Night of a Thousand Stars (22 page)

And with that he swung on his heel and left.

Eighteen

I did not sleep, not for a long time, but still he did not return and the fire burned itself to ash under the cold and distant stars. Sometime later, far into the night, Sebastian came back, noiseless as a cat, just before the rain began. A soft pattering at first, it soon fell in sheets through the broken roof. Exhausted and peevish, we hauled our bedding under the nearest bit of roof and tried to retrieve what we could of the broken night’s rest. I dozed fitfully, damp and cold, and when the rain finally stopped, I fell into a peculiarly shallow sleep where I dreamt of crisp sausages and hot cups of tea.

When I woke, I was alone and freezing. Sebastian had already risen, and I was wrapped in his outer robe as well as my own. He had started a fire with what looked like broken bits of chairs and had apparently just completed some basic ablutions. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only his trousers and riding boots. I blinked furiously, not entirely certain if he were a particularly delicious mirage. His body was utterly gorgeous, and as I stared open-mouthed, he shrugged into his shirt and reached for the inner robe that he left open like a dressing gown as he worked. He warmed more flatbreads and shoved a handful at me.

“Good morning,” I told him.

He rolled his eyes. “I would sell you to a Turk’s
harim
if it would get me a cup of coffee,” he replied.

I realised he wasn’t much of a morning person and applied myself to my flatbreads. Afterwards, I was thrilled to find he had warmed a little water and I took a vessel of it into one of the ruined inner rooms to wash as best I could in spite of the corset. I consoled myself by mentally composing a strongly worded note to Demetrius to send coffee when we reached Cairo.

I emerged to find Sebastian tamping down the coals carefully with a booted toe. “When do we have to leave?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We don’t. Remember that little river we crossed yesterday? It’s in spate now after the rain.”

I blinked. “Do you mean we can’t cross it?”

“Not unless you’ve an aeroplane tucked away in that,” he said, nodding towards my full skirts.

“Regrettably, no. Still, there must be something we can do. What about climbing up higher and going around?”

He looked amused. “Not possible. The source is a few thousand feet up and miles away. We’ve not got the equipment, the clothes, or the experience for such an undertaking.”

I sat down with a sigh. “Fine. We’re stranded. For how long?”

He shrugged. “The wind has turned and the day looks fine. No more rain is coming, so it might go down enough by tomorrow.”

“Have we enough food?”

“Travelling with you is like trying to provision Napoleon’s army,” he told me. “I’ve never seen a girl who could eat so much and have nothing to show for it,” he added, eyeing my slim waist.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out.

“Yes. There are more flatbreads and dried fruit and things, and if you’re really desperate, I saw a few burrows on the way up. I could go and snare a rabbit.”

I stared at him in mingled horror and fascination. “Could you really?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I don’t know. It seems such a frightfully bloodthirsty thing to do.”

He rolled his eyes. “Perhaps you’d like to have a look around the place. I’m going to tend to the donkey.”

He left me then and I amused myself by poking about, climbing over broken stones and remnants of walls, peering into storage rooms and wrecked cupboards. Almost nothing remained of the years the monks had spent there, only a few bits of furniture, riddled with worm and rot, and the faint outlines of a proper herb garden in one of the courtyards.

I found Sebastian long after midday, sitting in the main courtyard, deep in thought.

He looked up when I approached and gave me a quick glance from head to toe. “I’ve seen fewer cobwebs in haunted houses. You’re practically a cocoon,” he told me.

I plucked at the sticky silks. “And it wasn’t at all worth it,” I protested. “Nothing but rubbish left.”

“What were you expecting? Templar gold?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Or a cursed opal necklace. A Chinese jade horse would have been nice. A cache of French porcelain. Even a box full of love letters would have done. Anything other than spiders and broken statues. It’s as bad as General Tilney’s laundry list,” I said.

He gave a shout of laughter. “Oh, God. That’s it! You’re Catherine Morland, aren’t you? Always prowling about, looking for adventure where it doesn’t exist. You think you’re living in Northanger Abbey.”

He kept laughing, amusing himself at my expense while I stood, hands on hips. “Laugh all you like, Slightly,” I said with a smile.

He sobered instantly and gave me a quelling look. “No one but Gabriel calls me that.”

He turned away to stir the fire, whistling a soft tune. It was familiar, a waltz of some sort, one of the innocuous little melodies that was so popular that year. It reminded me of the song Hugh and I had danced to on the deck of the Mediterranean steamer. It seemed a lifetime ago, and in the cold grey light of morning, the whole business seemed sordid and distasteful. A man was dead and Sebastian was whistling a tune.

I told him as much and he shook his head.

“You can’t think like that, Poppy. You have to look at the broader horizon.”

“And what is the broader horizon here?” I demanded.

He began to enumerate on his fingers. “First, we’re still at large. Whatever plot is swirling around us, we’ve kept our heads and we haven’t been taken. Second, we’re alive, which is more than Mr. Talbot can say.”

“Don’t,” I begged.

“It’s the truth,” he told me, his voice gentle. “This isn’t a game for soft hearts, Poppy. If you can’t think about a man being shot to death and be glad it was him instead of you, then you need to go back to England right now and beg Gerald to have you back. Perhaps you could start practising your knitting and flower-arranging on the trip home?”

I squared my shoulders. “You know nothing at all of what I want if you think there’s any way I could be induced to marry Gerald. I won’t marry him—or any man, for that matter.”

“Really?” He cocked his head. “Has proximity to me put you off my sex altogether?”

“No,” I told him. “You’d probably do better than most. But the longer I’m out here and the more I see of the world, the smaller and smaller marriage looks. Nothing but sitting by the fire in matching slippers and talking over the price of tea,” I said with a shudder.

“I don’t think that’s always the case. The Starkes, for instance.”

I shrugged. “They’re not even together. She’s on her way back to England and he’s here.”

“Not for long,” he assured me. “Gabriel will win her back.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Because I’ve never known him to fail at something he wants. And he’s never wanted anything like he wants Evie.”

He fell to stirring the fire with the toe of his boot, his expression inscrutable.

“Are you in love with her?”

He jerked his foot, kicking up a shower of sparks. “I beg your pardon? In love with whom?”

“Evangeline Starke,” I said. “It makes perfect sense. She’s beautiful in her own way—and adventuresome. As soon as you realised where she was, you dropped everything and rushed here to find her. But she is your best friend’s wife, which I suppose gives you a great deal of conflict over your feelings. Perhaps that’s why you’re so awkward with women,” I mused.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, not this again,” he said with a scowl. “Poppy, will you please stop psychoanalysing me? If I wanted to lie on Dr. Freud’s sofa I’d go to Vienna myself. I’m not in love with Evangeline. I’ve met her precisely once, and that was for ten minutes when she was at the train station leaving Damascus and my only concern was in finding Gabriel. And for your information, she’s not even my type,” he said, getting to his feet. “She’s got black hair.”

I tugged on my now-black curls as he left to check on the donkey. “Probably prefers blondes,” I muttered. “Or redheads,” I added with a shudder.

He had left the map that had been tucked in his belt, and I pulled it out, tracing our journey with my finger. We were in the hills outside of Ashkelon, the city of silk. Cairo was to the south and west, roughly two hundred miles, it looked like. And none of the terrain looked easy. There were hills and river marshes and rocky fingers of desert between. Little wonder he had agreed with me we should go by sea to Alexandria. I knew he wasn’t pleased by the detour, but I was thrilled at the chance to explore the monastery where the documents had been found.

I washed quickly and went to look at the map again. This time I noticed the page folded under it, a single piece of writing paper scribbled with my handwriting. I was still holding it when he returned.

“You stupid, stupid man,” I said, holding up the page.

He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. “Surely you didn’t think I was really going to send that note.”

“But the poor old fellow will be so worried about me!”

Sebastian shrugged. “That was not my primary concern.”

“No, your primary concern is making sure that if we are apprehended, you can claim you were acting alone and abducted me. This note makes it perfectly clear we’re in this together, but without it, you can take the blame for all of it.”

He folded his arms over his chest and waited patiently for me to finish. I ranted a few minutes more, raging at him for various acts of stupidity and stubbornness, which he accepted with a politely attentive expression.

“Finished yet? Because if you’re done abusing me, I thought you’d like to see the space where we found the documents.”

I snapped my mouth shut. I had a good quarter of an hour of scolding left in me, but I was far too eager to explore. “Show me,” I ordered.

He led me to what must have once been the chapel. It was laid out in the usual cruciform shape, and there was a rectangular hollow in the stone where an altar had once stood.

He sketched out the details of what the chapel must have once looked like, warming to his theme and tossing around words like
transept
and
apsidiole
while I seethed with impatience.

“Sebastian,” I said finally, a note of threat in my tone.

He grinned. “I just wanted to see how long you could hold out. Come along. It’s along this way, down the crypt stairs.”

I shuddered. “It’s in the crypt?”

“It’s the safest place to hide things. Don’t come over all swoonish on me now. I won’t let the dead get you,” he promised. “And you can even see remains of the temple of Venus that stood here before the monastery. Did I tell you the name of the little river? It’s called the River of the Lady’s Milk because of how white the froth is when it foams up in full spate. They say it’s from the milk of Venus when she nursed Cupid, although the holy brethren who once lived here changed the story a bit to make it Mother Mary’s.”

I followed him, as enchanted with his stories as with the possibility of finding something interesting. Down, down, down we went, down the twisting stone staircase into the crypt. He’d fashioned a torch out of some twigs and a bit of rotting fabric, which burned too quickly and smoked like hell. “We won’t have long down here without good light and the air isn’t any too nice,” he warned me. It was an understatement of criminal proportions. The air was utterly fetid, rank with the odour of rot and decay. It was the stink of ages, of bodies wrapped in linen and left to lie in alcoves cut from the stone.

I covered my nose with my hand. “Ugh. How could they just leave them to lie like that?”

“Would you want to dig a grave through all this stone?” he asked reasonably. “Besides the desert air is dry enough it usually desiccates the bodies. At least that’s what they expected. Don’t imagine they took into account how close they were to the sea as the crow flies. The moisture in the air must have rotted these lads,” he added with a nod to the skeletons with their ragged shreds of flesh. They were like something out of a nightmare, fleshless faces with noses missing and eyes long gone. Lips that some mother had once kissed had fallen away, hands that had once folded together in prayer had withered to narrow bones that rattled as we passed, and I clutched Sebastian’s hand, grateful to find it warm and firm and very much alive.

He led me to the far end of the crypt where the first abbot’s body lay, looking only a little worse than the others. His wrappings were also of sheer linen, but he had been disturbed, and recently from the look of it.

“Gabriel said he’d been here,” Sebastian said thoughtfully. He reached under the abbot and I stifled a shriek. He quirked me a look. “Easy, princess. He can’t feel anything.”

He reached further under the old fellow, and to my horror, began to pull him out. I swallowed hard as Sebastian set the corpse reverently on the stone floor of the crypt and turned back to the alcove. The back of the alcove was not solid. It had been fashioned of hewed stones set atop one another, where all the others were clearly carved straight out of the rock. I watched in fascination as Sebastian took the knife from his boot and worked it deftly into a crevice between the stones. He murmured to the blade, coaxing it sweetly as he moved it back and forth.

Suddenly, the stone fell free, landing with a resounding thud on the shelf below, and I understood why he had been so careful to remove the dead abbot’s bones. They would have been crushed under the weight. Sebastian leaned forward, bracing one thigh on the shelf to peer into the hidden space behind the grave.

“Let me,” I said, shocked to hear my own voice.

He turned back, and I saw he was a little pale. “Are you sure?”

“Quite,” I said with a great deal more bravado than I felt. He stepped back quickly, too quickly, I thought, and I understood something about him I had not known before.

“You’re afraid of close spaces,” I said. “A claustrophobe.”

“I told you to stop analysing me,” he growled. “But as it happens, you’re nearly right in this case. I don’t much care for tight spaces. Now get up there if you’re going.”

I thought of what Gabriel had told me of Sebastian’s time in a Turkish prison and wondered if this had anything to do with his dislike of closed spaces. But one glance at his tight features and I didn’t have the heart to ask. He gave me a boost up and I found myself crouched on the abbot’s former resting place. I manoeuvered behind the stone and put out my hand into the space behind. It took all my courage to reach into that gaping black maw of a hole, and when I put out my hand, I wasn’t certain I would ever draw it back again. Who knew what lurked inside? Spiders, scorpions, snakes? And those were only the horrors I knew about. God only knew what else might lurk inside a thousand-year-old tomb in the desert rock.