Chapter 9
Nine
Isolde
Night still clings to the corners and arches of the Palazzo San Callisto, and I move as silently as the gray dawn currently sighing over the city as I slip into the courtyard behind my uncle’s Roman apartment.
Light spills from the tower of the butter-colored basilica next door, and I move a little faster through the shadows. They will be preparing for morning Mass. I need to be gone before then, before the piazza is full of the grieving faithful who’ve found no room to pray closer to the Holy See.
The front door is locked, but that’s not a problem.
There’s a grate above the front door, an easy handhold, and then a balcony above that with a nice little railing I can use to heave myself upward.
I inch the teal shutters open enough to get inside and find myself in the central stairwell.
From there, I can reach the roof, and from the roof, the open window of the penthouse apartment.
The floors are tile—standard in Rome and the preference of any man with enemies, since carpet too easily muffles footsteps—and I slide out of the window as languorously and quietly as a cat stretching in the sun.
There is a blink of light from down the hall, like headlights passing by, but we are on the top floor, so it’s not a car.
And anyway, I already know what the light is.
I’ve never been here before but can immediately recognize the hallmarks of my uncle’s style.
Sparse but tasteful antique furnishings.
Tall ceilings with their original plasterwork and occasional frescoes, all of which are distinctly pagan in subject matter.
A scattered rug or two that almost certainly has some complicated backstory, as a gift from such and such diplomat or a rescue from such and such villa that the Church sold off.
Small pieces of art in a mix of cheap and expensive frames.
Next to a crucifix, I see a picture of my mother—his sister—smiling in front of Cashel House with her blond hair blowing around her face, her gapped front teeth on display.
Like me, she had a faint dash of freckles across her nose and an upper lip that forgot to dip in the middle.
Like Mortimer, she had those distinctive teeth and eyes that didn’t quite match.
She had smile lines so, so young because she was always smiling, like there was never a reason to stop.
Under that photograph is a picture I drew for him when I was in kindergarten, a church with little stick figures kneeling and praying outside it.
It was beyond my childish skill to draw the praying figures inside the church, but I had known to bow their little stick heads and draw the ends of their little stick arms together, like folded hands.
In blue crayon, I’ve given them all tears.
Why are they crying , little mouse? my uncle had asked when I’d bashfully given it to him.
Because they love Jesus , I’d told him. I’d been confused by the question.
If you’d asked me to draw what it looked like to love God in any other way, I wouldn’t have understood.
I wouldn’t have drawn hearts or large eyes.
I wouldn’t have drawn their hands up in the air in adoration or them locking arms in their shared love. Love was kneeling. Love was tears.
My uncle framed the picture with its stick figures rendered in crayon with a heavy gilt frame fit for a Titian or a Rubens.
It abruptly unnerves me, and I’m not sure why.
It should be evidence that my uncle treasured a gift from his little niece, the closest to a child of his body he’d ever have.
But right now, in the near darkness, the weeping figures in their overwrought frame look more like the suffering sinners in Dante’s inferno, like an unhappy corner from a Bosch painting.
The art underneath my drawing is a copy in a simple frame: Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac .
Abraham has Isaac shoved to the altar, a knife poised to fall on his son, stopped only by the angel grabbing his wrist. Isaac’s mouth is open in a soundless scream, his eyes wild with horror.
Because there is no part of Abraham that suggests he wasn’t going to do the unthinkable and call it blessed and right to do so.
I think of what Tristan told me before I came here and close my eyes. Then I shake my head. I’m seeing darkness where there isn’t any, and there is plenty of darkness for the taking as it is.
I move through the large office toward the rest of the apartment, guided only by my memory of the floor plan Mark had in his safe, the floor plan I stole, among many other things, when I left Lyonesse.
Again, my uncle’s taste is evident. Restraint in everything, but of course, the restraint is purely to highlight the utter spaciousness of the residence, the restored plaster, the centuries-old art pressed into the ceiling itself.
You do not need to crowd your rooms with furniture to show your wealth and taste when they are rooms like these.
A dim light at the end of the hallway and a voice: prayer in a swaying Irish lilt.
I reach the bedroom door—it is open enough for me to slip inside, which is ideal, since my uncle would never keep a door well oiled, for the same reason he would never sleep in a fully carpeted house, and then I’m standing behind him as he prays a chaplet at his prie-dieu.
He’s only in a collar and a jacket now, not his simar yet, although he’s wearing his pectoral cross and his ecclesiastical ring.
The sapphire glints in the light from the small candle he has lit nearby.
He finishes praying St. Faustina’s closing prayer— for Jesus is our Hope: through His merciful Heart, as through an open gate, we pass through to Heaven —and without turning says, “Very good, Isolde. Now how did I know you were coming?”
“Two cameras in the courtyard, one in the stairwell,” I say, expecting the question. “A motion sensor in the office.”
“If not for those precautions, it would have been very well done. I didn’t hear a thing.” He crosses himself and stands, turns to face me. He smiles, my mother’s smile, the smile of the grandparents I barely knew, and then beckons me forward into a hug.
I allow this, and I even embrace him in return, pressing my face down into his shoulder and smelling the smells of Rome. Incense and sunshine.
“I’m glad to see you, child. It’s not your custom to disappear after you’ve been given a mission. I was worried that Mark had hurt you. Trapped you somewhere.”
There’s no sense in wondering why, if he’d thought this, he hadn’t tried to send help.
That’s not how things are done—if a saint falls, then they are a martyr and a new voice in heaven to intercede for the saints below.
The will of God is a greater imperative than a single life, even if that single life is your niece.
I remember Mark’s note at Morois, the stark brevity of the first line. Your uncle is the head of Ys, and he is using the saints for Ys’s ends now, not God’s.
And then his warning to Tristan last night, that my uncle wanted me dead, that even now, my fellow saints have been ordered to kill me. I have been declared an apostate.
I laughed when Tristan told me, felt like Mark was a boy telling scarier and scarier stories to frighten the girls on the playground.
Mortimer, the head of Ys?
Mortimer, kill me?
I pull back and say, “There was a struggle, All Saints’ Eve. I had my knife to Mark’s throat and nearly killed him, but I was stopped.” I don’t mention that I stopped myself. “I had no choice but to run afterward. I’ve been hiding in England with Tristan Thomas.”
His brows, a mix of red and silver, pull together. “The bodyguard?”
“Yes.”
He searches my face. “Tell me that you have not been foolish. Tell me that you have not been weak.”
I bow my head against the hand holding my chin. “I’m sorry, Uncle. It was not…planned.”
He examines me a moment more, then fully releases me to go sit in a chair in the corner.
Blue-gray light is leaking deeper and deeper into the room now.
“So you have tried to kill Mark and failed. It seems likely that you have committed adultery and run away with your lover. You have hidden all these weeks from both Mark and me, and now you have reappeared. Why, Isolde?”
His voice is brisker than it usually is with me. The briskness of a man with another meeting on the books, a man ready to have something over and dealt with.
It stings, that briskness. Funny that it should sting after Mark’s note, his warning delivered through Tristan, but somehow it does.
“When I heard the Holy Father had died, I knew I needed to find you and see if you required me.” I must be careful here—but not so careful that what I’m not revealing is just as apparent. “And Mark found Tristan. He says all will be forgiven if I come home.”
“All will be forgiven…such as your attempted murder of him?”
This requires no artifice, no care at all. It’s the whole, unvarnished truth. “I’m almost certain my husband sees a knife at his throat as a novel way to flirt.”
Mortimer’s mouth flashes down into a frown of distaste and then levels out again. “But he could certainly never trust you as he has before. You’ve lost any chance of an easy kill.”
It’s been years since I’ve fidgeted when speaking in front of him, but now I’m struggling to stay still.
I’m asking for too much at once. I’m betting chips I don’t even have.
On the heels of failure and adultery, I will not be granted anything so uncomplicated as blanket permission to do what I need to do.
Tristan knew this. He begged me not to come this morning, thought it was beyond dangerous. But I had to. I had to have a moment alone with my uncle so I could look at his face and see for myself if any of what Mark claims could be true.
“I have the key to his server rooms,” I say calmly.
“I took it the night I left. Everything in Lyonesse, we can have. I’ll be watched at first. My connection with Tristan was known at the end, so there will be more than Mark’s suspicion to deal with, it will be the club’s suspicion as well.
But when the suspicion eases, as it must over time, I’ll find my chance, and the Lyonesse treasury will belong to the saints at last.”
I see something I never thought I’d see.
Greed, plain as anything, on my uncle’s face.
He buries it quickly, a thoughtful expression and a half turn away from me, but I saw it. It was real. Mortimer Cashel, the famous cipher, the smiling, inscrutable puppeteer, undone by this singular desire.
“The Scales told us Mark is moving against the Church, but we don’t know his timeline yet, and we might outrun him—or we might be able to stop him. It’s a risk, I know, but whatever is in those vaults, Uncle, if it could be yours…”
“All of it,” he murmurs, more to himself than to me, I think. “I could finally have all of it.”
“Let me atone for my failure,” I plead. “Let me return and deliver what you’d asked for. It’s not certain, and it will take time?—”
“And you will kill Mark at the end?” Mortimer asks.
The mask is back, his eyes giving nothing away.
“Perhaps it would be unwise to kill him before you get into the server vaults, because your access as a widow or as a murder suspect will be limited, but after…he cannot live, Isolde. He will destroy us if he does.”
“Yes.” I bow my head again to show my sincerity and to hide my face. “I will make sure I kill him this time.”
A finger touches my chin. I look up into green-blue eyes, the right different from the left in its speckling and color composition. “You must,” he commands. “You must make sure. If you fail again, if you are weak again, God will find a better tool, a sharper blade. Do you understand?”
Did you declare me an apostate? I want to ask. Did you order my death like you once ordered an evil archbishop’s? Like you ordered Mark’s?
These shouldn’t be the questions choking my throat right now, not at all. I should want to ask about Ys, I should interrogate him about his plans, his activities, Drobny and Carpathia and if he’s hoping to become the pope so he can shape the world even more explicitly to his desires.
But he is the father I wished I had, the only adult in my life who’d ever come close to understanding my grave, desperate, self-scourging heart. My actual father sold me into marriage, and now I want to know if my spiritual father sold me into death.
Because of my failures? Because of my lack of faith? Because he thought I’d been corrupted by Mark?
Or , my mind supplies, turned by him .
Turned into a double agent, pretending to work for the Church while I help Mark bring down Ys and my uncle with it.
But I see no answers in my uncle’s face now; they are too well hidden. What is clear is the threat about failure and weakness he is making now…which is perhaps its own answer.
“Yes, Uncle,” I say, swallowing against the creeping clench of betrayal at the base of my throat. I think of that painting of Abraham and Isaac hanging in the other room, of the terror in Isaac’s face. He knew that Abraham wasn’t about to stay his own knife. “I understand.”