Shadow Conspiracy (41 page)

She kept her wits about her, mastered her breathing, and waited. The wind was cold on her bared limbs. He completed his arrangements and poised above her, pausing for an instant to savour his conquest.

Her knee snapped up. The air rushed out of him. He gagged and dropped.

She gathered, rolled, and sprang to her feet. He lay drawn into a knot, wheezing, clutching the outraged portion of his anatomy. Emma considered applying the tip of her parasol to it, but some imp of either wickedness or prudence urged her to continue the experiment. She swayed, hand to brow. “Oh! Mr. Fraser. I had the most terrible dream. Were there brigands truly? Are you wounded? Did you save my life?”

The eye that rolled at her was sour with loathing, until he remembered his own game. He rose with difficulty, thanking his stars no doubt that the greatcoat concealed the extent of his dishabille. “Your life is safe, my dear,” he said, “but it seems I misjudged the temper of heaven.”

Indeed, thought Emma, he had. The storm was coming. The mountains were veiled in heavy swathes of cloud.

Emma turned to retreat the way she had come. She recalled a place farther down, where an outcropping offered a modicum of shelter. It would not protect them from wind-borne rain, but it would keep the worst of the rain from their heads, and shield them from hail.

But Fraser—no honorific for him now, not in Emma’s mind, nor hereafter—seized her wrist in a rough grip and dragged her upward. She struggled; she stabbed with her parasol. She struck home: he grunted, cursed, wrenched the parasol from her hand and flung it across the stream. “Enough of that!” he barked at her. “There’s shelter up ahead, you silly nit, and I’m getting us to it as fast as may be. Now will you stop that and let us get on with it?”

That cooled Emma’s head admirably, and sharpened her wits as well. Her sobbing was feigned but her acquiescence was not. Whether she would be safe when she reached such shelter as Fraser might aim for, she had no way of knowing. But she was most certainly not safe on a mountainside in such a storm as was rolling down upon them.

It smote like the wrath of the Almighty. Within moments Emma was drenched through every layer of her considerable and sturdy clothing. Fraser made no offer of his greatcoat. He seemed to have forgotten what he dragged behind him, clambering up an ever steeper slope through the sluice of rain.

She concentrated her energies on keeping her footing and on simply breathing. He had not abandoned her; therefore he needed her. While she performed her experiment, it seemed, he had been performing one of his own: though what purpose she might serve, or what use he intended to make of her, she lacked the data to determine. She could only go on, and trust to such skills as she had, and hope to win whatever battles lay before her.

She lost her bonnet over the edge of a precipice, plucked ribbons and all from her head by a swirling gust of wind. Her hair, never the most biddable aspect of her person, shed its pins and tumbled down her back, save for one dark lock that whipped her face. She scraped it away, nearly oversetting them both on the narrow path.

He hurled her against the cliffside with force enough to drive the breath out of her lungs, bent and spat words in her ear. “One more such antic and I drop you off the cliff. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, mute. She hardly needed her acting skills to make her eyes huge or her face stiff with cold and shock.

His lips ground on hers. There was nothing tender in that kiss. It was pure possession. He owned her. She was as much his creature as any automaton, bound and enslaved to his will.

So he might be pleased to imagine. She let the rain scour the taste of him from her mouth. In her heart she swore a vow. “This you will pay for, George Fraser. Pay long, and pay high.”

Sister Annunciata was almost ready. The fire of the body had sunk low. The soul was nearly fledged, stretching its wings like a bird of flame.

Mother Agatha set down the opticon. As always, the light of the mundane world seemed grey and cold in comparison. In the plain whitewashed cell, Sister lay barely breathing. The skin clung tight to the bones of her face; the hands folded on her breast were skeletal.

“Tonight,” Mother Agatha said to the younger nun who knelt beside the narrow cot. “See that the vessel is prepared.”

Sister Magdalen bowed her head, crossed herself and rose. In the silence that followed her departure, Mother Agatha heard the chanting that resounded perpetually in the chapel, sweet and high and far like the voices of angels.

Mother Agatha bent over Sister Annunciata’s body. Breath barely stirred it. Her consciousness had gone some time since. Only the life itself was left, and the soul awaiting its translation.

The abbess laid her hand on the cool, still forehead. “Soon, Sister,” she said. “By God’s will.”

The light was fading. The storm, by the will of the mountain’s gods, was not. Rain had turned to sleet. If they ascended much higher, they would meet the snow.

Emma was cold to the bone. Only determination warmed her, and her well-nurtured hatred of George Fraser. He had stopped for nothing in longer than she was able to calculate, even to peer at his map.

For some time he had forced her to take the lead. He was using her as a windbreak. There was no pretence now of anything but mastery.

Let him believe he had mastered her spirit as he had, for this little while, her body. Her spine was steel and her heart was stone. She climbed in the deepening twilight, numbed with cold and blinded by the sleet, until she found herself face to face with a massive and iron-bound door.

Her first thought, which she dismissed as soon as it occurred, was that she had found the gates of Hell. Those would surely not be set with nails in the shape of antique crosses. As she looked up and to the side, she saw the stone wall and carving above the gate, the Lamb with his banner of the Chi and Rho.

She came perilously near to bursting out laughing. It was a monastery, of course, here in this remote corner of the Alps, and divine Providence, or George Fraser’s map, had led her straight to it.

There was a bell in a niche, out of reach of the wind. When Emma rang it, she started: the sound that emerged was not the simple clangour of clapper on bronze, but a clear and supernaturally resonant phrase of liturgical Latin. The bell, she realised, was a mechanical construct, and very finely done.

The echoes faded into the roar of the storm. A lesser portal opened within the greater one; a shrouded figure stood against a backdrop of flickering light.

The voice that invited them in was female, low and well modulated, speaking in French. Emma could discern few details of her habit, save that it was dark and voluminous. The nun glided ahead of them across a wind- and rain-swept courtyard, then up a wan-lit stair. Emma saw as she passed them that what she had taken for small and feeble lanterns were a variety of electrical illumination: globes of glass encasing arcs of incandescent light.

Someone in this remote fastness, it seemed, had expanded upon a lesser-known experiment of Sir Humphry Davy. Even in her near-frozen and exhausted condition, Emma was intrigued.

So much so, in fact, that she nearly forgot to maintain her façade of enfeebled femininity. Fraser however had kept it well in mind. He pressed close behind her, driving her upward when she would have slowed to investigate one of the dimly glowing lamps.

For strictest verisimilitude she should have fainted against him, but that, even for the sake of her art and her life, she would not do. In truth, she would rather die.

The stair ended at last in a long whitewashed corridor, at the end of which was a chamber of baronial magnificence. The ornately carved details of its beams and panelling bespoke the later Middle Ages; its rounded stone arches were older still, crowned with Romanesque stonework, faces of beasts and birds and semi-human grotesques. The lamps that cast light upon its curiosities however were as distinctly of the modern age as those that had lit the stair.

Their guide had left them at the door. She who received them, rising from a chair that would have well pleased a mediaeval baron, was clad in a habit of fine black wool and snowy linen that recalled no order Emma knew. The details of the scapular, the workmanship of the silver cross that adorned it, and the specific folding and arrangement of the wimple and veil were distinctive but unknown to her. The woman within the habit however was of a mould that she knew well: brisk, intelligent, with a penetrating eye.

This might not be a friend, but she could well be an ally. “I welcome you to the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Adoration,” she said in lightly accented English. “I am Mother Agatha.”

Fraser had assumed his most charming and gentlemanly semblance, bowing over her hand and kissing her ring of silver set with a ruby like a drop of blood. “Mr. George Fraser of Rosings in Derbyshire, at your service, reverend abbess. My wife and I are most grateful to have found sanctuary on such a night.”

Emma heard herself so titled, and so summarily altered in marital state, with such a mingling of shock and outrage and perilous mirth that she judged it most advisable to sink down in a faint. Not all of it was feigned: her head was light with hunger and sudden warmth after hours of brutal cold. Her knees were well inclined to co-operate in the venture.

Fraser, as she had taken care to arrange, was well out of reach. The abbess however was not. As those firm arms caught her, she tried her utmost to speak with her eyes, to flash a warning. She could not tell whether she succeeded, but in one respect she had won the day: when sturdy nuns were summoned to carry her out, they bore her not to a falsely connubial chamber but to the infirmary.

As Emma had calculated, there was nothing Fraser could do to prevent it. This was an abbey of holy women, and his putative bride was manifestly ill. He was swept off to some suitably safe and, Emma hoped, securely locked and guarded chamber. She lay in the very bosom of the abbey, on a narrow cot of immaculate cleanliness, closest to the hearth that warmed the long narrow room. The fire on the hearth was of mechanical origin; it burned steadily, without the uncertain flicker of a living flame.

She counted two rows of six beds each, none occupied save for hers. The sister who tended her had, it seemed, taken a vow of silence, but her face and eyes were eloquent; she had a smile of quite remarkable sweetness. Without a word spoken, Emma learned much from her: how to warm frozen limbs without danger to the extremities, how to brew a decoction that warmed the heart as well as the stomach, how to train her ear to hear the music of Heaven.

It must be the chanting of nuns in the chapel, and it must be fairly close by, for even with the chimney to enhance the sound, it was strikingly near and clear. They were vowed to perpetual adoration, Sister Infirmarer indicated to her. They sang forever the praises of the Almighty, untiring and unceasing, filling the abbey with the echoes of their devotion.

That was most admirable and indeed most beautiful, but Emma found more of interest in the casual curiosities of the abbey. They had a notable mastery of the electrical sciences, and of the mechanical arts no less. When Emma confessed her hunger, that which brought the light collation of bread sopped in warm milk and honey was indubitably an automaton. It bore little resemblance to a human servant; it was of such size and aspect as to recall one of the monkeys she had seen in great numbers in India, but with none of the mischief that made the creatures so amusing. This thing of glass and metal and leather strappery glided smoothly to her bedside, unburdened itself of tray and cup and bowl, and waited, silent and expressionless, for her to dispose of their contents.