Chapter Thirty-Nine. The Final Play
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Final Play
RUAN insisted on walking home from Laurent’s, despite the fact he was unsteady on his feet.
I think part of him needed to reassure himself he was well after being sedated for most of a day.
Hand in hand, we made our way through the night.
Mrs. Penrose and Mr. Owen fussed over me the moment we entered the house, but in time they allowed us to go upstairs.
Ruan refused to leave my side, insisting on bathing me himself, removing the blood and soot and filth from me with his own hands.
Checking my ear and my scrapes and cuts to make certain that no true harm had befallen me.
Then at long last, once satisfied I wasn’t about to die from my assortment of injuries—and heedless of his own more interior wounds—he took me to bed.
Twice. The first time was fast, desperate, and needy.
The second unhurried, patient. And each broken kiss and foolish word uttered between us in the predawn hours underscored those absurd words we said to one another at Laurent’s home. This was not lust, not in the least.
It was love.
And I’d be damned if I knew what to do with it, but I would try.
I did not deserve this man. I knew that much, but there was something between us that would always bring us back together.
Be it fate or love or his old gods’ schemes.
I knew in my very bones that I would always come home to Ruan Kivell and he to me.
Like the tide to the shore … returning each day without fail.
WHEN I LET myself into the darkened halls of the Ashmolean the next morning, I remained uncertain what to expect from Frederick Reaver. I’d read the morning paper while still in bed with Ruan, the headline staring back at me:
CELEbrATED ANTHROPOLOGIST DEAD OF HEART ATTACK AGED 72
A much younger photograph of Emmanuel Laurent sat below the newsprint, showing the man alongside his son before the latter went off to war.
Ruan had a peculiar expression on his face when he saw Ernst’s face smiling back from the newsprint.
He’d been so impossibly young when he died.
I hastily folded the paper and put it away.
I did not like the pain that flickered to life whenever Laurent was mentioned in Ruan’s presence.
And I was quite certain the two of us would have a great deal to talk about when it came to Ernst and his devious father.
But for now, I was grateful that Ruan was safe in body—even if his spirit had taken a beating.
He did not offer to join me at the Ashmolean, nor did I ask him to.
It was painfully clear that the less he learned about Laurent’s perfidy, the better.
With a kiss on his forehead, I’d left him there in the warmth of our upstairs room with Fiachna devotedly purring at his side.
I knocked twice on Reaver’s office door, slipping my lockpicks back into my satchel.
“Come in. Come in.” His voice was muffled through the wooden paneling.
I nudged the door open with my toe, half expecting to find the bristly, growling man I had thought my enemy these last several days but instead found an altogether different one sitting behind the desk.
Leona sat in a practical armchair across from him. She cast me a rueful look as she drank her tea. Her legs drawn up beneath her.
“Am I interrupting?”
Reaver shook his head, his singular dimple flashing as Leona studied the depths of her cup. “No. I wanted Leona here as well for this. She arrived a few moments ago.”
My fingers curved around the door suspiciously.
“Close it, if you would?”
I did as he asked, stepping into the bright office, and took the seat beside Leona.
Every muscle in my body rebelled from the night before.
A great deal had happened over the last week, and I wasn’t certain how I felt about having been lied to, suspected of treachery, and nearly killed again.
This was becoming a bad habit. “How is Jack?”
Reaver exhaled at the question, grateful for a starting point to a conversation that was long overdue.
“Better than expected. He’s at the hospital.
Surgeons say that he should recover within a few weeks.
He’s a good lad with a bright future ahead of him serving his majesty, should he choose to continue on. ”
Good. At least one less drop of blood stained my hands. “And your other friend.… What about him?”
He folded his hands upon his desk. “I do not know who you mean.”
“The captain. That fellow who arrived at the house last night at the perfect moment. The same one who blew up the canal boat.”
He stared at me unblinking.
“Charming scar beneath his eye. Took Jack to the hospital,” I added dryly, as if there could be any confusion of whom I spoke.
Reaver drummed his fingertips on the tabletop, visibly debating whether to admit the captain’s existence in the light of day. Finally, he nodded again, half to himself. “He is well, thank you for your concern.”
I exhaled loudly through my nose and shot to my feet, pacing the room.
It was good to move, to do something. “Who is he? I’ve met him before, during the war about the time he received that scar of his.
Every time I cross his path, my recollection of the event does not concur with the official record of the same and last time that occurred, things did not go so well for me.
” I laid the morning’s paper down on the table between us, tapping the fictitious headline lamenting Laurent’s death of natural causes.
“Hopefully no one will try to lock me in an asylum this time.”
Reaver chuckled half to himself. “Why am I not surprised? That was how I first met him too. The captain has had many names over the years, he is brilliant at his work—that was until he was nearly captured. After that he was sent back to the home front to hunt domestic spies rather than foreign ones.”
I blinked, not quite believing my ears. “He believed Professor Laurent to be a spy?”
“I do not know what he believed, but the crown certainly did. That’s why he was sent to Oxford. There were concerns that Laurent had been keeping the wrong sort of company. The seditious kind.”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it back shut again.
“Come now, Miss Vaughn. You cannot think that the threats against our country ended with the armistice?”
Of course not. “So you would allow the world to believe a lie—that Laurent died peacefully in his sleep—rather than to know the truth about him? If what you say about him is true, and Britain is not fully safe, even now…”
“Safety is an illusion even at the best of times,” he said with a deep frown. “And the lie is better than the truth in any event. Emmanuel Laurent has been dealt with and paid for his crimes. Does it matter what the truth is?”
“But no one knows he committed any crime at all. There will likely be some absurd plaque installed, lauding his achievements when he ought to be pilloried.”
Reaver furrowed his brow. “Would you prefer that the entire country knew that the man poised to be a MP was a kidnapper and a murderer, funding his political aspirations and peculiar personal habits through the sale of intoxicants to the very people who elected him? Let us not even go into the whispers about dealings he had with the Germans. A traitor willing to sell his soul to the highest bidder being that close to the levers of power? It is unthinkable, Ruby. Unthinkable that the crown would let that stand when a simpler explanation ties things up neatly and with fewer questions. A plaque is a small price to pay.”
“Yes. Yes I would. At least if people knew, they would not be so easily deceived the next time it occurs. Because you know as well as I do that a fellow like him will come along again.”
Reaver frowned. “Then we are in disagreement.”
My nostrils flared. “Is it that simple then? A lie rather than an uncomfortable truth? Then you and that man … you both work for the crown?”
He shrugged. “I work for the museum.”
“You’re not as good at the vague answers as your captain friend from last night.”
The edge of his mouth curved up. “No one is as good as he. He was born to perform it, I was simply dragooned into his service, as were you. Be careful, Ruby Vaughn. He has taken a liking to you, and you may end up ensnared in his web again.”
My gaze shot to Leona. “Do you also work for the crown? For this…” My hands fluttered before me as I could not quite form the words. “For that man?”
Reaver’s expression darkened. “No. Leona’s involvement was an entirely unanticipated occurrence.”
I hugged myself tight to keep my hands from shaking.
“Harker and Leona had a deal unbeknownst to me.” Reaver’s voice was grim as he poured a glass of Scotch from a bottle and took a sip.
“What sort of a deal?”
“We were acquiring goods,” Leona interrupted. She looked well this morning, with no hints of the trauma from the days before. Her eyes bright, and hair loose and unbraided.
“What sort of goods?”
“Artifacts. Antiquities. Objects that had been stolen from their homeland. Julius and I were…” she hesitated, wetting her lips “Collecting … with the intention of repatriating them. Sending them home where they belonged.”
Repatriation? I’d not heard of such a thing. “And that’s how Julius Harker crossed Laurent initially?”