Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (51 page)

“Don’t allow it to,” came the reply, “the RUC are hardly likely to look with sympathy on her case once they realize who she is or rather who she lives with. Regardless, she refuses and I tend to agree, this system would only re-victimize her and if her,” he paused and coughed, “husband were to find out there would be hell of a kind you can’t quite imagine to pay.”

Duncan raised his head at that. Husband? The girl had a husband? This was getting messier by the minute. He stood and looked around in bewilderment for an exit and finally decided on the door off to his far right when a cool voice said, “Duncan, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop eavesdropping and come in.”

Duncan meekly did as he was told.

The eyes, green as jade, held no mercy, no compassion. Nor did the face, hard and composed against its bones, betraying nothing, unrevealing of what stakes this man held in tonight’s events.

“Sit,” said the man, whom Duncan had seen only in magazines and on the television where he constantly seemed to be evading the camera, even while facing it directly.

Duncan sat and found a glass of whiskey placed in his hands.

“Drink it, you’ll need it before you see an end to this night.”

Duncan drank it, eyes filling with tears from the strength of it.

“Now you will tell me what happened tonight.”

“I didn’t—I couldn’t—” Duncan began, tripping over his tongue in his nervousness.

“For some things Duncan,” the voice was mild, though it held the sting of poisoned honey, “excuses may be applied; in this situation they are not acceptable.”

“Yes, sir,” Duncan replied, free hand bunching the cloth of his trouser leg.

The story came out then, from start to finish—the game, Bernie’s resulting mood, the couple on the train, the brimstone smell of hatred and danger in the air and his knowledge of what was about to take place from the instant Bernie set eyes on the girl. What had been done to the boy, what had been done to the girl in its detail and grotesqueness. He did not spare himself even the tale of his own cowardice. Through it all the man who sat in front of him uttered not a word, not a sound, nothing to indicate that the story touched him in the slightest. Finally, to his own relief he burbled to an end and was grateful for the silence that followed. A paper and pen were placed in his hands a moment later.

“The names of the boys, first and last, middle if you know it. Where they live, where they wander, what they eat and to whom they pray, no detail is to be considered too small.”

“I—but—” Duncan began to protest but the words quickly wilted on the vine as he looked up and met the unemotional gaze and ungiving mouth of his host. Here, he thought, was someone far more frightening than Bernie. Excuses did not apply and would be less than welcome. He would have to take his chances with Bernie. He wrote the names and across from them all the habits he understood if not of the individual boys, than of their neighborhood, of their race, the dark haunts, the appetites bred in some by poverty and ignorance, in others by some vicious twist of nature itself.

“Thank you,” said Lord James Kirkpatrick when Duncan handed him the paper, trembling, that could signify a swift and ugly end to his young life.

“What now? I mean shouldn’t the police be called?” Duncan asked desperation spilling out and ahead of his words.

Folding the paper in half and laying it with a light hand beside him, James Kirkpatrick said, “I think you will find this entire situation simplified Duncan if you abandon pretense.”

“No police then.”

“No police.”

“What do I do, where do I go?” Duncan asked with the anger of one who knows home is not an option.

“Perhaps a university overseas, in a place where the pearls of democracy float toward the shore rather than away and men,” the green eyes, lightless and dense, met his own like the thrust of a sword to a soft vulnerability, “still have the ability to dream.”

Duncan took the point as he was indeed meant to. “But how, I don’t know anyone or anything—” he faltered, aware that he was treading on ground not of his own making.

“Duncan you will find life considerably less confusing if you realize that all things can be arranged piecemeal to become a, if not familiar, at least livable structure. Do you understand?”

Duncan, for not the first time in his abbreviated history, thought miserably that he did.

In the time it took to mount the stairs, traverse the hallway and enter his own bedroom, Jamie had sorted, sifted and refined his emotions for the task that lay ahead of him. He opened the door to the room and closed another within his mind, recently cracked to light and hope. He turned to the paler declivities of the brain, ones without emotion and frailty and put the hasp firmly to its lodging and slid the bolt home. There was no place for weakness here, he must tonight and for possibly a great deal longer be the flesh to blunt the knifepoint, the beebalm upon the thistle, the sponge to sop the venom from wounds unseen. He put away from him, as the man in the psalm once had, the things that could or might have been.

She was no more than a huddle of wool and linen on the bed, the bedside lamp providing only a small halo of light that puckered in folds and hollows.

“Pamela?” he whispered, but to his ears overly alert and sensitive, it seemed a shout.

“Can I have a bath now?” she asked, voice small but steady. “Now that the doctor is done.”

“Of course,” he said, grateful to have a task, however small, with which to occupy his hands.

He started the bath, adjusted the water and then rummaged through the cupboards to find some scent, to take from her nose, at least, the memory of the train. At the far back of one shelf, pushed carefully there after his wife had left, were rows of small dark bottles, stoppered with old, cloudy glass. Oils from flowers and fruit, from herbs and trees, elixirs to bind thought and fear, for Colleen had been very desperate to believe that anything might help, even the bitter scent of dead blossom. He picked up the one closest and read the carefully lettered label in Colleen’s small, precise hand. ‘
Betony- For Purification and Protection against evil.’
A bit late for that he thought but dropped a small stream of it into the water.
‘Heather- to guard against violence and aid in the conjuring of ghosts,’
read the next. Again too late, he returned the bottle to its place and chose another.
‘Fragaria Vesca- Strawberry- For Love and Luck.’
The irony of that for before tonight she had seemed imbued with an uncanny amount of both. Jamie unstopped the bottle and scent wavered out, rising on the steam like berries crushed between pale hands. He added it to the bath. The last bottle he chose lay on its side, the color of rubies with an amethyst stopper. He remembered finding it in an antique store in London, how the day had been full of rain and heavy gray clouds and the bottle had glowed from amidst a clutter of glass. How it had seemed a bit of magic in a bad time when so many things were fading to black and white. Colleen had loved it, as she always loved pretty, abandoned things. It had become the talisman of her collection, the
genus loci
that would keep and contain the magic, turning mere liquid into medicine that would make whole all the parts of their lives. Fairy nonsense and as history had borne out it had not worked. Happiness could not, it seemed, be found, much less bottled.

He turned the vial carefully in his hands, the label worn and smudged and the glass cold where it had once possessed an unnatural warmth.
‘Balm of Gilead- To Mend a Broken Heart.’
Jamie emptied the entirety of it into the bath.

He sensed her in the doorway behind him and closed his eyes in a hasty and wordless prayer before assembling his mask and turning to give what he might and restrain what he could not.

“Do you need my help?” he asked, no trace of anything but a careful gentleness in his words.

“I can’t seem to stop shaking enough to get the buttons on the shirt,” she gave a short bark of laughter that was dark and strangled in its infancy.

She wore an old nightshirt, all Dickensian white cotton and pleated creases that Colleen had given him as a joke one Christmas. The buttons, tight and flat, were numerous and a challenge to even the steadiest of hands. He unbuttoned them slowly, hands light and mind averted. He pulled it over her head and laid it aside, then gave her his arm to lean on and assist herself into the bath. Once she was settled, soap, shampoo and cloths at hand he turned to leave the bath.

“Please stay, I don’t want to be left alone,” she said.

He stayed and helped, for her hands, comprehending what her mind had yet to, would not cease to shake and she, holding them clasped tightly in front of her, seemed afraid to let them go.

He washed her tenderly, as one does an infant, with concern and care. He noted the blood—black, blue, violet and crimson that had dried on the skin of her thighs, the bruises and scrapes on her back and front, the welt rising on her jaw, the raw split on her lower lip, the swelling on the upper one and knew what it signified. These things he witnessed and put aside one by one, saving the anger for later, knowing it had no place here and now. It would serve neither of them this night.

After he had washed and rinsed from her what physical traces as could be removed with soap and water, he wrapped her in a large towel, patting her hair down with another.

“Would you like to lie down again?” he asked handing her the nightgown.

She shook her head slowly but firmly, “No I’ve got to go to the hospital, I have to be there for Pat, I have to be there if...” her voice faltered, her eyes came up and met his for the first time that night, “he can’t be alone, Jamie.”

“Of course,” he replied quietly, leaving unspoken the words both of them felt with utter clarity. Pat must not be alone, for no man, even if it is meant, should die alone.

“He won’t die, but he’ll wish he had for a week or two,” the doctor said acerbically. “The internal bleeding wasn’t as bad as I’d originally feared and the bones seem to have set up nicely. He’s young and he’ll mend well. But,” he sighed and gave the two faces before him a weary regard, “the arm is broken very badly, in five places and it may never function fully again. The breaks weren’t entirely clean and the bone was near mashed in some spots. I’m keeping him in for at least two days,” he gave them both a stern look, “for observation and to be certain the internal bleeding is fully stopped. After that he’ll need constant supervision and help and someone to administer pain medication on a regular basis.”

“He can stay with me,” Jamie said firmly, “we’ll hire a round the clock nurse if that’s what’s needed.”

“I can do for him,” Pamela said, voice low with determination.

“That will be something for the two of you to work out,” the doctor raised his eyebrows at them.

“Can I see him?” Pamela looked up at the doctor with dry, burning eyes and Jamie wanted to say ‘no’ there on the spot.

“Yes, but only to rest his mind that you are safe and sound, a few minutes at most.”

“Thank you,” she said as if the doctor had just granted her a reprieve from the gates of purgatory.

“Nurse,” the doctor stopped a long-nosed fearsome looking woman on her way past. “Nurse Browning will take you to your friend.”

Pamela, with a small smile of gratitude, followed the nurse, who after quickly and circumspectly taking stock of her visible bruises and cuts, indicated with a gentle nod of the head that Pamela should come with her.

“Do you think it’s wise to allow her to see him?” Jamie asked as soon as Pamela was out of earshot.

“Yes, the both of them need to ease their minds a bit, he woke up just before he was anesthetized and tried to get off the operating table, he was shouting for her, certain that she’d been taken off the train by those bastards who beat him. I tried to reassure him but he was certain I was lying and I can’t say I blame him after the night he’s just had.”

“But he will be alright?”

“Physically yes, his mental and emotional rehabilitation will rest a great deal on how the girl recovers from all of this. If anything is to halt his healing it will be the guilt he feels over not being able to prevent what happened to her.”