Chapter Forty-One #2
Even here, behind the fortress ramparts of wealth and exception, time was running out.
—
Disgraced Mystic Discharged from Hospital, blared The Times the following week. Refuses to Answer Questions from the Press, Recovering at Home.
No specific address or even city was mentioned, but Duncan was willing to bet the archmage had returned to Adept House.
He talked to Savin; he talked to the others.
He rode roughshod over their protests, made light of what was coming, understated it as much as he could without making it obvious that he was lying.
Then he picked up the phone in Savin’s study, held it for a long moment in silence, until the operator came on the line, and he asked her to connect him with the number Bainbridge had given him.
—
Garner went home the following day.
“Safe enough now,” Duncan told him as they walked out to the car in the late-afternoon sun.
“Maunston’s buried, apparently. No one wants to talk about it anyway.
Too many awkward questions going unanswered.
Looks like Hardy overreached, even by his masters’ standards.
They’re drawing a line under the whole thing. ”
He handed the other man a thick envelope. Garner rolled his eyes.
“I don’t need paying, lad. Not after all this.”
“Well, the widow at the White Mare will. She’s had that bloody horse of yours for the better part of a month.”
Garner turned the envelope in his hand, gauged the thickness. “There’s a lot more here than a couple of weeks’ feed for Mabel.”
Duncan shrugged. “Treat her to something nice, then.”
“Oh, aye?” An unwilling grin crept out onto Garner’s face. “Mabel, tha mean, or the Widow Worrart?”
“Both. Either. Whichever takes your fancy. I know which I’d choose, but then I don’t like horses.”
“Aye, well, they don’t bloody like thee either, lad.”
Both men stood quiet, hovering on the verge of something neither was going to say.
Savin’s chauffeur stood waiting, rear door held open for his passenger.
Duncan looked down at the waxed manila bag in his left hand.
Hefted it. The McCulloch’s blunt, utilitarian lines, softened in the wrap of the cloth.
He drew a deep breath and—this bit cost him more than he’d show—offered it on both open hands to Garner. The Lancastrian looked steadily at him.
“Are tha sure, lad?”
Duncan nodded. “Aye. Bring blade and body only to the glade, same as it ever was. There’s no other way this works.”
Garner took the bundled trench gun awkwardly, as if gathering up a swaddled child. He swallowed hard. Searched grimacing for words like a man trying to force shreds of meat from between his teeth with his tongue, until Duncan took pity on him and clapped him on the shoulder.
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Nothing I haven’t done before.”
But as he watched Garner driven away, the smile faded slowly from his face and so, drowned behind sudden cloud, did the sun.
—
The cars arrived in a convoy of three a little after lunchtime, rolling sedately up the long gravel drive like toys and then round onto the forecourt of the house.
Bainbridge’s Crossley in pole position, followed by a gleaming blue Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and then a nondescript little red and gray sedan Duncan thought might be the new Austin 7 the drivers at the Erlsley Bird taxi rank had been chirping about all fucking year long.
Two fairly obvious plainclothes police officers sat in it, looking cramped and irritable as they drew up in the fumes of the Rolls’ exhaust.
Duncan and Savin watched the convoy arrive from the first-floor study window.
The plainclothesmen got out first, unfolding themselves with visible relief from the car, stretching the kinks out of their limbs as they looked around.
From each of the limousines sprang a liveried chauffeur to hold open the rear door, and the passengers stepped out onto the gravel of the forecourt.
Curiously, Bainbridge emerged from the Rolls, not the Crossley, limping visibly on his sphinx-headed cane, and just ahead of another man in his late fifties with thick iron-gray hair and a Kitchener mustache.
The Crossley disgorged a thin-looking woman wrapped in a long gray coat and matching beret, and a small child in a floral print dress who clung to her side like a limpet.
It took Duncan a blank moment to recognize Mimi Rush and her mother, then Susan’s sturdier figure as she climbed out behind them.
All three of them stood apart from Bainbridge and his companion, even after they’d all alighted, and when the man with the Kitchener mustache tried to say something to them, Mimi hid her face in her mother’s coat, and the mother turned her head angrily away.
“That’s Endershall?” Duncan assumed.
Savin nodded. “That is Sir Michael, yes. Shall we go down?”
They met the visitors in Capstone Park House’s marble-flagged main atrium, where Savin’s staff were helping them out of their coats. Mimi spotted Duncan as he came down the broad staircase, and her face lit up as if at fireworks.
“Mama, it’s Duncan!” she squealed, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, even as a manservant was trying to take said sleeve and the coat it belonged to from its owner. “Look!”
The woman he had known as Irene Rush met his eye.
Her lip trembled a single moment, then firmed again as she forced a thin, tight smile.
Mimi tugged at her again, pulled at her arm so she bent down, and then whispered excitedly in her ear.
The mother nodded, and Mimi tore free, raced across the marble flooring like an unleashed greyhound, and, as Duncan reached the bottom step, flung herself at him full force.
He just about got his arms out to catch her in time.
“You came!” she said fiercely into his chest. “I told Mama you would! I told her you’d come to get us.”
He hugged her back, crouched to her level, and set her back on her feet again. “Well, really, you two came to get me. Because look—here you both are.”
“No, but—” Face creased up with sudden confusion.
She looked back doubtfully at her mother for guidance, but Ada Endershall-Ulver, more slowly and deliberately than her daughter, was already closing the gap between them.
She put her arms around Duncan, held him tight to her, and whispered, thank you, thank you, over and over again, pressing her face to his.
He felt the sparse, hot smear of tears against his cheek.
Beneath the coat, she was thin and frail, worn down with the waiting and not knowing…
“I think that is quite enough! Unhand my wife at once!”
Peppery, baritone voice, educated and used to command.
Duncan felt how the woman in his arms shuddered at the sound of it.
He set her gently to one side. Looked to where Sir Michael Endershall stood bristling a handful of paces away, restrained only, it appeared, by Bainbridge’s hand on his shoulder. He felt his lips peel from his teeth.
A fresh mottling rose in Endershall’s cheeks. His voice scaled upward. “How dare you grin at me, you insolent baboon!”
Duncan looked at Bainbridge. “Does he hold any sway in this?”
Bainbridge shook his head. He seemed amused.
“I have come here,” snapped Endershall, “out of duty to—”
It was as far as he got. Duncan hit him with the hardest right cross he’d ever thrown at a human being.
Wet, gristly crunch as the other man’s nose broke against his knuckles.
Endershall staggered back on the marble flags, pinwheeling his arms, found no balance, hit the floor flat on his back.
Duncan glided after him, fists up. He caught movement from the two plainclothesmen out of the corner of his eye, a twitching forward.
He angled a couple of inches toward them.
Looked them in the eye, one after the other.
Whatever they saw in his face, it stopped them dead in their tracks.
No one said anything at all. Savin’s staff were frozen in place, the gathered coats of the visitors still over their arms. Sir Michael Endershall flailed on the floor like a man fallen through ice, managed to gain purchase and prop himself halfway up, eyes blazing with rage.
He seemed not to feel the blood streaming down into his Kitchener mustache and over his lips. His mouth worked.
“You get up,” Duncan told him grimly, “and I’ll break your fucking jaw for you, too. I’ll cave your ribs in, I’ll puncture your fucking lungs. I’ll put you in hospital for a solid month, if I don’t kill you.”
Maybe it was the mustache.
Behind him, he heard Mimi Rush whimper. His fists loosened a fraction at the sound. He leaned over the downed knight of the realm. His voice dropped to a corrosive hiss.
“You threw away the only thing that matters,” he said. “And you did it for politics. You are everything that has gone wrong with us. You belong nailed to a tree on the Forest fringe, offered up to the powers there you prostrated yourself to.”
He leaned in closer. “I’d put you there myself, but I don’t have the time.”
—
“I am sorry about the police. They were at Endershall’s insistence.
” Bainbridge, gesturing idly with his brandy snifter as they sat in the south library.
Soft autumn afternoon sunlight suffused the room, painted itself richly on walls of neatly shelved leather-bound books.
“I tried to dissuade him, of course, but Mr. Silver’s record has not encouraged him in such matters of trust.”
Duncan grunted. Buried his face in his own drink.
“I trusted Mr. Silver to bring my daughter out of the Forest,” Ada Endershall-Ulver said coldly. “And he did. I would trust him with my life.”
Bainbridge smiled. “Oh, I agree entirely. Don’t misunderstand me, Lady Ada.
I am here unaccompanied, without forces, because I know Mr. Silver to be a man of his word.
I know he will fulfill the terms of our agreement, just as I hope he—and you—have faith in my will to do the same from my side.
Funds have already been transferred to the viscount’s credit, though I understand there may be a few days to wait before confirmation goes through. ”
“Funds were not required, Bainbridge. I’m not a shopkeeper.
” Savin turned away from the archmage with disdain.
He faced Ada and a sudden warmth flooded his voice.
“At my order, my lady, you have a first-class cabin reserved aboard the RMS Northern Light, departing November 7 for New York. Tickets for yourself, your daughter, and your maid, Susan. There will be no charge.”
Tears welled in Ada Endershall-Ulver’s eyes.
“You are very kind,” she said softly.
Savin bowed stiffly. “We are kindred spirits, my lady. The same nightmare visited upon us, the same salvation delivered, and by the same man. How could I not make every possible provision for your comfort?”
Bainbridge cleared his throat, clearly none too pleased with being excluded.
“Yes, well, anyway. You will be met in New York by arrangement with some friends of mine, and accommodated at their home in Manhattan until you find your feet, so to speak. A stipend has been agreed with Sir Michael; I think you’ll find it generous.
To continue after the divorce is finalized as well, of course. ”
“Of course,” she repeated dustily.
“Yes, well, then.” Fumbling a bit. “It only remains, my lady, to wish you every happiness going forward, for you and your daughter. I think you’ll find America…
invigorating. Brimming with potential. It really is a new world.
” A sour glance at Savin. “It is not haunted by the same phantoms and failings that plague us here, you see. Perhaps that’s why the Forests have not stormed it in the same way. ”
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Bainbridge. I’m sure we will make a go of things there.” Ada Endershall-Ulver looked across the room. “And you, Mr. Silver?”
Lost in the warm march of sunlight down the library shelves, Duncan took a moment to notice she was talking to him. “Hmm?”
“I’m not a fool, Mr. Silver. I know the way this world works. What have you done to win this future for us? What was the—the trade? What is your side of this agreement?”
And across the leather spines, something seemed to happen to the light, as if the afternoon lost faith in itself, staggered by the onset of evening and the promise of winter to come. The tinker’s daughter’s words rose in his mind.
There’s something black and twisted following you.
Duncan forced a smile.
“It’s a small matter,” he said.