“This jest gits worse and worse.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It had been a long time since Bill had set foot inside a church, but Jacob Hop looked about him with a bewilderment that suggested this was his very first visit ever.
“I have been deceived,” Bill whispered. “I thought the Dutch were great churchgoers.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I held the wall in Mobile with a crusty Dutch sergeant named Harmonszoon. He called his gun Old Mortality, and he sat up there on the palisade with me and talked Bible the whole time. In between shooting at the Spanish, of course.”
“Of course.”
“One day I told him if he was going to quote the Bible all day, at least he could quote the parts with pretty girls in them.”
“Which parts are those?” Jacob Hop asked.
Bill shrugged. “Apparently, there aren’t any.”
They stood by the rood screen that separated the nave and the transepts from the chancel. The roof of the church resounded with an incessant hammering of rain. The cathedral’s interior was faintly illuminated by Bill’s dark lantern, just enough to reveal the images in the building’s stained-glass windows. The seven days of creation ran up one side of the nave, the crucifixion and resurrection ran down the other, and the fall of man, with a Creole-looking Adam and Eve sharing a bright red apple, crowned the apse. More than one New Orleans voice whispered that the Creator depicted in the windows bore a suspicious resemblance to the former bishop, Henri de Bienville.
Bill had Don Sandoval’s two large-bore pistols stuck in his belt; Jacob Hop wore the chevalier’s sword in its scabbard, hanging down his back from a belt over his shoulder. Hop had let them into the church by “another simple cantrip,” which had neatly unlocked a side door leading from the bare packed-dirt dueling yard behind the cathedral into the apse through a devotional chapel. The chapel housed the most prominent de Bienvilles, including the famous Bishop Henri, who lay in a glass coffin in his red bishop’s robe and cap, marinating in honey. Bill had crossed himself and bowed his head deeply as he passed the bishop’s tomb.
“This is a mighty god,” Hop said. “That is the message of this building. That its god is the ruler of heaven, earth, all men, and other gods.” He pointed to a gold stand, behind and above the altar, on which rested a pair of crossed small-bore pistols. “He is a vengeful god.”
“Other gods?” Bill asked.
Jacob Hop pointed at various stained glass windows. “There the god destroys dragons of the earth and sea and builds creation upon their bodies. There he is accompanied in his work by all the lesser gods, the stars of the night sky. The same gods attend the birth of his son, singing the music of the spheres. And there the servitor gods are arrayed in his worship. See? The one with the key, the one with the sword, the one with the lion, and the one with compass and level?”
Bill scratched under his perruque. “I’m no theologian, Jake, but you and I don’t see those pictures the same way. Those are Leviathan and Behemoth, they’re monsters that God kills. And those ‘lesser gods’ you’re talking about are the angel choir. And…what did you say, servants? Servitors? Those are Saints Peter and Paul, I believe, and Jerome is the one with the lion. And St. Jeremiah Dixon, I believe, though it’s more ordinary to show St. Jerry alongside Charlie Mason, with his telescope and his loaf of bread.”
“I do not see any difference,” Hop said stubbornly, “between your understanding and mine.”
“I suppose you may be right.” Bill was getting used to the Dutchman’s oddities. He believed Jake hadn’t been a deaf-mute at all, he had been taken for one on account of his madness. “Where do you think we should hide?”
Hop shrugged. “In the little room?”
Bill frowned. “I believe that might be called the vestry, Jake. It holds vestments, anyway. It’s a fine suggestion, although I think the priest goes there first. We require a vantage point from which we can watch for a few minutes before we’re certain of our target.”
Hop grinned wide and ran his fingers through his straight blond hair. “Shall I turn us into magpies, and we can watch from the rafters for the bishop to enter?”
Bill laughed. “I’d be unable to use Don Sandoval’s pistols to any advantage as a magpie,” he said, joining the joke. “Unless, of course, you could turn me into a magpie with hands.”
Hop frowned good-naturedly. “That would certainly be more difficult.”
“I’ve stumped the wizard Jacob Hop!” Bill cried in mock triumph. “Well, fear not, Jake, we can secrete ourselves at the platform at the top of this stair. It’s where the priest delivers the homily, and it will give us a good view of the scene. We’ll see immediately, for instance, whether the bishop brings any of his bodyguards.”
There came a rattle and a click in the darkness, and Bill shuffled toward the stair. “Hurry, Jake, that’s likely the bishop.” They sprang up the steps and hid behind the waist-high balustrade of the preacher’s crenellated perch. Bill shuttered the lantern.
A new light source entered the cathedral. It came from a transept door, the one facing the bishop’s palace.
Bill waited.
He listened for the door; it shut again, and he heard it lock. Then he listened to the footsteps—one man, and not in a hurry. The new arrival walked into the chancel. As Bill had predicted, he went straight to the vestry and began making preparations.
Bill had never met the Bishop of New Orleans face to face—using his son Etienne as a front man let the bishop maintain his public façade of piety—but he knew what the bishop looked like.
Now, as the priest went about dressing himself in ceremonial garb and setting out bread and wine for the morning’s rite, Bill eased himself onto the winding stair, took his hat in his hand and snaked one eye up over the bannister to examine the man below.
It was not the Bishop of New Orleans.
The man dressing for mass by the light of an oil lantern looked like the bishop, but was younger. He looked something like Etienne, too, but Bill guessed it must be the bishop’s other son. Bill had never had dealings with the man before, he was altogether on the priestcraft side of the family business.
“Shall we kill him?” Hop’s voice had a note of mischief in it.
Bill shook his head. “It’s the wrong man,” he whispered. “You can’t just kill anyone you like, Jake. That isn’t good soldiering.”
“Is it not?”
“We’re not out to cause random mayhem, Jake, we have a target. If we kill this man, we’ve sprung our trap and the bishop will be warned. If we assassinate the wrong man and the bishop escapes, we’ve fouled it doubly.”
“Shall we go find the bishop, then?” Hop asked.
“We stay hidden,” Bill said. “We wait until the bishop comes.”
“Are you sure he’ll come?”
“No.” Bill peered over the rail again to be certain they weren’t heard. Their voices sounded loud to him, but the bishop’s son showed no sign of having noticed—the rain on the roof and its loud echo within the cathedral must be masking their noise. “But he’s the bishop, and I understand that he says Mass every day. Apparently he doesn’t say the morning Mass, but it might be the midday Mass, so we need to hide ourselves and wait.”
“And if he never comes into the church today?”
“I’d rather surprise him here, where he’s out of his home and on the move,” Bill whispered, checking the priest again and finding him still dressing, his back turned to them, “but if the bishop doesn’t come to us, we’ll have to make some plan for breaking into his palace. Perhaps a bribe to a footman, though there we run into the problem of my shortage of funds.”
Bill shuddered at the thought of that undertaking; the bishop’s palace was a huge building, and it was always full of people. Priests mostly, Polites, he thought—weren’t they the ones who wore red? The thought that the bishop might have a cadre of spell-casting vicars for a bodyguard made Bill very uncomfortable.
“Can we hide in the chamber below?” Hop sounded eager. “The one full of bones?”
* * *
“I don’t understand how a dead man can do magic at all,” Sarah said.
Sarah had finally had her bath, in a half-barrel tub in a small tiled room in the bishop’s apartment, with Cathy Filmer to keep her company; they had talked little, and Sarah had tried to stick to what they had already told the other woman—that she was here seeking her old family friend, William Lee, on family business. It had helped that Sarah was exhausted; she drifted in and out of sleep in the hot water.
Picaw and Grungle hadn’t reappeared and the alarm spell Sarah had cast the night before on the riverbank hadn’t been triggered, so Sarah was confident that the Lazars had not yet arrived in New Orleans.
Perhaps the rain had forced the Lazars to ground.
Sarah sat in the bishop’s tiny study, in one of its three wooden slat-backed chairs. The bishop objected to wealth, which she could understand and respect, but she felt no sympathy for his apparent dislike of simple physical comfort.
Cathy Filmer sat in another chair. Thalanes and the bishop stood, browsing among books as they talked, waiting until it was late enough to go to the pawnbroker’s and redeem William Lee’s guns. The bishop sucked slowly at a small clay pipe, filling the room with the sweet odor of burning tobacco leaf.
Cal sat by the window, putting a fine edge with his whetstone on the silver letter opener, looking out into the gray flood falling from the sky. He had his face turned away from the rest of the party; was he being vigilant, or was he turning his back to her as punishment?
“Death is in some ways the heart of my craft and calling,” the bishop said with a kindly smile, “but I confess that I am unaccustomed to walking dead men. Perhaps my more thaumaturgically gifted colleague, Father Thalanes of the Order of St. Cetes, can illuminate us.”
“I wish I could.” Thalanes arched his eyebrows. “Robert Hooke was called the Sorcerer even in his mortal life, of course—”
“That’s somethin’ different from a wizard, I reckon?” Cal said from his perch in the curtains. So he was listening, at least.
“It’s all the same thing,” Thalanes said, “hexing, wizardry, gramarye, all terms for the same magic practiced by the children of Adam. People just use different names for practitioners to indicate approval or disapproval, or sometimes to denote a specialization.”
“Like illusionist or summoner,” Cathy offered by way of illustration.
“Or necromancer,” the bishop said. “Or warlock.”
“What d’you got to do to git called a sorcerer, then?” Cal asked.
“It has the connotation of someone who dabbles in dark arts,” Thalanes said, “someone who deals with demons, for instance, or specializes in curses, or works death magic.”
“What’s that say about Hooke?” Sarah asked. “Anythin’ in particular I maybe should ought to know about?”
Thalanes smiled. “Robert Hooke was famous in his mortal life for insatiable curiosity. He experimented with summoning, and his lectures at Cambridge apparently inspired young Oliver Cromwell.”
“I didn’t know Cromwell was a university feller.” Calvin scoured at the little blade. “It figures.”
“So was Hooke,” Sarah pointed out.
“What did he inspire Cromwell to do?” Cathy Filmer asked. “I wasn’t aware Hooke was a political man.”
“He wasn’t,” the monk said. “He was a wizard, in practice and in theory. And it was something in his lectures that moved Cromwell to the execution of Jock of Cripplegate.”
“Never heard of him,” Sarah admitted.
“There’s no reason you should have,” Thalanes said. “Jock was a pickpocket and a cutpurse and a second-story man who was sentenced to hang. The only thing noteworthy about him was that it just so happened that Jock’s father was Firstborn, a refugee from the Serpentwars that were just beginning in Bohemia and the Palatinate at that time.
“Cromwell was a gentlemen, with some connections in Parliament, and he convinced the king’s justices to let him carry out Jock’s execution. And he used Jock’s death as an experiment. He captured the energy released at Jock’s death, and used it to perform a magic spell.”
“Poor Jock,” Sarah remembered the explosions of light she’d seen on the Natchez Trace.
“Poor Jock, nothing,” Thalanes said. “Jock was a criminal and a low character and he probably deserved execution. None of that makes what Cromwell did right.”
“So that was the beginning for the Necromancer,” Cathy said. “He learned he could exploit the deaths of Firstborn and he did. He overthrew King Charles Stuart, he knocked over half the kingdoms of Europe before John Churchill finally stopped him. What was it all for? What did he do with the magic?”
“Create his New Model Army, for one thing,” the bishop puffed at his pipe. “Marching wooden men and corpses, creatures of sorcery and evil.”
“Of course,” Cathy Filmer agreed. “He killed Firstborn to create his army to kill more Firstborn to create an ever larger army. But that’s just a circle that never goes anywhere. Was he actually doing anything?”
“Yes, that is a circle,” Thalanes agreed. “I don’t know what his plan was, other than to establish the Eternal Commonwealth. I don’t know whether John Churchill cared enough to ask that question, or if he was happy just to cast the Necromancer out of England. And Cromwell appears to have achieved his own immortality.”
“The Death Wind,” Cathy said.
Thalanes nodded.
“What about Hooke?” Sarah asked. “He was Cromwell’s teacher, and I know he was called Sir Isaac Newton’s Shadow…what else? Why is he called the Sorcerer?”
“I don’t know,” Thalanes admitted. “We should assume that Hooke is dangerous, and that he means to destroy us.”
“Ain’t they a piece of the story missin’ here?” Cal wanted to know. “How in tarnation is Hooke still walkin’ around, and chasin’ after Sarah? Is they some story in which he gits raised from the dead?”
“This is very dark talk,” the bishop said with mild disapproval.
“That’s the Death Wind,” Cathy said. What could she possibly be thinking about this conversation? She sang two lines:
Come with me, my servant fair, onto the holy floor
The Death Wind soon shall catch me up, if you go on before
Sarah shot the other woman a curious look.
“I listen to songs all night at Grissot’s,” Cathy explained. “There are ballads about Robert Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax.”
“Hooke mentioned the Necromancer,” Sarah said in a monotone, and she felt like her voice was the voice of someone speaking far away. “He said my screams would feed the Necromancer, or something like that. So should we assume that Oliver Cromwell is also on my trail?”
“This jest gits worse and worse,” Cal muttered gloomily.
“I do not know why you would expect Robert Hooke to tell you the strict truth,” Bishop Ukwu objected, “or even any truth at all. He was a sorcerer, a heretic, and a murderer in life, and I see no reason to think that death has made an honest man of him.”
“Nor I,” Thalanes hastened to agree. “That he can talk at all surprises me, as I thought—in my admitted absence of experience—that Lazars were mute. But you say he didn’t move his lips, that he seemed to send his thoughts to you directly, so it must have been some sort of spell.”
“Which brings me back to the original question,” Sarah observed archly. “How can he do magic? When I do magic, I draw on my life energy, unless some other source is available, like a ley. How can Hooke cast spells at all? Isn’t he dead? Is he tapping into a ley line all the time?”
Thalanes shrugged. “He must be drawing power from some source. It might be simply the Mississippi.”
“What else might it be?” Sarah asked, feeling a chill shiver in her bones.
Thalanes shrugged and shook his head.
“Beware,” the bishop said. “Be very, very careful.”
* * *
Ezekiel eventually opened the door to Captain Berkeley’s bedchamber himself, after repeated knocking beyond the bounds of decency and any reasonable allowance for a hangover failed to produce the captain. Berkeley was gone, as were his clothing and weapons, and the only sign of him, on a small table beside his bed, were his Tarocks.
The cards sat beside an empty liquor bottle, mute testimony of an all-night vigil and a wrestle with some dilemma. Berkeley had dealt three cards face up on the table and had left them there, so Ezekiel examined them. He didn’t know the Tarocks, but the cards bore both pictures and, underneath, neatly lettered titles.
The first of the three cards Berkeley had left was the Horseman, a soldier with sword and pistol, mounted on a white horse and wearing a long red coat and a tricorner hat. Ezekiel frowned, noticing that the painted figure strongly resembled Captain Berkeley. Coincidence, but the captain might think otherwise. The second was Simon Sword, and it depicted a blond boy swinging a two-handed sword. The third card was the Priest, a Spanish friar-looking character with a cross on top of a tall walking stick and a bag in his hand. No, on a closer look, Ezekiel saw that it wasn’t a bag that the cleric held in his hand, but a letter, folded and sealed.
Ezekiel cursed himself for not speaking privately with Berkeley the night before, for not pursuing the subject of the bishop’s visit. What was it that Berkeley knew? Some dark secret troubled the captain. Did he just want to defend Thomas from the accusations of the bishop?
Or did he want to defend Thomas from the blackmailing the chevalier?
Ezekiel was puzzled. Berkeley’s absence irritated him, too—this morning, they were to have split up to comb the city for Witchy Eye, pairing each Dragoon with one of the chevalier’s gendarmes so as best to combine local knowledge and Imperial authority. For Berkeley to disappear now was a dereliction of duty.
Or had he left the Tarocks as an explanation?
Obadiah edged into the door behind Ezekiel. He’d come to the Palais with the message that the Blues were ready to search, as ordered, and that a contingent of gendarmes of the same number of men was likewise at alert.
“Where be the captain?” Obadiah asked.
“How should I know?” Ezekiel snapped, and instantly regretted it. “I…” he couldn’t bring himself to apologize to the pagan Obadiah, no matter how much time the man had spent recently digging into his Bible. “I don’t know.”
“Aye, Father.” Obadiah hesitated. “Ought I…?”
“Get out,” Ezekiel commanded him. “Just get out. Go join the Blues and the chevalier’s men and wait for me.”
Obadiah clopped away without another word.
The Horseman, Simon Sword, and the Priest.
Franklin’s Tarock was rank superstition of the worst kind, worse than astrology or hedge-witch hokey-pokery, which at least had some root in God’s created order. The Tarock had no basis but the fevered imagination of Benjamin Franklin and the lascivious whispering of gypsy soothsayers. It made a mockery of God’s election, His grace and His love, and His true gift of prophecy. Ezekiel sneered at the cards.
Devilish gibberish though they were, it was possible that Berkeley had used the cards to leave Ezekiel a message.
The Priest could be him, Ezekiel. Or it could be the bishop. And Berkeley was definitely a horseman, even if the card hadn’t looked so much like him.
Simon Sword? What was the mythical folk-bugbear of the Mississippi supposed to mean? This was a card Berkeley had been rattling on and on about back in Nashville, when it had seemed to the captain that he drew Simon Sword in every reading.
Simon Sword. Ezekiel racked his brain to try to recall the Poor Richard Sermons he had memorized in his first year at Harvard. Simon Sword was a bringer of change, and chaos, and war. Judgment, Berkeley had said.
Simon Sword meant judgment.
Ezekiel gathered up the cards to take them with him.
* * *
They trooped out into the rain under Thalanes’s facies muto incantation. Sarah still felt the drag on her soul of her Mississippi River alarm spell, so she was glad it was Thalanes casting the disguise enchantments, and not her.
“I’m glad you’re with us,” Thalanes told Cathy.
“I’m pleased you find me charming,” she said. “A disproportionate number of my friends are priests. I think they enjoy my elevated conversational style.”
“Oh?”
“That’s one of the things they enjoy, in any case.”
She winked at the little man.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said, reddening. “I don’t…I don’t know what you…look, my order is a chaste one, Mrs. Filmer. I only meant that changing the composition of our group will help reinforce my illusions.”
“Of course you did, Father.” She fixed him with an eagle eye. “I expect you to find my friend Sir William. If you have to make me look like someone else with your gramarye to find him, I’m perfectly happy to cooperate. It won’t be the first time I’ve dressed up for a priest.”
Thalanes coughed, and Sarah wanted to laugh. Since she’d known him, she’d never seen the priest so off-guard and disarmed, and Sarah had certainly tried.
The rain had let up from its earlier downpour, so Sarah eschewed her heavy coat for her purple-and-suns shawl, which had always been a favorite. She carried the sharpened silver letter opener tucked into her belt. She was careful not to let it touch her skin, so it wouldn’t interfere with the watchfulness spell she’d cast on the Mississippi.
Thalanes went first, looking like a gaunt little Igbo monk with his illusory curly black hair and dark brown complexion; then followed Sarah and Cathy Filmer, whose glamour-spun façade was of two dark-eyed hidalgo dames; and Cal brought up the rear, looking heavier than himself, grizzled and paunchy, with bright white hair and a long scar up one side of his face.
The Place d’Armes was nearly empty, and Sarah was silently grateful for the cobblestones as she trekked under the warning stare of King Andy Jackson—the puddles of cold water were better than puddles of mud. The Quarter was calm, the lights all out in the inns, taverns, and dancing halls, and most of the residents drunk or asleep.
But Hackett’s was open for business, its shining glass windows and front door thrown wide.
“I’ll honor the ticket,” Hackett said when Calvin presented it, along with the nine Louis d’or indicated on the ticket’s face, “though it troubles me it isn’t Captain Lee himself to redeem his pledge. Is the captain well? I heard there was some trouble with the gendarmerie.”
As he spoke, Hackett retrieved from behind the counter a brace of long, large-bore horse pistols and laid them on his countertop, then dug out and set beside them a heavy cavalry saber. Sarah hoped she could work the spell she imagined she could, and find William Lee.
“I hope he’s well, too, Mr. Hackett,” Cathy agreed, and her smile put old Hackett at his ease.
“We’re all Will’s friends here,” Thalanes said. “We’re collecting his weapons for him and expect to meet up with him later today.”
“You’re absolutely sure these are Captain Lee’s guns?” Sarah confirmed.
Hackett nodded.
Sarah let Thalanes take his old comrade’s sword, but she took the heavy guns in her hands and led the way out of the pawnbroker’s. The street outside was empty, but she saw no sense in taking any chances, so she turned down a small alley to get behind Hackett’s. This was close enough; for all practical purposes, she was standing where Bill had stood. When she was sure no one was watching, she squatted in a patch of mud.
Should she walk to the river to take advantage of the ley’s energy? The arrival of the Lazars was imminent, and Sarah chose haste over access to the river’s power.
WILLIAM LEE, she scrawled in the mud with her finger, and scratched out the rough outline of a man around the name, head, body, arms, and legs. Rather than wiping her finger clean, she smeared that mud around the open mouth of each gun, tracing two circles of dark wet earth on the steel. Sympathy and Contagion, Sir Isaac’s two laws. Things that appear to be connected, and things that were once connected. She stood, her feet on Lee’s names, and held the pistols by their grips.
She closed her eyes. “Ducem bellorum quaeso,” she incanted, the same words she’d tried the night before over the claim ticket, and she poured her spirit into the guns.
Instantly, the weapons bucked in her hands, twisting and pointing so that she had to clutch them tightly and turn with them in order not to lose her grip, as if guiding a plow pulled by a particularly aggressive mule.
“Ha!” She opened her eyes.
“Congratulations,” Cal drawled, a proud and gently mocking gleam in his eye, “I reckon you’ve jest created the only two possessed pistols in all of New Orleans.”
She pressed them into his hands. “Jest for that, you git to hold ’em.”
“Whoa!” he called to the pistols as they pulled him to one side. “Now what?”
“They’s jest like dowsing…” Sarah caught Thalanes looking at her with a raised eyebrow and clamped down on her glee. “They should work just like a dowsing rod, Calvin. If you let them pull you, I think they’ll take you to Captain Lee.”
“You should go back to the bishop’s apartment,” Thalanes told Sarah. “We don’t know where Lee is, and it could be dangerous.”
Sarah felt nettled at being given such a strong suggestion, though the monk had a point. She bit back a fiercer retort in favor of a mild objection. “It’s dangerous for me everywhere.”
“You can disguise both your appearances as well as I can, and we’ll meet you back at Bishop Ukwu’s home shortly.” He smiled. “I hope. I only worry that we might find Sir William in a gendarmes’ jail, or someplace worse. If we get trapped, I don’t want it to become worse because you’re stuck with us, and we get overtaken by the Lazars.”
“Have you forgotten the slaver on the Natchez Trace?” Sarah asked. “You sure you want me going off alone?”
“I haven’t forgotten how well you handled him,” Thalanes said, “and I think this is the safer thing to do.”
His efforts to make his suggestion sound reasonable only irritated Sarah, as did his flattery. She steeled herself to reply with a blanket assertion of her authority.
“Please,” the monk added, his voice soft. “I can’t tell you what to do, Sarah, I’m just asking. I really think you’ll be safer.”
Once again, the monk was talking to her as if she were a child!
Sarah gritted her teeth and was winding up to let out a shout when Cathy cut in. “I would like to go to my room and change clothing, if I could. Sarah, would you mind terribly accompanying me?”
All the wind spilled out of Sarah’s sails. She nodded. “Only I ain’t sure I got enough mojo to cast me a facies muto jest now,” she said in Appalachee, a final gesture of defiance.
“Take this,” Thalanes offered, unpinning his moon-shaped brooch from the front of his habit and handing it to her. Unable to think of any reason not to, she glumly took the offered bauble and was impressed that at the slightest touch, merely holding the jewelry in her palm, she could feel it throb with energy.
“It will work as well for you as for me,” Thalanes predicted. “I fill it with a little of my own energy every day, and then I have a reservoir to draw on when I need it. You should be able to use it, too, since you can draw from the leys. You’ll have to touch it during casting, but otherwise it works just the same.”
Sarah pinned the brooch to the shawl, somewhat mollified. “Facies muto,” she said, touching the brooch, and she shaped her own face into the likeness of a craggy old woman, turning Cathy into a similar crone. She could feel power coming out of the brooch. It made her tingle to have the energy flow through her, but it didn’t leave her exhausted.
Thalanes smiled. “Grand old ladies. You both sort of resemble the Elector Calhoun.”
“After a terrible drunk, the fall-down kind where you wake up and best no questions asked why you’re wearin’ what you’re wearin’,” Cal agreed. “Honestly, you look more like Granny Clay.”
Then Cal was off, struggling with the bucking dowsing rod-guns. Thalanes followed close behind him, walking fast.
Cathy offered an elbow to Sarah. “Shall we go?”
Sarah cheerfully locked arms with the older woman. “You’re always so calm. Please tell me how you do it.”
“It isn’t terribly complicated,” Cathy said. “But it requires a lot of practice, Sarah Carpenter. Or should I say, Your Majesty?”
* * *
Obadiah was looking for an opportunity to leave. His employer hated him. All the things he had formerly seen as the great benefits of his job as the chaplain’s factotum—travel, food, women—had become tiresome and empty. He would have preferred to hole up and read his Bible, or look for a good puppet show. He wanted to go home.
He wanted to see Sarah.
Duty had gotten him out of his cot that morning, and had kept him working with the gendarme lieutenant to arrange the gendarmes and Blues into paired teams he jokingly referred to as “yokes,” to their blank incomprehension. The chevalier’s man du Plessis had observed at his shoulder, and du Plessis followed him through the enormous Palais du Chevalier as well, when Obadiah went to report.
Angleton had dismissed him curtly, angrily, indifferently.
There was a higher life, and it would not come from Ezekiel Angleton.
Obadiah believed Sarah could show it to him. Even if she couldn’t love him, and of course she would never love him, not the way he loved her, he could be in love with her. He would follow her home.
He would have left the Blues already, except that sticking with the Blues was his best chance of finding Sarah.
Captain Berkeley still hadn’t appeared by the time they all mustered in the large courtyard of the Perdido Street gendarme station, and Obadiah was a little surprised that the Blues still formed in ranks in the rain and took orders not only from Father Angleton, but also from Obadiah.
Under his watchful eye the Blues matched up each with his assigned gendarme, and took a printed city map with their assigned patrol area indicated on it with pinpricks. Then the Blues and gendarmes assigned to the first watch exited the station’s courtyard and those assigned to the second watch returned to their bunks or to the predictable leisure activities of soldiers and constables everywhere: gambling, eating, drinking, and thinking about, talking about, and looking for available women.
Obadiah turned his back on them with a great sense of relief.
Ezekiel Angleton said nothing to Obadiah and assigned himself to a search yoke ad hoc, simply joining the first pair of men to leave the yard. Obadiah joined another by the same expedient, and found himself trotting toward the Quarter behind two grim men in nonmatching blue uniforms.
He was on patrol, and he had a plan.
“En cette direction ici,” the gendarme said to the dragoon. He led and the dragoon followed, Obadiah bringing up the rear.
He almost missed Sarah when they passed her.
He had been dreaming of Sarah Calhoun for weeks, replaying in his mind’s eye every moment he’d spent with her and lovingly revisiting every detail of her dress and manner. So he might have missed the fact that one of the pair of crones stumping down the boardwalk by his side had the walk and bearing of his beloved, but even deep in emotional turmoil, he didn’t miss the fact that the crone was wearing Sarah’s purple shawl with golden suns.
His mind processed the shawl over a couple of seconds’ time, so that he realized he had seen it only after he had passed the old women. A mighty impulse washed over him and he fought back the urge to turn his horse, jump down, and plead his case to her. Instead, he discreetly drew a pistol from his belt and thumbed back the hammer.
Did he really want to throw away his position with the Philadelphia Blues for this girl? Sarah didn’t love him, and he was being treated with respect by the dragoons.
But the respect he was getting now was surely temporary, and would vanish with Berkeley’s return. And Father Angleton was still treating Obadiah like a bad dog, to be snapped at and whipped. Once, that had been an acceptable burden to bear for a decent wage. Now, Obadiah longed for a life of meaning and love.
Whichever it was to be, he had to get Sarah.
He wheeled his horse, barking to his search yoke. “She be ’ere!”
But she wasn’t there. The only person on the boardwalk was a little boy, sweeping the detritus of the prior night’s carousing from the boardwalk with a rough straw broom.
“Lad!” barked Obadiah. “’Ave you seen a girl wiff a caitiff eye this mornink, all red and swole up?” Pushing a thumb into his purse, he threw a copper bit at the boy.
The boy caught the copper, but only stared back at him. “Je ne comprend pas.”
Obadiah sighed and looked at the building. Grissot’s, its signboard said. There was nowhere else they could have gone. “Keep the bit,” he told the boy, and dropped from his horse. The search yoke stopped and looked puzzled, but Obadiah didn’t wait—beckoning them to follow, he entered the tavern.
A hunchback vigorously working the bar raised his polishing rags above his head as he saw Obadiah enter. “Look ye,” he said, “we’ve no desire for trouble on us.” Obadiah ignored him and stepped across the disarrayed common room, toes only onto the stairs on the other side, at the top of which he’d seen a flash of purple and gold.
What would Obadiah do once he had her? Could he go through with his plan? Would he submit again to Father Angleton, and his life of safe satisfaction of bodily lusts, safe but grown stale?
He didn’t know.
He turned just long enough to shush the search yoke, following a few steps behind him, with a finger over his lips—and how he would love to feel Sarah’s finger on his lips—and then crept up the stairs, gun first.
He heard two women’s voices talking and recognized one of them as Sarah’s. He couldn’t make them out on the staircase, but as he reached the hall of the upper floor, he caught a few words: “Penn,” “Lee,” and “Mad Hannah” were among them. Whoever the other woman was, Sarah was recruiting her.
Obadiah peered down the hall and saw the two crones shut a door behind them. Perfect. He walked slowly, not wanting to alarm them, and when he reached the door they had entered, he threw his shoulder into it, smashing it open.
Inside sat the two old women, one on a small bed and the other on a chair beside, their hands clasped together in intimate woman-talk. They pulled apart and jumped to their feet as Obadiah drew his second pistol, leveling both guns at the women.
“Sarah Calhoun.” He locked eyes with the crone in the purple shawl.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted in a creaky imitation of an old woman’s voice.
Obadiah shook his head. “Nay, you’ll not fool me wiff that old phiz, poppet.” He swiveled one pistol to point at the other crone’s face. “An’ if you try again, I’ll ’ave to blast your friend ’ere to kingdom come.”
The crone Sarah blinked, and then the illusion disappeared, and Obadiah saw his love, Sarah Calhoun, with her eye covered by a patch made of a long strip of cloth, and a tall, brown-haired woman he didn’t know.
“Fank you, love.” He tucked his guns back into his belt and turned, just in time to meet his search yoke in the door and block their view. “Gents,” he said, digging discreetly into his purse as he talked, “it ben’t ’er, but I definitely ’ave somefink ’ere. Stand watch whilst I palaver wiff these ’ere informants.” He shut the door in their faces and turned back to the ladies.
“Sarah, my poppet.” He opened his arms wide to show his harmless, affectionate intentions. “Can we ’ave a wee chat?”
Suddenly, Sarah yelled, and Obadiah leaped back. She slapped at her own face, scratching her cheek in her eagerness to tear the patch away, and then she was digging her fingers into her eye, and scooping something out of it, something that might be…mud?
“No, no, no!” she gasped.
“Poppet, what is it?” He felt genuine concern.
She looked up at him. Her eye, though it seemed to be smeared with mud, was no longer inflamed. Nor was it shut—it was open, and it stared at him with an iris as white as snow and full of horror.
“They’re here,” Sarah whispered. “They’re here!”