The Frenchman smiled. “Ah . . . a wandering spirit.”
It was casually said, but Lawrence didn’t think it was as casual a remark as it appeared. “Well,” he said diffidently, “not exactly.”
“Ah, a fellow exile then.”
For some obscure reason the comment amused Lawrence and he smiled. “Yes . . . I guess you could say that.”
The Frenchman settled back against the cushions as the wheels clicked along the rails. His long, clever fingers turned the shaft of his cane in a slow circle so that the silver head seemed to search the whole of the room. Lawrence saw clearly now that it was a wolf: fierce and snarling. A beautifully made stick, but somehow repugnant.
The cane made a final turn and as the wolf’s head swung around toward him, Lawrence felt—as absurd as the thought was to his civilized mind—that the eyes of a real wolf glared out at him through the lifeless metal. It required effort to wrench his own eyes away from the cane and he caught the Frenchman in a split second of unguarded interest, the old eyes keen and sharp, and an enigmatic smile curling the corners of his mouth. Then the moment passed and the old man was just old and wizened and the cane was nothing more than metal and wood.
“A man needs a good stick on the moors,” mused the Frenchman. “I purchased this in Gévaudan . . . oh, it seems like lifetimes ago. Isn’t it lovely? The work of a master silversmith, an apprentice of Pierre Germain. Do you know Germain’s work? One of the Rococo artists. Very beautiful art . . . so alive.” He bent forward and offered a warm and inclusive smile. “You would do me a great honor, sir.”
The Frenchman gripped the wolf’s snarling head and with a deft turn of the wrist he released some hidden lock and pulled the head away from the wooden shaft. Not entirely, but enough to reveal a hand’s breadth of a wickedly sharp rapier that was hidden within the heart of the stick.
Lawrence gasped, but the Frenchman’s smile turned genial as he slid the rapier back into place with a quiet click. He took the sword cane in both liver-spotted hands and offered it to Lawrence.
“I . . . can’t,” stammered Lawrence, and in truth he was as unnerved by the look that had been in the Frenchman’s eyes when he said that he’d obtained the cane lifetimes ago as he was by the deadly potential of this unexpected gift. “We’ve only just met.” He picked up his own stick—stylish but no match in either form or purpose with the Frenchman’s cane. “This one will do me just—”
The old Frenchman interrupted with a chuckle and a shake of the head. “Nonsense! It would give me great pleasure to know that my old stick was in the keeping of a civilized man. Besides . . . its heft is somewhat too much for me these days.”
Lawrence opened his mouth to rephrase his refusal, but the old man beat him to it.
“It is one of the few privileges of the old,” the Frenchman said, “to pass on our burdens to the young.”
He held the cane out again.
“Merci,” Lawrence said after a long pause. He accepted the cane with a gracious nod.
“From one exile to another,” the old man said softly.
The sword cane was light but solid, the heavy silver head balanced by a thick brass ferrule that showed signs of hard use in rough terrain. The wood was unmarked and lovely, with a tight grain that swirled throughout the polished hardwood. “You are overly kind,” murmured Lawrence.
“Not at all.”
Lawrence picked up his own cane and held it out, intensely aware of how shabby it looked by comparison. “I insist you take mine in trade, then.”
The smile the old Frenchman gave was mostly gracious, but sewn through the wreath of wrinkles on his smiling face were traces of some other emotion; and as he accepted the stick his finger brushed one of Lawrence’s fingers. It was a casual accident, but Lawrence nearly recoiled. The Frenchman’s skin was as cold as the tomb and strangely rough. The Frenchman’s eyes were hooded as he sat back and examined his new stick, a smile of some rare kind trying to blossom on his lips.
The train whistled like a shrieking ghost as it sped along through the tangled vines and twisted trees of Northumbria.
CHAPTER FIVE
Near Blackmoor
The country lane twisted and turned through forests more ancient than any of the races of men—both savage and civilized—who had lived there. Vast oaks with trunks as stout as stone towers; gullies that dropped away into spider-infested darkness; paths that led into the hearts of bottomless bogs.
Lawrence sat in a corner so that he could watch the countryside and have enough light to read and reread the letter that he held between thumb and forefinger. The paper was expensive, the handwriting precise, flowing and emphatically feminine. He read the letter again, perhaps the twentieth time since it was delivered to his London hotel, and his heart hammered as forcefully and as painfully as it had the first time he’d read it.
Dear Mr. Talbot,
I beg you to pardon this overly familiar and desperate appeal.
I believe your brother Benjamin has mentioned me to you in his correspondence: I’m Gwen Conliffe, his fiancée. I’m writing to inform you of your brother’s disappearance. He has not been seen for three weeks now and we fear the worst. I have recently learned that you are currently here in England with your theatre company.
I understand that your schedule takes you back to America soon, but I would implore you to help us find him. Please come to Talbot Hall.
We need your help.
With each line the handwriting had become more passionate, the pen digging more desperately into the paper. The signature was a scrawl and the letter had been hastily blotted before it had been folded. Speed and urgency, he determined. And fear.
Lawrence folded the letter and placed it in an inner pocket of his coat. He rearranged his clothes but his hand lingered over the place where the letter rested. Over his heart.
“Ben . . . ,” he murmured.
For most of the way the hooves of the horses thudded dully on hard-packed dirt, but when they began clattering on stone, Lawrence glanced out the window. He looked out just as the carriage passed under a great stone arch that he thought he would never see again. The massive portal was topped with a hunting scene of snarling hounds on either side of a trapped stag. The words talbot hall were engraved with cool severity into the keystone, but the letters were mostly obscured by tangles of vine. A flock of threadbare ravens were roused from their slumber by the passage and they leaped into the air, salting the afternoon with their rusty protest. A fox with one milky eye watched the wheels roll, its body hidden by shadows thrown by stones long ago fallen from the arch.
Lawrence turned and looked back, trying to remember the arch as it had been and catching only embers of memory that had long since burned away.
The carriage rolled on, moving quickly down a lane once guarded by double rows of beech trees, but scavenger maples and tall weeds had invaded their ranks and the trees now looked like a line of beggars. The fields beyond, once immaculate and trimmed, had become tangles where crabgrass and wild onion ran rampant. Crass shrubberies of a hundred unnamed varieties now clogged the flower beds and unswept piles of leaves lay in rotting dunes in the cobbled turnaround. Even the stone hounds and wolves that stood like gargoyles on marble pedestals along the drive were gray with dust and strangled by vines.
The carriage stopped and Lawrence hesitated before turning the door handle. Even though he knew that much would have changed since his boyhood, he had never expected this total descent into squalor and dissolution. The house itself had an abandoned air about it. Most of the windows were dark, a few had cracked panes, and from one empty frame on a top floor Lawrence could see finches flutter in, one after another, carrying twigs and worms.
“ ’Ere you go, sir,” said the driver, hopping nimbly down. He cast an appraising eye at the hall but kept his own counsel as he pulled Lawrence’s expensive steamer trunk out of the boot. He carried it to the top of a flight of heavy stone stairs and left it standing on one end beside the door,
then retreated hastily to the carriage. His charge had not yet emerged, so the driver folded down the wrought-iron step and opened the door. “Talbot ’all, sir.”
Lawrence debated telling the driver to fetch back the trunk and get the hell out of this place. He tasted the words and how clean they would feel on his tongue, but then an old memory stole like a thief into his mind. Lawrence and Ben, a pair of boys playing at being pirates, running from the portico to the shelter of the trees. Ben with a wooden cutlass, Lawrence with a tree root shaped like a boarding pistol.
Where are you, Benjamin, he wondered for the thousandth time since he had first read Gwen Conliffe’s desperate letter. Come out, come out wherever you are. He sighed and unfolded himself from the carriage and stepped down on the same flagstones across which those boys had run a thousand times. But that was before Hell came to Talbot Hall and all things merry and light had been torn away. Now he and his brother were grown men who had never once met face to face. Lawrence wondered if there would ever be a chance to walk these grounds with Ben, just a couple of young men sharing brandy and cigars and chatting about the separate worlds in which they lived. Lawrence feared that it would never happen, even if Ben was found hale and healthy. This place seemed drained of all of its potential for comfort.
The driver, no lout, caught something of Lawrence’s air. “Shall I wait, sir?”
Lawrence looked at him for a moment, lips pursed, but then he shook his head. “No, thank you. This’ll do.”
He handed over a fistful of uncounted coins and the driver beamed a great smile and climbed back onto his carriage. The horses moved off sprightly as if happy to be quit of such a dreary place and soon even their echo had vanished away down the lane, through the arch, and out through the iron gates. Lawrence stood as still as the ancient trees until only silence rolled back toward him.
“Ben? . . .” Lawrence called lightly, but not even the birds in the trees answered him. Lawrence sighed again and began the long climb up to the front door.
The door was closed and Lawrence had never possessed a key. As a boy he hadn’t needed one, and he had never been here as a man. He knocked on the heavy wood.
A chill wind sent dry leaves skittering across the steps as if even the moistureless debris of autumn wanted to flee this place. He turned and looked around, saw nothing, and knocked again.
No one and nothing answered his knock.
On a whim Lawrence tried the doorknob and was surprised when it turned under his hand, the heavy lock clicking, the oak panel yielding to a little pressure. Lawrence grunted and pushed it open and stepped in, leaving his trunk behind. Even though the carriage had gone, just knowing that the trunk was still outside made him feel that he still had the option of flight.
He stepped inside, his eyes adjusting from the dappled sunlight to the gloom of the enormous entry parlor. Rich wood paneling covered the walls, paintings of old relatives scowled from their dusty canvases, a once luxurious and now moth-eaten Turkish carpet stretched forward into the brown shadows of the inner house.
Lawrence looked around, listened. Nothing.
Silence.
“Hello!” he called. “Father?”
Nothing.
On a whim he called, “Ben?”
The only sound he heard was the steady ticking of the old family grandfather clock. That at least was a sign of life; somebody had to wind it. Lawrence moved to the foot of the sweeping double staircase that led to the upper landing. Between the stairways hung a tapestry depicting strange monsters and heroes from Hindu legend. Lawrence studied it for a moment, as fascinated now as he had been as a boy, always discovering a new creature, a new brave warrior. He absently twirled his new cane through his fingers, the wolf’s head chasing itself through the air. Lawrence sighed, slid the cane into a Ming urn full of umbrellas that stood beneath the tapestry, and turned to call out again . . .
. . . but a fierce growl froze him in place as something huge and furry rushed at him from behind.
Lawrence cried out in shock and recoiled as the massive form of a great Irish wolfhound—two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew—galloped toward him across the big foyer, its savage teeth bared in a terrible snarl of pure rage.
Lawrence instantly backed away, backpedaling until his heels found the stairs and then he began to climb backward as the hound stalked him. He raised an arm across his throat, but even the thick wool of his greatcoat would be like tissue paper to those fangs. The hound began barking with a deep-chested bay that shook the whole foyer. Lawrence flinched at the noise and then cried out again as he collided with something behind him on the stairs. He whirled.
And there was his father.
Sir John Talbot stood tall and imposing, a huge rifle in his hands.
“I—” began Lawrence. He awkwardly retreated a step or two, caught now between the barking hound and the sudden and powerful presence of his father.
Sir John’s eyes were cool and calculating and he looked down at his son, but spoke to the dog. “Samson!”
The hound instantly went quiet.
The hall fell into an electric silence. Lawrence stood on the bottom step, one hand gripping the banister, the other frozen halfway into a gesture of contact—hand open as if to touch his father, but his reach withheld. He swallowed and took one last retreating step, standing on the landing. Close to the hound, but closer to his walking stick, totally uncertain how this drama would play out. There were so many ways it could turn bad.
Sir John descended the stairs until he stood in front of his son.
“Lawrence . . .” he murmured, and there was surprise in his eyes. Confusion, too, as if Sir John was waking from a dream and found that fantastic images had followed him into the real world. “Lawrence?”
Lawrence cleared his throat.
“Hello, Father.”
Sir John’s eyes roved over Lawrence, taking his measure. “Lo and behold,” he said softly. “The prodigal son returns. . . .”
Despite everything, Lawrence smiled.
Sir John blinked and looked down at the big Holland & Holland “Royal” double rifle he held, smiling bemusedly as if surprised to see such a thing in his hands.
“Not too many visitors these days,” he said as he broke the rifle open and draped it comfortably over the crook of his arm. With that done the tension in the room eased by slow degrees as father and son stood there, each lost in the process of calculating all of the possible meanings behind this encounter, and feeling the tides of memory surge in on them.
“Shall I slaughter the fatted calf?” said Sir John with a rueful grin.
Lawrence stiffened. “Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”
Sir John stepped closer and once again took his son’s measure. As an actor, Lawrence was skilled at reading faces, but as bits of emotion flitted onto and away from his father’s face he found it impossible to get a read. When his father nodded to himself, Lawrence said, “What? . . .”
“I’ve often wondered what you’d look like.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s quite true.” Sir John wore a heavy robe trimmed with leopard fur. His hair and beard were snow white but his blue eyes were youthful and charged with vitality. His personal energy was completely at odds with the rundown state of the grounds; however, his cool smile was in perfect harmony with the chilly and cheerless house. “Yes,” he said more to himself than to his son, “I’ve often wondered . . .”
Lawrence didn’t know how to respond to that, and didn’t want to try. Instead he said, “You seem well.”
Shutters dropped behind Sir John’s eyes. “Do I?” He paused. “You come here for your brother, then?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” echoed Sir John.
“Has there been any word?”
Sir John turned away without answering. He crossed the hall and entered his study. After a moment’s hesitation Lawrence followed.
The study was a man’s place, with many sofas and
chairs and bookshelves crammed with volumes in a dozen languages. Tables were scattered about, some bearing bottles of wine and brandy, others covered with maps, and one with an open book on astronomy. Tall windows of thick leaded glass let in filtered light, which was warmed and colored by the glow from a thick knot of logs in the fireplace. Pistols, swords and weapons of ancient design were mounted on the walls or set in cases of museum quality. But as much as it was a man’s room it was also a predator’s room, with the heads of a score of animals—rhinoceroses, lions, bears—gazing fatalistically into the chamber, tiger and leopard skins on the walls, and a plaque on which were mounted claws and teeth from ten species of great hunting cats.
Lawrence lingered in the doorway, his attention not drawn by the violent majesty of the décor but by his father’s odd behavior. It was true that Lawrence had not seen his father in many years, but a chance meeting of this kind should have provoked some flicker of humanity. Instead, Sir John seemed distracted, his attention drawn inward instead of outward to his son’s presence.
Lawrence said, “Miss Conliffe learned that my company was in London. I was going to invite you and Ben. . . .”
“I see,” said Sir John, stopping by a globe and idly tracing a line of latitude.
“I was going to send word to you,” said Lawrence. “To invite you to a performance. You and Ben. . . .”
But his voice trailed away as Sir John turned to face him. The look on his father’s features was oddly twisted as if he was in physical pain.
“Well,” said Sir John quietly. “A fine idea. Some years too late, but a fine idea.” He was trying to sound offhand, but Lawrence could tell that something was wrong and his father’s next words drove home that suspicion with terrible force. “Unfortunately your brother’s body was found in a ditch by the priory road yesterday morning.”
The words hit Lawrence like fists. He staggered back against the door frame.