Chapter 14 #3
He had not meant to stop. But there they were, staked and thriving where nothing had grown for years, and something in the sight of them cut through the anger enough to let him breathe properly again.
He stood a moment among them, one hand closing loosely round a stem he had staked himself, and let the worst of it drain out of him into the dark.
Then he went inside.
He had not been to the second floor since the night he arrived. He climbed the stairs now without letting himself hesitate, past the landing where his mother's portrait had once hung and did not hang now, down the corridor to the room at the end that had been his parents'.
The door had swollen shut with damp. He put his shoulder to it and it gave.
Inside, the ruin was total — the roof had failed somewhere above this room years ago, and rain had done what rain does, patient and thorough, until the plaster hung in sheets and the floorboards had gone soft and grey at the edges.
But the fireplace still stood, and above it, warped in its frame but not entirely destroyed, hung a painting he had forgotten was there at all.
His parents. Formal, posed, the kind of portrait commissioned for a hall rather than a bedroom — too large, he understood now, for anyone to have carried out in a hurry the night the guards came.
It had been left because it could not be saved, and twenty-three winters had taken their toll on it.
The canvas had buckled. Damp had eaten a ragged hole through one corner, taking most of his mother's face with it — only the line of her jaw remained, and one hand resting on his father's arm.
Benjamin sat down on the floor across from it and did not move for a long while.
Then he rose, crossed to it, and reached up to where a loose curl of canvas hung down over what remained of her — the way, he thought distantly, one might brush hair back from a living face — and moved it aside, gently, though there was nothing beneath it to reveal but more ruin.
He let his hand fall.
Through the broken window behind him, the Whitfield estate sat pale in the moonlight, and from where he stood he could see her balcony clearly — the same rail she had stood at three nights running, though she did not stand there now.
He turned back into the room, reached into his coat, and drew out the folded pages she had left him weeks ago on the stone at the gate — soft now with handling, the ink gone faint in places. He set them on the floor beside him.
Then, with two fingers, he began to write in the dust that coated the boards.
Harrington.
An arrow, drawn slow and deliberate.
Somerset.
Another line.
The Baron.
He sat back on his heels and looked at what he had made.
Then, methodically, the way he had once mapped enemy positions on a tent floor by lamplight, he added the rest — Mrs. Miller.
The workers. Frederick. — each name connected by a line to the one before it, a web spreading slowly across the boards, threat and ally tangled together the way they always were in the end.
At the center of it, without quite deciding to put her there, he wrote Amelia, and drew a circle around it.
He looked at that circle for a long time.
Every line in the dust led, eventually, back to her.
Not because she was the target — Harrington did not know to look at her at all, not yet — but because every calculation he made now, every risk he weighed, bent itself around the fact of her without his permission.
He had built this map the way he built every other one, cold and useful, and it had told him something he had not asked it to tell him.
He wiped it away with the flat of his hand, all of it, until the boards showed nothing but disturbed dust and no names at all.
Then he turned back to the painting.
"The walls are closing in, Father." His voice came out rougher than he meant it. He looked at the ruined place where his mother's face had been. "Mother."
He was quiet a moment, gathering what he meant to say.
"I will see it through. What I came here to do — I have not forgotten it, and I will not." He looked down at his own hands, still faintly grey with dust. "But I have to be certain nothing touches her. Whatever else happens. That was not part of the plan I made when I came back to this house."
He almost laughed, low and without much humor in it.
"I had one mission, until now. One thing to finish, and nothing else was meant to matter beside it.
" He looked up at the painting again — at his father's steady, painted eyes, the only part of the portrait time had left whole.
"I do not know what to do with wanting something else as well.
I was never taught how to hold two things at once and not let one of them get someone killed. "
The house held its silence around him, the way it had every night since he'd come home to it.
"I hope you would understand," he said quietly, to whatever was left of them in that ruined room. "I hope you would have done the same."
Outside, the moon had begun to sink behind the trees, and somewhere across the fields, a lamp went dark in a window that was no longer his to watch.