Sleeping Beauty (29 page)

She glanced up at him as he came round the table. “What papers?”

He sat. “I want to admit in writing that I am David’s father.”

“Well, do so, then.”

“No, the official papers. I want my name amended to his birth certificate. I want the Home Secretary notified.”

“Horace’s name is already on the birth certificate.”

“He lied.” He clattered the teapot onto the table with a blithe
thunk
. As if aligning himself with the truth at this late date was a great asset.

Coco tilted her head, contemplating him with a narrow look. “Yes, happily, he did,” she said. “Horace was willing to lie for us, when you weren’t willing to tell the truth. He gave David a name.”

“The wrong one. Which I now wish to fix. And it isn’t up to David.
You
have to say I’m the one.”

“I won’t do that to Horace.”

“Horace is dead.”

Coco let out a snort. “Yes, he is. For almost three years now. But it’s another death, isn’t it, that’s making it suddenly convenient to be David’s father?” She lost all patience. “I’m sorry, Phillip. Put it in writing for David, if you like, but he knows you’re his father. You don’t need to do more. Meanwhile, live with what’s left. I’m not unwinding anything so as to tidy up your loose ends.” She leaned forward slightly, lowering her voice and spoke in a vehement tone. “Leave me out of your plans. Stop inviting me, waylaying me. David wants your attention. I don’t.”

She scooted back, about to stand, to leave, but Phillip stopped her by reaching across the table.

He lay his hand over her arm, a gesture of restraint without any force. “All right,” he said. “I deserve no less. I’m sorry. Don’t go.” He faced her with a contrite expression—yet it was indulgent, too, solicitous in a way that was not flattering. He said, “I can see you’re still angry with me two decades later.”

She heaved a breath. “Oh, Phillip, honestly. Get this through your head: I’m not angry. I’m not anything with you—not anything but finished. Over. Done with. I’ve moved on.”

“Yes, yes, I have too, of course. You don’t need to worry about me.”

As if she would. “Good,” she said.

“I’m back in the game,” he continued. He smiled slightly, though she could only see part of his face. He’d glanced away, watching the doorway, perhaps; watching across the room to see who was coming and going in the hallway.

“Good,” she said again. She scooted forward on her chair, reaching for the sugar. In an effort to put the conversation back on a friendly tenor, she added, “And with first-rate seats at Fenner’s, too.” A cricket match always put him in good humor. She calmed herself by spooning sugar into her tea, one scoop, two. Where was David? When did they leave for this blast-and-damn cricket match?

Phillip muttered, “Yes, good seats at Fenner’s. But that wasn’t the game I was talking about. My term as Vice-Chancellor is over in the autumn. There was mention of a cabinet position for me.”

“Well, good for you,” Coco said genuinely. “That’s lovely.” To be a queen’s minister was something he’d always wanted.

“Was,” he repeated. “But I hear now that they’re favoring a certain young knight instead.”

Oh, dear. James.

“And the Royal Geographical Society wants him on their board of advisors, which makes me sick to my stomach since I gave up that board so as to compete for the presidency of the society next spring, but Ranshaw took early leave. Kilmoore, the vice-president, stepped in, and he won’t leave for years. So I have nothing there. You see,” he smiled, “I could marry you easily. I have nothing to lose.”

His face grew stern. Rigid, in fact. “Unlike that bastard Stoker, who is not so slowly collecting everything I ever wanted. The Queen intends to make him an earl, did you hear that? I suggested a title, and Her Majesty suggested one higher than my own. Can you believe? The son of my old coachman, going into dinner ahead of me?” He scowled, then raised one smug eyebrow. “But that’s the game I’m in again. He won’t get any of this, because I have taken care of him. God, what a burr in my side he’s become.”

“Pardon?” Coco stopped, halting her spoon in mid-motion on the gritty bottom of her teacup.

“Nigel is right. James is as daft as a loon. And his own African journal hangs him out to dry.” He tested a quick, triumphant smile on her.

Coco wet her lips, cleared her throat. “Phillip, I don’t think you have something quite straight.” Her heart began to pound strangely, noticeably so that she wanted to put her hand over it. She didn’t. Instead she shook her head tolerantly, making small, slow circles with her spoon in the cup. “James is—”

“A liar and a possible murderer. His notes admit as much.”

“Excuse me?”

“His African journal.”

“You’ve read it, then?”

“Yes. He betrayed us, Coco.”

“Us?”

“England.”

She blinked, stared at him. The urge to shove from the table, to get up and leave again, was there. She restrained herself. Her heart kicked with sudden
vigor in her chest. Her blood leaped through her veins in surges she could feel at her wrists, at her neck.

James would arrive momentarily, she realized. Why had they agreed to meet here? It seemed stupid now. She and James had debated how much to hide their affair from those closest to them. But neither of them had anticipated Phillip’s being a familiar of the place. Even David she had imagined would be at the library or the chemistry lab most of the time. Yet here she was, trying to figure out how to keep everyone from colliding with full knowledge of hers and James’s affair. While trying to figure out just what Phillip was on about.

It had been a long time since she had coddled a man along in earnest. She didn’t do it anymore. But she attempted to remember how. She smiled with interest, saying, “He won’t just let you take his notes, you know.”

“He has already.” Phillip raised his brow and smiled broadly. “And I left him with three star atlases. I don’t think I’ll have to play him along very far before he gives me the exact area of the gold. Then he’s gone. He’ll be lucky to escape jail once we’re through with him.”

“Jail?” Her breath lurched in her lungs, while she tried to smile outwardly with wonder and appreciation.

Phillip leaned closer. Coco knew what was coming and smiled with utter sincerity at this point: years ago, Phillip had enjoyed confiding his shenanigans to her. It was a matter pride with him, wanting someone to know that certain incidental
events hadn’t just occurred, but rather had been masterminded.

He raised his finger, waving it back and forth in mock sternness. “It’s all very murky, you see. His notes. He made poisons with those people. Poisons strong enough to kill regiments of Englishmen.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really. He’s as good as out.” Phillip looked pleased to announce this. Then wonder and delight passed across his features. “But wait. He tells you things, too, doesn’t he? Like the day on the balcony in France. He said everything right in front of you. Ha!” He laughed. Phillip tilted his head sideways, studying her. “What
are
the two of you to each other? He says you’re not lovers. Are you?”

This part was long-practiced and easy to do. Coco kept her face fixed. Other than the faint remnants of her smile, she met his question deadpan, without a word or indication one way or another.

He laughed harder, a man who’d expected as much. “Tight-lipped Coco,” he said. “We could always count on your silence. No one keeps a secret like the Queen of Pillow Diplomacy.” As his laughter died, he sent her a gleam, a kind of rictus really. “So would you like to know more? A little peek as to how?”

She raised her brow.

He asked, “You wouldn’t tell him, would you?”

Again she gave him a look of stoney evenness. In all her years, the “Queen of Pillow Diplomacy” had never told one man another’s secret. He knew she hadn’t. He’d counted on it at one point.

He and Nigel had known about each other. They had each told her things they shouldn’t have. There
had been a kind of intimacy that had come from the fact. She had become an odd connection between the two men, part of their rivalry, wherein they both told—and knew they each did—like two chess masters confiding blow-by-blow to a third party whom they tried to impress with their grander, bolder, clever strategies.

So there was an old pattern at work when Phillip said, “His pages talk a lot about his friends the Wakua. As if they were just like us, Coco. When they’re not. They’re simple-minded and dirty. He dusted himself in ash, you know, to be like them—naked but for ashes. He hunted with them, learned their customs, acted like them.” He made a sound down his nose, a grunt. “Protect them indeed. Honestly. Protect those black-skinned bastards from what, I ask you? From English gentlemen, scientists, and missionaries? Quite the opposite, I should think. We need the protection. Cannibals, the lot of them, you know. As soon eat you as look at you. I read it in his journal.”

Phillip eyed her a moment, as if to see if he had her coming along with him. Apparently she wasn’t as good at pretending to be sympathetic as she used to be. Because he sat back, his face bluff. His expression said, Hang her and anyone else who didn’t agree with him; full tilt ahead. He blustered, “Add to this the fact that he took the Bible Fund.”

Coco blinked. She couldn’t have heard correctly. “Now, wait one—”

“There’s no use defending him. He did it. Your sterling young knight embezzled twenty-eight quid. On top of everything else, he’s a small-time, petty swindler.”

Twenty-eight quid was more than many Englishmen saw in a year of wages. Though, granted, to Phillip it would seem very little. Still, her mouth remained open; no words would come out. She was purely dumbstruck.

He leaned toward her across the table, defending against what he took to be her reservations. “Coco. He’s developed his own point of view, his own side. I can’t let him get away with it. If I don’t level him, he’ll level me.” He pushed his lower lip out and scowled in a way that asked for sympathy. “You know, his returning as he did wasn’t exactly ideal for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—” He started to say something, then stopped himself. He chose to say instead, “Let’s just say I had my plans made in one direction, then he came back and I had to reorganize rather quickly and seriously.”

“Phillip, you are sounding, well, almost larcenous. You’re alarming me.”

He sat back, waving her alarm away. “Look, I’m going to make some sort of excuse for Stoker regarding the Bible Fund. It’s a pittance. But I want him out of the way for a while. Athers has all but accused James of wrongdoing in the deaths of his friends, suggested events didn’t happen quite as our James has said. And James’s journal is an indictment: he went native, his sympathies converted. He made poisons. Our people died. He gained fame by bringing home a king’s ransom of gold that his friends gave him for helping to kill everyone, gold he can replace by simply going back. What a story.
It has everything. Treachery, tragedy; greed and glory.”

“Everything but plausibility. Phillip, I don’t think James’s journal says these things.”

“Ah, but they do.” He smiled. Their old game: Coco’s playing devil’s advocate, so he could show how clever he was. He leaned toward her again, confiding, sotto voce, “After about the first year and a half, James’s notes aren’t dated. He lost track of the day, the year; he just wrote. It will be a fairly easy matter to slip these undated pages behind dated ones. It’s quite amusing, actually, what a difference it makes to simply change the order of events.”

Coco was trying to smile, but she was open-mouthed. Her jaw wouldn’t close.

Seeing her distress, perhaps, Phillip said reasonably, “Coco, my plan isn’t to ruin him, just to clip his holier-than-thou wings a little, so I can proceed. Rest assured, I don’t think the charges of murder will hold in the end. Who’s to say? James was the only one there. But these charges will certainly cast some doubt and keep him occupied for a while, so I can go down and stake out my gold.”

Coco was completely dismayed. Phillip had never seemed so…venal. He’d always had money. She could make sense of nothing that he was telling her.

He was about to say something further, but he spotted someone at the door and suddenly stood.

From behind her, David’s voice asked, “Are we going, then?”

“Right-o.” Phillip pushed his chair in, looking across the table at Coco. “Well, I’m glad to see you again, my dear. And we should definitely have dinner some night. Sometime when you’re free, let me
know. I’ll take you somewhere nice, someplace posh that suits you.”

She wanted to say no, but she didn’t. She eyed James’s former sponsor and friend, a man who had something more tucked up his sleeve for James. A very nasty something, something that involved Bible Funds and a sudden unexplained thirst for money.

In her silence, Phillip’s face took on a slow, faint smile. “Dinner then, sometime?”

She said nothing, but stared at Phillip, not taking her eyes from him; which was a kind of admission. She didn’t say no this time.

David came around the table to kiss her cheek. “Off to Fenner’s. See you later.”

Coco said something perfunctory. Right, dear. Take care. See you later. Mostly, though, she was inside herself, trying to figure out what to do.

The first thing she thought was, She and James could never meet here. It wasn’t nearly far enough away from Cambridge. Then, Well, at least they’d been lucky. James was running late.

Except there was only one road here, and Phillip and David would pass him on the roadway. James in his little open calèche.

The man and this very calèche trotted up the drive not five minutes later. Coco came to the front doorway as, with a soft
whoa
, James halted his bay. He looped the reins, then leaped down, smiling across the courtyard as he came toward her.

And, despite herself, her dismay was relieved. James charged her, his face radiant with pleasure. “Ah, me loov’ly,” he said, imitating an accent he
did sometimes. His father’s, she thought. He scooped her up, lifting her right off the ground, grabbing her up into his arms. He felt strong, sturdy; he made her feel slight, a piece of paper, a drawing of a woman. “Are we off, then, to look for sweet little cottages? I’ve heard of two without tenants, both within ten miles.”