The Alleluia Files (25 page)

Celia herself answered the door, dressed in an embroidered nightshirt that looked expensive enough to pay for remodeling her hotel. Her salt-and-pepper hair was coiled on top of her head, and her complexion was rosy from sleep. “Why, Lucinda! I had no idea you were back! Is there trouble? Where’s your aunt?”

“She’s still on the ship that brought us from Samaria,” Lucinda said. “There’s a hurt man on board. I’ve sent Jackson to the harbor with a stretcher. Do you think Hammet can meet us at the Manor in an hour or so? I don’t know how soon they’ll arrive.”

“But of course he can!” Celia exclaimed. “What’s the nature of this man’s injury? Hammet will want to know.”

“Concussion and some pretty big chest wounds,” Lucinda said. “Our ship was fired on by Jansai cannon, and the ball hit where Maurice was sitting.”

“Fired on! Jansai!” Celia repeated. “I can’t believe—”

“I couldn’t either. But I was there. No one else was hurt.”

“Sweet god singing,” the older woman murmured. “Don’t you worry. I’ll have Hammet over at your place in half an hour.”

Lucinda checked in at the Manor again briefly to make sure both Emmie and Jackson were doing as they were told, and then she glided back to the wharf to waken the harbormaster. Not that there was much he could do, but Foster liked to be apprised of all the events going on in his domain.

“Jansai, yes, they’re a terrible nuisance on the high seas,” he told her as they strolled down to the dock to await
The Wayward’s
arrival. “More than one Edori ship has come dragging
into harbor here having run afoul of a Jansai warship.”

“I didn’t know anything about this,” she said.

Foster shrugged. “I suspect they war on none but the Edori. Who are not the type to complain to the Archangel. He may not even know of the piracy.”

“Or he may,” Lucinda said, thinking back to her conversation with Reuben.

Foster shrugged again. “Or he may. The ways of the angels are mysterious and sometimes prejudicial to mortals. Which is why I left Samaria twenty years ago.”

“Someday you’ll have to tell me the whole story,” Lucinda said, but absently. She had spotted
The Wayward
‘s masts shaping out of the early morning mist. “When we have more time.”

There was an excruciating wait (it seemed pointless to fly back to the ship just to get in everyone’s way), and then an hour’s worth of bustle as the ship docked and Maurice was carried off. The sailors commandeered Jackson’s stretcher and bore their captain down the short street to the Manor, following Gretchen’s brisk lead. Lucinda trailed behind them, feeling useless and stupid.

Another pair of hours passed in purposeful activity as Hammet examined Maurice, Lucinda fed the sailors, and Gretchen consulted Emmie and Jackson about the status of the hotel while she’d been gone. Everything looked fine to Lucinda: The roof was still on and none of the windows had been bashed in, so she couldn’t imagine that anything dreadful had gone wrong. But Gretchen liked to be in control of her environment, and she could not relax for half an hour until she had identified potential problems that had boiled up in her absence.

Reuben slipped away before Lucinda had a chance to talk to him; she guessed he had swallowed his breakfast, then tracked down the doctor in Maurice’s room. There was good news, though: Reuben had told Gretchen that he would much appreciate a room at the hotel, though he expected the three others would sleep on the ship. Which meant, for another day or so, she would have the exquisitely wonderful, exquisitely torturous gift of his company.

She busied herself cleaning the kitchen, though Emmie could do it well enough. Gretchen swept through, saying, “Well, nothing’s irretrievably broken, and that’s a blessing, though a small one,” before marching toward the stairway to check on the
condition of the upstairs rooms. Lucinda smiled, men she sighed.

It was another half hour before she had any news of Maurice, and that was brought by Reuben himself. Lucinda had drifted into the large parlor and begun automatically to open curtains and neaten the furniture, though Emmie had kept everything in reasonably good shape. She cast a longing glance at her harpsichord, for she found nothing so soothing as music, but she did not want to disturb the hurt man. So she merely dusted the top of it with the cuff of her sleeve, and closed the lid over the keyboard.

“When you’ve time, you’ll have to play a song or two for me,” said a voice from the doorway, and she was so startled she almost crushed her fingers under the lid. “At least, I assume you play?”

“I do, and so does my aunt. She taught me. How is Maurice?”

“Your kind doctor says he’s well enough and just needs two or three days of quiet rest, undisturbed by gunfire or violence.”

“You told him what happened?”

“He did ask.”

“Was he shocked?”

Reuben came farther into the room and shook his head. “He didn’t seem like a man easily shocked, your doctor. My guess is he’s got sharp old eyes that have seen a great deal in this lifetime.”

“Luminauzi,” Lucinda said with a shrug.

“Well, they are the wisest.”

There was a moment’s silence while Reuben stared out through the lace curtains and Lucinda tried to think of something to demonstrate her own wisdom. All she could come up with was, “So what will you do now?”

“Wait a few days till the captain’s better, then sail on to Ysral,” he said, still looking out the window.

“I meant—this minute. Is there anything I can do for you? For Maurice?”

“Where are Michael and the others?”

“They went back to the ship. They said they needed to sleep for a week.”

Reuben smiled. “As do I. Perhaps we’ll be here longer than a few days.”

“There’s a room ready for you,” Lucinda said tentatively. “If you’d like to go there now.”

At last he turned to look at her, smiling faintly, and she felt all her blood rush to her cheeks at the sheer beauty of his face. “What I need more than a bed right now,” he said, “is a hot bath. Is such a thing to be found here on Angel Rock?”

“Yes, we have baths in a chamber out back,” she said, though it was a struggle to speak normally. Which was ridiculous; she could not imagine why she was behaving so oddly. “I’ll have Emmie heat the water. It will be ready in ten minutes.”

“And
then
I’ll sleep for a week,” he said. “When I come down, I’ll be so civil and cheerful that you won’t know me.”

“You may be changed,” she managed to retort, “but I don’t think a little water and a little dreaming will improve you so much as all that.”

“Wait and see,” he promised. “Wait and see.”

After that, the rest of the day was nothing but dull anticlimax. Reuben and Maurice slept; Gretchen sailed through the house, noting inefficiencies and errors; Emmie trailed behind her, explaining things away and rolling her eyes at Lucinda; Jackson kept to himself in his basement quarters until he was summoned to a chore or an accounting. Most of the neighbors dropped by to welcome them back, but of course Gretchen had no time to visit with any of them. Lucinda listened with far less interest than usual to the recitations of events that had occurred while she was gone (learning from three separate sources that Timothy and Gia had decided to marry, though no one was supposed to know it, and Parker was considering returning to the mainland, though he had not decided if he would live with his son in Breven or his daughter on her farm in Bethel). These were the comforting, familiar threads of her daily life; she was shocked to learn that other faces, other names, could take up so much of her attention that she had little to spare for her oldest friends.

But she was tired and out of sorts. In a day or two, when the Edori sailed away, she would revert to her ordinary self. The Manor would not look so strange, as if the rooms had shrunk down or the furniture had been wrongly arranged; the accents of her neighbors would not sound so provincial and unmelodic. Everything would be the way it should be, as she remembered it, as it had been before she’d left.

And the next day she did feel much better. She had gone to bed early and slept late, and not stirred once the entire night. She woke to the smell of Emmie’s pancakes and bacon, and the aroma was so delicious and so familiar that she instantly felt like she was
home
. And was swept with a great nostalgia for this place that she had known most of her life, and missed more now, at this instant, than she had for the whole time she was away on her journey.

She bounded into the kitchen and had breakfast, chattering with Emmie the whole time. Yes, it was true, Timothy and Gia were marrying but the
real
secret was that Gia was already with child and if Gia’s parents ever found out, she would be banned forever from Angel Rock. As for Parker, he had been saying for five years that he would leave the island, but Emmie herself would believe that when she saw his ugly face grinning at them from the railing of an outbound ship.

“But who cares about any of those people?” the housemaid said impatiently, clearing off a place at the table and sitting beside Lucinda. The two were nearly the same age and had both been raised on Angel Rock; neither could remember a day they had not known each other. “Who is that gorgeous man? And how long is he going to stay here?”

“You couldn’t possibly be referring to poor sick Maurice, now could you?” Lucinda teased.

“No, I couldn’t be. I meant that other one—Reuben, I think your aunt called him.
He
‘s enough to make you want to go sailing off to Ysral.”

“Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” Lucinda sighed. “Although—Edori sailors. You’re the one who told me never to trust them.”

“Well, and I had good reason to tell you that,” Emmie said firmly. “That Yacov! Well, and I didn’t have much luck with Amos, either, although he was a beautiful man to look at and said sweeter things than I have ever heard coming from a man’s mouth. But this Reuben looks like an intelligent, thinking man. So tell me about him. Did you get to know him on this journey? And how is it you come to be traveling on an Edori ship, anyway? I thought your aunt wouldn’t consider it.”

But the trip home was the very last part of a very long story, and Lucinda was just as glad to turn the talk away from Reuben’s
manifest charms. There were many other tales to tell Emmie, of the Gloria itself, of Bael and Jared and the other angels, of Cedar Hills and Luminaux. And Emmie listened intently to it all, easily remembering names and events and interjecting the occasional shrewd comment on Gretchen’s probable reaction to events.

“But the Edori boat,” the housemaid said at last, toward the end of the narrative. “What in the world changed her mind about that?”

Lucinda shook her head. “One day I was at Cedar Hills, having lunch with Omar—”

“The Archangel’s son.”

“Right. And the next day we were scurrying off to Port Clara, bound and determined to take the next ship out. I have no idea what set her off. You know my aunt. It could have been anything.”

“No, not quite anything,” Emmie said, frowning. “She has strange reasons, sometimes, but once you know them they always make an odd kind of sense. Someone must have said something to her that made her feel like she’d overstayed her welcome. Or made her feel like she was in some kind of danger.”

“
Danger?
” Lucinda repeated incredulously. “In Cedar Hills? It’s true someone may have made some comment that she took amiss—”

Emmie leaned forward. “Did you ever ask her,” the girl said, “why she left Cedar Hills in the first place? When she brought you here? Did you ever wonder what made a middle-aged spinster bring a small child to the most isolated spot in the whole world? Did she kidnap you? Was she afraid someone would take you away from her? If she just wanted to raise you away from the hold, couldn’t she have found a nice little house outside one of the small towns in Jordana? Why Angel Rock? Why did she have to run away?”

“I don’t know,” Lucinda said blankly. “She never said. It’s never come up.”

Emmie sat back in her chair. “If I were you, I’d want to find out. And I would think whatever it was, that’s the same thing that sent you away from Samaria so fast that you ended up on an Edori boat. With the most handsome man I’ve seen walking around live in all my days.”

After the meal, Lucinda carried a tray up to Maurice’s room, where she knew her aunt had spent much of the night. She was surprised to find, instead of a comatose man and a sleepy woman, two wide-awake Edori. Maurice was sitting up in bed, and Reuben was standing over him, grinning.

“You’re awake! You’re better!” Lucinda exclaimed, laying her tray aside and coming forward. “How do you feel?”

“Like five horses rode over me in the dark, and a sixth one kicked me in the head,” the captain replied promptly. “But not so bad, considering. Reuben tells me your doctor has recommended three more days in bed, but says there’s no reason I shouldn’t heal completely.”

“Well, that’s good news. Are you hungry? Are you allowed to eat?” She glanced around. “Where’s my aunt Gretchen?”

“I sent her off to her bed when I came in this morning,” Reuben said. “I don’t think she would have gone but she didn’t have the strength to protest.”