The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (5 page)

BOOK: The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious]
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As his panting breath calmed, the floor creaked again beneath him, and the sound of vehement whispers drifted through the boards. A thud, and then a long murmur in a passionate, persuasive tone.

Charles drew his many coloured dragons more firmly around himself and stood. Long experience of sneaking home in the early morning let him find the silent spots in the slowly seasoning planks underfoot. He prowled down the stairs and into the rarely used east wing, following the sound of urgent secrecy.

He pushed open the studded door of the family chapel and went in. On the wall behind the altar a lamp flickered ruby red above the tabernacle where the sacrament was reserved. His bare feet brushed over grave-slabs. His mother’s name, deeply incised into black slate, poked into the pad of his heel.

The vestry door stood open. Yellow candlelight spilled out, over the mosaic floor of the chapel, lighting a swathe of St. Werberg’s drapery, her solemn Anglo-Saxon face. Charles put a foot in the centre of it and drew closer to the vestry, looking in at wardrobes, a hanging chasuble bright as a slice of enormous emerald.

A shadow moved in the small room, as a body passed before the candle. George’s voice, quavering on the edge of a sob, gulped, “Not even you could be that heartless!”

Charles paused, then picked up the brass bound family bible as a weapon and slid closer. He flattened his back against the wall and peeked cautiously around the door jamb.

George had both of Jasper’s hands in his, pinning the clenched fists. He leaned in, imploringly, shuffled forwards. Charles had only ever seen that beseeching look turned on Emma before, sea green eyes wide and trusting and the fine mouth half open, trembling with anticipation like a flower beneath dew. But this iteration had an entirely different quality, something not quite sincere about it, coquettish and false as the sob.

George's hands slid from Jasper's fists to his flanks, fastened with firm possession around the man's waist.

Jasper turned his face to the wall, grimacing. "It's so long dead and buried, George, there is no part of it that doesn't stink."
George laughed, a little whispered breath of certainty and amusement. He drew the taller man closer to him, and reaching up, dragged down Jasper's face to his own. The first kiss was not shocking at all, a chaste and beautiful butterfly touch of closed lips. Charles, watching, felt only that he had wandered back into the realm of dreams, the safe place where such imaginings did not touch the outer world, could not be called anything so sordid as sin or crime.
"No?" this time the chuckle was sweet and thick as treacle. George pressed closer, the skirts of his robe sweeping forward to enclose Jasper in crimson silk, and the second kiss began open mouthed, not chaste at all, their lips wet in the candlelight, their cheeks hollowed. Jasper's hand came up to cradle George's cheek as he made a sound of half protest, half bliss. The line of his body, braced against the wall, sagged as he opened his mouth wider to take in more of George's tongue. Tears gleamed gold beneath the tight shut black line of his lashes.
Charles slammed the bible back into its stand. At the ringing boom, they scrambled apart, Jasper drawing cuff, shirt sleeve and the back of his hand furiously across his mouth. "No." He took a step back into dark shadow, a blur of white face and hands for a moment, and then he was gone, as quickly and thoroughly as the ghost. George pulled his robe tight around him and knotted the belt like a noose.

Running back to the door, Charles eased it shut, stood resting his hot hands and sweaty forehead against its floral ironwork as though he had only just entered, swung it closed with a bang.

"God in heaven, do you mean to wake the whole house?"

George was still so very George. Still so elder-brotherly, so stuffy, so pompous. How could that be? He'd meant to pretend he saw nothing, found himself asking instead, "What was that?"

"What was what?"

This narrow eyed look he had not seen before. He felt as he had, years ago, playing with a rapier in the armoury as a child, when it slipped and pierced his thigh in earnest. Why had he thought playing with murder would be any safer?

"I heard voices," he said. "I thought there was an argument; that you might need help."

George flashed a fatuous grin. "Oh," he said. "Well, thank you." Returning to the vestry, he picked up his candlestick, and Charles took the chance to follow; wardrobes standing open, shelves burdened under liturgical silk and linen. The smell of dust and prayerbooks and ambergris like incense. Dust scattered in a fan below the panelling where the secret priest's door had opened and closed "But it's nothing you need trouble yourself about."

“I want to help,” absurdly, Charles felt his own eyes fill. “I hadn’t a chance to be anything other than a burden when father… and I want. I want to make him proud.”

“You have a heart in you after all? Who’d have thought it?” George laughed and shoved Charles companionably in the head. Then he raised his eyes heavenward and said, with complete candour, “It was Jasper. He keeps the monastic hours. I found him saying Nones or Vespers or some such nonsense and represented to him that it was practically blasphemous to parade his papistry at a time like this.”

Not a flicker of insincerity. George lied with the fluid ease of a man who has been doing it all his life. “His mother was a Minorcan whore, you know, so it’s in the blood.”

What is in
my
blood
? Charles thought, aghast, just as George gave a careless shrug and asked, “What brings you out into the corridors in the middle of the night anyway?”

Even in the best of circumstances, Charles would not have attempted to converse with his brother on the subject of either nightmares or ghosts. He said, surprising even himself, “I want to look in father’s eyes. They say a picture of the murderer is left in the back of the eye. A final impression and accusation.”

In the silence that followed, he could hear the hiss of the flame as it ate its way down the wick of George’s candle. The pool of red light beneath the nave light pulsed like a heart.

“You little ghoul,” said George, almost in a tone of wonder. “And if there is nothing? Will you then give up this mad, unseemly quest of yours and let it lie? No image, no murderer, am I right?”

Charles rubbed a thumb over one of the daisy shaped rivets in the door, burnishing it. Within, relief gave a dull gleam to match. “I just want to look.”

“Do we have a bargain? See nothing, and there was no murder. You never knew him the way I did, and I can tell you now, this is not what he would have wanted.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted justice?”
“Not at the price of our family’s good name.”
“I don’t understand that.”

“I know it, goose. I suppose every house must have its idiot.” George chuckled again, that rasp of self satisfied humour that made Charles want to punch him. “Go and look, then. I have no doubt at all you are wasting your time.”

And that was true, Charles thought, lighting a taper by George’s candle, clinging to the thought as to the light. George would not have been smiling with such easy contempt if there had been even the slightest chance his own image lurked beneath the dead lids to confront him.

Charles led the way into the tiny, grilled off room which had once been the Lady Chapel. The Madonna’s headless, handless statue still presided in its niche over a stone altar from which every saint had been laboriously chipped. The body that lay on top beneath a fresh lawn sheet looked too small for Ambrose Latham. As he lit the candles at its feet and head, a sense of deep wrongness, like a mortal dread, made his fingers tremble. He approached the corpse as if walking through tar.

The sheet was stained with faint yellow-brown exudations. He put his hands out to turn the material down around the head, and drew them back twice, suddenly very glad for George’s mocking presence at his shoulder.

His skin crawled as he finally touched the damp fabric, and his spirit seemed to do the same. He looked down at his father’s face, the jaw bound up in more linen, the sunken, sweaty, waxy white of it, and felt only a conviction that whatever this was, it was
not
Ambrose Latham.

The eyelids felt like thinly rolled cold pastry, and the eyes beneath had turned white, mucus-milky as semen. George still watched, so he stifled disgust and leaned forward. The scent of the thing was rotten-sweet.

“Well?”

Not even his own reflection showed in the spheres of cold jelly. He covered the corpse back up again with less reverence. “Nothing.”

Blowing out the candles, they left their father’s body in the dark. As George closed the chapel door behind them, the cockerel crowed in the kitchen garden.

“Are you satisfied?” George asked, softly.
“Not really. No.”

“Then permit me to give you some advice: learn to be. You seem to have forgotten, Charles, that I am the head of the family now. I don’t brook disobedience, and I want this dropped. Do you understand me?”

“No. No I don’t.” He looked at George’s thin lips, the crevices of disapproval that newly bracketed his mouth, and added quickly, “But I am trying.”

c
hAPteR five
“Wait!”

The shadows of the yew walk lay inky dark on the neat clipped grass of the path. The morning tasted of autumn, moist and cool. A faint mist veiled all distances, brought the world intimately close. At the back of the house the gardener burned the first crop of fallen leaves and the scent of smoke spoke of winter to come.

Jasper hesitated, walked a pace further, hesitated again, his head down and his back braced, waiting for the inevitable insult. A wide-shouldered, strong back, Charles couldn’t help but notice, set off by the flare of coat skirts. His calves beneath them looked almost indecently exposed in their clinging skin of silk.

When he turned it was with the air of a bear who has suffered the taunts of one too many dogs.
Charles stopped in his tracks. His night had been sleepless and sticky with the memory of that kiss. Something he had only dreamed about had been made real before him, fantasy given flesh, and he could not stop reliving it. Over and over, each time with the same shock of disbelief and delight. No wonder the world forbade this as a sin! If not restrained, no one would ever do anything but sit and picture it, and let the world go hang.
Now, though his eyes were scratchy and raw, and his legs weak from fatigue and wet dreams, it swept over him again—ravenous delight. How had he not been aware, before, of the height of this man? Of the way his neck joined his shoulder in that perfect fluid line? Of the way the black waistcoat with its jet buttons clung tight about his powerful chest? Struck by the personality, how had he failed to be aware of the body that contained it, until now?
“Mr. Latham?” The raw, dangerous look faded slightly as Jasper watched Charles stand with his mouth open, looking—he imagined—like a codfish on a slab. “Are you well?”
“I don’t…” Charles shook his head. Jasper shouldn’t ask complicated questions like that.
Am I well?
“I don’t know what I am.”
A little resurgence of that inward wave of laughter flickered in Jasper’s face for a moment, until Charles said, “I saw you, last night,” and it blew out like a candle.
Jasper turned to the hedge, picked up a cobweb, the dew running down his fingers. “Ah.”
“With George.”
The side of Jasper’s mouth twitched; it could have been a grimace, or a very bitter smile. “Of course.”
“Is that why you’re here? Because George…?”
He wiped the web off, dark glossy leaves snapping and the red berries bounding at the violence of the gesture. The whole hedge trembled, and grey drops of water spattered over Charles’ hot face. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because,” Charles thought of his brother’s empty smile, the way the good humour peeled back to reveal something unexpectedly hard, “I don’t trust him.”
Jasper gave a short, harsh bark of laughter. “Half my age and already twice as wise.” Fallen dew trembled like gold dust in the mass of white curls that framed his face, and Charles wondered how you did this. He had watched plays enough—whether on the stage or off—to have some idea of what he might say to a woman. None at all for how this worked with a man.

“I wish you wouldn’t wear that stupid wig.”

This time the laughter was more natural. Afterwards, Jasper heaved a great sigh and let the amusement linger around the edges of his mouth. “Do I gather you will not be reporting me to the magistrate? I have been pilloried once before.” He picked one of the yew berries, squeezed it until it gave a little pop and the juice oozed out. “It was enough.”

Charles stepped forward and closed his hand around Jasper’s wrist. A snap of contact, like the shock of rubbed amber, set him tingling. He could feel, from the size of the bones, the weight of muscle in his hand, that Jasper could pull away any time he pleased. But when he looked up it was to find only a patient, quizzical look aimed at him. Time thickened about him as he drank in the sherry coloured gaze, sweet and warming as liquor. Then the shape of Jasper’s eyes changed slightly with understanding.

Pulling out his handkerchief, Charles wiped the cold yewslime carefully from Jasper’s unresisting hand, earning himself another small, bemused smile. “The juice is poisonous.”

“I
was
aware of that.”

Letting go abruptly, Charles stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and waited, shoulders up to his ears, for the burning of his face to subside. A woman would have spared his feelings, refrained from mentioning her own knowledge, allowed him to be chivalrous and protective. Would it have killed the man to do the same?

But that question led back inexorably to his father’s death. Was he not looking for a poisoner? And were not Jasper and George, together or separately, his prime suspects for the task? He should keep his mind there, not on the shape and pent up strength of that palm. “I do intend to go to the magistrate,” he said at last, poking out his head from between his shoulders, like a tortoise emerging from its shell. “But not until I have a murderer to hang.”

He began to walk down the narrow corridor of dark trees towards the statue at the further end, and Jasper fell into step beside him. “You still believe it’s murder then?”

BOOK: The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious]
13.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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