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“Whether they matched …” he repeated.
“I told him a man’s eyes was his own business and no affair of travelers.” Cobb drew himself up. “And the big one said something in the French and got him up the stairs, and next morning they took the chaise and went. No word of where. The boy thought they turned back toward the Dover road, but the boy thinks a great many things, not all of them correct.”
The anatomist knew about him. The empty slab would have told him. Perhaps the missing coat. Damian had desired an escape and he had not been careful enough about hiding his departure.
He drank off half his pint. A man at his ease would, and he could feign that much. He set the tankard down and reached into his coat.
“Cobb. I shall tell you what this is, because you are a sensible man and the parish listens to you.” The lie came together as smoothly as a firing drill. He had built it on the ride down. Now he served it out. “It is a matter of debts. Not mine. A brother officer dead at Waterloo, God rest him, whose affairs on the Continent were left in a tangle. There are foreign agents. Moneylenders’ men. They fancy the Archer name might be dunned for what it does not owe, and they have been sniffing along all summer for anything they can hang a claim on. Scars. Wounds. Was he really the man who died. Carrion-crow work. Trying to make out whether I am who I am, so they can serve papers or make a scandal of it.”
“The villains,” exclaimed Cobb, with enormous satisfaction. It was a tale Cobb could wrap his wits around, and it gave him something to talk about. Word would spread through the village like a field on fire.
“Nothing will come of it. But I would not have my mother pestered, nor her ladyship troubled by such men at the gates.” He laid a guinea on the boards beside the napoleon. It sat looking respectable next to the little emperor. “That is for your trouble and the house’s health. If either of them shows his face in this parish again, the thin one or the broad one, you will send a boy up to the Hall to inform me directly. Me. Not the servants’ door. And you will tell these villains nothing, and let them find the village very dull.”
“They’ll find it mute as the churchyard, my lord.” Cobb swept up the guinea and stood a full inch taller, as if he had been handed a commission. “And might I say. The whole parish is glad, my lord. When your lordship come home … Whatever any foreign crow says of it.”
“Thank you, Cobb,” said Damian, and picked up his hat, and did not say that the foreign crow had it right and the parish had it wrong, and that the bells had rung for an undead monster, because his family needed him to live out the fiction that he was alive.
Outside, the light had gone a strange greenish bronze. The air was thick like a wet blanket. The thunder was roaring now, no longer muttering. A long roll away south over the downs. Then the pause. Then another. The bay’s ears went back and forth, back and forth.
Damian rode home and let the knowledge settle where it would, same as a wound left to stiffen. No sense poking at it. It would hurt regardless.
The grave has followed me to Hartleigh.
He had thought, when he allowed himself to think of it at all, that the Channel was a moat between him and that cellar. Walk out of a Belgian cellar and keep walking, and water might stand between a body and the table it had been laid out on.
Water was no moat if the man on the far side did not believe in graves. The anatomist had found the slab empty. Counted the missing garments. Missed the valuables Damian had taken off dead men to buy his passage home. Then he had drawn the only conclusion his madness would permit, which happened, God help them all, to be the true one.
The experiment had risen. The experiment had walked. And the experiment had been fool enough to walk home. To the one house in England with his name over the door. To accept a title, to stand up in a church, to let a whole parish ring bells over him.
He had led the madman here. That was the part that ached in his chest like shot. Every mile he had crawled toward Edward, toward the green meadows he had dreamed of in that cellar, he had been paying out a thread behind him. The man at the other end had simply reeled it up.
In between, he had forgotten. A few weeks of candlelight. Her low laugh across a card table. Watching Ophelia deal with those quick clever hands and feeling, absurdly, warm. Captain Archer, who had known since France exactly what he was and exactly what he was owed, had let a golden-haired gamester teach him to doubt it, to want things that were no longer his to want.
He had known better. An undead monstrosity has no claim on a living woman. No claim on candlelight. No claim on any of it. He had known it in the cellar and known it on the road and let himself misplace it somewhere between the whist markers and her mischievous smile.
Well. The world had sent him a correction, gaunt as a gallows, asking after him and wielding his secrets.
Thunder rumbled above him as he turned in at the gates. The open gates, standing wide as they had stood since his father’s time. And the soldier in him wept at what he had brought to these gates.
He had Stroud in the study before he had changed out of his riding coat.
“The gates are to be closed at dusk and the lodge minded through the day. No stranger comes past them. None. Whatever his business, whatever card he sends up. No caller is admitted to the house unannounced. Tradesmen we know by face. Anyone we do not, the lodge turns back with apologies and sends word to me. The grooms will bring the dogs up to the stable yard at night, and I want Hodges walking the near woodlands of a morning.”
Stroud received all this with his hands behind his back and his face swept clean. There was a half-second. Damian had spent a career reading sergeants and he saw it plainly. A half-second in which the butler’s whole training wrestled with the fact that nothing at Hartleigh had been locked in thirty years. Including, on famous occasions, the plate room.
“Very good, my lord. May I know what the men should say, if they are asked the reason?”
“That there are discharged soldiers tramping the roads and thefts over toward Barcombe, and his lordship is careful of his own.” All of which was true, and none of which was the reason, and both of them knew it. “It is ordinary prudence, Stroud. Nothing more.”
“Of course, my lord. Shall I inform her ladyship of the new arrangements?”
The question landed with the force of a thousand artillery guns.
“I shall tell her ladyship myself,” Damian replied.
He did not tell her ladyship himself.
He went instead to the gun room, in the green storm-light, and stood in the smell of oil and beeswax taking inventory as if the room were a magazine and he its master gunner. Which, he supposed, it now was.
