The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (46 page)

Marsh skimmed through the files in roughly chronological order. He learned of a pair of psychic twins, rendered mute by the process that had forged them into bonded empaths, each seeing and feeling everything the other did. He learned that the ghostly man who walked through walls was named Klaus, and that Gretel was his sister. (Interesting: Klaus wasn’t the first person to manifest the ability, but he was the only one to survive it longer than a few days.) Marsh also learned of a flying man named Rudolf, who had been killed in an accident weeks before the conclusion of the Spanish war. That fact was annotated with a footnote that led Marsh, after more searching, to a very thick folder: Gretel’s file.

This last thing he read until the batteries in his torch died. Which was how he learned that Gretel had been roughly five years old when
von Westarp had acquired her and her brother for his “orphanage.” And how Marsh learned that through years of random experimentation, the mad doctor had created a mad seer, imbuing her with a godlike prescience.

Marsh sat up. “Bugger me.”

He set the file down, absently, on the crate where he’d made his perch. He cracked his knuckles, staring into the distance while the cogs of his mind turned.

That single piece of information—
the
girl’s a bloody oracle
—was like a fingertip nudging the first in a long chain of dominoes. So many things fell into place.

That’s how she knew me in Spain, though we’d never met. That’s how she knew when Agnes was born. That’s how she escaped so easily; they probably had the entire operation planned before I captured her. That’s why they were ready for us, why our December raid never achieved the element of surprise. We never had a chance.

Click, click, click, fell the dominoes.

He remembered little things. Her tone of voice:

Try anything, anything at all, and I’ll put a bullet in your gut.

No, you won’t.

And the daisy:
For later.

He took up the file again. As the years dragged on, the men who ran the IMV, and later the Reichsbehörde, had come to realize they could not control her. She was immune to their coercive tactics. Yet they tolerated her because her advice, when she deigned to give it, was invaluable. Marsh let out a long, slow whistle: Gretel had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic destruction of Britain’s air defenses.

But slowly, her handlers began to speculate that highly intelligent Gretel had her own agenda. Their speculations reached a crisis point after the destruction of the invasion fleet bound for Britain. Gretel’s very existence should have rendered such a loss impossible.

Why
would
she let that happen?
Marsh wondered.

And eventually they realized, however reluctantly and with no small amount of trepidation, that von Westarp had created a precognitive
sociopath. The Reich’s greatest weapon was a monster feared even by the Schutzstaffel.

“Jesus bloody Christ.”

But there was more. Marsh read further.

He discovered that the woman who had winked at him in Spain, who had become his willing prisoner in France, and who had first congratulated him on Agnes’s birth, had also convinced the German High Command to obliterate Williton.

Gretel had looked through time and, for reasons known only to her, had orchestrated the death of his daughter.

The files offered no explanation as to why. In justifying the bombing raid, the OKW said only that their source—Gretel—had deemed the matter urgent and vital. They didn’t know why she wanted Williton destroyed; the file made no mention of Marsh or Liv or Agnes.

She said we’d meet again,
he remembered. At the time, during her escape from the Admiralty building, Marsh had assumed she was taunting him. But now he knew that wasn’t it at all. She’d meant it as a statement of fact.

They’d meet again. He’d find her, and she’d explain herself. She’d explain herself, and then he’d kill her.

If the woman truly was what the records claimed, she already knew Marsh’s intent. But he imagined a bullet would kill her dead just the same.

23 May 1941

Swansea, Wales

M
rs. Weeks objected to the term
funk hole.
Her establishment was an exclusive boarding hotel, nothing more.

She also disapproved of people who arrived unannounced, with no ration books to share and, most uncouth of all, with no cash and no checks on hand.

And she did not like Will. Not at first. But that changed quickly when she experienced his charm and, more to the point, learned his brother was a duke. From then on, Will enjoyed unlimited credit and boundless goodwill. He had the run of the place. Or would have, had he chosen to venture from his small but acceptably well-appointed room.

After the first several days, he started taking meals upstairs. He’d met the other residents and found them dreadful. Posh hypocrites who’d done nothing for the war but criticize it. They had no appreciation of
the dirty reality, no conception of what it took to keep the island safe. He knew, in that corner of his mind that could still form a thought, that their view of him was likewise dim: exceedingly wealthy, embarrassingly unkempt, a drunken lout at all hours of the day. Even here, where the rich and cowardly convened, there were standards to uphold. And Will was letting the side down.

He abandoned sartorial conceits a week into his residence. After all, if he wasn’t to venture past the threshold of his room, what point in clawing out of his bedclothes for a few hours each day? Far better to lounge beside the open window in his dressing gown. Breezes whispered through stands of hazel in the garden and rubbed his skin with warm silk. He dozed in the sunlight, inhaling the scent of hyacinths and listening to the occasional clack-and-murmur of a croquet game down in the garden. The smell of hyacinths made him think of weddings and the happier world of a lifetime ago.

His appetite disappeared not long after that. It was, he imagined, the bravest part of him, preceding him unto death. Will dozed, dimly aware of a quiet tapping and the clink of a dinner tray set outside his door. Time passed. It grew dark outside, then light, and over again. Will lost count. More dishes rattled in the corridor outside his room. He lost count of that, too.

And through it all, he floated in a pool of molten gold, drowning himself in a tide of his own design.

Yelling. Crashing. Splintered wood.

Will dreamt he was back in the glade on his grandfather’s estate. Where a natural spring gurgled up through earth and stone, where no birds sang. Grandfather was there, yelling at him with juniper-berry breath while he and Aubrey kicked down the trees. Crack. Smash.

Then he floated. Out the window. Down a hole into the dark earth, because the faeries had come to spirit him away. Into cold, damp warrens, where all the lost children went. Will shivered. The faeries sang to him, but he didn’t like their language.

Mr. Malcolm found him. Craggy-faced Mr. Malcolm, who had died
long ago. He tore into the faerie mound with rough, strong hands. He lifted Will and carried him away, to hide him from grandfather, just as he used to do.

Motion. Darkness. Tires ringing on macadam. The smell of leather seats.

Daylight on polished walnut, flowing like honey through mullioned windowpanes. Ravens cawing in the distance.

Moonlight. Flannel. Ice water. The taste of stomach acid. A bucket. Strong hands.

Will woke in a four-poster bed, vaguely surprised to find himself alive. His head floated on a raft of goose-down pillows. He realized he was naked beneath a mound of blankets. Cool bed linens caressed him. He ran his hand through the sheets. Soft, fine: Egyptian cotton, high quality. It soothed the stump of his missing finger.

He cracked one eye open, but the room’s walnut paneling was polished to such a high gloss that the glow of sunlight caused a flare of pain in his open eye. He squeezed it shut, satisfied that he knew this place.

His nose twitched at a whiff of something sweet. Attar. If he could have mustered the strength to look, he knew he’d find a decanter of rosewater and a porcelain bowl on the bed stand.

Somewhere off to his left, he heard the clink and gurgle of somebody pouring from a service. A few seconds later, his stomach did a somersault at the smell of strong Indian tea. This time he did attempt to turn his head, but the effort left him exhausted.

He woke again some time later. Minutes, perhaps, or hours. The scent of tea still wafted through the room, less intensely than before. The ser -vice had cooled. The light had moved, too, enough that it didn’t hurt to squint.

A figure stood silhouetted before a panoramic bay window. Will couldn’t tell if the yellow sunlight was from a sunrise or a sunset.

Sunset. These windows faced west, he remembered.

The man by the window held a saucer. He sipped from a cup, staring outside. Will recognized the way he held himself, the turn of his elbow and wrist as he sipped. Tense. Uptight. Even here, now, in his own home.

The tickle in Will’s throat became a cough when he tried to speak. He worked up enough saliva to swallow down the gravel, and tried again.

“Good evening, Your Grace,” he croaked.

Aubrey turned from where he’d been staring out the window. “William.” It came out as a sigh, betraying the slightest hint of relief and worry. “I feared we’d have to call the physician back.”

Hunger clawed at Will. It wasn’t a hunger for food, but for something else, something that would fill his body with liquid gold.
Yes,
Will wanted to say.
Call the physician, call the man with the painkillers.
The craving had been his constant companion for months. Will knew it intimately. Though strong and insistent, it was diminished from what it had been.

“How long—?” Will’s voice broke into another raspy cough. He didn’t have the energy to finish the sentence, but his brother understood.

“Several days.”

Aubrey moved to the bedside. He set his cup and saucer on the tea service and poured a second cup. Will’s mouth watered. “Here,” said Aubrey. “Can you sit up?”

Will worked himself into a sitting position. The effort made his head spin, but he resisted the temptation to close his eyes again. Aubrey propped a spare pillow behind him. “Here,” he said, offering the cup.

Will wrapped his fingers around it. It was the good china, the Spode pearlware. That must have been a mistake; the lustrous Spode was meant for honored guests. The tea warmed Will’s fingers. It was strong tea, with lemon, the way he liked it. He wondered how Aubrey had known this, or if somebody on the kitchen staff remembered how Will took his tea. It soothed him, and eroded the burrs that scraped his throat.

After half a cup, he rasped, “How did I get here?”

“The proprietress of the, ah, that place. She contacted us in quite a state.”

“Because I hadn’t left my room in several days.”

“Because you hadn’t paid. She said she had a, ah, guest on the premises who insisted, rather loudly I understand, that I would cover his expenses.”

“Oh.”

Aubrey sat in a century-old hand-carved oaken chair across the bed stand from Will. “What were you doing there?”

Will took a long slow sip, thinking about how to answer his brother’s question. “I needed a change.”

“But why there? Why didn’t you come home?”

“I’m rather unsure where that is these days.”

Aubrey quirked an eyebrow. Even during a heart-to-heart talk, or what passed for one, he strove for an elegant, understated comportment. The man was so entrenched in his position that he looked upon everything, even himself, with utter seriousness. “That’s an odd thing to say. We grew up here, you and I.”

“We had different childhoods.”

Aubrey drained his cup. He poured the last of the tea for Will, then sent the service out with a servant whom Will didn’t recognize. He supposed most of the house hold staff would be strangers to him. Who remembered the way he took his tea?

Sunlight on the near wall turned orange, then red, as it inched upward. The windowpanes crisscrossed the sunlight with thin shadows. Will nursed his tea. It was strong, astringent; it had steeped too long.