“It is not the big miracles,”Father Sebastian had reminded him in one of their conversations.“But the small everyday miracles— a life saved, a wrong that is set right, food and clothes for those who have none.”
Brodie didn’t believe that the clothes he delivered from a woman who ran the seconds shop in Holborn from time to time for children at the school were a miracle. It was simply something that he could do.
Then there was what had waited in Edinburgh, finding his mother’s murderer, and the fire for revenge that had burned in him since he was a lad.
Father Sebastian had cautioned him about taking revenge on that last visit before Brodie left. It was not wrong to seek justice he explained, but revenge for the sake of revenge was a sin.
In the end he didn’t know whether it was justice or revenge he’d found in Edinburgh. Afterward, he had spoken of it with Mikaela at Old Lodge in the north of Scotland before returning to London.
“And your choice would have been to simply let the man go about destroying other lives to protect himself and his career after murdering your mother when she refused him? And the others who knew what happened that night?
“What about Kip?” she had then asked of the boy from a previous inquiry case who had verra nearly died, and yet they had found the persons responsible and he supposed there was some justice in that, the possibility that other children— at least a few of them, wouldn’t suffer or be used as the lad had been.
“And what about Templeton?”she asked of her friend.“Would you have simply let her be tried for a murder she did not commit?”
“Well there was the damned lizard,”he had admitted.“Dangerous beast. It would have served her right.”
“Ziggy is an iguana,”she had corrected him.“And he was not at all dangerous. He’s an herbivore— he eats only plants.”
He wasn’t certain he believed that given his encounters with the creature. But he believed in the woman who had dropped into his life like a storm and took away his doubts about his reasons for going to Edinburgh.
Father Sebastian had sent word a week ago when it seemed that everything had gone quiet.
“It was told to me in confession,” the priest had said when he met with him afterward.
“I have prayed over it. As you well know, my friend, that which is told in confession is inviolate and I am bound to keep secret. However, this seemed most serious and I cannot condone the taking of innocent lives.”
It was then Father Sebastian told him what it was that he had heard in confession— a conversation overheard by a man on the voyage to London that troubled him deeply, and the choice the priest was forced to make to break his vow of silence regarding confession.
The man who had come to him, a tailor by the name of Anatole, was traveling from Budapest with his wife and young son.
With anarchist groups terrorizing the city, it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the country where they were born.
His wife’s brother had immigrated to London the year before and encouraged them in letters to leave.
Once the decision was made, they traveled from Budapest to Paris, then to LeHavre where they found passage to London.
It was on that trip from LeHavre that Anatole overheard a conversation between two men.
The tailor had stumbled upon them on a walk about the deck one night and had then hidden himself because of the words he’d overheard.
The two men spoke of an event that had been set in motion, with information one man was to take to others once they arrived in London. Then a packet with something inside was exchanged.
Payment for seeing that the information was delivered, perhaps?
The tailor did not know, but the men’s manner, a phrase he picked up on even in his broken English—“They will pay in blood”— had convinced him that it was something dangerous.
In addition, there was a note, to be delivered once the one man arrived in London.
Was there anything else the tailor mentioned? Anything that might tell them what the event was?
The priest nodded.“That it would not be suspected with the coming holiday celebrations. But he saw something in addition to that message. It was a tattoo on the wrist of one of the men— that looked like a black hand.”
There had also been a name,Soropkin.
“I know this name as well,”Father Sebastian had continued,“from the old country. The man is an assassin. If what the tailor overheard is true, I fear something will happen here and very soon.”
From what Brodie had learned at the Agency, Soropkin had once been the leader of an anarchist group responsible for assassinations in France and Spain. And the tattoo the tailor had seen was the mark of the anarchist movement found on posters in several cities.
