The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (35 page)

Rachel remembered the Giant carrying her as he leapt down from the balustrade, and sitting under that orange tree with her like a guard dog. “I’m sure he does a very good job of it, too.”

“Does Sebastian know—about you, I mean? About who you are?”

“Yes, Sebastian knows.”

The tension on the girl’s face seemed to ease a little. “Does Rosa know?”

“No. And you mustn’t say anything to her. Please? And not to Emilio or Eduardo, either. Not yet.”

Evangelina nodded soberly. Rachel’s heart ached at the seriousness on her face. Such a young girl, to be asked to accept all this. Sarah may not have hugged this child, or called her sweetheart, but it was clear the child had loved her, and needed to be loved in return.

“Please trust me,” Rachel implored.

The child’s brow furrowed for a moment, as if she were making up her mind about something.

Then, she reached into the pocket of her little apron and drew something out. “I think I should give you this.”

Keeping her bright eyes trained on Rachel’s face, she offered it.

It was a small, leather-bound notebook.

Chapter Twenty-One

Rachel’s breath hissed inward. A book.

The book.

The one everyone wanted. It had to be.

With shaking fingers, Rachel took it, laid its spine across her palm, and pushed open the cover.

The pages were covered with rune-like ciphers in heavy black ink, almost identical to the ones on the papers Sebastian had given her that morning, though with slight differences in thickness and curve—the same symbols, but written by a different hand, a
masculine-looking
hand.

Atop the black writing, lighter blue jottings crisscrossed the page—Sarah’s writing, in the same ink and same symbols she’d used to write in the volume of Tacitus.

Dear God.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Sal gave it to me to hide,” said Eva, “the last night she was here. She seemed very frightened. She said to keep it for her, and if anything happened to her, to keep it hidden.”

A strange sliding sensation went through Rachel’s chest, as if streams of cold water were pouring down on her head and shoulders. “Why are you giving this to me, not to Sebastian?”

Eva looked at her expectantly. “Sal said someone would come here, a woman, and I would
know
. I should give it to her. Only to her.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes.”

Only to her. Not to Sebastian
. “Then why did you wait until now?”

The child shrugged again. “I don’t know. I was afraid.” Her eyes grew brighter with a shimmer of sudden tears. “I thought maybe she might come herself, after all, if I just waited a little longer. But she didn’t.”

Maybe Sarah had never hugged the child, but Rachel couldn’t bear watching her cry. She pulled the girl close and ran a soothing hand over her glossy black hair. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry she didn’t. But thank you for trusting me. I will—I will try to do what Sal wanted done.” She paused and reconsidered, thinking of other secrets Sarah seemed to have kept. “I will try to do what’s right.”

Gulping down sobs, the child raised her black eyes to Rachel’s face again. “Are you—are you going to tell me what happened to her?”

Surely the child had a right to know that Sarah was gone, gone forever. And yet everyone might be safer for the time being if she did not. “I can’t talk about that, sweetheart. I’m sorry. And you mustn’t either—to anyone. Not now.”

The child nodded, her expression grim. A deep sorrow on her face suggested she’d intuited the essential truth already. Rachel’s heart ached for her.

Rachel pulled the child tighter against her, and wrapped both arms fully around her, offering shelter; the child stiffened again, but didn’t push away. A spot of dampness touched Rachel’s cheek. The contact only lasted a few moments, and then Evangelina jerked her body away and rushed out the door before another word could be said.

The poor child. Rachel wanted to run after her, but that was clearly not what Eva wanted. Not now, at least.

Rachel was left staring at the book in her hands.

The book Sarah had died for.

The dark markings inside seemed to stare back up at her, heavy, mute, and intractable.

So she focused instead on the symbols in blue-ink, substituted in the Latin letters they’d stood for in the Tacitus.

But she got only nonsense.

Had Sarah retained the symbols of this earlier cipher, but reassigned them different letters?

Or was it worse than that? As girls, she and Sarah increased the difficulty of their cyphers by writing one line forward, left to right, then the next backward, right to left. Easy to read if you knew the system, but an obstacle for a code-breaker. Any number of similar concealments were possible: reversing letters within individual words, for instance, or having meaningful letters only every third symbol.

To clear her mind, she washed herself for bed, changed into her nightgown and brushed out her hair, then brought the little notebook into the blankets with her. She turned the pages this way and that in a daze of thought, trying to bring the symbols into some kind of meaningful focus.

Sarah’s blue ink filled nearly every blank margin, sometimes marked in with apparent great deliberateness, sometimes looking hastily, messily scrawled, as if her mind had been working at a furious speed. Specific symbols were circled here and there, with arrows leading to longer notes scribbled in the margins.

Clearly, the markings held meaning. But when Rachel looked for a pattern in their sequence, nothing emerged. Not even a clear pattern of high-frequency or low-frequency letters, which made no sense at all. No cipher could avoid such patterns.

Though there was another method Mr. Rapson had taught them—the use of a rotating cipher that could not be broken without access to a separate code sheet.

Something Sarah would only have resorted to if it were imperative that no one else could read her writing.

If she felt that she could not trust even those closest to her.

Rachel’s head began to throb.

A small part of her longed to take the book straight to Sebastian, to tell him everything that had happened tonight. But Lord Henry had spoken of treachery. If Sarah had concealed this notebook from her partner, if she’d told Eva not to give it to Sebastian—perhaps she had good reason.

Sebastian couldn’t help her, anyway. He’d have even less idea than she did how to read this. He’d handed over those other papers this morning as if they had no more meaning to him than if they were blank.

In frustration, she threw the book onto the coverlet. As it hit, the covers flew wide—and a tiny strip of paper, barely as wide as a finger, slipped out from where it had been tucked into the spine.

She snatched it up with a gasp. The strip of paper was covered in symbols in blue ink—Sarah’s Tacitus symbols. There were twenty of them, evenly spaced along the strip.

It was probably nothing. A bit of scribbling used as a bookmark that had stuck in the folds of the book. Besides, she’d already tried to read these symbols as they were used in the notebook, and had got nowhere. They didn’t correspond to the same letters as in the Tacitus cipher.

But the symbols seemed to wink up at her, hinting at meaning.

Surely, this would be nothing but an exercise in frustration, but she did it anyway.

She took the letters a few at a time, substituting the letters that worked in the Tacitus cipher, though they hadn’t worked in the notebook. It was at least a place to start.

S-O-R went the first three. Promising so far.

The next three were O-R-M.

Her heart thumped: the next two were E-A.

SORORMEA. It was Latin. Perfect Latin.

Soror mea.
My sister
.

Her nerves began to hum—she could barely see for the emotion that shook her. The next two letters were M and S. But that made no sense. Nothing in Latin started with the combination M-S.

Unless the phrase so far was Soror
meam
.

But
meam
was the accusative form. Soror was in the nominative. The two words didn’t go together. Not “my sister,” then. The “my” referred to something else—something the sister was acting upon.

She was almost afraid to decode the rest. S-E-R. Then V-A-F.

No Latin word used the sequence “V-A-F.” She’d gone one letter too far this time: the new word was “SERVA.”
Protect
.

It was a command.
Sister, protect my
….

Her heart was in her throat. Six more letters, and even as her pen scratched out each letter as she found it, it seemed the word was rising from some deep place inside herself, as if somehow she knew before she saw it exactly what it would say: FILIAM.

Same case as MEAM. FILIAM MEAM—
my daughter
.

The world spun.
Sister, protect my daughter
.

My daughter
.

Sarah had a child. A little girl. So many pieces came together in an instant, instinct and intellect working together.

Eva
.

Rachel’s breathing went ragged.
Eva was Sarah’s child
.

Her coloring was so different from Sarah’s—that dark, dark hair, the crow-black eyes—it had been easy to believe the little girl a true Spaniard, Rosa’s granddaughter, but what if that coloring came from another source?

Eva was of an age to have been conceived when Sarah worked at Madame Jonas’s.

And that was where Sarah had met—
Will
.

Will with his black eyes and black hair. Dear God. Eva was Will’s child as well.

When he told her about how he met Sarah, he said they’d done no more than talk the first night he’d shared her bed—but he also said he’d spent his nights with Sarah for many months. He never said they’d done nothing else but talk during all that time. The Black Giant
had
been Sarah’s lover.

Rachel stared hard at the slip of paper in her hand.
Sister, protect my daughter
.

Eva was Sarah’s child. Sarah’s flesh and blood.

Sarah still lived in her.

Rachel’s heart seemed to swell, and pulse with new life. She had
family
still—a niece, a child who needed her. A child she needed to protect. Astonishment and love and fear swept through her in equal measure.

And then another thought: Sarah had
known
Rachel would come here. Isn’t that what Sebastian had said, that Sarah insisted he come find her sister if she died? And she’d told Eva a woman would come. Sarah had
known
Rachel would follow Sebastian to Spain to avenge her, and that Rachel would search her books, and would figure out how to read this message. No one else could have found it.

And she’d told Eva to give the notebook to her.

Sarah trusted me. Sarah had faith
after all
.

The thought was terrible and wonderful—it seemed to tear at her lungs, and to wrap her in warmth, all at the same time.

And now—Sarah had given her a job to do.

This was what Lord Henry Walters had threatened her with. This was who he’d threatened to hurt.
Eva
. Somehow he’d learned Sarah’s secret and was using it against her.

He was going to kill Sarah’s child
.

Snatching up the notebook again, Rachel stared hard at the black symbols, willing them to yield up their secrets. Tears of frustration filled her eyes. This was the one thing she could do for Sarah, the one thing she
had
to do for Sarah. But stare hard as she would, nothing came to her.

She sat down on the bed, concentrating on the unyielding symbols until at long last her eyes began drifting closed, and the strange black markings eddied deep into her brain.

She didn’t know quite when sleep came over her, but at some point she fell into dreams, adrift in sliding, smearing washes of ink. Symbols and letters danced before her eyes.

Strange snaking lines of symbols, dizzying her, brushing about her, strangling her.

And something began to drum at her.

A fragment of something. The tattered edges of a pattern. Several of the symbols Sarah had written in blue ink seemed to snap themselves together in a firmer line.

Her eyes flew open again. Her candle had gone out, and the room was dark.

Perhaps if she copied that set of symbols out herself, she might at least have a place to start. She could search specifically for other groupings, other repetitions, for any small connections, however meaningless at first, and perhaps eventually something would begin to take shape.