CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Lawrence pounded furiously on the door to Ben’s old room. When there was no immediate response he knocked again and again until Gwen opened it a handsbreadth, her hair disheveled, eyes puffy from sleep, her nightclothes pulled around her. She held a brass candleholder and a match still smoked in the tray.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Lawrence pushed the door wider and stepped halfway into the room.
“Gwen, listen to me,” he said in a voice that was breathless with urgency. “You have to leave. Now. Right away. Grab only what you must take with you and return to London.”
“Leave?” She half-smiled, as if expecting this to be some kind of prank, but that smile faded at once. “It’s the middle of the night, Lawrence.”
“I’ve sent for a coach. It will take you straight to the train station and the driver will wait until the train arrives.”
“What is this?”
“It’s not safe here. Please!”
She raised the candle and the expression cut into his features made her gasp. “Lawrence . . . what has happened? Have the villagers returned to—”
He shook his head and dug into his pocket for something that flashed silver in the candlelight. He pressed it into her hand.
Gwen stared at it, her mouth open to form a perfect “O” of surprise.
“Ben’s medal. . . .”
“You must wear it,” Lawrence insisted. “You must wear it now. Around your neck.”
“But, Lawrence, how did you get this?”
“You must wear it at all times. Promise me!”
She took the medal but did not put it on. Instead she reached out her hand and touched his chest, the medal swinging from between her fingers to brush his shirt right above his heart. Her blue eyes, even in the weak light of the single candle, were as bright as hope and promise, and as beautiful as all of the spring mornings in the world. Lawrence looked into those eyes and he could feel his self-control fracture like a diamond that a jeweler had struck the wrong way. Her fingers were warm where she touched him, and in the cold autumn of Lawrence’s heart the weeds were withering as something fresh and wonderful struggled to bloom.
He closed his eyes and prayed to God that this moment, this feeling, could be real, could be true, and that it could chase away all of the shadows in his soul. His heart hurt worse than if he had been stabbed.
“Lawrence,” she said very softly, “if there is something you need to say . . .”
“Is there something you need to say to me?”
In the darkness inside his mind he felt something stir. Something that was not love, not passion. Something ancient and dreadful and hungry. The thing in his mind whispered to him.
Take her! Smell her flesh . . . smell her blood! Take her now.
“No!” he said and staggered back from their point of contact, forcing his hands to close into fists. Not as weapons, but to keep his fingers from reaching for her. He took a step toward her and she involuntarily stepped back. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the reflex was too fast for her to control. If she had slapped him it could not have hurt more deeply. Yet it was very correct, very safe, and in a strange way it steadied him.
“Gwen . . . if anything ever happened to you,” he began, his voice thick with emotion. “I’d never forgive myself. Never.”
Those words should have made her take another defensive step away, but Gwen looked up into his eyes, her brows knitting with concern. “Lawrence . . . what are you afraid of?”
He backed away one pace, then another.
“Please get dressed,” he said. “You must return to London tonight.”
He dared not say anything else, dared not do anything more. He whirled and stalked down the hallway toward the stairs.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER she came downstairs with her bag. Lawrence fairly snatched it from her and caught her wrist with the other hand and pulled her out the door and down the steps to where a coach was waiting. Several times Gwen tried to make eye contact with Lawrence. She could feel the heat of whatever passion drove him to such actions, but he would not meet her gaze.
The driver hopped down, placed her bag inside, and stood by the open carriage door.
Gwen wheeled around and forced Lawrence to look at her. His eyes were fever bright.
“I don’t want to go, Lawrence.”
She said it softly, without challenge. A plea . . . and the tone drained some of the madness out of Lawrence’s eyes, leaving only sadness.
“You must go,” he said softly. “Please . . . you must go now, Gwen.”
“I—”
He turned away, his head low between hunched shoulders. “Pray for us.”
Gwen reached out a hand, almost touching him.
“Everything will be alright, Lawrence,” she said.
Lawrence whirled on her and Gwen gasped. He seemed larger, broader, a towering figure against the white façade of Talbot Hall. The wind whipped his dark hair and the open folds of his half-buttoned shirt. His eyes smoldered with hungers that touched secret places in her body and soul. She felt him as if he was somehow inside her every nerve, as if his breath whispered secrets against her secret flesh.
“Go!” he snarled, and he shoved her into the coach, his hands too strong to resist. He slammed the door and then leaned toward the driver so fiercely that the man backed away until his back thumbed into the corner of the carriage. Lawrence dug a heavy coin out of his pocket and slapped it into the driver’s hand.
“Take this. Don’t let her out of your sight until the train disappears. Do you hear me?”
“Yes!” the driver quailed.
Gwen leaned out of the window and called Lawrence’s name, but Lawrence turned his back on her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Darkness had come to the village of Blackmoor long before the setting of the sun. For a month now the people had lived and worked and moved in a state somewhere between grief and dread. Everyone felt it; no one escaped the gloom and the anxiety.
Inspector Aberline, though a stranger to this region, was sharp enough to see that the current mood was not the usual atmosphere of the town, but something new. It had begun on the night that Ben Talbot and two other men had been murdered, and since the massacre at the gypsy camp the town was as dismal and sick as if the Black Plague had returned. No one smiled. Children did not play in the streets. No one walked unaccompanied, and every man above the age of ten carried a weapon of some kind, be it an axe, pitchfork or firearm.
Aberline walked the town, taking its measure, and with every step he felt his own mood darken.
He passed a house where a father and his two half-grown daughters worked with reckless haste to nail boards across their windows. Aberline paused to look down the row and he saw that every house was either shuttered or boarded.
He stopped into the big church and stood for several minutes in the back, listening as Pastor Fisk hurled fire and brimstone from the pulpit. It was a Tuesday evening and there was no saint’s feast day that he knew of, but most of the pews were filled.
“There are those who doubt the power of Satan!” Fisk’s voice was hushed and threatening. “The power of Satan to change men into beasts. Yet the ancient pagans did not doubt. Nor did the prophets.”
Blimey, thought Aberline, he’s barking mad.
“Did not Daniel warn Nebuchadnezzar that Pride goeth before destruction? A haughty spirit before the fall?”
The parishioners murmured agreement.
“But the proud king did not heed Daniel, and so, as the Bible says, he was made unto a wolf and cast out from men.” He paused and his face was alight with holy purpose. “A beast has come among us.”
LAWRENCE WAS GLAD Gwen was gone, though it broke his heart to have been so rude to her and to see that hurt in her blue eyes. However, he knew that on this dreadful night, hurt was the kindest thing he could offer her.
After the carriage had clattered away down the road, Lawrence turned and b
egan walking. Not toward the house, but down the garden path that led to the woods. He needed to think things through, to decide how to act, and the house was too claustrophobic. He needed to be out in the wind.
His footsteps carried him down through the first patch of woods and to the rocky shelf that looked out over the gorge. Even in the failing light the vista was beautiful. The sun was swollen to an unnatural size and as it fell behind the distant line of trees it seemed as if the whole world was ablaze.
Lawrence watched the sun fall, dreading it and all that it meant. He turned away from it and continued walking toward the dense black shadows under the trees. Back to the Hall.
ON THE OTHER side of the ancient forest that edged the Talbot lands stood the crumbling and vine-shrouded ruins of an old abbey. Only parts of the thick walls still stood and trees grew between the cracked and displaced flagstones. Colonel Montford stood with Dr. Lloyd, heavy-bore hunting rifles cradled over their arms, their faces grim and set. Montford’s face was crisscrossed with sticking plasters and discolored by bruises; the doctor’s face was flushed with fear and hyper tension. A few yards away MacQueen and a pair of stout lads from the squire’s estate worked to position a sturdy stake and pound it deep into a cleft between two of the broken flagstones. MacQueen gripped the shaft and gave it a shake to assure himself that it was solidly placed.
He nodded to Montford and Lloyd. “This’ll do ’er fine.” Then he crooked a finger to the squire’s men, who went to a wagon where a stag was tied. They loosened the tether and led the animal to the post, and MacQueen knelt and tied it firmly in place. MacQueen produced a knife from his belt, and with a deft flick of the wrist he opened a long but shallow cut on the stag’s flank. The animal screamed and bucked as hot blood flowed down its side.
MacQueen wiped his knife clean on his trousers and stalked over to Montford. “The breeze will carry that scent for miles.”
Dr. Lloyd mopped his face with a cloth. “Shouldn’t we get back to town?”
Colonel Montford and MacQueen looked into the sky. The full moon was nearly over the horizon.
“Get indoors if ye want to,” muttered MacQueen. He unslung the hunting rifle and checked that it was loaded. “I’ll go home when this bastard’s dead.”
WHEN LAWRENCE ENTERED the foyer his father stepped out of the Great Hall, his face dark with fury. “What have you done?” Sir John demanded. “Miss Conliffe has left Blackmoor. Explain yourself.”
Lawrence did not bother to ask how his father knew of this. He could not manage a single new complication.
“This place is cursed, Father,” he said weakly. “I sent her away. She’s back in London by now.”
His father went very still and his eyes were hard as fists.
“You’re a fool,” hissed Sir John as he briskly pushed past Lawrence and vanished into the empty heart of the Hall.
PASTOR FISK WAS warming to his rant, his voice rising to a bellow of righteous fury. “But God will defend His faithful. With His right hand, He will smite the foul demon!”
The congregation said nothing, but everyone was bent forward, hanging on the vicar’s every word.
“I say to you, the Enemy’s ploy is a devious one. Twisting the accursed into beasts, he seeks to bring us low. Make us as animals. Teach us self-loathing, so we forget that we are made in the image of Almighty God!”
That brought murmurs of angry protest from the crowd.
“You ask me, brothers and sisters, why does God tolerate this mockery?” Fisk stared around at his flock and beat upon the pulpit with his fist. “Because we have sinned against Him! Because our crimes reek to Heaven. And our sins demand vengeance.”
As another pair of congregants entered the church, Aberline slipped outside. He was not a churchgoing man. He had some faith, but it was rusty from disuse, and even as an idealistic lad he had never had much use for all the talk about hell and damnation. Aberline placed a much higher stock in crime and punishment, and in the growing police practice of scientific investigation. Evidence and analysis. The devil, he mused, was truly in the details.
He walked past the blacksmith’s shop, surprised to see it open for trade this late. A small crowd of villagers were gathered in the doorway and Aberline joined them, looking over the heads of a pair of boys to where the blacksmith’s assistants were taking silver plates and bowls and spoons and dropping them into a big iron pot that was so hot the metal began melting at once. Another assistant scooped the melted metal out with a stone ladle and poured it into a set of heavy molds. Aberline frowned and shifted so he could see what the blacksmith himself was doing at the far end of this production line. The big metalworker, wearing only trousers and a leather apron in the inferno heat of the workshop, held an old-fashioned bullet mold in his big hands. As Aberline watched, the blacksmith dumped a batch of bullets into a bucket of water and then scooped them out with a ladle before handing them to another assistant who checked them for burrs and smoothed their edges and finally stacked them with the dozens of others that had already been cast.
Aberline shook his head. Beyond the blacksmith were several bullet molds that had been discarded, and he had little wonder. Silver had a much higher melting point than lead and it probably ruined the molds after only a few castings. This nonsense was costing the blacksmith a lot of money and very likely going to result in him having a shop filled with useless junk instead of instruments of his craft. And yet . . . these people were all here with their precious silver—family heirlooms, wedding dowries, keepsakes—all to acquire bullets for something that didn’t exist.
He hid a smile as he turned away and continued his stroll through the town. It was all madness. But maybe amid the madness some truth would be revealed, and then he would make his move.
He lit a cigar and kept his eyes and ears open.
TWICE LAWRENCE TRIED to go back to bed, to lose himself in sleep. Each time he was out of bed within a few minutes, pacing his room with nervous energy, sometimes muttering to himself. Fear was a clawing thing that tore at the walls of his chest.
He thought about the box of bullets Singh had shown him. Should he go there, ask for some cartridges?
Maybe, he thought, but why? Defense or escape?
He still did not know which option was his to take. Maybe it would be better if Colonel Montford and his lackeys succeeded in their murderous plans. It might be the best way for this madness to end.
He stood in the emptiness of his room and tried to decide what to do. He wished he had an opium pipe. Losing himself in the velvet dreams would help, but the last train to London had already passed through town, taking Gwen Conliffe with it.
Whiskey, he thought. A lot of whiskey might do the trick, and so he hurried downstairs to the Great Hall, filled a tumbler to the brim with his father’s scotch and gulped half of it down. He choked and coughed, but the warm burn inside his chest felt good. He took a second gulp, and a third, then refilled his glass and went back to his room, but as he entered he heard voices. Outside. He crept to his window and peered out. Below, half hidden in the shadows of the garden, he saw his father and Singh. Sir John was uncharacteristically ruffled, his face haggard and distressed. He held a shielded lantern in one hand. The big Sikh looked frightened, and he stood with his right hand resting on the hilt of his silver kirpan.
“Please,” urged Singh, “you must let me help him.”
“He doesn’t need your help,” snapped Sir John. “Give me the keys, Singh.”
“No, Sir John—”
Sir John set the lantern down and as fast as a snake grabbed Singh’s left wrist and pried something from between his fingers. Even from that far above Lawrence could hear the dull metal clank of keys. Sir John stepped back, snatched up his lantern, and pointed a warning finger at Singh.
“Don’t follow me,” he ordered harshly.
ABERLINE LEFT THE dismal streets of Blackmoor and stepped into the tavern for a wet. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it near the door, loosened his tie, and
was about to call for the barman when he realized that the entire establishment had gone quiet. He turned. Every eye in the place was on him, and in every eye there was suspicion and fear.
Bloody superstitious fools, he thought and hung his hat next to his coat. He saw a young man—Cramer, the bar-back—coming toward him, but Aberline sank into a seat and unfolded the London paper. He was already engrossed in the paper when someone stopped in front of his table.
“Pint of bitters, please. And if you have any steak and kidney pie I—” He stopped talking as he glanced up and saw that it was not Cramer but rather the publican’s wife, Mrs. Kirk, who stood there, fists on hips, her face harsh with disapproval.
“Good evening, Mrs. Kirk,” said Aberline.
“Why aren’t you out with MacQueen trying to catch that thing what killed my husband?”
Aberline leaned back in his seat and appraised the widow. When he spoke he pitched his voice loud enough for the other patrons of the tavern to hear what he had to say. “Seeing as I don’t know where the lunatic will strike, it seems the most practical thing to do is stay as near as possible to the potential victims. And seeing that two hundred and fourteen of the three hundred and eleven residents of Blackmoor live within five hundred yards of this tavern, I was planning to spend the evening here.”
He glanced around and every face was a study in doubt and fear. Only Mrs. Kirk held her ground and kept her scowl in place.
“Here? Not Talbot Hall?”
Aberline studied her. “Interesting. Why would you say that?”
“They’re cursed,” said Mrs. Kirk. “All of them.”
Around the room, other people nodded or grunted agreement with the widow’s statement. Aberline managed to keep a smile off his face.
“ ‘Cursed.’ Yes, well, unfortunately ‘cursed’ does not get me a bench warrant to wander around Sir John’s estate at night. Rules, rules, rules.” He leaned forward and put a spooky tone in his voice. “It’s all that keeps us from a dog-eat-dog world, you know.”