Since the Surrender (25 page)

He shunted the thought away and looked about the room hopefully. Saw only a teapot and two cups of tea nicely arranged on a tray in preparation for pouring, a few slices of purchased lemon seedcake arranged on a plate, and no brandy decanter. Not even any sherry. He turned his head slowly back to his cousin and looked at him incredulously.

Adam cleared his throat. “I imagine you’ve come to inspect me for suitability and the like.”

“Why the Church?” Out the question came without preamble.

“Why the military?”

Well. Point to cousin Adam, because he hadn’t expected to be lobbed a question as an answer to a question. Unless it was the sort meant to answer his question, a typically irritating scholar trick.

“Because it’s the thing that suits me best,” he said. “It came quite naturally to me.”

He had never in his life been asked that question, or considered the reason.

As for vicars, in his experience, men became vicars as a result of having no choice in the matter.

“Why do you suppose that’s true?” his cousin asked. So conversationally asked that the answer eased right out of him before he even thought about it. “It’s what I do best. Serving and commanding men in the service of good purpose. Fighting to protect things that matter—family and country. Maintaining peace and freedom. Order and discipline and loyalty and camaraderie in honor of all those things.”

Unlike his brothers Colin and Ian, the military had literally and figuratively left its mark upon him. And now, unlike Colin and Ian, he seemed not to fit anywhere anymore.

“I think the Church is what I’m best at. For oddly enough, very similar reasons.”

He stared at his cousin.

Who stared back. Then helped himself to a slice of seedcake.

“So, Cousin Adam…”

Adam sat up alertly at Chase’s tone. Challenging. There was something Chase wanted to know. “You’ve rules, yes, in your profession? Love thy neighbor, and so forth? Rules that you’re honor bound to drill into your parishioners and to live by?”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Soooo…I’ll say yes,” Adam said, waiting expectantly, thinking this might be a test. He also looked a little amused, Chase noticed.

“What if you don’t see how the rules apply in a given circumstance?

What if doing right in one way means you must do wrong in another? And does a grave wrong take anything away from a good deal of right?”

He was of course thinking of Rosalind, and Kinkade, and Colonel March.

“When the rules as you understand them—when your own rules

—don’t fit your circumstance,” his cousin said, “you must trust your instincts to guide you toward the higher good. You must trust that your own innate good will lead you to do the right thing, to do what you believe is the right thing, which is the best any of us can do. None of us ever truly knows the ultimate consequence of any of our actions.”

Chase stared at his cousin.

Adam Sylvaine gazed evenly back.

And then finally Chase sighed. “Oh, I think you’ll do, Adam.” He said this sourly.

Adam grinned at him. Chase noticed that it was his mother’s grin, around the edges anyhow.

“My thanks, Captain—”

“Please do call me Chase.”

They chatted about family for a while longer, and then Chase decided he must take his leave. “Feel free to call upon me if you intend to stay in town longer, Adam.”

“I will be here for another week or so, cousin, and then I’ll return for my belongings and move into the vicarage. I shall look forward to meeting the rest of my family.”

It occurred to Chase that he would need to warn Adam Sylvaine about the Redmonds. An interesting position for an Eversea relative to be in: tending to a flock containing Redmonds was rather like asking a cat to look after the spiritual welfare of dogs. It might pose an interesting moral dilemma for his cousin, and this cheered Chase, who loved presenting anyone with a good challenge. He clasped his cousin’s hand—Adam had a good shake, as he’d had brothers to wrestle with, too—and turned to leave. It was when he’d reached the door of the small room that he noticed his leg didn’t hurt. At all.

That he’d walked holding, but not using, his stick. He went utterly still.

Chase had seldom known true fear.

Oh, there were different kinds of fear. The fear of confronting a heavily armed enemy, for instance, which was familiar. Tolerable. He knew how to behave in those circumstances. There was a known within an unknown.

This was entirely different. It was a fear that he’d gone mad. His heart leaped into his throat. He felt again uncertain as a child, and it was a feeling he loathed, because he’d never, never felt that sense of uncertainty these days.

That was, apart from when he spent time with Rosalind, of course. He paused at the door and turned slowly to look at Cousin Adam. He might have imagined it. It might have been a trick of the light. But he thought Adam looked terrified.

Whatever expression Chase had caught on his cousin’s face transformed quickly into a smile.

Chase lifted his hand by way of farewell. Adam lifted a hand by way of farewell.

And Chase’s leg ached again by the time he’d arrived home.

The next day—another sticky, appropriately lemon-skied London summer day—he fetched Rosalind to go back to the Montmorency, which was, as usual, not precisely bustling with activity. At least of the sort visible to anyone outside of it. Liam was, unsurprisingly, sitting on the steps. For some reason today he seemed dwarfed by the museum facade, as he’d never been before. And Chase realized this was because he was ever in motion: he had never seen the boy truly still.

Liam looked up as though his head suddenly weighed twice what it once had. His arms were extended out in front of him, resting on his knees.

When they approached, he splayed five fingers without lifting his arms, as though the effort was simply more than he could endure.

“Care to interpret that, young man?”

Liam finally looked all the way up, and Rosalind’s breath caught. His eyes were utterly lightless. His face was blank, stunned. As though he’d taken a blow.

“Interp…?” And then he stopped. As though he didn’t care whether he spoke another word again.

“Interpret means please tell me what this means.” And Chase fanned out his fingers in imitation of Liam. She could hear the subtle tension in Chase’s voice, even if Liam did not.

Chase, despite himself, was worried.

Liam straightened a little at the tone of Chase’s voice; one could use that tone as a spine, in a pinch, she thought. use that tone as a spine, in a pinch, she thought.

“Five men went into the museum yesterday, Captain Eversea. Two came out.”

Chase exchanged a look with Rosalind.

“Liam.” Chase said it with low command, but tension thrummed in his voice. Careful not to be too gentle, because he sensed the boy would balk. “Please look at me.”

The head went up. Those bleak eyes were intolerable. Rosalind was unaccountably frightened.

“Are you ill?” Chase kept his voice even.

And that’s when she knew Chase was frightened, too. The two of them carefully did not meet each other’s eyes, for in this moment they understood something irrevocable had happened to the two of them: they’d allowed Liam to matter.

Liam appeared to be biting the inside of his lip. Finally he spoke.

“Said she’d nicked a loaf of bread. Called the Charley’s. Took ’er away.”

Oh, God. They knew he meant Meggie.

The very worst part was that he wasn’t crying. He had the look of someone far beyond tears. Dazed, and yet stoic, and Rosalind could scarcely breathe for the plummeting panic she felt on his behalf.

No ten-year-old boy should ever look like that. And yet here he was, absorbing another loss, overwhelmed by the fact that life was stripping away from him the very few things he could call his own. stripping away from him the very few things he could call his own. And now he was entirely alone.

So little remains between any of us and this kind of desolation, she thought. What holds the world together for us are the people we love.

“Are you talking about Meggie?” Chase was all sharp questions.

“Who told you this?”

Liam seemed not to be fully listening. “She willna be comin’ ’ome after all,” he confessed shamefacedly.

“Liam. Answer me. Who told you this? Might she have nicked a loaf of bread? Where did they take her? Who took her?”

Liam shrugged. “She might ’ave done. She ’as before, I ken. When we dinna earn enough to buy food. I ’eard it from everyone in the boardinghouse.”

He was right. It didn’t matter. Theft was theft, and theft was wrong, and the justice system all too frequently seemed unjust. Hanging was seen as a deterrent; the English preferred to eliminate their criminals by sending them away or killing them, as he and Kinkade had discussed.

And soldiers were routinely flogged for petty theft in the army. Chase had found himself needing to order more than one flogging for various transgressions.

But this wasn’t war.

And starvation was wrong, too.

And vanishing sisters were wrong.

And suddenly right and wrong were superfluous, and he thought of his cousin’s words, and was fiercely glad he’d heard them.

“Where did this happen? And do you know the name of this Charley?”

“Aye. ’E walks o’er t’ Covent Garden most nights. Name o’

Buckthwaite. Everyone knows him. But she isna in the stone pitcher. No one has seen her. I tried to find her. I tried…” His voice trailed off.

The “stone pitcher” meant Newgate, they knew.

Chase and Rosalind exchanged a look. Chase’s eyes were nearly black with anger, but something stoic and determined hardened his features.

Rosalind sent him a beseeching look. He met it inscrutably. And they looked away from each other.

Each understood their reluctance to do what they did next, but there was never a question that they would do it.

“Come, Liam.”

The boy looked up at Chase in dull surprise. As though words were taking longer to penetrate his mind today.

Chase swooped down, picked him up under one arm, barely allowing him time to squeak, and swung him back into the carriage.

They took him to Rosalind’s borrowed home, as it was closer, and she had no servants other than her maid who would be scandalized by the presence of a filthy boy, and because, in truth, neither of them could bear the smell of Liam for a much longer trip. The memory of him would likely linger in the carriage’s upholstery until it was cleaned and aired.

On the way there it became increasingly clear that Liam would need to be scrubbed in order to be tolerated in close quarters, and would likely leave a lingering memento behind in the way of his own singular odor in any place he visited until then. So Rosalind heated four kettles worth of steaming water and dumped them into a large copper tub, then pumped in cold to make a perfect broth for bathing a boy.

And then she beckoned Chase and Liam into the kitchen. She produced a bar of soap—Liam was going to smell of lavender whether he wanted to or not—and slapped it into Chase’s hand. He stared back at her in mute appeal.

“It has to be you, and you know it. Just…show him how it’s done, if he doesn’t know.”

Chase sighed heavily. Man and boy vanished into the kitchen. Much splashing and rude swearing, and then, mercifully, magically, laughter ensued while Rosalind listened from the parlor, sitting in the chair, curtains parted slightly to allow sun in to warm her face. She felt unaccountably exhausted, unaccountably light, strangely borderless. She was entirely uncertain how to feel about anything at all in this moment, but missed Lucy profoundly and felt glad to have both Chase and Liam there, though they represented nothing to her but uncertainty and possibly heartache and she was too weary to care about that for now. It was sweet and bittersweet, and much care about that for now. It was sweet and bittersweet, and much better than if they hadn’t been there at all.

They would not have been if Lucy hadn’t been missing. She nearly dozed off to the low tones of Chase’s voice, oddly soothing, though he was no doubt telling Liam more gory stories of battle.

It was the sound, oddly enough, both of safety and a fear she could not articulate.

A half hour or so later Chase half carried, half herded a blanketwrapped somewhat abashed Liam out of the kitchen and deposited him unceremoniously in front of the fire, for all the world as if he were a pile of wet clothing or kindling.

Liam spent a minute struggling to keep his eyelids aloft. They watched him nod off and begin to tip, sit bolt upright with surprise to find himself nodding off and tipping, then nodding off and tipping again.

He did this a good five times before he finally toppled completely over.

In an instant he was in the deep, twitching throes of the kind of sleep available only to the very young.

Rosalind watched him, almost regretting the bath. Without his layer of dirt for armor, for necessary street camouflage, he looked like any other boy: small, vulnerable, ordinary, pale. The sort that could be hurt and abandoned and forgotten.

She knew a quiet terror, a quiet sense of possession, that she recognized was part and parcel of caring about anyone. Bloody hell.

It wreaked havoc on the heart and nerves, caring for someone. No wonder she’d learned not to do it indiscriminately. There was such a cost.

When the boy began to snore, Chase scooped him up wordlessly and carried him straight back to her bedchamber. He returned moments later, lowered his body into the chair across from her and carefully stretched out his leg.

“He weighs nothing at all.” He said it nearly tonelessly. They sat in silence. Knowing they’d both just irretrievably given up the safety of ambivalence toward the boy. They’d allowed him to mean something. Neither of them were pleased about it, but neither would they give him up for the world now.

The fire popped loudly. Rosalind jumped.

Chase didn’t. He was somewhere else entirely, in the grip of a black, black mood. He sat in the chair, his face grim as granite, his mouth a forbidding line, eyes dark as black ice, thump…thump…thumping his walking stick at maddeningly even intervals.