Since the Surrender Read online

  The celestial light was ironically quite helpful: it showed him that both had knives. Palmed; having been slid down into them from their coat sleeves. The sun nicked light flashes from the blades.

  Spendid.

  Chase calculated he couldn’t reach his boot pistol in time. He cursed the fact that he’d only brought the one with him on this outing, when force of habit and sheer love of weaponry usually meant he had another loaded and tucked into his coat.

  His blood was an exhilarating tsunami through his veins.

  Time, as it always had in moments at the precipice of danger, slowed for him: seconds stretched out luxuriously, like a tightly woven blanket pulled wide, revealing to him every minuscule move his stalkers made.

  Only two of you?

  If they had seen his smile then, they might have had grave second thoughts regarding what they were about to do.

  They did not. He was diabolically glad.

  They were even with him now, parallel to each other, close enough for him to see the color of one’s eyes: brown as manure.

  The first one lunged.

  Chase brutally whipped his walking stick across his torso. The man folded double, allowing Chase to drive his elbow down between his shoulder blades, once, twice, again, piling him into the ground. And when the man toppled, Chase drove his foot into his groin, then spun to crack his walking stick across the plunging forearm of the other man. He held him fast; inches away from his face, aimed at a point between his eyes; the knife point trembled.

  Strong brute.

  But Chase only needed to hold him just long enough. He slackened his hold a split second, long enough to surprise the man into thinking he was winning, to relax almost imperceptibly. Which is when Chase seized the wrist holding the knife and bent it back and back and back until the man rasped a hoarse scream, his fingers splayed, and the knife tipped from it.

  Ugly-beautiful thing went winking in the sun to the damp ground. Thunk.

  Very good knife, that.

  He kicked the man hard in the knees and down he went, hard. With a bit of a splash. Gazed up at him, stunned, from the ground. Chase slid his pistol out of his boot, cocked it without ceremony and pointed it into the man’s face.

  “Optionally,” he said, as though they’d been in the midst of a negotiation, “I can crush your windpipe with the heel of my boot, and you can die slowly rather than quickly.” He was scarcely breathing heavily.

  The brown eyes, flat and soulless in a pitted face, reflected more astonishment than terror. “S-S-Sorry, guv!”

  Chase’s laugh was mad and incredulous; it scalded his throat. Sorry I attacked you with a knife, guv! Sorry! ’Twas all just a misunderstanding!

  Terror officially replaced astonishment on the man flattened below him.

  Chase explained patiently, “I think I see your error. Did you think I was a ‘gentleman’? You’d be amazed at how many gentlemen were made savages by war. I’ve killed better men than you without blinking. I’d think twice the next time you to come for one of us. Some of us might have even developed a taste for it.”

  The other man was spared a soliloquy and a gun in his face because he was rolling about on the wet ground, tucked up like a hedgehog and gasping something about his baubles.

  Chase assessed him curiously for a moment, the way one might regard an animal needing to be put out of misery. And then he locked his pistol, knelt awkwardly—his leg was nearly ready to buckle beneath him, and somewhere beneath his fury pain sang its relentless, familiar tune—and collected that devil’s knife, too.

  Quite good, they were. He’d been an artillery captain; he was still able to admire a decent weapon regardless of context. Who knew when he might need them?

  He fished about in the man’s pocket and found a sheath and managed to tuck both knives into it.

  When he pushed himself upright with the stick, and righted his hat, which had tipped down over one brow, with one hand, Chase looked more like the urchin’s cocky imitation of a gentleman than he would ever know. He nodded curtly and nonspecifically to the cluster of people who’d stopped to gawk, and hailed the hackney clip-clopping by, oblivious to the seconds-long ruckus that had just taken place and unaware that a gent armed with knives and a pistol was about to board it.

  Chase pulled the door open. The hackney was empty, but a great cloud comprised of the smells of all its previous passengers rushed out.

  He was suddenly aware that his body was sticky with sweat and rain dampened. He settled into the seat, produced from his pocket a soft handkerchief embroidered by his sister Olivia with his initials and three tiny flowers, of all things. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her he didn’t want them on his handkerchiefs, since Olivia felt she’d needed practice with flowers, when what she really needed was to stop charmingly rebuffing every man who’d attempted to court her since that bastard Lyon Redmond had disappeared. He dragged the handkerchief over his face, slid it behind his neck, stuffed it back into his pocket.

  Well, then.

  He was shaking a little: from nerves, from exhilaration, from all the ways that life had changed in the past five years. Rolling along in that carriage, he suddenly felt restless and strangely disembodied, separate from everyone and everything else in the world, a member of no country or family.

  A humorless smile stretched his lips. Then faded.

  He supposed he did resemble prey now.

  He sighed, stretched his leg out and propped his heel on the seat across from him. Then drove his knuckles hard into it, kneading it, to stop the twist of pain. He did it again. And closed his eyes. And waited.

  And breathed.

  And breathed.

  The third breath was more of a sigh.

  “You ought to marry, Chase!” his brother Colin had taken to urging with an intolerably enigmatic air, as one initiated into a sacred secret order, when he wasn’t talking about cows. As if marriage were the Rosetta stone, the thing that finally gave meaning to the merry chaos of Colin’s life.

  “I ought to throw this pint at you,” he told his brother. “Ha ha.” Thanks to Colin, Chase had learned that one really could speak through clenched teeth. He would be damned if anyone would tell him what he ought to do.

  But that’s not what had gotten him banished. Colin and Madeleine had just laughed and laughed. That time.

  Unbeknownst to his family, Chase had written to inquire about a position with the East India Company in India, requesting that his reply be directed to him in London.

  Now, he left his quieter leg where it was, lifted off his hat and tapped it against his hand to dash the remaining water from its brim, slid his arms out of his greatcoat and gave it a shake. Pinhead bright droplets flew everywhere. He smoothed his hair with his hands and jammed the hat back down.

  Thus concluded whatever grooming he would do for his assignation at the Montmorency.

  He pulled the grubby message from his pocket and read it again. He hesitated then, half-whimsically, gave it a sniff.

  He could have sworn he detected the faintest scent of…roses?

  Chapter 2

  The Montmorency Museum reminded Chase of an abandoned mistress, perhaps a French one: elegant but aging resentfully, reluctant to receive visitors. The French architectural influence was there in the mansard roof, in the small, fanciful dome arcing over the center door, in the curving bay windows flanking it. The courtyard the urchin had described was surrounded by an uninviting spike-topped iron fence. It wasn’t precisely swarming with eager visitors, either.

  Chase got up the wide marble steps with the help of his temper and walking stick and pushed the enormous doors open.

  He paused, nonplussed. The place was vast and marbled and as hushed as a sickroom, and lit with a certain amount of drama: daylight must have once poured into the half-circle windows built high into the walls, but buildings had mushroomed up around it in the intervening century since it was built, and good wax candles burned in a brigade of small, elegant sconces stretching back and back through a warren of halls and rooms. And when he inhaled, he discovered that the place smelled like the tiny, ancient church in Pennyroyal Green, with all those ancient wood pews polished by linseed oil and centuries of Sunday best-clad Sussex arses and candle smoke soaked into its walls.

  Which of course reminded him of the duty he’d shirked in favor of this misadventure.

  He shrugged off his conscience much more easily than he’d fought off his attackers and stepped forward.

  A clerk of some sort, his posture buckled with boredom, was stationed behind an exquisitely simple desk. He’d propped his cheek in one hand and was disconsolately fingering the pages of a book with the other, reading without seeing. Another, much larger, book lay open next to him, quill and inkwell nearby. A guest book. Its sheer size and volume was a trifle optimistic, Chase thought. As though the Montmorency expected legions of visitors.

  He leaned forward nosily: only four names were written on the page in front of him, three male, none he recognized. The fourth was a woman’s name: Mrs. Smithson. He did recognize the handwriting and the color of ink. She’d written her message to him here at the Montmorency. He nearly rolled his eyes: Mrs. Smithson. Very cunning, indeed. Quite the subterfuge.

  “Where might I find Italian paintings?” he said to the clerk.

  The man shot upright as though a puppeteer had jerked strings from above. His book went tumbling to the floor. He blinked at Chase. He had a pink handprint on his face.

  Chase realized then that he’d inadvertently barked a command rather than a question. Habit of intonation. He immediately forgave himself.

  The man recovered. “Paintings of Italians, sir, or paintings of Italy, or paintings painted by Italian artists, or paintings of—”

  “Cows.”

  The man didn’t even blink. Admirable. Chase peered: he saw the telltale powder marks beneath the skin. Yes, as he’d suspected: this one had been a soldier.

  “Italian cows, sir? Or cows in addition to the Italian paintings? Or—”

  “Italian cows.” Chase made it a drawled challenge.

  The clerk reared back, accepting the challenge. His eyes rolled ceilingward and he cocked one eyebrow, presumably to aid concentration, as he mentally prowled the museum corridors.

  Somewhere, an ancient clock tocked out seconds. One…two…

  “The East Wing!” A triumphant pink flushed the man’s face. “Go straight back and bear right at the puppetry exhibit. The room is small, and adjacent to a room filled with sixteenth-century bedroom furniture.”

  Oh, God. The news that there was a puppetry exhibit was very unwelcome.

  “You’ll find paintings by Italian painters of Italian landscapes, and in these you’ll see cows and other farm creatures, should you care to look at those as well, sir.”

  This was said without a trace of irony. He was no doubt accustomed to all manner of daft questions and specific requests from the aristocracy.

  “My thanks,” Chase said sincerely, because he was always genuinely pleased to encounter anyone who knew their job, and he invariably enjoyed testing people as much as he enjoyed being tested.

  The man nodded acceptance. “If you would sign the book, sir?”

  Chase signed his name and rank: Captain Charles Sylvaine Eversea, taking an immodest amount of space on the page.

  He surreptitiously thumbed through a few pages and found a ragged quarter inch of paper remaining in the seam where a page had been torn from the book. And scarcely any names on the other pages.

  “Are all of your visitors required to sign the book?” Chase asked.

  “Aye, sir.”

  How on earth did the Montmorency justify its existence if no one came to see it? But then again, it was only Monday, the start of a new week, and perhaps the ton was still recovering from drinking the night before.

  And then he went where the man pointed. The clerk peered down at his name as Chase left.

  And went still as a stone.

  Linseed oil and beeswax couldn’t completely banish the must of aging wood and upholstery, of old things moldering together in a crowded and dim space. Chase passed a room filled with Egyptian antiquities: saw sarcophagi propped along the wall, and tiny ancient glass bottles shining dully behind the newer glass of cases, slabs of stones with Egyptian letters etched into them, fragments of the stories of other people’s lives or perhaps codes of law. Another room made his soldier’s heart leap: here was armor, suits hammered both for horses and men. Italian armor he recognized quickly; another suit, he knew, hailed from the twelfth century. The Everseas owned several suits of the stuff, all apparently bequeathed by ancestors, all positioned strategically throughout the house and kept gleaming and oiled by the servants. They’d damaged one suit in an attempt to extract his brother Colin from it when Colin was thirteen years old, but to be fair, his brothers had all dared him to get into it. Judging from the armor, the men in the Eversea clan had been much smaller centuries ago. Doubtless they’d been forced to grow larger in order to defend themselves against the Redmonds.

  The thought amused him.

  He would treat himself to a look around this room one day. To make up for the fact that he would have to walk by…

  Puppets.

  He tried not to look, but there they were. Rows of them lined the walls on specially built shelves. Little bodiless hand puppets with their heavy heads and tiny little hands. Some suspended on hooks, like torture victims.

  And then there were the marionettes.

  When he was younger, his uncles had told them—because he and his brothers begged them to, as it was the nature of little boys to be gory—stories of medieval torture, about how accused criminals were strapped to a table and strategically stretched and stretched and stretched until their limbs popped from their sockets and dangled uselessly.

  This is what Chase thought of when he saw marionettes.

  Rattling, wrecked, unnatural things with screamy falsetto voices provided by invisible people yanking at strings. Evidently, people throughout the centuries had considered this entertainment. The first marionette performance he’d seen gave him a nightmare when he was six years old, and he had avoided them as much as he could ever since.

  If he’d ever told a soul how he felt about marionettes, he’d known he could expect his brothers to pool their allowances to buy him a marionette for every birthday; that he would likely never be able to go up to bed at night without wondering whether one was stashed beneath his blankets; that he would have been surprised by a puppet show now and again when he went to the loo, which meant he would have screamed and pissed everywhere.

  The Eversea boys were endlessly inventive. Chase was intelligent and excelled at self-preservation.

  He’d never enjoyed watching Punch swinging his stick at Judy, but marionettes were by far the most loathsome. And there was an enormous one perched up high in a chair, presiding dourly over this wing of the museum. Doubtless centuries old and priceless and a fine example of Czechoslovakian craftsmanship and all that, but it had bulging eyes painted white and dotted with minute blue pupils, outsized grim ruby lips, and a nose like a petrified potato: enormous and misshapen. A deliberate wart sprang from it. Its face was carved into a scowl. Its legs and arms dangled impotently from a body covered in a white shirt and lederhosen.

  Chase spared this atrocity a killing glance, then pretended it wasn’t there at all, though he thought he felt its eyes on his back.

  And at last found himself in what appeared to be the East Wing, because cherubs and angels swam into view.

  There was a woman standing alone in this room.

  She was apparently riveted by a painting covering about three-quarters of the back wall. Tall. Slim. An air of suppressed vigor, as though stillness was an unnatural state for her. Her pelisse fell from her shoulders in the sort of effortless line only certain modistes seemed able to achieve—he had sisters, he’d kept a mistress or two, he recognized the difference; perhaps they paid crews of seamstresses to massage the fabric into languid compliance. She wore a hat with a feather in it—a subtle hat, a subtle feather—brown and fluffy but not at all fussy. Pretty hat, the urchin had told him, and he’d been right. From bonnet to boots she was, in fact, dressed in rich shades of brown, from chocolate to the dark gold trimming the pelisse. The overall effect should have been one of camouflage, given the old wood and muted light surrounding her. But she was the sort of woman who had no hope of remaining unnoticed regardless of where or how still she stood. She had presence.

  Given his gait, he, for that matter, had little hope of remaining stealthy.

  He stepped forward. The floor gave an irritated squeak against the press of his walking stick.

  She didn’t turn.

  She appeared to be drinking in the painting.

  Chase casually paused before a painting called The Miracle, at least according to a brass plate affixed to the frame. The artist was an Italian whose surname was nearly as long as the painting itself and primarily comprised of vowels. He supposed it would be considered pastoral—there were trees clustered in a meadow, with two muscular black cows and two improbably fluffy sheep arranged beneath them—and in the sky were two winged cherubs so fat that surely the miracle in question was how they had gotten aloft at all. They would have needed to have the wingspans of albatrosses, not those foolish wee flaps sprouting from their shoulders, he decided, irritated. One of the cows was looking up at them with what he fancied was an expression of surprise and alarm. Which was precisely the expression he would wear if he’d suddenly noticed two fat cherubs bearing down on him.

  Now, a fine James Ward picture of a horse, or an Antoine-Jean Gros battlefield scene, even if it depicted Bonaparte doing something fraudulently benevolent with lepers, something practical, visceral, something of actual life…

  Though doubtless Colin would have been enthralled by that cow, he thought sardonically.

  -->