Chapter 34
The door burst on the second kick. Splinters spat from the lock, hinges shrieked, and Vincent thundered through it into the grand hall with his pistol up and the rain dripping off the hem of his cloak.
“CUSTOR!”
The name curdled out of him and rang around the marble.
A summerhouse built to swallow money whole, this place; all pale Portland stone and a staircase that forked like a serpent’s tongue. And somewhere hiding inside, the man who had caused the death of his father and brother, and put poison in his wife.
Three young footmen came running at the shout, then a fourth senior—the butler, his deduction—from a back passage with his wig sitting half-cocked over one ear.
Every one drew up short at the sight of the masked figure dripping in their master’s hall.
Except for the butler who tried to make for a poker by the cold hearth.
Swinging the muzzle round on him, Vincent warned, “Touch it, and I’ll paint the wall with you.”
Cowed, he fell back against the panelling, teeth and fangs all gone out of him.
Vincent had not been a phantom tonight. He had not climbed up a drainpipe in the dark and carried himself into the house through a breached window pane. He’d kicked the door in like the wrath of God, and he did not care a whit who saw the mask.
“Where is he?” Vincent leveled the pistol at the nearest, a young footman gone the color of parchment. “Custor. Where!”
The boy’s throat bobbed. His eyes flicked up to the gallery above. Somewhere along the landing, a door slammed shut.
That was answer enough.
“Don’t move. I’ve no quarrel with his staff.”
Taking the forked stair three at a bound, Vincent reached the landing with his lungs sawing and his ears fixed on the sound. It was a web of pathways, but he knew what to look for.
Third door. Brass handle. A slice of light beneath.
He was aware of every breath he took and the tenseness in his muscles as he punted it with his shoulder, and the thing banged wide.
It opened to a small but quaint bedchamber. A rooster motif adorned the furnishings; gilded wings spread across the corners of the drawers, and at the center stood a four-poster bed crowned with a feathered canopy.
A fire burned low in the grate, and there, wedged into the gap between the great bed and the wall—a slight young man with his arms flung wide across a woman clutching a babe to her bosom, and a little golden-haired girl with her face buried in the man’s coat.
All of them were trembling.
“Where is Custor?” Vincent advanced, the pistol fixed on the man’s Brutus curls. “I have not come for you. Give me him, and I’ll go.”
“P-please—” The young man pressed his family harder into the wall behind his outstretched arm. “There are children—I beg you, sir, I have my children here—”
“Custor!” Vincent roared. “Gibbs Custor! Don’t play the fool with me, boy, I have spent ten years, and I’d be wary making me wait another minute!”
“G-Gibbs Custor? He’s—but—he was my father, sir—”
“Then fetch that bounder!”
“But he is dead!”
The words hung in the cold air.
“Y-you lie…” Vincent breathed, the muzzle dipping for a shocked second, before he sprang it up almost immediately. “You lie! He is hiding. He always does! Fetch him out, or I swear before God—”
“He passed seven years ago come Michaelmas!” the man sobbed, tears cutting down his cheeks. “A seizure of the heart in his sleep. My brother and I were the only ones who attended his funeral. I beg you, look! Look!”
His shaking arm flung out, pointing.
Vincent’s eyes followed it.
Over the mantel hung a portrait of a heavy-jowled old man, and across one corner of the gilt frame, draped careful and black, a length of mourning crepe gone dusty with seven years’ hanging.
On the mantelshelf beneath it sat a memorial card edged thick in black, and beside that a brooch of plaited grey hair under glass… the sort a family kept of its dead.
The pistol sank an inch in Vincent’s fist, then another.
“D-dead…?”
Seven years dead?
A ghost…
The man he was hunting for nearly a decade had been a ghost… because he was six feet in the ground?
All those years crouched over schematics by lamplight, all the foot soldiers run to earth, the bigamist, the burned house, the Harlowe brothers, Barnaby, Atwood, Dallagh, Weaver… the whole rotten ladder of it climbed rung by bloody rung toward a… a corpse.
Ten years, Vincent had fed to it. Ten years of the work that made him sleep so poorly, all of it… spent hunting a dead man…
Into a hole he was already lying in?
He couldn’t breathe.
“All this time,” he choked, and the voice came out of him not the Phantom’s at all but small, a boy’s of seven-and-ten, an hour after watching his father hanging by a rope, lost and alone in the world. “All this time I wasted chasing… he was already… but he didn’t pay—”
He couldn’t finish it.
The mask felt suddenly like a hand clamped over his face, swallowing his flesh, turning him gaunt beneath it. His left hand came up to the ivory tip and pulled, gently at first. It held. He pulled harder. It clung to him like it had grown roots, and the breath thinned in his lungs.
“W-what—” Panting, he tried to wrench it harder off his face, scrabbling and desperate, until pain snapped behind his ear as the cord ripped at the seam—when the door flew open behind him.
“Vincent!”
He whirled, and his blood iced in his veins.
“E-Emma?”
She stood there, breathless.
For one stupid, impossible second, Vincent almost sighed in relief that she had seen him without the mask.
Then her gaze dropped to the pistol.
The pistol, still in his other hand.
Leveled at the tiny family of four crying and trembling behind the bed.
Her hand flew to her mouth in horror. Fear broke across her face, worse than any slap, worse than anything, and it crumpled him clean through.
“Emma—” he tried, dropping the pistol as if it had singed him, “Emma, this isn’t—”
She turned and ran.
Blast it all to hell!
Swallowing against the sting of bile that clawed up his throat, Vincent rasped, “I’m—I’m sorry,” and then he was sprinting after her, down the forked stair two and three at a time, past the white-faced footmen still flattened against the wall, and out through the splintered door into the grey drizzle of the drive where the gravel hissed under the rain.
She was halfway to the waiting carriage, her cloak dark with wet, moving fast for a woman who could barely stand an hour gone.
“Emma!” He caught her arm and spun her around on the gravel. “Emma, please, just let me expl—”
The slap cracked across his cheek hard enough to whip his head.
He took it. Stood there and took it, the mask hanging in loose fingers, the rain running down his stinging face, and looked at her numbly.
“I sewed you up!” she sobbed, crying into the lashing rain. “In my own bedroom. I stitched your side in the dark and never asked a single thing of you. And this”—her chin jerked back toward the house, the pistol, the Phantom—“this is the man I gave myself to? This is what you are?”
“Emma, I-I thought he poisoned you, I only wanted to keep you—”
“Don’t.” The word fell flat and final and stopped him dead cold.
“Don’t you dare tell me it was for me! I know about it all, Weston told me everything.
You were ashamed and desperate and so wrapped up in your own pride that you left me all alone in a strange place while I was unconscious, just to quench the sickness in your own heart!
You still are the same heartless monster who took from my father and left us with nothing.
“I don’t want to see you again. Ever. I’m going home.”
Wrenching her arm free of his slackening fingers, she climbed up into the carriage and slammed the door to herself.
The wheels bit the wet gravel and went off.
Vincent stood alone in the drive with the rain coming down and the Phantom hanging lifelessly in his hand.