Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (119 page)

“I will turn my back. Will that do?”

“That will do,” he said and stood as she turned, slipping into the furs, the boots, the leather, his stomach suddenly loud at the thought of food.

They ate well of the soured mare’s milk and fried bread and cold, roasted meat which he knew now was reindeer. There was tea after, hot and sweetened with honey. It tasted like nirvana.

His brain felt like it had been scoured with a wire brush, scrupulously gleaned for every bit of lint and ephemera it held as well as the more concrete things. Which wasn’t, it had to be said, the optimal state in which to meet with his godmother.

The girl brought Kolya to him after breakfast. She said something in Yakut and Jamie understood that Kolya had been fed and had slept well, wrapped tight in furs alongside the woman’s own child.

Yevgena saw the look on his face. “She was widowed last year, her husband lost to the sea. If she has given you comfort, know that you also have given such to her.”

The woman’s eyes on him were soft, and he remembered particular moments from the night, and returned the look in kind. He was grateful, for somehow the night had removed some of the thorns from his soul. She was a stranger and she had done this for him. He thought somehow that she understood this.

He held Kolya facing forward on his lap, the boy’s hair a halo of copper in the morning light.

“And who,” Yevgena said, as a startlingly blue pair of eyes goggled at her, “is this?”

“This,” Jamie said softly, “is my son—Nikolai Andreyevich.”

Chapter Ninety
The Summons Home

It was, in those first hours
, almost more than he could manage. It was life returning: the business of it, the details, the responsibilities. But Yevgena had fed them out as on a fine line, invisible on its own but freighted with news, gossip, and correspondence. He ought to have known, and had he been sharper, less distracted, he would have understood that beneath the glittering waves of all these morsels lay the dark water hiding, as was its way, the monster whose presence was felt long before it was seen. She had given him those two days in which to sleep, to mend a bit and to readjust a little to the idea of returning to the West, to home, to civilization as he understood it. Only he thought, perhaps he no longer did.

Two letters, written on his own personal letterhead and therefore they could only be from one person. But why was Yevgena acting as though she carried an incendiary device? He took the letters, his eyes still on hers, questioning.

She merely looked at him and then quietly left the room. They were in his Paris house, having felt it was not wise to stop on their flight from Russia until they were very far away. He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. It was nearly noon and he had slept twelve hours.

One was written in a hand he recognized vaguely, the other in Pat Riordan’s broad and immediate slash. He felt something seize just below his breastbone at the sight of that bold writing—Pamela? No, he could not countenance that. He opened the other letter first and understood why it had seemed somewhat familiar, like an echo so far back in his mind that it was barely registered much less heard. It was from Robert who was, despite his own lengthy absence from the land of the living, his secretary.

Jamie took a deep breath and began.

Dear Lord Kirkpatrick—
the title alone made his head swim—he had been Yasha for so long that the thought of any of the many names and titles he carried in this other world had the effect of either making him want to laugh or hide somewhere for a good, long time.

He resumed, eyes taking in the neatly-blocked letters as well as the sense of the man writing them. Economical with his words—well, he would be from what little Jamie knew of him.

I hope this letter finds you well.

That, thought Jamie, was a matter entirely up for debate.

We are, of course, rejoicing here to know that you are safe and whole and will be returning to your home soon.

The ‘we’ gave Jamie pause—who was ‘we’? Robert and Maggie? Montmorency and the horses?

Not wishing to waste your time, I will get down to business.

How very Scots and thrifty of him, Jamie thought, picturing the small owl face of the man he had met so briefly under less than ideal circumstances.

The wee Scot had a very to-the-point style and Jamie felt that he had a good grasp of what had taken place in his companies in his absence.

It was wise of you to appoint Mrs. Riordan as your legal heir in your absence. She has been most astute from the beginning, making the hard decisions when they had to be made, but also exercising compassion when it was a personal matter. She has proven herself tough in negotiations too, though I daresay that her face alone addles her opposition so much they barely know that they’ve agreed with her before they are being hustled from the premises with whiskey in their bellies and yearning in their hearts.

Yes, Jamie thought wryly, no doubt they did leave in that state. Though he had never known Pamela to indulge in vanity of any sort, still she was shrewd enough to use her looks when she needed to. He could well imagine some of the tough foremen from the linen mills being entirely discombobulated in her presence.

She has a mind that adapts readily to the ups and down of the markets, both those of goods and finances. She tells me she was well trained by you to understand these things, and that now she knows why. I am politely paraphrasing here, of course.

He laughed out loud, for he could well imagine just how Pamela had reacted to the news that she had the running of his home and businesses.

I shall miss working with her. We have formed a well-functioning team these last two years and I have become very fond of her and her family. I look forward, however, to working with yourself whom, I am assured is no slack taskmaster, and I am informed that I will not have time to miss her. I think she underestimates her charms, though. I will, of course, miss the children as well for I have come to regard them as part of this house and its daily rhythms.

Children
? Jamie’s eyes slid further down the page. So Pamela and Casey had another child. The thought of it made him suddenly feel unmoored from the earth, as if he had been gone so long that nothing would be familiar upon his return. Nothing
was
familiar, that was already too apparent. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to go home, and he knew how irrational that was considering how much he had missed it these last three years. But Russia had turned him into someone else, someone unrecognizable in the mirror even now that the small niceties of shaving and showering had been re-introduced to his world.

I must tell you now so that you are prepared when you come home, that the distillery was destroyed by fire, and in the ashes was found the body of your Uncle Philip.

How the hell had that happened? He didn’t feel any sadness on behalf of his uncle for the man had spread a taint by his mere presence, one from which Jamie’s spirit and self had always recoiled. The distillery though, he did regret. It had been part of his home and he had spent many soothing hours there, both on his own and in years past with his grandfather.

He returned his attention to the letter. Robert continued with a brief summary of market reports and investments. There was a summation as well of the threats against the companies and the two years of sleight of hand in which Pamela and Robert had been engaged to save it. He felt sick at the thought of the threats she had been under.

Jamie paused here, feeling suddenly that the Scot was trying to lighten the blow of something that was stated further down in the letter. An ominous feeling had lodged itself at the base of his spine and was building with each line his eyes took in.

There were a few more lines that provided a pathway toward his final words, which Jamie skimmed, not really taking them in. And here it was, what wasn’t being said.

I feel it is best that you read Patrick’s letter. This is not information that is mine to impart and so I will not. If you have read his letter first then you will know why I urge you to come home as quickly as you can.

Jamie looked at the dark lettering on the white field of the envelope and knew he had never wished to read anything less in his entire life. The weight of it hung in the air, unavoidable, inescapable. He had felt it when Yevgena placed it in his hands, that it contained news that would shift the axis of the universe and that it had already done so to those he loved in Ireland. He realized suddenly that he was gripping Robert’s letter so tightly he had torn the paper in two. If, after all….no, he would not think it, would not allow the thought to even rest in his mind for a moment, lest it take seed.

Read the letter he must though, there was no avoiding the world anymore. He opened it and one thin sheet fell out. Only a few lines, most definitely the economy of that was a harbinger of dread news.

Dear Jamie,

We are so relieved that you are well. I write this in haste to go in the package with Robert’s letter. How to say this, without baldly shocking you—which I know you do not need—but there is no way to sugar-coat things. Casey has gone missing and I fear he’s dead. The circumstances surrounding his disappearance are strange, and yet I cannot see how my brother could still be alive and not come home nor give his wife and children a sign that he is alive somewhere.

I know you will be wondering how Pamela is managing. The answer is that she’s not. She’s frantic and in complete denial. The look in her eyes is something I can hardly bear to witness. I don’t know what will happen if—but, no, I won’t write those lines here. The children are too young to understand, thank heavens. Will this be a blessing for them, I wonder, and then my heart plummets to know that if Casey does not come home they will have no memory of their father.

I know you haven’t had time to adjust to the idea of coming home, but for Pamela’s sake, and I admit, for my own, please hurry. We need you.

Patrick

He scanned the letter twice more, rapidly, but the words remained in place, stubbornly insistent, unchanging and irrevocable.

He stood from the bed, took clothes from the closet, put them on, all without a sense of breathing or moving, as though the world hung in a horrific state of suspension.

“Yevgena,” he called out.

She opened the door as though she had waited outside it, knowing he would need her.

“You know?”

“Yes,” she replied, black eyes liquid with sympathy.

“Why didn’t you give these to me, as soon as we arrived?”

“You know why, Jemmy. You’re still too weak but I felt I had no choice. You must go home. You are needed.”

Jamie functioned through the brutal discipline of his mind in the next hours, arranging a plane, arranging transportation to the plane, calling on every resource of his vast holdings to get back to Ireland as quickly as possible.

But once on the plane from Paris to London, with Kolya fast asleep on the seat beside him, he found he could not escape his thoughts nor the fears of what he would find when he arrived home.

It was as he slipped toward sleep himself that they came to him—his ghosts, both the living and the dead: Violet, Andrei, Nikolai, behind him now; Pamela and Patrick and their fears and loss in front of him. And he remembered the last words the Mother had spoken to him.

“It is you who holds yourself there. It is you who must let them go, or they will become yor and be trapped here. It is not the dead who cling to the living, but the living who cannot let the dead go. It is not time yet but one day you must do what is right for them and allow them to move on. It is the living who have need of you. It is to them you must go.”

And so he would go back to his life, to whatever form and shape that might now take. The ache of loss was an open wound still but at the heart of this pain was that fragile seed of peace, a sense that eventually he would come to a place where he might embrace his ghosts and then release them.

For now, however, he would carry them with him, for he was not ready to let them go.

Epilogue

James Kirkpatrick was fated to make one more stop
before reaching home. An official summons had greeted him when he arrived in London and he had been all but manhandled into an anonymous black car. Politely, for his abductors were British after all, but with a firmness that told him they would knock him out and truss him up if that was what was required to buy his acquiescence.

They drove in the back entrance, but back or front, Jamie recognized the tall ugly shadow of the building to which he was taken. He sighed. He had been afraid of this, but had hoped to slip through England before they were aware of his presence.

It was all familiar, including the room they took him to and the man who entered a few moments later. Aubrey Fielding, for his sins. The man was an officious bastard and Jamie had never been fond of him. They could hardly be serious about allowing this man to debrief him. Whatever he had been to them before Russia, he was now a free agent and he would not answer to any man he did not wish to, including British prats who couldn’t see beyond their pointy bureaucratic noses.

The questions began simply. No doubt the man thought he could lull him into actually answering something if caught unawares by the sheer mind-numbing stupidity of what he was saying.

“Why were you so long in the Soviet Union?”

It was one question too far. The camel’s back snapped. “Are you serious? Taking an extended tea with Brezhnev—what the fuck do you think I was doing?”

The man in front of him spluttered and Jamie thought of how much easier it had been to deal with someone like Gregor, direct and to the point. He turned to look up at the corner where the camera sat.