Downtime (40 page)

“Are we finished with the chess for today?”

I flashed a hopeful grin as the two of them looked around at me. Derry, with a quick brush of a sleeve across his face, studied the board. “You’re teaching Morgan to play?”

Ezra cleared his throat, and I noticed he was fighting down a smile. “No, apparently he already knows.”

“Ah,” Derry said, taking my seat as Ezra mercifully eliminated the evidence of my defeat. I watched the two of them at it a while. By the second game, Ezra was nearly asleep in his chair, and I decided to nix my plans to attend the Stride funeral or do any investigation at all. Ezra needed a distraction, a healthy one. I talked it over with Derry, who came up with half a dozen suggestions that no doubt sounded like fun to him, even if they didn’t sound that way to me.

What the hell, maybe an afternoon in the park would be good for me. More importantly, it would be good for Ezra. I virtually sleepwalked him from chair to bed and asked Sully to keep any wayward spirits from disturbing his sleep. But it wasn’t long before Ezra started tossing and turning. I hung on to him through the rough spots and soothed him back to sleep when he woke. By three in the morning, an afternoon in the park was looking better and better. We’d both be too tired to do anything but lie in the grass and soak up the sun.

“And there’d better be some goddamned sun,” I muttered, giving Ezra a little squeeze as he relaxed against me. I wished I could get in his head and chase away whatever or whomever haunted him. I had leaned on him more than I’d realized and now, when I couldn’t, I felt the loss. Worse, I couldn’t provide the same comfort he had provided me. I couldn’t make him stop doubting his own sanity, nor help him escape the visions that caused him to doubt it in the first place. All I could do was hold him, which seemed inadequate when he was caught between this world and the next and moaning fearfully in his sleep.

But as terrible as the tossing and turning was, it had nothing on waking to find him gone.

“Ez?” I jerked upright and looked around the dimly moonlit room, to find he hadn’t gone far. Still in his nightshirt, he knelt over a small suitcase into which he was stuffing his possessions. He worked with a speed bordering on panic. I hated to imagine the nightmare that had led to this. “You going somewhere?”

As I sat beside him on the rug, Ezra continued to throw anything at hand into the suitcase. “He will not be done. When he knows I’ve gotten away, they’ll come again and I’ll be locked up some place where no one can find me.” Eyes bright and anguished fixed on my face. “Not even you.”

“Ezra—”

“Come with me. We’ll run away, to Paris or Naples. America, if you like. He’d have no hope of finding us there.”

Goddamn, I wanted to kick someone’s ass and I knew just whose. I caught the feverishly moving hands, putting an end to the packing for our new lives as fugitives. “Listen to me. He’s not going to come after you. It’s over.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know.”

“I do. He won’t, because….” I sighed. I hadn’t wanted to tell him, at least not until he was a little steadier. “Your dad was the one who signed the papers for your release.” I gave him the truth, without quoting dear old Sir William; that shit, he didn’t need to hear. Ezra let me get it all out, seeming too dazed to interrupt. An uneasy corner of my mind wondered if he would hate me for what I’d done. He didn’t seem angry. I wasn’t sure what he seemed. “You okay?”

“You blackmailed my father.”

“We didn’t know how else we’d get you out of there as fast. Or even at all,” I added, reaching for any points I could.

“You blackmailed him.” He couldn’t seem to grasp the concept. His eyes rose to mine. “For me.” He said it as if it were a revelation beyond all imagining.

A teasing response came to my lips and I swallowed it back. His eyes were gleaming with the tears he hadn’t so far shed. I couldn’t brush off a reaction like that. “I hated to do it that way. He’s your father and should love you unconditionally. If he can’t do that, at the very least he owes you the simple respect to let you live your life as you want to live it. We all owe that to each other.”

There was a soft hitch in his breath as he spoke. “Didn’t you….”

“Didn’t I what?” I prompted gently when he couldn’t seem to get the words out. He was tired and chilled and I was getting a little cold myself. Pushing away the suitcase, I got up and led him back to bed. Once we were comfortably entangled, he relaxed against me and I wondered if I should just let him sleep while he could. But then, with his head tucked against my neck, he got the question out.

“Before Sully came, you thought I must be mad—didn’t you?”

It wasn’t a question I really wanted to answer. But I couldn’t be less than truthful with him. “Once I was pretty sure you weren’t a con man, yeah. I figured if you were seeing something I couldn’t, you had to be hallucinating. But I was wrong. If anything, you’re holding yourself together better than all the rest of us.”

“Why would you think that?”

“You’ve been stuck down here with us, but for some reason, you can see beyond the veil. You’re living in two worlds and I’ve gotten a good idea lately of just how hard that is. I don’t think a weak mind could handle it. Look, if you were the big guy upstairs and you needed a little help sorting out the recently deceased, you’d want to give the job to someone who had his shit together, right?”

Ezra’s expression was tinged with the wry humor conversations with me seemed to provoke. “Are you trying to say that God has given me the ability to see spirits because I am, in fact, not insane?”

“Well, yeah.”

He didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or give in to the still-threatening tears. “That is a specious argument for my sanity.”

“Maybe it is. But I believe it.” And I hadn’t believed in ghosts two weeks ago. I wished like hell I could persuade him beyond a doubt that he was okay. Then again, maybe a grain of doubt about one’s sanity was safer than cocksure certainty in this world. “You all right?”

“I shall have to be. And you? Are you all right? I saw the blow you took for me.” He threaded fingers gingerly into my hair. “I think I felt it.” His voice dropped. “All the ride to Northampton, I prayed someone would come to tell me you were all right. I cannot seem to recall what happened after that. Your Mr. Sullivan came briefly, but I do not remember that he spoke to me. So many others were begging and crying….”

He closed his eyes, fighting to keep his composure, and I pulled him hard against me. “I’m sorry. Sorry they put you through that. Hell, I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you through.” I remembered the look on his face when he had set eyes on me at the asylum. Now I knew what it meant. For an instant, he’d thought he had seen a ghost—mine. It hadn’t occurred to me that out of all the terrors he’d faced, the one that would stick with him was the fear I’d been killed. “I’ve really complicated your life.”

He shook his head. “I’ve never been so free. I owe you more than I could repay in a lifetime. So perhaps in the next one.” Fingers intertwined with mine and squeezed lightly. “I will hope for that.”

The ache in my throat made it a little hard to breathe, let alone talk. “You changed your life. I think you’re the bravest damned son of a bitch I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of them.”

He looked rueful and a little embarrassed. “Let us hope it is not some sort of Dutch courage stimulated by your presence or I shall have a devil of a time of it when you leave.”

“Trust me, it’ll be for the best. You haven’t known me long enough to know what Reese and the other guys I’ve dated eventually figured out. I’m too much of a pain in the ass to keep around for long.”

“I rather thought it was because you put your work above all things.”

“Well, that’s a big part of it.”

“Why do you?”

If I had a nickel for every time I was asked that question…. “It’s my job to pull monsters like Jack off the street. Granted, I haven’t accomplished anything in this case, but I’ve managed to haul in a few in my own time.”

“How many must you capture to finish your penance?”

I smiled reluctantly at that. “Got me all figured out, huh?”

He slid closer and rested his chin on my shoulder. “When my mother died, she came to me in a dream, to ask me to let her go. The guilt I’d felt over not being able to save her kept her coming back to try to ease it. In my darkest moments I was quite certain that if I’d only concealed my own weaknesses better, she might have borne up for a longer time under hers.”

“Come on, you were just a kid,” I muttered, all too aware of the point he was trying to get across. Archie had come to me in a dream and maybe he’d been doing the same, trying to get through to me as we rode together one last time. I had spent years of my life coming up with every scenario, every way in the world I could have prevented his death. And all those years he might’ve been hanging around, waiting for me to finally figure out that I’d been powerless to prevent it. That if I had been there with him, I might have died too.

Whatever the case, my guilt wasn’t doing either of us any good. And I had to figure the same went for Sully. But I couldn’t let Sully go; not right now, anyway. He was my safety net, my only link to my own world. With all its real moments, Ezra’s world was still a dream, and my interrupted life stood far in the future, at a standstill, waiting for my return.

What worried me now was that I didn’t mind letting it wait. Turning back onto my side, I molded myself against a half-asleep Ezra and closed my eyes, wanting only to lose myself in the warmth and comfort of his presence. His arms came around me as mine went around him and he breathed an appreciative sigh. “Morgan.”

“Yeah?”

“If my father had refused….”

“Derry did say storming the gates seemed to come second nature to me.”

A bright, clear dawn woke us and, at breakfast, we discovered Derry had sown the seeds of our plan far and wide. And we weren’t the only ones headed for a day in the sun. The crisp morning had lured everyone in town to the same destination. Nannies pushed carriages across the vast, open green, older children trailing after like baby ducks. Women strolled in stately procession under their umbrellas or sat in the shaded pavilion, listening to a band. It was picture-perfect, in disturbing and startling contrast to the dark, grimy world I’d gotten a glimpse of in Whitechapel.

We spread a blanket under an enormous ivy-draped oak and I handed over all eight hundred pounds of hamper with relief. The day was warming up and I had no intention of spending it in layers of clothing. Tossing my hat into the grass, I shucked off my coat and dropped onto a corner of the blanket to let the breeze wash over me. Ezra divested himself of hat and coat too, and sat beside me. I watched him from the corner of my eye as he watched the boats in the distance. He might be more relaxed, but he was still not quite himself.

“You row in college?”

“Some, yes.”

“As did I,” Henry said from his perch on a low, twisting limb.

“Yeah?” I couldn’t resist. I nudged Ezra. “That old Oxford and Cambridge rivalry? You guys win?”

Derry’s smirk should have warned me, but it took Kathleen’s soft groan and the flush of angry color in Henry’s face to get through to me that I’d just unearthed a serious bone of contention. Ezra was struggling to suppress a smile, but the glint in his eyes was unabashedly wicked. “We gave a good account of ourselves.”