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She stood in that corridor glowing at him, this brave, gambling girl, believing she had just won something. Believing she had struck a spark off a stern, scarred, living man who might, in time, be a husband in more than name. She did not know the monster she was smiling at. She was marrying to give Edward’s child a father, and the father she had chosen had crawled out of a grave. Worse, a pile of corpses. Every laugh he surrendered to her was a coin drawn on an empty account. Every degree of warmth was a lie.

The undead do not get to have this.

The sound came out of him low, from his chest, hardly words at all. A growl, rough as a door dragged shut.

“Good night, Ophelia.”

She blinked. For half a heartbeat she simply stared at him, the smile still on her mouth with nothing left under it, like a flag flying over abandoned works. Then it came down. He saw it happen. Saw the light he had put in her face go out, because he had put it out. She gathered herself the way she gathered her cards. Quickly. Neatly. Showing nothing.

“Of course.” Her chin found its angle again. “Forgive me for keeping you from your rest, my lord. Seven o’clock.”

She dipped him a curtsy, correct to the inch, and turned, and went away down the corridor with her candle held before her. Her back was straight. Her shawl pulled close. The halo of gold hair retreated along the dark paneling until the corner took it and her, and the corridor went black.

Damian stood in his doorway a long moment, gripping the banyan closed at his throat, listening to the rain.

Then he shut the door, and set his back against it, and told himself, in the silence of his brother’s room, that the undead do not want. Cannot want. They were mostly dead, after all.

It had never yet sounded so much like a lie.

* * *

The master had not eaten the herring.

Luc saw the plate first. It sat where he had left it at noon. The fish had gone stiff and gray. Then the newspaper, spread over the top of it, soaking up the grease. An English paper. A fortnight stale. The sort the milord travelers left behind in the coffee room below.

The master had bought or begged every English sheet that came across from Dover. Luc had fetched them and then had watched him tear through the columns with a finger that shook. Until today the finger had found nothing. Today it had stopped.

The master read the paragraph aloud. Once in French, once in the English as printed, and then again in French, softer, as if the softer version might change what the hard one said. An officer believed fallen at Waterloo, miraculously restored to his family. Now succeeded to the dignity of Baron Archer.

“Miraculously,” the master muttered. He said the word again. Then something in German, twice, the way he did when the thought would not sit still. “A miracle, they print. It is not a miracle. It is mine.”

Then he was already packing. That was what Luc understood a half-breath later. The leather roll of instruments lay open on the bed. The notebooks were squared in the bottom of the case.

“Doctor, eat something.”

“The morning packet,” said the master, to the newspaper. “We take the morning packet.”

Luc went to the window. Below lay the harbor. Masts, tar-smoke, gulls quarreling over the tide line, and beyond the Channel lying gray as a knife. Twenty years the two shores had spent killing one another. The ink was scarcely dry on the peace treaty. Half the men on that island over the water had buried a brother or a son to French shot. More than one. And here stood two men with French in their mouths, meaning to land at Dover and go about the countryside asking questions after an English lord.

Questions got asked back. Of foreigners.

Luc’s fear had always been a hangman’s rope. What he and the master had done in that cellar had no name, in French or English, that did not end on a scaffold.

The master felt none of it. The master had room in his mind for one thing only. The newspaper had just told him where that thing now lived.

He could say no. He turned the word over once, like a coin he already knew was counterfeit. If the work resulted in a hanging, it hanged them both. A man who kept close to his master kept close to his only shelter.

Luc pulled the second valise from under the bed, and packed.

CHAPTER 9

The garden door had taken on water in the night and stuck in the frame. Damian put one gloved hand to it and pushed. The wood gave with a wet complaint.

Ophelia stepped past him into the morning light.

The rain had gone through before dawn and left everything rinsed. Gravel dark as wet slate. Box hedges strung with silver beads that shook when her skirt brushed them. The park steamed faintly under a washed blue sky, and the air smelled of box and turned earth and last night’s rain still sitting in the grass.

“The rain has finally cleared,” he remarked.