Night of a Thousand Stars (21 page)

He gave me a nod of satisfaction before turning back to the fire. He was kindling it with a handful of small twigs and I looked over his shoulder.

“There isn’t much firewood, is there?”

“Just the burning bush,” he said evenly.

I shrugged. “I don’t know why they call it that. It doesn’t seem to be burning all that well.”

“They call it that because it’s the actual burning bush, you heretic. You know, Moses?”

He was still occupied with the tricky aspects of starting a fire from pithy green wood, and it smoked like hell as it caught.

“You’re having me on,” I said finally, waving aside some of the smoke.

“I am not. The original burning bush is said to be at Saint Catherine’s monastery, but the monks who settled here claimed to have brought a bit of it with them while they searched for a place to build their community. They wandered this whole countryside, stopping each night. One morning, when they woke, the bush had put down roots, planting itself into the ground. They decided to build there, since the bush had chosen.”

I snorted. “Sounds more like one of the brothers got tired of wandering and decided this was as good a place as any to stay.”

He gave me a lopsided grin. “Such cynicism in one so young.”

I shrugged. “I prefer to think of it as a healthy practicality. I do have some, you know. I’m not entirely useless.”

He was quiet a long moment as he fed larger bits of wood to the hungry fire. “I would call you many things, Poppy. Useless isn’t one of them.”

He rose swiftly and disappeared, returning in few minutes with a goatskin of water and the food he had bought in Ashkelon. The last of the purple twilight had faded, leaving us in darkness, with only the fire for light and the dim stars just beginning to shimmer to life.

He heated flatbreads until they were charred and delicious and so hot they burned my fingers. He passed me one and some sort of salty cheese. “Eat up. There’s dried fruit and some nuts as well, but I don’t want to dip too far into the supplies. We don’t know how long we’ll be out here.”

He handed over a jar of apricots soaked in honey and when I dipped the bread into the delectable stuff, the result was so sublime I rolled my eyes in ecstasy.

“This is the best meal I have ever eaten in my entire life,” I said through a mouthful of the concoction.

He smiled. “I do have my uses.”

“I’m sure you do,” I told him solemnly. I chewed for a moment then ventured something of an apology. “You know, it’s been weighing on my mind, involving you in all of this.”

He cocked his head. “Involving me?”

I waved a hand. “In this sort of escapade. I mean, I know you worked with Gabriel Starke and that must have been very thrilling indeed being his underling, but this must be quite beyond the scope of your usual activities.”

He put down his bread. “Underling?”

“Yes. Working under Gabriel Starke. It must have been absolutely ripping to be his foot soldier. Oh, don’t worry. You’re doing very well at leading this little expedition,” I assured him. “But I am sorry to have dragged you into it all.”

He seemed to choke a little and he cleared his throat before he managed to speak. “How precisely do you think you dragged me into it?”

I flapped a hand. “This whole mess with Hugh. The way I see it, you were simply coming back to find Gabriel and make certain he was alive and well. That’s very loyal of you, and certainly something one would expect of a trusted lieutenant,” I said hastily. “But I know you didn’t expect to track down the gold for yourself. And they’d never have found you if it weren’t for me. It’s very kind of you to humour me by taking this route to Cairo, and I know it must be taxing your abilities.”

He looked thunderstruck, as if someone had just hit him with a hammer, and I hurried to reassure him. “But you really are doing a smashing job of it. This food really is delicious,” I told him again.

“Yes, Gabriel always did praise my abilities in the kitchen,” he said tightly.

I sighed. Somehow I seemed to have offended him again, and I observed, not for the first time, that Sebastian could be a trifle prickly. He fell into a reverie then and said nothing for a long time. The silence fell like the night, deep and purple and heavy between us.

I looked up at the stars again. “They’re so close, you could almost believe you could touch one,” I mused.

“So long as it isn’t the naughty star that goaded Peter Pan into flying off with Wendy,” he said absently.

I blinked at him. “What did you say?”

He stirred from whatever had been preoccupying him. “The star. That was the reason Peter Pan fled the nursery with the Darling children. A naughty little star told him the adults were coming back. It was now or never.”

“I know,” I said, feeling an odd warmth creeping up my chest. “I mentioned it once to Hugh, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

He shrugged. “I blame Nanny. She was always reading to me. Some of it stuck.”

“You’ve mentioned her before. What about your parents?”

He took a deep draught of water from the goatskin. “God, that’s foul. I would sell my own sister for a bit of good Irish whisky right now.”

He sat back, resting one wrist on his upraised knee. He had taken off his outer robes and his headdress, and again I thought he had the look of a buccaneer, albeit a rather distinguished one. I told him so and he laughed.

“Well, Hook did go to Eton,” he pointed out.

“You didn’t answer my question. About your parents.”

“What do you want to know? They were parents. They had me and promptly forgot.”

“That’s terrible,” I protested.

“But quite natural when one is the youngest of seven.”

I gaped at him. “And I thought Mother was overly enthusiastic with five.”

“Yes, well. My parents had seven sons. The eldest is twenty years older than I am, and our parents have been dead for quite a long time. It was rather a relief to them to be able to hand me off to Nanny. I wasn’t like the rest.”

“Why not?” I nibbled at another flatbread, not even minding that this batch tasted strongly of smoke.

“They’re all academics. Scholars and clergymen with extremely esoteric interests. I’m politely regarded by them as little better than backwards. They don’t think I’m actually mentally defective, but if you asked them, they’d say I was slightly imbecilic.”

“That’s outrageous! You’re one of the cleverest men I’ve ever met. I’m quite sure Gabriel Starke couldn’t have managed half of what he accomplished out here without your help. You’re very skilled with maps and languages and—what’s so funny?”

He was smiling broadly at me, and the effect was fairly devastating.

He shrugged again. “I just find it amusing to hear what you think of me. A man is never quite certain how the gentler sex perceives him. It’s nice to know I’m not entirely stupid in your estimation or only good for my prodigious skills in the kitchen.”

“I think you know better than that.”

“But you still don’t think much of me as a field agent,” he said, tipping his head thoughtfully.

I evaded the implied question. “Tell me about this organisation you work for. The one that recruited you and Gabriel Starke in London.”

He looked as if he were about to change the subject, but after a moment he sighed. “It’s called the Vespiary.”

“Like a wasp’s nest?”

“Clever girl. Yes. It was formed as a sort of experiment in the 1890s. There were many in the Government who believed Germany was a threat—a rising and credible one. They stepped up their efforts at espionage in all the usual areas, ferreting out all sorts of military secrets, spying on members of political cabinets. But there seemed to be a clear need for another group, one that could handle anything that fell outside the usual channels. The times were changing and espionage had to change with it. Not everyone agreed, so the Vespiary was formed to see if it could hold its own against the more conventional sorts of information-gathering. It specialised in recruiting people with unusual talents, misfits if you like.”

“Lost Boys,” I said softly.

“And girls. You ought to have met Jocasta,” he said, his expression dreamy. “But yes, the ones who were a bit adrift were the best recruits. They took young people mostly, those who had gifts and didn’t know what to do with them, people who would have been crushed by the system if they’d been recruited by the more formal organisations. This one was nothing like those. It was a noble experiment, held together by the force of the personalities that ran it. They took people from their own circle when they could, relying on loyalty to bind them together as much as their devotion to duty.”

“It sounds magnificent,” I breathed.

“It’s a job,” he corrected gently. “But yes, it has its moments.”

“And that’s how you met Gabriel and the rest of the Lost Boys?”

He nodded. “We weren’t the whole of the Vespiary, not by a long shot. But we were the most unconventional of an unconventional group, and most of us were frightfully young and wet behind the ears. So, they put us together. Some of us had gone to school together. Some were bound by ties of blood or friendship. Some of us were strangers. But the seven of us were like family. Only now it seems one of us has turned.”

His voice had hardened and the line of his shadowed jaw went rigid.

“The missing map?”

He nodded. “One of us must have come back here and retrieved it before Gabriel could get back.”

I hesitated. “Do you think it’s possible that Gabriel took it and lied?”

He spread his hands. “Anything is possible. I’ve learnt that lesson more than once and in painful ways. But no. I don’t think he did. Gabriel has always been quite forthright about his sins. If he’d taken it, he would have said and dared me to make an issue of it.”

“Would you have?”

He fixed me with a solemn stare. “I would have thrashed him all the way to Mesopotamia and used what was left to saddle my horse.”

I felt a tiny shiver at his words. He didn’t seem as if he were jesting, but I knew perfectly well that Sebastian was the last sort of man to engage in a physical fight. He’d proven that often enough by fleeing at the first sign of trouble during our little adventure.

“What do you think will happen with his wife, Evangeline? Do you think they’ll reconcile?”

His eyes were oddly bright in the firelight. “Yes. She’s the only woman he’s ever loved, and Gabriel is the most loyal man I know. He never even touched another woman all those years when he was pretending to be dead.”

“How do you know?”

His look was inscrutable. “Men talk.”

“About that?” I gaped at him.

He shrugged. “Desert nights get long. Sometimes you’re too cold to sleep. Sometimes you’re too bloody tired. And sometimes you know the odds against you are so long, the next morning might never come. So you talk. And Gabriel only talked about Evie.”

“Who did you talk about?” I asked, feeling oddly breathless. “The estimable Pamela?”

“No one, Poppy. There is no Pamela. There never has been. I’ve never even met anyone called Pamela.”

I started to smile, then faltered. “Wait, you don’t mean...you’ve never? Oh, my. I suspected as much. Being a clergyman would be vastly inhibiting. And besides, I suspect you’re quite shy.”

He stared back at me, his expression puzzled. “Poppy, what the hell are you talking about?”

“The fact that you’re a virgin,” I said boldly.

“I bloody well am not!”

“There’s no shame in it,” I assured him. “In fact, I think it’s rather sweet. I’m sure you’ll meet the right girl and feel perfectly inclined to amend matters when you marry her. And really, you should. Shall I send you
Married Love
? You know, you ought to read up on the intricacies of marital love.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice tight. “The bloody sex-tides.”

I brightened. “Exactly. Of course, if I’d known you were inexperienced I never would have told you all about that. I must have shocked you terribly,” I said reasonably.

He shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, moving closer. “Do you have something in your ear?”

“My head is buzzing,” he said, sounding a little dazed.

“Maybe something flew in. Let me look,” I told him. Before he could refuse, I sat next to him, peering into his ear. “I don’t see anything.” I rose on my knees and put one hand under his jaw, brushing the softness of his beard as I tipped his head. I lowered my face to his to peer into his ear. “I still can’t see anything.”

“There’s nothing in my ear,” he said tightly. “Now go sit over there.”

His tone was cold and clipped and I gave him a pitying look. “I understand. Really, it’s quite normal for a virginal male to be nervous in such proximity to the opposite sex. But you must overcome frigidity if you ever want to have a normal relationship with a woman.”

His voice was strangled now. “For the last time,” he said, grinding out the words through clenched jaws, “I am not a virgin. And I am not frigid. In fact, I am the very opposite of frigid.”

I shook my head. “I read about this in my psychology course. It’s called ‘overcompensation.’ It’s when a male attempts to overcome his natural reticence around women by—”

I never finished the sentence. With a roar of pure outrage, Sebastian flung himself to his feet, his hands tight on my wrists as he pulled me up close. His eyes blazed, but when he spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm.

“I see that I have your attention. Good. Listen well. I am not a virgin. I am not frigid. I have utterly no difficulties whatsoever with communicating my desire to a woman when I choose to. And this conversation is at an end.”

In spite of his last sentence, he hesitated, his mouth hovering near mine. I arched my back and parted my lips, waiting for the kiss that never came.

He stepped back, releasing my hands as quickly as he had seized them.

“Sebastian,” I began.

He held up a hand. “Not a word.”

He moved away, clenching and unclenching his hands. He turned slightly, his face half in shadow and half lit in the hellish light of the fire.

“I’m going to check on the donkey. I will be a very long time. Kindly be asleep when I return.”