The Shadow of Albion (28 page)

she could smell the rank scent of decay. There was something behind her; something

monstrous and evil.

And it was moving toward her.

Sarah stood frozen to the spot, unwilling to believe, until she heard the sound of

crackling underbrush, as something heedless in its power began moving deliberately

toward her. Hunting her.

Sarah began to run.

The sound behind her grew louder, and now the choking stench of the monster

that pursued her was all that she could smell. Wildcat – boar – without knowing

what followed, Sarah feared it as she had never feared any earthly peril. If it caught

her, a disaster worse than death would be her portion.

As she ran, the forest began to dim, but instead of the cultivated fields and

whitewashed frame houses that made up Baltimore in the first years of the new

century, she broke out onto an endless vista of close-manicured green.

This is Mooncoign.

She stopped, disoriented enough to forget, for a moment, what pursued her. New

memories warred with old, and try as she might, Sarah could not reconcile them. She

had been journeying to England – She had taken ship in Baltimore –

No. She had been born at Mooncoign….

Both could not be true.

„But they can.“

Sarah spun around. The voice had come from behind her, and as she turned she

thought wildly that it was the monster itself, given human voice. Then she saw the

speaker, and for an instant believed that it was one of her Cree brethren who spoke –

but this stranger, for all that he dressed in the skins of animals and carried a tall

spear, had the rosy-fair skin of an English child.

His hair was a white, lime-stiffened crest over his skull and down his back. Rings

of blue paint around his eyes gave his gaze the staring intensity of an owl’s, and

around his neck he wore a gleaming tubular collar of pure gold. As he regarded her

serenely, she realized that she had seen him before.

In Mooncoign’s garden, the night of the masquerade ball.

„How?“ Sarah asked, falteringly. „How can both be true?“

The stranger smiled, as if she had passed some unknown test merely by asking

the question, and held out his hand.

Sarah set her hand in his.

The dream shifted. Now she and the stranger were walking through the paths of

Mooncoign’s formal garden, and the great house itself reared up before them, its

white facade blue with the chilly spring twilight of weeks before. Sarah still wore her

beaded buckskins, but the stranger now wore a fantastic archaic costume in green

velvet and a brazen mask ornamented with sweeping golden antlers. He gestured

toward the house with one gloved and jeweled hand.

„It begins here. But where does it end – ah, me; there is the riddle. And not mine

to solve, Sarah Cunningham – but yours.“

„Mine?“ Sarah echoed, startled. The juxtaposition of her suppressed self and the

undeniable reality of Mooncoign was illuminating that baffling netherland of memory:

there had been Baltimore, then the ship, men the coach.

And Dame Alecto in both – in Baltimore, and here.

„The same woman, but not the same person,“ her guide said. Now he wore a

leopard’s skin over black Elizabethan velvets and a mask to match, and stared wisely

out at her from behind the jeweled eyes of the cat.

„You’re talking in riddles,“ Sarah said angrily.

She’d forgotten that she was dreaming, but she had not forgotten the loathsome

beast that had chased her out of the wood. If it were not a trick of this smiling,

elegant gentleman – something she was not prepared to. rule out – then it might

return at any moment.

„Riddles are my nature,“ the stranger replied, „for I am the Master of the Horn

Gate and the Ivory. But here is your answer, Sarah – look.“

Sarah looked. They were in the shadow of the house itself, now, and she could

look in through a ground-floor window and see an opulent room with a fire burning

upon the hearth, and over the hearth, a painting of a woman in antique gems and

velvets.

„That is my bedroom,“ Sarah said. At least, it is the bedroom of the Marchioness

of Roxbury, and everyone says that I am she.

„Is it?“ said the stranger. „Then why aren’t you in the bed?“

Sarah looked. A young, brown-haired woman lay in the great carved bed, her

slender form elevated upon a mound of pillows.

„But I am in the bed,“ Sarah said in growing confusion.

Through the glass of the window she could see herself plainly.

Just as she had seen herself in the moments before the mail-coach had crashed.

The sun had been rising –

 – setting –

 – the stranger had been driving a gig –

 – sitting inside a coach; and she had –

„Stop!“ Sarah groaned, turning away from the bewildering scene at the window.

„How could I be in two places at once?“

The same woman… but not the same person.

„Ah,“ said the stranger. „A question I can answer.“ He plucked at Sarah’s sleeve,

and led her away from the window.

The ornamental water had been added to the grounds by the last Marquess of

Roxbury, Sarah’s grandfather. But which Sarah? Following her guide, Sarah began

to dimly realize that all that she thought she knew of Mooncoign – or of London

society – she had been carefully taught in the weeks that followed her accident.

And her own memories had been hidden from her.

Sarah leaned forward, gazing into the still, silvery surface of the lake. Though she

could feel the presence of her companion’s body beside her, the surface of the lake

reflected only her.

Instinctively, Sarah tried to turn toward him, to reassure herself with her own eyes

that he still knelt beside her, but his hand upon her cheek prevented her.

„No, Sarah. Gaze into the water, and see the truth.“

Sarah leaned forward, and the mirrorlike surface of the water darkened until it

seemed an endless void opening beneath her feet. In its depths she could see a

flicker of light, and as she stared at it the flickering took on form and color.

Figures. Pictures. Scenes. And at the center of each one was Sarah.

Sometimes it was as if she gazed into a mirror. Sometimes she did not recognize

herself at all. It was the present that she saw – but an infinity of presents, ranging

from the nearly familiar to those so alien that Sarah hardly recognized them. Here she

was in the dress of a Cree maiden, a baby in her arms and a tall warrior at her side.

There, she slaved still in her cousin’s house in Baltimore. And again, another Sarah

stood beside the Duke of Wessex –

„I will not look at any more!“ Sarah cried, dashing her hand across the surface of

the water and spoiling the mirror. „What does it mean? They are all me, but…“

„But they are all in their proper places, Sarah Cunningham of Baltimore, and you

are not,“ her companion said. „You have been brought from your own world to take

the place of one who failed – and yet who dared not fail. For a creature stalks this

world – “

In the distance, Sarah heard a faint savage howl. Though the day had been

sourcelessly bright, it seemed now as if a cloud passed over the sun. The day

seemed darker now, ,and colder.

The sound came again. Instinctively she connected it with the creature that had

chased her.

„That is what you must help to destroy,“ her companion said gravely. Sarah

opened her mouth in automatic protest – they had risen to their feet, her

companion’s uneasiness communicating itself to her – but the wailing came again,

closer this time, and now it seemed as if she could smell the foul rankness of the

hunter once more.

„Go,“ the other said, pushing her toward the trees. „You must flee, Sarah; I will

hold the beast back while I may, but it is not my blood that it hungers for.

Remember all I have told you – and remember, too, that you do not yet belong to

this world. If you cannot make yourself a part of this land, you will die, Sarah, and

the Great Work will remain undone!“

„But – But – “ Sarah sputtered. Half-hints and impossible truths – what was she

to make of them?

Her companion now was garbed in silver armor, a red cross blazing like rubies

upon the shining white damask of his stainless surcoat. He lifted a sword that flashed

so brightly in the light that she could not tell whether it was forged of gold or silver,

and raised his shining shield.

There was a crashing sound, as of something forcing its way through the

ornamental hedges at the far side of the house, and Sarah surrendered to the urgency

in his voice and to her own fear.

She ran. And as she ran, she heard an unfamiliar voice shouting for her to come

back, come back, and a high keening sound, as of a stormwind whipping through

the treetops.

Wessex cautiously opened the door to his bedroom. The early summer dawn

thrust a ghostly illusion of light through the narrow windows, allowing him to make

out the shapes of the familiar room even without the hoodwinked lantern that he held.

The bedside candle had burnt itself out, filling the pewter receiver with a white

pool of beeswax. At some point the window had been opened and not relatched;

when it was closed the slant of the house had caused it to drift open again, filling the

room with morning chill.

Wessex reached into his pocket for the object he carried, and advanced

cat-footedly toward the silent bed. The lantern was well oiled; there was no betraying

squeak as he opened it and allowed a ray to fall through the opened bedcurtains onto

the bed’s sleeping occupant.

His wife lay pillowed against white linen like a Renaissance angel in disarray. Her

braided hair lay loosely against her neck; her lashes brushed her unpainted cheeks,

and the whitework-embroidered lawn of her nightdress made her look absurdly

young. Disturbed by some dream, she frowned. Asleep, she possessed what was to

Wessex’s eye a curious purity, almost an innocence.

And her life, her fate, and her reputation were now in his keeping.

I will never hurt you, he vowed, gazing down at her, and a fatal quirk of honesty

made him silently amend the words to: I will hurt you as little as I may.

But he had come here on a specific mission, and he wanted to fulfill that charge

without wakening her. He set the dark lantern down carefully on the table beside the

chamberstick and drew the package from his coat pocket.

Ruby and gold flared in the lantern-light, caught in a web of glittering flame. The

necklace held a heart-shaped ruby the size and color of a ripe cherry, surrounded by

diamonds as clear as winter’s first ice. On each side of the ruby a

diamond-encrusted heart led to the wide gold chain. For almost two hundred years

his line had presented the Heart of Flame to Dyer brides as the Morning Gift.

He turned it over. The back of the flanking hearts was plain polished gold, on

which the intertwined initials of generations could be seen. A new set of initials now

shone bright upon the old gold, graven by steady expert hands at Rundell and

Bridges: R and S, ornately intertwined. Rupert and Sarah.

Careful not to waken her, Wessex set the glittering necklace on the pillow next to

Sarah, and picked up the lantern once more. A moment later he was gone as if he

had never been there at all. The door closed softly behind him.

Sarah did not wake.

Moving like a specter through his own house – it was his mother’s residence, but

that was an inconsequential distinction – Wessex reached the library and eased the

door shut behind him. He drew a breath of relief; no one would disturb him, and he

would disturb no one, here.

In his father’s day, this had been the study, and a strictly masculine preserve. The

heavy mahogany desk and sideboard remained from that time, and books still lined

the mellow oaken shelves, but the Dowager and her lady-companion had since made

their own stamp upon the premises. There was a needleworked footstool beside the

deep chair that faced the fireplace, and a wicker sewing basket, half-spilling its

freight of embroidery, lay upon the seat cushion.

Wessex set his lantern down upon the desk and rummaged in the drawer for a

rolled spill. Finding one, he lit it at the lantern’s flame and used it to light first the

candles on the mantel, then the elaborate candelabrum that stood on the library’s