Garrett Investigates (14 page)

Sebastien bowed in silence.

“In any case, I was well-established within the Resistance by the time London fell. And I was one of the ones sent to spirit Phillip away during the invasion—although of course I could not risk the plane.” She curled her fingertips into the flesh of her leg. It was still soft, Abby Irene noticed, and the divan dented under her weight as it never would when Sebastien sat there. Mary was dead, but young. “I met him again in America, since I was a native there, and I have been with him—protecting him—ever since this summer.”

“A wampyr? In America?”

“Things have changed,” she said. “They do not burn the blood on sight there anymore, Sebastien.”

He licked dry lips with a colorless tongue. He had lost one child to colonials, and nearly his own life too. But that was long ago, half a lifetime by humanity’s mayfly standard, when America still languished under English rule.

Now it was an independent nation, in no small part due to Sebastien’s efforts, and things were bound to be different.

Garrett cleared her throat. She should have drunk more tea. “And you came back with him.”

“In advance of him, more precisely. It is not generally known,” Mary said. “But he flies in before dawn. Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a fanfare—but he wants a few hours to feel the earth of Albion beneath his feet beforehand.”

With uncommon gentleness, Phoebe said, “It has been thirteen years.”

Mary nodded. “And he understands, as one who…who also considers one of the blood his friend…that afternoon is not the best time to meet with you.”

Sebastien would have held his breath in shock, did he breathe. Surely, she was not implying—

“After His Majesty’s formal presentation to his people, there will be a reception at Greenwich Palace. His Majesty would like to see you there. You, Lady Abigail Irene. And you, Mrs. Smith. And you most especially, Monsieur Amédée Gosselin.”

Sebastien smiled, but it was a cool smile, and Garrett could tell already that he was unsettled. “This new King Phillip has no objection to wampyrs?”

“Oh, quite the opposite,” Mary said, with a small, pleased catlike smile. “I think you’ll find.”

He was too old and experienced to be surprised that someone he had known as a servant in apron and kerchief could be so very bold. She’d always been a woman of uncommon bravery, as one must to accompany Lady Abigail Irene Garrett anywhere.

But for a wampyr to seduce the King of England? That took a certain kind of gall.

Don Sebastien de Ulloa, ancient of his kind, was impressed.

***

Mary had brought a car—a Prussian staff car, it happened, with the Teutonic eagle crudely painted over on its grey doors and a gold lion stenciled in its place—and so it was not necessary for Sebastien to wake Jason, the household’s driver. Instead, he left a note for Mrs. Moyer the housekeeper, and helped Mary’s driver load Abby Irene’s wheelchair and bag into the boot while Mary saw to Abby Irene herself.

The drive to the palace was uneventful, London’s roads deserted at this cold and rainy hour of morning. Though the curfew of the Prussian occupiers was finally lifted, the habit of early retiring had not yet entirely broken its hold on London. The streets were not safe in the absence of law and the presence of shortages.

In a quick crisis, Sebastien had noticed, people became more altruistic. But over the long term they began to sneak and hoard—and England has been under siege for over a year. The rule of law must be reinstated, and quickly, before the sort of people who preyed on others realized how secure their position had become.

The palace itself, however, was quietly alive. If Sebastien had expected bustle and fuss, he was disappointed—but electric lamps burned in nearly every window of the long white facade, and the long sweep of drive had been raked and swept. Through the colonnaded walkways and across the courtyard, he glimpsed the dark sparkle of the Thames.

As he got out of the car, he paused to look at the flagpole, naked of standards in the rain and the dark, and imagined the Union Jack snapping there. The palace had not been a royal residence since before the reign of Alexandria, serving in the interim as a military hospital. But the Prussians had claimed it as a command center, and now—apparently—Phillip II expected to make it the center of his reign.

The symbolism was strong. Phillip’s grandmother had been born here, and many a King and Queen of England before her. It was here that Geoffrey II had taken the surrender of the Portuguese, and here that his great-great grandson had received the emissaries of Holland-in-Exile when they signed their colonies over to English rule.

It was an auspicious place for—not a coronation, for Phillip had been crowned in exile in the Americas—but a triumphant return to an England newly washed clean in the blood of her enemies. Except Sebastien was uncertain that any amount of blood could truly wash something
clean
.

But it was the nature of nations, he had observed, to act as if their existence had some objective, intrinsic value and meaning. And corporations, that relatively new colonial excrescence, did not bode to develop any better.

The driver had run around to open Abby Irene’s door, and Mary—with as much familiarity and ease as if forty years had not gone to dust in the interim—was helping her into the wheelchair she despised. It was a side effect of sorcery, it seemed, that allowed those of its practitioners who did not die young and violently live to unprecedented ages. But sorcery could not prevent the infirmity that came with age. Just as vampirism could not prevent the loneliness.

Together, the two old women and the two immortals proceeded towards the palace doors, as the car glided away into the night. Mary and Sebastien must carry Abby Irene’s chair up the steps between them, and Sebastien feared her response—but Mary had the wit to make a joke of it. And so Abby Irene angled her black umbrella like a parasol, and nodded gravely to each side as any Eastern queen in a palanquin.

Her weight was nothing to two of the blood, and the pause to situate her again on the landing gave Sebastien time to examine the façade of the great door, hewn with unrepaired scars on the pale wood where the Prussian eagles had been prized loose.

They set her down before that door as it swung inward, and an East Indian man resplendent in a footman’s uniform bowed low beside the frame. “Honored guests,” he said. “We were expecting you.”

A palace was a residence. Sebastien hesitated at the threshold.

“Please,” Mary said, directly to him. “Come inside.”

The wheels of Abby Irene’s chair squeaked over dished flagstones. The Prussians had taken the carpets, as well.

***

Garrett had seen photographs.

But nothing could have prepared her for the actual face of the man who awaited them in room the footman bowed them into, the first fully-furnished room they had come to. He was of slightly above-average height, his hair glossy black and curly enough that no amount of hair wax could tame it. A sprinkle of gray hairs at the temple loaned him a certain air of dignity, and his eyes were creased at the corners, as if he spent a good deal of time in the sun.

He wore an unassuming gray suit of excellent cut, and his only jewelry was a red stone in gold on his right hand, and a wedding band on the left.

Henry
, Garrett thought. But Henry was dead, had died saving this man.

“Your Majesty,” she said, as Mary and Phoebe curtseyed to either side, and Sebastien bowed at her back. “Forgive me if I do not stand.”

“At your ease,” he said. “Please. Lady Abigail Irene, Don Sebastien. Mrs. Smith. Mary.”

At his gesture, the footman shut the door behind them and withdrew. All around Garrett, her companions rose, and stood somewhat uncertainly in their places.

The King of England moved to a blue velvet chair in the corner and seated himself. He gestured to a marble-topped sideboard—once ornate, now somewhat banged around but serviceable—with a liquor service on top. “Help yourselves to brandy. Those of you who can. And please, take seats.”

Sebastien, ever the gentleman, poured two snifters and brought one each to Garrett and Phoebe, before settling himself beside Phoebe on a fainting couch. Mary stood by the door, her long arms folded over her belly.

The king raised his eyebrows at her. She nodded.
I am content to stand.

No, joining the ranks of the blood had not changed Mary overmuch.

“Thank you for coming,” the king said. It was a needless pleasantry—they were on his soil and so his to command, for all they had each risked their lives to win that soil back for him. Garrett prickled, wondering if she should take offense at the hypocrisy or pleasure that he treated them as equals.

But the others were waiting for her to speak. “Your Majesty,” she said. “What we did we did not for reward, but because we could not bear the Prussian boot on English soil.”

She glanced at Mary. Mary’s eyes were forward, her face set in the stone dispassion of the professional servant. No help there.

She wondered, if Mary had to pick sides, which side she would fall upon.

“A reward you shall have nonetheless,” he said. “It is through your offices that the Chancellor fell; it is through your efforts that we sit here, in our great-grandfather’s palace. Dr. Garrett, you have not always been the truest friend of the Crown—”

Phoebe made a sound of protest, quickly throttled. Phillip gave her a slight, sideways glance, but she did not blush or look down.

“—but,” he continued, “you have been a good friend to England. Except inasmuch as the Crown
is
England.”

“It presents a complication,” Garrett agreed. She folded her hands over her lap-robe, the brandy resting in the topmost. By the aroma, it was excellent. She mourned that, given her age and the degradation of her senses, its excellence would be wasted on her.

“I would like to offer you a stipend,” he said, dropping into an informal—and personal—mode of speech. “Though my resources are not what they should be, and though the Prussians made off with the Crown Jewels as well as everything else of value on this island—it seems the least I can do.”

And if you will put me on the shelf,
Garrett thought,
at least you will set someone to dust around me.
But what else could he do with her? She still had her mind, and her wit, and her sorcery—even in a failing body, those remained strong.

“You will of course be pardoned fully, and invited to participate in the return of the Enchancery’s library to the Crown.”

And there was the true hook in the bait. She had preserved those books, and the archives of the Crown Investigators, all through the long years of occupation. It had not been an endeavor without risk—but even that was not enough to win Phillip’s trust.

She would die Lady Abigail Irene, or Doctor Garrett. And the thing she had fought to win and retain the first fifty years of her life, the title and work of Crown Investigator, would remain beyond her reach.

She would have liked to spend her last years teaching the next generation of forensic sorcerers. Instead she was to be packed away like a wedding goblet, like Gwenevere in her cloister.

“Thank you, your Majesty,” she said.

“The library,” he said, “will be catalogued and archived.”

She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, your Majesty.”

Raising his eyebrows at her, he nodded. “Speak your mind.”

“Will the library not be returned to the Enchancery? It was for that purpose that I preserved it—”

“That remains uncertain,” he said. “Frankly, there are not enough of your former colleagues remaining—”

She felt Phoebe shift beside her. Sebastien was too well-practiced to give so much away. “Your Majesty,” Garrett said urgently. “Allow me, if there is no other.

“Lady Abigail Irene. I will take it under consideration.” He turned his attention to her right. “And as for you, Mrs. Smith, I should like to create you Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and offer you a full pardon for whatever was done during the late war with the colonies.”

“That is very gracious,” Phoebe said.

The king said, “Don Sebastien, I am afraid that there is little service I can do you in return, but you have my word that so long as I am King, you and your kind will be welcome on British soil, and subject to the same laws as any of my subjects.”

Garrett glanced over her shoulder in time to catch the quirk of Sebastien’s smile. There was a hook there, of course: for his kind to reproduce required a murder. But he nodded, and seemed about to speak when the door opened without so much as a knock and a ginger-haired woman in an elegant cream silk dress entered. She might have been in her mid twenties, a little more than half the king’s age, and modestly pretty—but she was doing everything possible with that prettiness.

Her clothes and hair were impeccable, her matching shoes pristine to the soles. She extended a hand with the nails painted shell-pink and curtseyed to the King.

“Darling,” she said, in cultured American tones. “Pardon me for interrupting. But a supper—or perhaps a breakfast—or some sort of food in an hour usually reserved for sleeping—is being served.”

He cocked his head at her, but smiled. “And you could not send a page?”

“It was faster and more forceful to do it myself.” She waved his concern for protocol aside, and turned to Garrett and her companions, much animated by mischief. “Besides, it was my opportunity to meet Mary’s friends.”

The king stood, and so perforce did Phoebe and Sebastien. “Ladies,” he said, as Mary stepped away from the door and dropped a curtsey. “Gentleman. My royal wife, Queen Sofia.”

***

Sebastien recalled from his tabloid reading that the Queen was a distant relative of the royal family of Holland, a descendent of the Dutch peerage left behind when New Holland had been given over to England during Holland’s tenure as a French subject state. Phillip had married her in his exile, when it seemed possible that he would never reclaim his throne. Now, seated across from her at a breakfast table set with mismatched porcelain and silver that had obviously only just been polished until it shone, Sebastien thought that perhaps he had brought home a better Queen than anyone could have anticipated, from such a hasty love-match.