Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (40 page)

“It’s only that you don’t look well,” she said.

“Please you’ll make me blush flinging all these compliments around.”

“Can I do anything for you before I leave?”

“Stir up the fire, tie me down in silk pajamas, blush, dimple and perhaps throw in a seduction just for old time’s sake, all or any of the above and in whatever order you prefer.”

“Chivalrous of you.” She moved about the room lightly, smooring the fire, opening the window a crack, setting a glass of cool water where Jamie could reach it. Then stopped at the foot of the bed, eyes watering, “What on earth is that smell?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the strangely acrid smell that had, without warning, filled the room.

“The sweet scent of cows in hell,” Jamie murmured, head bright as a new penny against the shadow of his pillows.

“What?”

“I think you’ll find that you’ve thrown my shoe into the fire,” he said.

“Oh heavens so I have,” she looked in consternation at the merrily crackling shoe. “Well the shoe’s a loss I’m afraid,” she said peering into the fire, “is there anything else you need?”

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness...
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

Jamie said lightly.

“Not I presume,” she said tartly, “from the works of the venerated and prolific Jack Stuart?”

“My dear girl you disappoint, any Pilgrim worth her salt should recognize the honeyed vowels and consonants of that venerable Arabic bede, Omar Khayyam.”

“Persian poetry,” she said and had the memory to blush.

“And now if you don’t mind I think I’ll go to sleep. Won’t your knight be impatient at the gate?”

“I suppose he will,” she said, hesitating only slightly before heading for the door.

It closed with a quiet click behind her and Jamie opened his eyes and gave the door a look that the perceptive observer would have apprehended as longing, pure and undiluted.

Then with the smell of burned leather still clinging to the air, he closed his eyes and wished for sleep.

In the middling hours of the night, when the moon’s light was impeded by a milk-splot of cirrus cloud, the Duke, feeling an acute craving for his cook’s fried chicken, eased his girth from under his wife’s limp arm and made his way downstairs.

Having secured the chicken and a glass of port to accompany it he headed to his study. The door, freshly oiled that morning, slid to with ease and shut with an equivalent and pleasing silence.

“You do choose the most unappealing hours for these assignations my boy. You might have at least lit the fire,” he grumbled, setting the chicken and port down on his desk.

“Then let us meet as oft we’ve done,
Beneath the influence of the sun,
Or, if at midnight I must meet you
Within your mansion let me greet you,”

said a voice cheerfully from the corner of the study.

The Duke struck match to paper, watched it kindle and placed a couple of peat bricks on top when it was well caught. He rubbed his hands over the blaze and turned to contemplate his nocturnal guest.

“Lords and lambs a-leaping boy, how many goats went to the guillotine for that confection?”

“Fret not over them, like all good little Muslim goats they went willingly and with Allah’s name on their lips.”

Swathed in luxuriant black from head to toe, looking like some dandelion-headed Kashmiri prince or very well-heeled White Russian boyar, head wreathed artfully in spinning blue smoke, emerald clad fingers poised around a black cigarette, lay the supine and ankle-crossed form of His Lord of Ballywick and Tragheda, James Kirkpatrick.

“Slipped the charms of your soubrette so soon have you?”

“She’s far too sensible for French perversions Percy, besides she seems much more interested in dressing rather than undressing me.”

“Pity,” Percy replied, filling another glass with port and handing it over to his guest.

“No thanks,” a smoke-spiraling hand waved it away, “I’ve drinked enough drops tonight.”

“Pigsticks you have,” the Duke snorted, “you didn’t drink even one drop of alcohol tonight, though I imagine your bladder’s seen enough apple cider to last it a goodly while.”

“What does a man have to do these days,” feverish leaf-green eyes met his own through a haze of burning French tobacco, “to maintain the appearance of debauchery?”

“Those bloody-minded Jesuits have a lot to answer for boy,” the Duke growled, “I can’t discern between artifice and art with you anymore, did they feed you evasion with your oats?”

“I am merely the glimmer in the gimlet’s eye, the quivering aspen in airy cage, the shining, if you will, from shook foil.”

“Speak native boy, but as long as we’re tossing about glimmering gimlets, where do things stand with the government?”

“Well,” Jamie drawled, bemused momentarily by the construction of an airy plume of smoke, “it would seem we find ourselves caught between two rather famous Greek rocks.”

“The devil and the deep blue sea, is it?”

“Something like,” Jamie swung his legs around neatly and sat up, black cashmere stippled with diamond points of dew. “The Unionists are looking to shove their own man out of the tent and possibly use anyone within party ranks whose ideas are too radical as the lever to do it.”

“Mmphmm,” the Duke mused and offered Jamie a leg of chicken, which was politely refused. “The Piranha Theory is it?”

“A little blood in the tank attracts every cannibal in the bunch,” Jamie agreed.

“And you get rid of all your undesirables in one fell swoop and then it’s business as usual. Could be to our advantage boy.”

“Could be,” Jamie rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and tossed the remains of his cigarette into the fire. “But at least O’Neill was approachable on a few fronts, if we end up with someone like Faulkner or Chichester-Clark in power, we’ll be firmly wedged between those aforementioned rocks.”

“Orange to the bone those two.”

“O’Neill has a plan, however, that he intends to present in the next few weeks. Derry has forced his hand. However it consists of simple reforms, would have seemed like revolution two years ago but now it’s too little, too late I fear. Really, it’s hardly more than a promise to listen to the Catholic complaint. But no one is willing to talk to deaf ears anymore. Stormont doesn’t seem to understand the politics are in the streets now and not in the marbled corridors.”

“And what do we hear from London?”

Jamie grimaced, “Ireland is not on their agenda at present. I’ve made a few inquiries, discreet and otherwise and when I wove all the whispers together it basically came down to a rather large shout of ‘we’re not getting sucked into the Irish bog.’”

The Duke took a swig of port and wiped his fingers with a linen napkin.

“And so you think Derry was merely the opening shot in a larger battle?”

“Derry opened the ground up a crack and the Nationalists are seeing light for the first time in decades they aren’t going to allow anyone to snuff it out.”

“And our more radical friends?”

“Quiet, too quiet really,” Jamie idly toyed with a crystal ballerina he’d picked up, “it’s never a good sign when an underground organization isn’t making the slightest peep of protest.”

“Larger things on their collective mind, perhaps?” The Duke tried to catch Jamie’s eyes and failed. “What’s bothering you, Jamie?”

Jamie carefully replaced the little crystal dancer on her table before answering. “Percy surely you recognized the name of the young man Pamela is bringing to you.”

“Yes, I did see the papers after that debacle. Is he our worry?”

“No, he’s only getting his political feet wet and is for all his background and neighborhood a bit of an innocent. It’s his brother.”

“Inheritor of the family legacy is he?”

“It would seem so.”

“And you’re worried about her? I take it it’s the brother she shares a mattress with and not the pretty poster boy for the nationalist left?”

“I think he’s planning to split the army.”

“What?” The Duke leaned forward, as if he couldn’t believe his own words. “That’s insanity.”

“I don’t suppose he sees it in quite that light. The army has stagnated, it needs change, schism is change. Dublin doesn’t understand Belfast and vice versa. He’s a man of action, not words. All the speeches and marches may only be a precursor of what they’ve always been in this country.”

“Prologue to the gun and requiem to any real change.” The Duke eyed his guest shrewdly, “How’d you come across this tidbit? Surely she’s not spying for you?”

“No, she’s not.” Jamie smiled deprecatingly, “I hear things, acuity of a bat, my curse and not your problem.”

“Christ you are slippery,” the Duke said admiringly, “raised by Gypsies and Jesuits what else can one expect though? Tell me are you so intent on protecting her that you’d allow her to spy on yourself?”

“No,” Jamie shook his head wearily, “it’s not her. I’m not quite so blinded by her charms as to not consider that as a possibility, but no Percy, I’ve not let the viper in through an open door.”

“You do know who she is though, don’t you?”

“My memory, despite occasionally bearing a resemblance to Swiss cheese, does have its solid spaces. Yes,” Jamie said softly, “I do know who she is.”

“And yet you let her think you don’t remember, not terribly flattering to her,” the Duke said, regarding him with an eye that, despite the late hour, was sharp and shrewd.

“I imagine if and when she’s ready to tell me she will, and if not perhaps there are reasons it’s better she doesn’t.” His words were said with a polite finality, indicating that this topic, by his measure, was exhausted.

“And so we come to the real viper. What did you make of your dinner guest?”

“He’s playing his hand very close to his chest.”

“But?”

“But nothing, I can’t make head nor tail of his animosity towards me.”

“And who is in whose little orange pocket?”

“I don’t think the Reverend takes well to confined spaces.”

“So he’s the puppetmaster?”

“And so skilled at it that not a one knows when he’s pulling the strings.”

“He’s a real danger Jamie; you need to take care for yourself.”

“I am,” Jamie said thinly, looking suddenly to the Duke’s acute gaze like a prince caught within the fired walls of his own castle.

“You shouldn’t have chased her away Jamie, she’s good for you.”

“Have we come so soon to the fatherly advice portion of the program?”

“Your tongue doesn’t fool me the way it does most, James. You always did like to create difficulty where there wasn’t any though. Do you really think you can keep her safe at arm’s length?”

“Safe from myself at least,” Jamie rose, an elegant blackbound courtier, face impassive.

“One night in her bed boy would do you more good than a year’s worth of those pills you take, or are you taking them?”

“I’m not in any danger of being locked up in a hospital,” Jamie said eliciting a stern look from the Duke. “I take them with my oats and evasion in the morning and my whiskey at night.”

“You’re impossible.”

“I do my best.” Jamie smiled, a flash of white amidst the gold and green of his countenance.

“So, in summation, we are wedged rather tightly between the green of Scylla and the orange of Charbydis, with little room to breathe and even less to maneuver.”

Jamie turned, firelight laying stars down the length of his lashes, slender costly form limned in dying embers. “Oh Percy, there’s always a backdoor if you know where to look, and I,” he winked and reached for the window latch, “do.”

A breath of frosted air, a light displacement of currents and the tempest, with holy goats swirling, was gone.

The Duke sighed and returned to his chicken.

It was a Saturday, early winter bestowing its first lingering kiss hard on the trees and fields, when Casey woke Pamela in the dark hours in a manner enjoyed by both, then told her, as she snuggled back into the blankets, that it was time to get up.

“Go away,” she said, pulling the blankets up over her head, “it can’t be more than five o’clock.”

“Come on,” he threw the blankets back, “there’s someone I’m takin’ ye to meet today.”

“At this unholy hour,” she said, swinging her legs over the bed, irritated at his alertness regardless where the hands of the clock were pointing.

“Aye it’s a bit of a drive, an’ then it’s a matter of finding him as well.”

“Who,” she paused to yawn and stretch, “are you taking me to see? And where did you get a car?”

“Borrowed the car off Devlin an’ as for who I’m takin’ ye to see ye’ll see when we get there,” was his unenlightening response.

They took the Antrim Coast Road, partnered on one side by green fields swiftly browning and on the other by a gunmetal gray sea, surging with bearded breakers over rocks, reflecting the pale sky imperfectly. They had breakfast in a small seaside village, a postcard painting silent in the dying of the year. Lobster pots lay like abandoned toys in the rocky harbor, the smell of fish and salt blending with the scent of frying eggs and sausage.