Chapter 2
Two
Mark
Present Day
I’m not sorry. I think it’s important that you know this about me—that you understand this.
I’m not sorry. I’d do it again.
It’s selfish to do what I’m doing, but everything I’ve done since I kissed my bodyguard on the roof of my club has been selfish. Everything since my engagement to Isolde Lawrence, since founding Lyonesse, since watching my husband bleed to death under the cover of night and opera music.
I can dress it up as justice; I can dress it up as revenge; maybe I can even dress it up as love…but I know the truth. I know myself. I want . I want like a hungry wolf; I want like the sea lashing at the rocks. I want senselessly and ceaselessly and entirely.
I want my wife back. I want my bodyguard.
I want a hand around their throats and the salt of their tears stinging my lips.
I don’t take the usual way to Morois House but instead park a few miles away in a private, unmarked lane and press through the snow-caught heather until I reach the edge of the woods and leave the moor behind.
On the narrow path leading into the valley and to the house itself, I keep to the grass and the rocks as much as possible to avoid making tracks—an old habit.
One I learned here, in fact, alongside Melody and our older sister, Blanche.
My grandfather, retired MI6, would play long games of hide-and-seek with us in these woods, teaching us how to hide during a sunny day and during a rainy one, how to find cover when the light was good and when the light was bad.
He taught us the names of the flowers and the birds, how you could use the latter to assess whether anyone was coming close, how you could throw sticks and rocks against the trees to confuse a pursuer, how you could double back, triple back, go in circles to make your trail impossible to follow.
One day, he took my sisters and me on a long walk to a stone circle, half fallen over and overgrown with grass and wildflowers.
The trees were too thick for the local farmers to let their sheep graze, my grandfather explained, and aside from the occasional rambler hoping to end up in a pub, no one came there.
It was on the Ordnance Survey maps, but it was difficult to get to, and with the photogenic shores of Tintagel so close, why would anyone bother?
Cornwall has plenty of standing stones, dolmens, and cairns that come with more convenient parking and fewer brambles, and besides, most visitors weren’t coming for the history; they were coming for the sea.
But we weren’t visitors, not the Trevena family, not even the last American flowering of it, and Grandad wanted us to know.
He insisted that the Trevenas had once used these stone circles in times gone by, that we came from the people that built them five thousand years ago, that his own grandad took him to this very spot and told him that the Trevenas must never forget who they were: bronze, stone, sea.
Melody, even at that age, was too practical to care about something as intangible as an ancestral past, and Blanche immediately made a romance of it, but I knew what our grandfather was giving us that day, and it wasn’t a homily about the beauty of Cornwall. It wasn’t an invitation into a legacy.
It was a warning.
Trevenas outlast . Trevenas are cruel. We are salt-skinned and thorned with gorse, and we worshipped capricious gods long after the saints began crawling over our hills. We have hearts of tin and minds of slate, and we do not flinch.
Grandad was MI6; his grandfather returned from the Great War with three German cavalry pennants and not a single ounce of shell shock; and his grandfather before him was the last of the great Cornish smugglers.
My own mother had been a mergers and acquisitions shark in the City, carving up corporations and portfolios with clever, monstrous slices, a shark who made her husband take her name after their wedding because she refused to have a new plaque etched for her firm’s office.
The only softness we ever saw of her before she died was her love for our father, who was a gentle man.
Blanche inherited his sweetness, his generosity, his goodness.
Melody and I inherited his crooked pinkie fingers and nothing else; we twins were Trevena through and through.
It’s something I think about often these days, who I am. What I am.
If I were a different man, would I be sneaking through the mostly naked trees toward my own house right now? Would I have a fine red ridge on my throat from the night my wife almost killed me? An ugly knot of scar tissue on my shoulder from the time I was stabbed?
Would I have played the game, moving piece after piece on a board I couldn’t see the edges of, for years and years, just to have both of them in my power?
I exhale slowly. It doesn’t matter. I’m not a different man, and I’m not about to become one.
Although as I hear a melody floating over the wet, snow-patched graveyard, I almost wish that weren’t the case. I almost wish that I were good, normal , the kind of warmhearted and generous lover that could follow the sound of singing to its source and greet it with a smile and open arms.
Instead, I lean my shoulder against the trunk of a tree and close my eyes and listen.
Tristan is singing.
I’ve never heard anyone sing quite like Tristan, like his heart has slipped onto his tongue, like it’s not really singing if you don’t leave a little arterial spatter on the floor when you’re done.
And not in a tortured way, not in a way that implies labor or pain—more like someone offering their kidney without a second thought.
Like someone taking off their coat in the cold and draping it over your shoulders instead.
It’s too generous; I don’t deserve it. Neither does Isolde. The two of us deserve chants of penance or half-muffled opera music in the dark. We are the same that way.
He’s singing “Hallelujah,” and it charms me to think he considers himself the baffled king, the overthrown Samson.
There is something so piquant about a good person thinking they are bad, about a strong person thinking they are weak.
It is a devil in me—a devil just like Saul himself had—that I want to encourage this.
That I want to croon in Tristan’s ear that he is so bad, so very bad, that he is so weak to let me do the things he lets me do.
I finally open my eyes, starved enough for the sight of my soldier that it hurts like a stuck blade, and see him moving at the edge of the graveyard.
Gathering sticks—for a fire later tonight maybe.
He’s wearing one of my old coats, a wool thing Eliot bought me after complaining about my jacket and its pragmatic layers of recycled polyester.
And seeing Tristan in that coat—at Morois, in this place that meant so much to me and Eliot… I almost have to close my eyes again.
It reminds me of this last spring, of coming here for the annual lament I’ve allowed myself over the years. Of looking up to see Tristan in the library, his green eyes brimming with concern, his lips parted enough to show the shine of his tongue.
God, what I’d felt then.
Anger, sawtooth anger, and a grief that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Lust like razor wire in my belly.
I did warn him, you know, and you can’t say that I didn’t.
With the screen of the trees, I can only see fractions of him, subdivisions of dark, overgrown hair and wool-clad shoulder.
Gloved hands—his unknowingly wicked hands.
Cradled wood. I watch him bend one last time for a stick and then straighten.
He goes toward the house still singing, and like a sailor after a siren, I follow, helpless to do otherwise.
She’s in there, I know, waiting for him. With her honey hair and her unusual mouth, made while God was in a playful mood. With her turquoise eyes and her features so delicately shaped that you’d think she was part porcelain doll.
She is not a porcelain doll, obviously. Dolls don’t murder people.
I move silently toward the house, keeping to the trees and then to the chapel.
Dusk comes early during a Cornish winter, and it’s easy to stay in the gloaming, in the cold obscurity of the shadows, until I’m looking into the conservatory.
And there I see her, wearing a white shirt—mine—and linen pants—also mine—with my ring on her finger.
The light inside the house trims her in shades of pearl and gold, and she could be a holy card right now, Our Lady of Perpetual Knives , a saint of masochism and lies.
And Tristan—kissing her over the bundle of sticks before he carries them into the library—could be a knight in a stained glass window.
Glowing with purity and carrying the weight of chivalry on his shoulders, drawn for a fairy tale but sculpted in war.
What do they think of me, I wonder, after a month away? Isolde, the loyal saint, Tristan, the valiant hero? Knowing what they know of me now? Having had time to put the pieces together…perhaps not all of them but enough. Enough of those bloody, jagged pieces.
At Lyonesse, they think me furious; they think me brokenhearted.
Mark, the untouchable lord, the dominant of dominants, cuckolded in grand fashion by two submissives, his wife and his bodyguard , if you can believe it.
Mark, who sits in the hall at night with his inscrutable features, who hasn’t touched anyone to play or to fuck since his wife left him for another man.