Renegade (32 page)

Finally, after a few moments, Neil spoke. “Ah’ll go wit ye, but this might be a fool’s errain. Why, there’s nae inhabited islands in that place. Only rocks. Rocks we’ll smash against if we go at the wrong point of day, fer certain.”

“We have reason to believe she is there. We must at the very least find and explore the area,” I said urgently. Simon shot me a split-second gaze, and I realized that I hadn’t taken a single sip from my teacup. Although my stomach churned, I immediately took a sip in order to appear sociable.

Neil finished his tea and sighed. “Best time to go out will be early mornin’. Three o’clock. I don’t want people around here knowin’ I’ve befriended ye.”

I took another sip of the hot tea.“
Why
are you befriending us?” I asked. Other people in Bromwell had lost loved ones; I didn’t understand why Neil had sought us out, why he was troubling himself for us.

He was quiet for a moment, then finished his tea and sighed. “Ah’ll show ye. Go up that stair.”

We followed his wife, who had just come in from outdoors, up a creaky set of stairs until we were at a room at the top of the house. She opened the door to a small bedroom. It was simple, like the rest of the house, but had been brightly painted. Whitewashed. In a small bed with a lace coverlet lay a little girl, no more than seven or eight years old. She had long stringy dark hair and her eyes were black and hollow. She lay on her side, unmoving, not speaking, as if she was unaware that we were there. The woman sat by her bed and stroked the girl’s hair gently. The child clutched a one-eyed, threadbare doll in her hands.

I had seen this look on a few of the children in the hospital—most of them had been beaten. We’d had one terrible situation soon after I began working at Whitechapel, where a young girl had been raped by her drunken uncle. She came to us with her wounds, along with the same hollow, terrible look. Trauma.

I sat at the end of the bed, near the child’s feet.

The girl did not look down at me, even as the bed moved with my weight. She did not speak.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked the woman.

“Three weeks,” she said. “Ever since … ”

She didn’t continue, but I intuitively knew what she could not speak of, the root of her speechlessness.

The attack.

There was no point in talking about it in the room. The woman stayed with the child, and as soon as we closed the door and were in the narrow hallway outside the room, Simon whispered, “The child witnessed the attack?”

Neil nodded. I could see, under the wrinkles in his face, that he was still highly affected by the state of the child. “She did. Her older sister, Margaret, was to git married next month. She and her fiancé were in a meadow, on the northern part of the shore. My Laura had arrived there to meet her and saw the attack upon ’er sister. She saw ’er sister devoured before ’er eyes. And she saw the beast.”

“The lamia,” I said, stunned, feeling coldness creep through my veins. William was still with that creature.

“The child is a strong one,” Neil said quietly. “She’ll be fine. But ah don’t feel safe til the beast is gone—she’s smart—been livin’ in these waters for years. Mostly left us alun. But not lately. Disturb’d, she is. Ah can’t let mah Laura out of the house wit’ this she-wolf still alive. Ah wan mae grandchild to be saf’ agin. Their father, mah son, is dead. Their mother gone. Ah’ve raised them. This beast, this creature, has taken everything from me. Ah’ve ridden my boat out at nights, in the places the search parties have not been. She’s out there, she is. Ah’ve seen the gleam of her back in the distance.”

We spent the next hour discussing where and when we would meet him.

Simon and I arrived at a copse near the southwest shore of Bromwell, with Hugo, at one o’clock that morning. I felt strange, as I was wearing some of Simon’s clothes—his pants, one of his white shirts. It simply had seemed foolish to meet this lamia creature wearing a dress and stiff crinoline. Although his clothes fit me about the waist, the pants were far too long, and I’d spent our time back at the inn, after we’d left Neil’s house, stitching them up with a needle and thread. Simon’s shirt hung loose around my neck, the sleeves rolled up as securely as possible. I had pulled my hair tightly away from my face in a large knot.

My heart pounded as we waited. I felt as I used to feel when anticipating a knife tournament in Dublin, but this endeavor was so much costlier, so much more frightening.

William was so much on my mind.

Simon and I sat, leaning against a rotten tree trunk in the reflecting light of the water. Hugo lay beside me, looking out over the waves. Occasionally, he perked his head up, laid his eyes back, and growled or whined, and I wondered what he sensed out in the depths. I knew that we all might die, and so much remained unspoken between Simon and myself.

“Abbie,” Simon said suddenly, quietly. “You are under no obligation to love me.”

I laughed a little as a tear slid down my face. I had always felt amazed at Simon’s level of perception, at his ability to know how to read me, how to read my heart.

I looked at him, feeling as if I might split in two. The sea roared ahead of us and a breeze pushed through his curls. This situation was so different from the one last fall, when I had rejected Simon’s proposal of marriage. I had not known him well then. The break from William had, painfully, allowed me to see Simon’s heart—to know that he did not merely
seem
good, true, constant. He
was
good and true and constant. And we were so similar. The story he had told me of Africa … for someone to live through what he had and to still believe in humanity at all … it was nothing short of miraculous. I felt another tear slide down my cheek and I choked awkwardly.

Simon leaned forward, wiped the tear away.

“I’m sorry, Simon. You are so bloody perfect for me—in every way. Grandmother would even approve. I do love you, but … ” How did I explain that the love I felt for Simon was too temperate? My thoughts didn’t make sense even to me, and yet I knew the choice had already been made. In spite of good reason and judgment, I knew, suddenly, that I had and always would love William.

Simon leaned forward and kissed my lips lightly, in what I knew would be our last kiss. This journey to the Orkney Islands marked the end of so much. I tried clumsily to speak, but Simon placed his finger upon my lips, urging me not to speak another word.

A streak of green light flashed across his pale face, and I turned out to the water to see where it came from. In what was probably the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, I saw what looked like enormous green yarns, green serpents, glowing beautifully, weaving themselves across the dark skies as if alive. Flashes of fires. I had never seen anything like it, but scenes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” came to my mind—“a hundred fire-flags sheen.”

I murmured the line under my breath.

“Northern lights,” Simon said, gazing out, and I knew that he had heard me. I looked out at the display with him, and then I felt his eyes upon me.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered. The beauty only made my heart more sorrowful.

“Odd,” Simon responded, his light blue eyes focused over the waters again. “They appear more often in winter. But this is lovely.”

The lights played around his hair in slithering auras. His beauty, as it had back at the inn earlier this evening, almost overwhelmed me. Yet, I knew he was not my own. I also knew in that moment, tragically, that I was the only person he would ever love. This realization came instinctually. There would be no one else for Simon St. John.

“I’m sorry, Simon,” I said again. It sounded weak. Pathetic.

He turned in the darkness to face me just as an intense streak of light fell upon us, illuminating our forms, blinding me for one second before I could refocus on Simon’s face in the darkness.

“Inexplicable,” he whispered. “Wild. Unruly. And yet the lights still stir the heart.”

More tears now. I knew his point, deftly identifying the nature of my love for William.

He reached for my hand, and somehow this felt more intimate than the kiss had. “It’s all right, Abbie.” He paused, looked away. His voice cracked. I saw a tear in his eye. “There are some matters, some paths of the heart, that even the will cannot conquer.”

A little before three o’clock, even amidst the night winds, we heard Neil’s boat approaching us, softly coursing near the shore.

“Our ride,” Simon said gently, helping me rise and leading me down the rocky mounds to the water.

Part IV

“O fair and strong and terrible! Lioness

That with your long locks play the Lion’s mane!”

—The Princess

Twenty-six

A
storm rolled in as we neared the island. Indeed, the island seemed to be all rocks—a small sharp bundle of cliffs and crevices jutting out in all directions, a craggy, pointed starfish. I would not have noticed the place if we had not been looking for it—the island seemed to rise up from the waves only when we were almost upon it. Even Neil said that he had been in the area but had never seen it. “Th’ currents veer away,” he said. “E’en on sunny days, a blankit ah mist settles in the area an’ it’s guid as covered.”

We had been forced to steer the dory hard against the current, and then, just as we almost reached the shore, fighting to near it, the current altered course and began sucking the boat violently toward the rocks.

“Paddle ’arder!” Neil shouted over the winds, just as we were almost dashed against a towering cliff wall. Hugo lost his balance and fell hard against the side of the boat, nearly tipping us. It was only when we steadied and escaped the sucking current that I felt myself breathe again. But the moment we steadied, Neil shouted at us to veer sharply again, and we washed up on—or rather, crashed upon—a narrow, almost hidden strip of sand. The boat slid so violently onto it that both Hugo and I were thrown out of the dory, landing hard onto the packed wet sand.

As Neil secured the boat and Simon checked his medical bag to make certain that the supplies he brought for attending to William hadn’t been damaged on the rain-soaked journey, I surveyed our surroundings and checked our weapons. I had my own knives strapped tightly to me, and I’d taken the sword out of its case. Neil had brought gunpowder, but that, like Simon’s revolvers, had been soaked during the journey.

“Useless.” I cursed and tossed them back into the boat.

“It doesn’t matter,” Simon said quietly, placing the useless revolver in his medical bag. “You’re more comfortable with the knives, at any rate.”

Hugo uttered a low growl, and the hair on his neck stood on end. I felt goose bumps rise all over my skin; we were all highly alert.

Taking out my bowie knife, I stared above us at the cliffs. Seraphina could be anywhere—in the surrounding waters, somewhere in her underground home waiting for us. She could even be in the rocks looming above us, crouched in a crevice, ready to pounce like a terrible mountain lion.

The sheets of rain had ceased a bit, but thunder roared in the distance and the wind had picked up, even more so than when we were crossing the water. The storm was far from over.

“We’re too exposed,” Simon whispered as we eased away from the boat.

“We must get underground,” I whispered. I turned to Neil. “You have been so kind to bring us here. You should stay here with the boat.” It was me that she wanted; at least Neil might have a slim chance of escaping if Simon and I were murdered inside the lair. I remembered that little girl, and I wanted her grandfather to arrive home to her, safe.