Page 61

Which was exactly why he could not knock. He could scarcely carry the burden himself. There were nights he set it down for an hour just to breathe. Hand it to her, and she would take it. That was the certainty. She would take it without blinking and shoulder her share and stand her watch at the wall beside him, because that was who she was. He would have made his wife garrison to his unholy siege. Sworn her to his grave the way he was sworn to it. She had been robbed of enough futures. He would not bring her into this one.

Lightning whitened the corridor end to end. His raised hand stood stark against the door panel, every scarred knuckle-crease of it. He stepped back before the thunder came in. Four counts. Close now. Hard enough to shiver the candle-thread under her door. The cards paused. He imagined her listening to the storm on the other side.

Damian turned and walked back down the corridor, still wanting. Simply, enormously, uselessly wanting what was not his to want. He left the wanting standing outside her door in the dark, where it could do her no harm.

Below, in the hall, the first rain arrived all at once, flung against the tall windows like grapeshot. The storm that had made him had found his house at last. He turned the gun room key over once in his pocket, took up his post at the window, and watched the night for gaunt men.

CHAPTER 15

The first gun came a little after midnight.

Damian was awake for it. He had been awake for the wind. For the elms fretting along the drive. For the long waiting hush any soldier knew at once. It was the silence before a battery opened fire. The silence before the violence began.

When the sky split above the west park and the boom rolled in behind the flash, he did not start. He lay in the dark with his eyes open and counted the seconds between light and sound. Range. Old habit. The army had taught him things he had never asked to learn.

Four seconds. At the next stroke, three.

Closing.

The house took the next peal through its bones. The window leads buzzed in their sashes. Somewhere below, a loose shutter knocked twice against its frame. A fist wanting in. The floor shivered under the bed. Hartleigh shook. Oak and brick, two centuries of it, meadows on every side, the house he had dreamed across half of France, and it shook the way the farmhouse had shaken him … awake.

He would not think about the farmhouse. He refused to think about the farmhouse.

Lightning again. The room leapt out of the dark all at once. Clothes-press. Washstand. The carafe on the night table with its glass turned over the neck. For the length of the flash the carafe was not a carafe. It was a jar. Squat. Thick-walled. Greenish glass. Something pale afloat in it and turning, slow. One of a shelf of such jars. Each with its drowned tenant. All of them catching the storm-light together.

Dark. Carafe. Water. His own room.

He knew what was on the table beside him.

He could still see what was bobbing in the jar.

He did not move. That was the wrong lesson for his body to have kept. Lying still was what he had done on the slab. His heart went like a drum beating the alarm. It had no right to. That was the joke of it, if a man wanted a joke at half past midnight. The one organ in him that behaved as though nothing at all had happened was the one that should have known best.

Thunder broke directly overhead. Under it, inside it, the way damp got into powder, he heard the muttering.

German rubbing against Latin. Dry sticks, one against another. A voice that never rose and never stopped, talking not to any man but to the work under its hands. Once, only once, a word Damian’s schoolroom had left him enough Latin to keep forever.

“Vivit.”

It lives.

The counterpane lay across his chest. Only a counterpane. Wool and wadding. A few pounds at most. And it was the whole weight of … them again, the heavy cold slack weight of the dead pressing him down into the stone.

He was off the bed and on his feet with the bedding flung to the floor before he had issued himself any order to move.

He stood in the middle of his own bedchamber in his shirt. Breathing hard, as if he had run from the gates.

He made himself take stock of his surroundings.

His room. His house. England. Rain on English glass. The bedposts were bedposts. The press held his coats, every one of them hung in a row like a picket of dumb sentries.

The seams across his chest ached in the wet air. The long ridges of them pulled at his skin, asserting its memory of death. He set his palm flat over his shoulder through the linen, over the worst of the stitching, and pressed, as if the thing might be persuaded to lie quiet.

His room. His house. Three miles of dark, wet, decent English country in every direction. No slab. No jars. No door at the top of a cellar stair, clicking shut.

The lightning called him a liar. Every flash, the room went white and was not his room. Every shadow between, he stood in the cellar with corpses stacked on him and the mutter of a madman in the black. There was no drill in any army on earth for that.

The floorboards of the gallery were cold under his bare feet.