“And I should not distress you now, if I were not obliged to do something that you might never forgive.”
He swallowed nausea and pride in one gulp. “Jess, the only unforgivable thing you can do is leave me,” he said. “Se mi lasci mi uccido. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I should never leave you. Really, Dain, I cannot think where you get such addled ideas.”
Then, as though this explained and settled everything, she promptly returned to the main subject, and told him what had happened that day: how she’d stalked the beast to its lair—in Dain’s own park, no less, where the little fiend had broken into the summerhouse, and had been more or less living there for the last week at least.
Dain’s sickness swiftly subsided, and the unendurable weight with it, swept away on a tide of shocked disbelief. The Demon Seed he’d planted in Charity Graves had been terrorizing his own village, skulking about his own park—and Dain had heard not so much as a whisper about it.
Speechless, he could only gape at his wife while she briskly related her capture of the boy, and went on to describe the encounter with the guttersnipe’s mother.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere about them had darkened ominously. The spitting rain had built to a steady drizzle. Under it, the spray of feathers and ribbons adorning her bonnet had sagged and collapsed, to cling soggily to the brim. But Jessica was as oblivious to the state of her bonnet as she was to the fiercely gusting wind, the fine beating rain, and the black mass rolling above their heads.
She had reached the crisis point in her tale, and that was all that troubled her at present. A crease had appeared between her gracefully arched eyebrows and her gaze had dropped to her tightly folded hands.
“Charity wants the icon in exchange for the boy,” she said. “Otherwise, if I try to take him, she threatened to scream blue murder—because that would bring you into it, and she knows you’ll send him—and her—away. But that I cannot permit, and I brought you here to tell you so. I will find a way to keep him out of your sight, if you insist. I will not, however, let him go away with his irresponsible mother to London, where he will fall into the hands of cutpurses, perverts, and murderers.”
“The icon?” he said, scarcely heeding the rest. “The bitch wants my Madonna—a Stroganov—for that hideous little—”
“Dominick is not hideous,” Jessica said sharply. “True, he has behaved monstrously, but he received no discipline at home in the first place and he has been much provoked in the second. He was blissfully unaware he was a bastard, or what that meant, just as he did not grasp the meaning of his mother’s trade—until he went to school, where the village children enlightened him in the cruelest possible way. What he is, is frightened and confused, and painfully aware that he is not like other children—and no one wants him.” She paused. “Except me. If I had pretended I didn’t want him, his mother might not have demanded so much. But I could not pretend, and add to the child’s misery.”
“Plague take the black whoreson!” he shouted, pulling away from the rock. “That bitch will not have my icon!”
“Then you will have to take the child away from her yourself,” said Jessica. “I do not know where she is hiding, but I strongly doubt she can be found in less than twenty-four hours. Which means that someone must be at the Postbridge coach stop early tomorrow morning. If the someone is not me, with the icon, it must be you.”
He opened his mouth for a roar of outrage, then shut it and counted to ten instead.
“You are proposing,” he said levelly, “that I toddle down to Postbridge at the crack of dawn…and patiently await Charity Graves’ entrance…and there, before a crowd of bog-trotters,negotiatewith her?”
“Certainly not,” said Jessica. “You need not negotiate. He’s your son. All you have to do is take him, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She could not claim she was being tricked—as she easily might if anyone but you attempts it.”
“Take him—just like that? In front ofeverybody?”
She peered up at him from under her soggy bonnet. “I do not see what is so shocking. I am merely suggesting you behave in your customary style. You stomp in and take over and tell Charity to go to blazes. And to hell with what everyone else thinks.”
He clung doggedly to the fraying threads of his control. “Jessica, I am not an idiot,” he said. “I see what you are about. You are…managing me. The idea of mowing Charity Graves down is supposed to be irresistibly appealing. Also, perfectly logical, since I have no intention of giving up my icon. Which I don’t.”
“I’m aware of that,” she said. “Which is why I could not possibly steal it. I cannot believe the woman actually thought I would. But she is completely amoral, and I daresay the word ‘betrayal’ means nothing to her.”
“Yet you mean to take the icon if I do not do as you ask,” he said.
“I must. But I could not do so without telling you.”
He tilted her chin up with his knuckle and, bending his head, gave her a hard stare.
“Did it never occur to you, Mistress Logic, that I wouldn’tletyou take it?”
“It occurred to me that you mighttryto stop me,” she said.
With a sigh he released her chin and turned his gaze upon the mountainous mass of granite. “And I should have about the same success, I collect, as I would in trying to persuade this rock to trot over to Dorset.”
Dain heard a low rumble in the distance, as though the heavens themselves agreed that the situation was hopeless.
He felt as bewildered and angry and helpless as he had in Paris, when another storm had been rolling toward him.
He could not even think about the loathsome thing he’d made with Charity Graves without becoming physically ill. How in Lucifer’s name was he to go to it and look at it and talk to it and touch it andtake the thing into his keeping?
The Haytor storm followed them back to Athcourt. It pounded on the roof and beat at the windows and flashed demonic bolts that lit the house with blazing white light.
