumped down in her chair with her hand over her mouth, when Mr. Gerard came. She shot upright, springing out of the seat guiltily.
He leaned on his crutches and gave her a peculiar look. “Did I startle you?”
“Oh, no! I was just reading the paper.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“Well, I was,” she said, rustling the sheets in her hand. “You hadn’t left me any other instructions.”
There was a sound from the door to the library. Her glance flew to it in dismay. The lock clicked, but the door remained closed, to Leda’s vast relief, and in a few moments there was a distant sound of soft voices and footsteps in the hall.
She knew she was bright crimson. She simply could not help herself.
“Concealing secret admirers?” he asked.
Leda took the high ground. “I believe you wished me to attend you here at your convenience, Mr. Gerard?”
He reached around with one crutch and knocked the door behind him shut. “Close the other one, would you?”
She pursed her lips in disapproval, but he only stood watching her expectantly. With a sigh, Leda stood up and obeyed.
“I spoke to Lord Gryphon,” he said, as she turned back to him.
She resisted the impulse to blurt, I know. Instead, she walked to the secretary and took up her notebook. “We can cross that off the list, then.” She opened it and sat down. “I’ve been considering recommendations for the next step, but I’m afraid that your injury is something of a hindrance. You cannot conveniently invite Lady Catherine to view the paintings at the Royal Academy, or ride with you in the park.”
He leaned back against the door. “I’m not an invalid.”
“I’m quite sure you think you could jog-trot all over the gallery on one foot,” Leda said tartly. “But you are not, perhaps, an entirely heroic figure on crutches. At least as the escort of a young lady going into society for her first season.”
“It’s no longer a question. I’m going to have to leave.”
Leda looked up sharply.
“I’ve had some news from Hawaii. It’s necessary that I return. Immediately.”
The shock closed her throat. She sat staring at him in dismay.
“I’ll need a stateroom on the first steamer available. Use the telephone to make arrangements. It doesn’t matter what port—New York or Washington are the same. And a private coach to Liverpool.” His mouth curled upward. “Keep breathing, Miss Etoile.”
Leda took a gulp of air and swallowed. She looked down at the notebook and wrote with a shaking hand. Stateroom. First steamer. Private coach.
The she stood up jerkily. “Have the police discovered something? Is that why you must leave the country?”
“It’s nothing to do with that.” His tone was easy and unremarkable. “There’s a political crisis in Honolulu. The king’s been made to sign away his dominion by the reform party. By Friday, Kapiolani and Princess Lydia will be informed of it. They’ll go back, too, I imagine, and lucky if they find their thrones intact.”
“You know of it before they do?”
“Yes.”
She did not ask him how that came to be: something in his steady gaze forbade it.
“I can’t conduct affairs at this distance with the government shaky,” he added.
Leda looked down. She had known it could not last. It had been too wonderful to last. “Well,” she said in a subdued voice, “it has been an honor and a pleasure to assist you as your secretary, Mr. Gerard.”
“I hope you’ll find it as enjoyable in the future.”
Her heart made a bound. “You wish me to accompany you?”
“No, that won’t be necessary. You can stay here.”
In a welter of disappointment and relief, all she could think of to say was, “Here? In this house?”
He shrugged. “Wherever the family is. I told you, they may go down to Westpark.”
“They won’t go back to Hawaii also?”
“I can take care of what has to be done. I’ve already talked to Lord Gryphon about it.”
Leda remembered the voices from the ballroom, which hadn’t drawn her attention until they concerned him. “But—they truly don’t mind? They wish me to stay with them?”
He smiled a little. “I believe they view you as something in the nature of a lifeline amid the social tempest.”
“Oh,” she said.
“You’ve only to continue as you’ve been doing—excepting that you may feel free to leave every door in the house open, once I’m gone.”
“I don’t believe it will be necessary once you’ve gone,” she said quellingly, fortified by the idea that she was a lifeline in a social tempest.
He looked rather self-conscious at that, she thought. Perhaps she was having some refining influence upon him after all. She desisted from mentioning that Lord and Lady Ashland liked one another rather more than was decorous, and appeared to prefer their doors closed, too. With a pattern such as that before him, no wonder he had no notion of setting an example for the servants.
He gave her one of those silver stares. “What would be your opinion, Miss Etoile, of my speaking to Lady Catherine before I leave?”
“Oh, you must not.” Leda grabbed at the book as it slipped down her lap. “It would be—it would be entirely too precipitate.”
She managed to catch the notebook before it fell. Without thinking, she quickly brushed it off, as if it had actually hit the floor.
“She’d refuse.” He said it coolly, with no trace of emotion, but Leda suddenly saw what Lady Ashland saw—the way his hands gripped the crutches, the vast uncertainty behind his impersonal facade.
“As to that, I’m sure I can’t say.” Leda took on Miss Myrtle’s most academic tone, as if it were a mere question of etiquette. “But in consideration of a lady’s natural delicacy, a gentleman will not embarrass her by dismissing convention and becoming too previous in his overtures.”
His hands relaxed a little on the crutches. The faint trace of a smile returned. “Not even in an emergency?”
“You are not going off to war, Mr. Gerard,” Leda informed him. “There is every expectation that you will be restored to us alive and intact. I do not think attending to unexpected business affairs can justly be ruled an emergency.”
He inclined his head. “No doubt you’re right. As always.”
“I feel that I am in this case,” she said modestly. “With all respect.”
“There is one other thing,” he said, “if you’ll agree to help me.”
“I will be happy to be of service in any way that I can.”
“Good.” He leaned his head back against the door and looked down at her, his eyes half-closed in an ice-man glitter that made Leda suddenly begin to regret her ready compliance. “There’s a certain item that needs to be retrieved from your former room before I leave,” he murmured. “This evening, Miss Etoile, you and I are going to go and get it.”
Eighteen
The House of the Sun
Hawaii, 1882
They said that Haleakala was ten thousand feet above the sea.
Ten thousand rivers collect in the ocean.
One true intention
will defeat ten thousand men.
Only the wind came here; the wind and the clouds rolling up through a giant, empty gap in the cliffs that rimmed the crater wall. The mists slid silently into the House of the Sun, dimming the vast red sweeps of gravel and cinder, the charred hills and stark distance. The clouds tumbled and boiled and vanished. Samuel and Dojun had walked for half a day within its fantastic expanse, and still the far cliffs were clear and remote—like many things: no closer and no farther than they had seemed at the beginning of the effort.
Count the last ten miles of a hundred-mile journey as but half the way.
Samuel asked no questions. He’d never come here before. Nor had Dojun, that he knew of. It was two days’ travel from Honolulu: one day on the inter-island steamer to Maui, another to walk up the mountainside through the cane fields and cloud forest and then above the tree line to the rim of the monumental crater. The air was thin, a dry ache in the lungs. An alien silence held all life frozen—even the scattered plants were strange icy silver star-bursts, glowing from their centers with a faint illumination, as if the inner blades caught daylight and reflected it back upon themselves, intensifying it to a metallic radiance.
Here where there was no one to see, Dojun openly carried a sword in a long scabbard. By his own custom, Samuel favored a less conspicuous knife, though he’d trained with the sword as a weapon and as a tool for prying cutting, even as a convenient prop for an extra boost in climbing. He knew the secret chambers in the deceptive scabbard—his knife’s sheath had the same, filled with blinding powder and poison.
“Rest,” Dojun said, halting at the foot of a long slope that led up to the round mouth of a cinder cone. They had been following a bridle trail that wound across the desolation, but Dojun suddenly left it, walking out over the unbroken stretches of gravel toward the hill.
Samuel stood still, watching. As the minutes passed, Dojun’s figure seemed to become tiny; the cinder cone grew bigger in perspective until it was huge and Dojun nothing but a dark speck moving up the slope. He disappeared over the concave lip.
The silence was a physical presence, a humming in Samuel’s ears. If he shifted his feet, the magnified grate of stone made a loud crackle. This place played tricks on the senses, causing small things to seem large and huge things to seem insignificantly sized.
He savored the nothingness of it. The empty space, the fearsome isolation—he felt it as a respite in his heart from things he had not known troubled him. He was even glad that Dojun had left him. He was thoroughly safe; there was no weapon that could reach him, no shame that could touch him here.
He knelt, waiting. When the clouds came down it was glacially cold. For years he hadn’t felt this kind of cold. He remembered, for the first time in a long time, wintry rooms and frigid water, his hands swollen from it and his wrists bands of freezing fire where he’d jerked against the cords that held him. He hadn’t jerked to escape; he’d never even thought of flight; he’d only flinched each time he was hit or touched, because he couldn’t help it, and that was what rubbed his wrists raw.
There were some he could remember who had not survived; who grew ill and faded, who cried until someone tired of hearing it. He’d been stronger, but not strong enough or smart enough to know life could be different.
Lady Tess had done that, freed him, and now he was here, breathing clean, high, sterile air—so clean and empty and unsoiled; even the cinder beneath him was pure. He swept up a handful of it and rolled the chinkery black angles between his palms. The ebony facets glittered, ugly and beautiful at once, like the volcanic crater that had spawned them.
He opened a length of drab cloth and scooped a small pile of the sparkling gravel into the center to take as a gift for her. As he tied it, a sensation of darkness swept over him.
The world seemed to collapse in on itself; he came out of a sideways roll with the whoosh of steel passing, the high-pitched whine singing close to his ear. The sword flashed down even as he escaped it, unleashed power that sliced without hesitation in a full killing arc, the point biting into the ground in a three-inch gash that buried the tip in black cinders.
Dojun let go of the hilt with both hands, and the sword stood alone in the earth.
Samuel stood balanced, washed in menace; when Dojun walked toward him a shadow seemed to drift past—Samuel leaped to the outside of the driving hand that came at his neck, brought up his crossed wrists and ducked the following kick that would have struck with an impact meant to smash bone. The strikes pounded one after another; Samuel floated in the shadow, evading, arresting, his conscious mind blank, amazed at the situation—Dojun was assaulting him, all-out, the quality of each motion full and deadly with that black intent casting a shade before it came.
Samuel didn’t attack in return; in the end he only twisted and bowed to the shadow, lowering his shoulder to invite it in as Dojun kicked through his guard, hit the ground on one leg, and followed the invitation, his body fully committed to a driving lunge that took him where Samuel had been, over Samuel’s ducked shoulder as if he’d been thrown, though Samuel never touched him.
Dojun struck the ground with his hands and rolled, springing up in a patch of dusty sunlight, the shadow fading with the mist as if it had never been.
Samuel stood panting, staring at him, trying to believe the earth had crumbled, the sun gone to ashes and the sea to dry rock: that Dojun had broken his vow.
“Sō,” Dojun grunted, resting his hands on his hips. “Make promise you. No hit Samua-san, eh?”
Samuel’s lip curled. He could see the sword from the corner of his eye, buried point-deep in the ground where he’d sat. You bastard, he wanted to shout. I trusted you!
Dojun shrugged as if he’d spoken. “Been try hard. Damn hard. No can do.”
Samuel sucked the thin purity of the air into his lungs, looking down at the sword. He remembered Dojun’s vow as if it were engraved upon a wall in his mind.
I pledge to you, I will never strike you by intent for any reason.
Dojun had tried to hit him.
Tried. Been try hard. Damn hard.
And had not succeeded.
Samuel lifted his eyes, with shock and the truth dawning. “You couldn’t do it,” he said slowly. “You knew you couldn’t do it.”
“You more young, eh?” Dojun, too, was breathing heavily. “Got small-little edge.”
Samuel clenched his teeth together, pulling cold air through them. He found himself laughing. He tilted his head back and laughed without sound at the sky.
“‘Assa madda you?” Dojun asked grumpily. “Think you number-one man now?”
But he was smiling as he said it. He went and jerked the sword free of the ground. He looked up sideways at Samuel.
“Good song you got, Samua-san. Lucky me, yeah? This sword kill you, what I gonna do?”
It could have killed. There had been no safety catch in that lethal sweeping downswing.
Dojun spoke in his own language. “In the training halls, there are tests. There are forms and patterns they teach you. There is kyujutsu, the art of the bow and arrow. There is jiujutsu, the art of yielding. There is kenjutsu, the art of the sword. There is first dan, second dan, third dan, up the ladder.” He sheathed the blade. “The art I teach has no ladder. There is no training hall. You live. Or you die. That is the only test.”
Nineteen
Mr. Gerard had a true talent for contriving to have his own way. Before Leda’s eyes, he suddenly became a most recalcitrant invalid, snapping peevishly at Sheppard when the butler arrived at his summons, complaining that his leg hurt him, refusing the medication that the doctor had left, and insisting that he needed some fresh air and exercise.
A small crisis ensued, in which an open window, a chair on the terrace overlooking Park Lane, a bench in the back garden, and finally a sedate ride round the park in the victoria were pettishly refused. He wanted exercise. He wasn’t accustomed to confinement and inactivity. In short, he wanted to walk.
Si
nce he’d been up and walking about the house for three days, no one could seem to convince him that he could not perfectly well walk outside. He wished to ask Lady Catherine to accompany him. Sheppard murmured that Her Ladyship and her brother were out bicycling with a party of young ladies and gentlemen. A note was sent to find Lady Ashland wherever she might be in the house—the reply came back that she would lend herself to no such nonsense as Samuel walking in the park. Mr. Gerard then scowled at Leda and said that the two of them would go; and no, he did not wish for a footman or a maid or a damned bath chair—it was only across the street, for God’s sake.
The descent of his language into the gutter seemed to shock Sheppard into compliance. Leda did not feel it appropriate to correct her employer in the presence of servants, but she gave him a thin, eyebrows-raised, Miss Myrtle look.
Beyond the fact of his injury, she could not feel that it was perfectly appropriate for her to be walking out with a bachelor in the park, unaccompanied. However, when she ventured to mention this, she received such an expression of palpable menace from him that even Sheppard agreed that perhaps Miss Etoile could look out for him well enough on a short jaunt.
So Leda and Mr. Gerard went for a walk in the park. They walked in one gate, Mr. Gerard moving briskly on his crutches, and out the very next, where he hailed a four-wheeled growler from the cab stand on the corner.
It took her that long to realize it had been a performance the entire time—that he cared nothing for a walk at all. With a sense of impending doom, she heard him give directions to the cabbie. The old clarence rumbled and rattled along Piccadilly, avoiding the crowds at Buckingham Palace, rocking amid the traffic in the Strand. As they crossed the bridge, the familiar smells of river and vinegar crept into Leda’s nose, stronger even than the stale smoke and perspiration scent of the cab.
Mr. Gerard was watching her. She could see his face as he sat across from her, profiled by the faint, steady light from the grubby window that intensified to a rush of golden color over his features as the cab crossed an intersection where the afternoon sun shone down between buildings.