Shadow Play (47 page)

"I beg your pardon?"

She turned to face him. "You lied when you told me he was dead."

"My dear, you are obviously overwrought. Allow me to send for Lord Sheffield—"

"Lord Sheffield can go to hell. Lord Sheffield is not my keeper and he never will be. I've come here for the truth and I shan't leave until I hear it."

"And what might that be?"

"Morgan was left alive on that dock. Wounded horribly, near death, but alive. You lied to me when you said he was dead."

Wickham's smile was sad. "Sarah, the man was dead. Surely you cannot think me so cruel as to purposefully break your heart."

She glared at him, feeling the tears rise again, choking off her breath, making her tremble.

"I'm sorry if that grieves you," he said, then added more gently, "We realize how deeply you cared for him—"

"Loved—love him. I love him."

Wickham lowered his eyes. "This happens occasionally, my dear. When one loses someone they ... love and don't have the opportunity to witness the actual burial, they experience difficulty in accepting the demise. Such is your case, I'm sorry to say."

The tears spilled down her cheeks. Chin quivering, she managed in a choked voice, "Can you stand there and swear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Morgan is dead?"

He shook his head. "Sarah, for the love of God, what good can come from holding on to such—"

"Can you?" she screamed, causing his gaze to fly back to hers. "Well? Answer me, damn you!"

"There was a wound I could put my fist through—"

"Can you!"

"...no."

The world reeled, and falling against a chair, Sarah clutched at it in desperation.

Wickham rushed to help, but she shook her head. "Don't you dare touch me."

Eyes flashing, she stared at him. "You have allowed me to grieve inconsolably the last

months—"

"You cannot think that he could have survived such an injury."

"There's someone in London who says he's from Brazil, and that he knows me."

"I would believe it to be King before I could accept that it was the American. Besides, if this man were Morgan Kane, why would he not have approached you before now?''

"I don't know. I simply... don't know."

Chapter Twenty-three

TWO WEEKS PASSED, AND THERE WERE NO FURTHER SIGHTings of the man in white. The first week Sarah made herself as accessible as possible, straying from her town house to walk the parks, even venturing to the Thames, where she sat on the banks and watched the water... for what? Some mythical
boto
to materialize from the river?

There was no doubt about it now, she was quite insane. She had accepted the fact, even relished it to some extent. At last all invitations had stopped arriving. Acquaintances pretended to look the other way when she met them on the street. She rarely saw Norman, which didn't break her heart; but it did leave her with a nervousness in her stomach she was loath to acknowledge. The days and nights grew long, with only the Indians and her monkey to keep her company. She took to sitting in the garden throughout the day, day- dreaming or napping, watching the foliage on the trees begin to yellow as the first hint of an early autumn moved in.

She had dozed while enjoying a rare afternoon of sunshine when she awoke suddenly, jolted by some sound or movement close by. She raised her head, expecting to find one of the Indians or the marmoset. There was nothing.

A servant stepped from the back doorway at that moment, an envelope in hand.' 'This was just delivered, Miss Sarah,'' the woman told her.

Still groggy, Sarah tore into it and pulled out the note.

Miss St. James, it is imperative that I see you. Meet me at the Kew Gardens nursery, near the Palm House, this evening at half-past nine. Come alone.

Respectfully, J. Hooker.

Sarah wondered why the Director of the Gardens wished to see her so late in the evening, then reminded herself that the issue of the seeds was not one to be discussed publicly until the propagation had been successful and the young plants were on their way to Ceylon. Perhaps something had gone wrong. The thought made her frown. So many had sacrificed for those seeds; Norman's future depended on them, as did her own to a lesser extent. Since her return to London, the only thing that diverted her at all from Morgan was the fantasies she'd had of traveling to Ceylon and starting her own plantation. Were that dream to be snatched from her now...

She arrived at the gardens a half hour early. Her driver was stopped briefly at the main gate after being shown Sir Joseph's letter, the guard waved the coach through, locking the gate behind.

The sky was growing dark as she left the coach and moved down the walk, enjoying the heady fragrance of flowers and the song of birds in the nearby trees. Then she entered the nursery, or "the pit," as Hooker and Wickham referred to it. The wet heat and heavy smell of humus took her breath away, reminding her of the rain forest. The tinted, yellow- ish-green glass overhead blocked out what little light remained of the day, and only the lamps burning at intervals along the sunken room illuminated the Interior. Dim as it was, a moment passed before she realized that the thousands of sprouts peeping up through the moist soil were the
Heveas.

Easing down the steps into the pit, Sarah wandered along the walkway, studying the tender plants as best she could, looking up occasionally in search of Sir Joseph, vaguely noting the passage of time as she thrilled over the successful propagation of the plants. At last she realized that nine- thirty had come and gone, and still the director had not appeared. She left the pit, mopping her face with her sleeve, shivering as the night breeze brushed her face.

She returned to her coach to discover her driver absent. Odd. She looked about the gardens, the beds of flowers all colorless in the night. Perhaps Hooker had become tied up with business, she thought, and taking a cautious look around, she moved down the walk toward the director's office, passing the Cottage Garden and Succulent House on her way, reaching the administrative building only to discover it dark and locked.

A shiver of apprehension crawled up her spine as she turned and looked out over the gardens. How serene the manicured beds and shrubs appeared in the moonlight, yet there was something sinister in the shadows spilling over the ground from the occasional tree or fountain or statue. The marble likeness of a dancing cherub, its face turned up to the sky, reflected the celestial glow with an eeriness that made her skin crawl. Then she realized: it was the silence, the stillness, as ominous as it had been deep in the Amazon.

Doing her best to breathe evenly, she moved back toward the coach, chastising herself for
her ridiculous fears. Nor- man was right. She was extremely overwrought. Sir Joseph had obviously been detained, and...

Where was her driver? "Maynard?" she called. "May- nard!"

She hurried down the flagstone path toward the Palm House, a shimmering iron-and-glass structure with a high, domed ceiling. Perhaps Hooker had meant that he would meet her there, where many Amazonian plants thrived in the tropical atmosphere. There were lights burning inside. No doubt Maynard had ventured there, believing she would be occupied for some time with Hooker.

She stopped. To her left, a pond's glassy surface reflected the moon and the Chinese guardian lions erected on its opposite edge. On her right, Japanese cherry trees cast shadows across her way. This is ridiculous, she told herself. She had battled across thousands of miles into the Amazon, had faced cannibals, headhunters, man-eating animals, and she couldn't get up the courage to walk in the dark by herself.

Sarah.

It was a whisper, so lightly brushing her ear she thought she had imagined it. Then it came again—softly—chilling her, making her heart slam and her nerves tingle. She turned, eyes aching from the strain of searching the shadows, ears burning from the silence, flesh crawling with the sensation of cold fear as an image materialized from the darkness, an image dressed in a white suit, a Panama cocked low over the left eye.

She backed toward the Palm House, her mind refusing to accept what her eyes saw. Morgan. Morgan. Oh, God, it was Morgan! The man who had followed her, had asked after her, had watched her from the Sunderland place—it had been Morgan all along. Dear God, he wasn't dead!

Then he removed his hat and his gold hair spilled over his shoulders. Flashing his white smile, he said, "Hello, Sarah."

She whirled and ran, too terrified to scream, her only thought to reach the Palm House, where there were lights—

She flung open the door and stumbled into the floresta. The humidity made her gasp. The sudden ruckus from the blackbirds and sparrows that inhabited the monstrous building made her cry out. She fled through the towering palm,
banana, coffee, and coco trees, tripping over offshoots of the giant bamboo and tumbling facedown into the moist earth. Lying as still as possible, she listened hard, and heard the door open and close. On her hands and knees, she crawled through the low-growing cycads, finding herself stabbed by the fiercely spiny leaves of the ferox. Curling up

beneath the giant fronds of an
Angiopteris
fern, she listened for King's footsteps.

"It's very ironic, and apropos, that we should find our- selves face-to-face at last in these environs," came his voice. "There really is no way you can escape me, Sarah. There's no reason why you should try. My war is not with you. I have no intention of hurting you, but I do need you. We have one thing in common, you see. Morgan."

Sarah stifled a sob.

"I suspect that Morgan is alive."

Don't listen to him. He's mad. He'll do or say anything
—

"I was fished out of the river by my men, and as I recuperated in Bel6m I learned that Morgan survived his injury."

He's lying!

"He was in Belem Hospital for four weeks, then he disappeared. Where else would he go but here? To you. So I came to London and found you. I've been watching you, waiting for Morgan to make his move. But then I realized: Morgan knows me too well. When the officials were unable to find my body, Morgan suspected I was still alive. He probably figured that I would be behind him wherever he went, so he decided, upon arriving in London, to keep his distance from you. Naturally, he wouldn't risk endangering you in any way, not until I was taken care of. So it seems Morgan and I have come to an impasse, Sarah. The only way to lure him out into the open is to threaten the very thing he loves most, his only reason for living. You."

Don't believe him,
she told herself.
He'll say anything do anything to get what he wants. Rodolfo King is evil and demented and
—

"Sarah, it'll do no good to run. Even if you escaped and went to the authorities, no one would believe you. They all think you're insane. All of London is whispering about it."

She slid on her stomach through the mossy compost where the South American
Equisetum gigateum
fern spread its luxuriant leaves over the ground and towered ten feet above her. Glancing up through the fronds, she watched the black- birds fly through the draping, flame-colored orchids and bromeliads, and for an instant she was swept back to those months when the world was hot and green and—

She screamed as King came at her through the bushes, and jumping to her feet, she ran, slapping away the foliage that clawed at her face and hair while the birds' excited trills escalated to a shrieking cacophony. Bursting through the overgrowth of ferns, she tumbled into the pool of water that was blanketed with giant Amazon water lilies. She thrashed amid the fleshy leaves and white flowers before dragging herself out on the opposite side, gasping, her eyes searching for some sign of King. She finally managed
to climb to her feet and backed toward the exit. If she could get out of the enclosure she might stand a chance. She could easily lose herself on the grounds.

He moved up behind her so swiftly she had little time to react. He was pressing something over her face. The horrible stench momentarily burned her nose and mouth and brain. Then blackness swallowed her.

The rocking motion of a coach awakened her. Con- fused at first, she rubbed her aching head and did her best to recall what had happened. The dim glow of the coach lantern hurt her eyes. She closed them; then King's voice jolted her to complete awareness.

"You're awake," he said, and threw a newspaper into her lap.

She glanced at the headlines, searched the columns until her attention caught on the lower corner and the cryptic message there that brought a rise of hope she tried to ignore.

M.K.

I have Sarah.

I'll see you at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Tonight.

Randi

Throwing the
Times
aside, she declared, "I don't believe you. Morgan is dead."

"We'll know soon enough."

The coach stopped. As King shoved open the door, al- lowing the misty night wind to swirl around them, he turned his cold blue eyes on her and smiled. "Be warned, Miss St. James. If you make one unnecessary sound, I'll kill you without a moment's hesitation."

"You're going to kill me regardless."

' 'Not so." He took hold of her arm and forced her to the street. "I don't have any reason to kill you."

"What reason did you have for murdering my father?"

"He was a threat to my empire, but now my empire is gone, and the man—my supposed friend—who brought it down is out there, walking London's streets, and I'm going to kill him." As she struggled to wrench her arm from his hand, his grip became fierce. "Lovely lady," he said through his teeth, "don't test my patience. Just because I have no intention of killing you doesn't mean I won't change my mind."

He forced her down the dark walk toward the cathedral, whose great towers were shrouded in fog. King followed, nudging her on when she faltered. The wind whipped her hair as she mounted the steps toward the monstrous, intricately carved doors. London stretched out around her, windows shining like ten thousand stars in the night, winking through the haze. A shiver ran through her as she paused and gazed down the empty streets. King stood beside her, leaning against one of the dozen fluted pilasters that lined the facade. He regarded her with a smile.