The Hidden Blade (14 page)

“Sir Curtis told me.”

“Sir Curtis? But I’ve never mentioned my daughter to him.”

“He knows these things.”

“But why? And why does he still employ me if he knows about my daughter’s disgrace?” Mr. Colmes made a sound half between a laugh and a moan. “It isn’t as if I am so exceptional a scholar that such things can be overlooked.”

Mr. Colmes’s utter lack of suspicion made Leighton feel almost as vicious as Sir Curtis. “Do you really think my health is so frail that I cannot be allowed outside at all? And do you really believe that I have locks on my door and bars on my window because I am a sleepwalker?”

Mr. Colmes stared at Leighton. “I still don’t understand.”

“I am here against my will. Against the will of my family. But Sir Curtis knows their Achilles’ heel just as he knows yours, and they could not prevent him from taking me away.”

“I’m…I’m so sorry.” Mr. Colmes sank heavily back into his chair.

“He knows that I don’t want to spend the rest of my minority here—and that someday I might succeed in escaping. So he tells me about Miss Colmes to let me know that such action on my part will have consequences.”

Mr. Colmes shot out of his chair again, owl-eyed with incredulity—and the beginning of horror. “He is threatening my daughter?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Colmes stumbled over to the window and rested his forehead against a pane of glass. Outside snow fell, the moors white and silent. Mr. Colmes had his eyes tightly shut.

“You don’t need to worry,” said Leighton, his voice seeming to come from somewhere far away. “I won’t do anything to jeopardize Miss Colmes’s position.”

“Thank you, Master Leighton,” said Mr. Colmes, his voice muffled, his hands now covering his face. “Thank you.”

I know how you feel
, Leighton wanted to say.
I know what it is like to not be able to protect those you love. To go through life wishing that you had been able to prevent that one terrible thing from happening.

But he didn’t know Mr. Colmes—or his circumstances—well enough to be so familiar in his manners. And he was only a child, after all.

He ate his scone in silence, fairly certain he would never wish to taste clotted cream again.

A lethargy settled over Leighton.

He ate very little, slept far more than he ever did, and paid scant attention during his lessons—languages were his natural strong suit, and the Greek Bible posed few difficulties. He read aloud when asked to and answered questions correctly but tersely. Mr. Colmes, possibly even more preoccupied than Leighton, did not challenge him to any greater feats of scholarship.

He even lost interest in Mother’s letters. She was still in London, only two hundred miles away, but she might as well be on the rings of Saturn. Besides, she wrote very little that was new—she was fine; Marland was fine; she was waiting for this to finish and that to come through. Her letters had become infrequent. But that was his fault: He hadn’t written in a while, unable to muster the energy to present a coherent account of an idyllic life in the country.

From time to time he opened his wardrobe and looked at the place where the books he’d brought from home had once been stacked. And from time to time he stood before the barred window and looked out to the moors, to the open acreage he used to explore at will. At such moments he would feel a faint flicker of something, like the sparks that flew when one disturbed coal that was almost but not quite spent.

Then numbness would reign again, smothering the embers of frustration and longing.

Months passed. He now felt tired as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning. His stomach grew intolerant of anything with actual taste or texture; he subsisted on porridge, broth, and an occasional boiled pudding, from which he discarded all the raisins and candied orange peels.

He stopped paying attention to his lessons altogether. The Parsi Bible lay on his desk, opened to the same chapter of Genesis as it had been for weeks. Beside it sat the latest letter from his mother, already ten days old and still in its sealed envelope.

“Master Leighton,” said Mr. Colmes.

They were at their afternoon tea again, with Leighton staring into a cup the contents of which he had been stirring aimlessly. “Yes, Mr. Colmes?”

“Master Leighton, you cannot go on like this.”

He had to go on like this; didn’t Mr. Colmes see? Spending his days swaddled in apathy was the only way to pass through the years—the only way to keep from being eaten alive by the utter atrocity of it all.

“No, indeed, sir,” he said.

Now, why couldn’t he have spoken so docilely when Sir Curtis had asked him whether he was sorry about having been surrounded, growing up, by those imperfect people he loved so much? Why did he have to be so proud? Had he been more careful, more calculating, today he might still have the run of the moors. And what wouldn’t he give to walk miles and miles without seeing a single soul. What wouldn’t he give to fall face-first into an ice-cold stream in the middle of the night!

Anger stirred, a beast with burning claws. It wanted to burst out of his chest. It wanted to grab the fireplace poker and smash everything in the room. And it wanted to take the train to London and use that same poker on Sir Curtis’s skull, again and again and again.

Hastily he derailed his train of thought.
Stir the tea. Just breathe—and stir the tea
.

“You mustn’t lose hope,” said Mr. Colmes.

Leighton almost laughed. He didn’t—he was afraid he might cry instead. If only he could go to sleep and wake up to find himself twenty-one years of age, this long, long nightmare behind him.

He stirred his tea.

Mr. Colmes rose, sat down again, and cleared his throat. “After what you told me about Sir Curtis, Master Leighton, I was terrified. Unbearably ashamed, too, about all the mistakes I’d made, which not only led to a trying life for my daughter, but also indirectly to your current difficulties. But mainly I was frightened. So much had gone wrong with Cordelia’s life. To see her thrive as she has been of late—I cannot tell you how glad I was. The idea that it could all be taken from her…I was in a state of torment. If Sir Curtis is truly a man as you’ve described, then she isn’t safe, even if you remain meek as a lamb under his thumb.

“Finally I decided to go see her. If there are dark days ahead, I thought she should know—and not be caught unawares. So that was what I did two weeks ago.”

Leighton had the vague impression that Mr. Colmes had indeed been gone for a few days this month.

“I arrived on her half day and we went for a long walk. At first her reaction was much the same as mine—perhaps even more extreme. I believe at one point she screamed. At another point she wept. And then, amazingly enough, she shrugged. She said that she had been saving her money, that she always thought it was too good to last, that she had inquired into emigration to Australia on the few occasions when she went to York.”

Leighton blinked, feeling as if the light in the room had suddenly become too bright. “She will actually leave the country?”

“She isn’t ready to do so yet: There is the matter of funds—and also her promise to her employer that she will stay with her until the end. She asked me to apologize to you for any inconvenience her timetable might cause. I told her I didn’t think you were quite ready to run off just yet. Are you, Master Leighton?”

Leighton shook his head, half dazed by the news.

Mr. Colmes continued. “On my way back, I visited Starling Manor.”

Leighton jerked. It had been so long since he’d heard that name, the house might as well be on the rings of Saturn, along with Mother and Marland.

“How…how was it?” he heard himself ask, his voice a croak.

“Lovely place. It has been let to an industrialist from the north. The family wasn’t in residence at the time of my visit, so the housekeeper conducted me on a tour.”

“Mrs. Everly?”

“Yes, the very same. She also gave me permission to wander the grounds. I took the liberty of visiting your father’s grave—I thought you’d have wanted me to do that.”

Leighton’s vision grew blurry. The last thing he had done before leaving Starling Manor was walk to the family cemetery at the first light of dawn—and kiss Father’s gravestone.

“And looking down from the cemetery, I saw whole fields of red poppies—an absolutely astounding sight.”

Leighton blinked again. The poppies,
blooming
? “It’s…it’s spring?”

“Not everywhere yet—it was bone-chillingly cold in Yorkshire, but spring has most certainly arrived on the Sussex downs.”

A year ago Father, Herb, and Leighton had picnicked on the slope just beneath the cemetery, with that wide vista of brilliant poppies before them. And when Marland had come back from his trip with Mother, Leighton had taken him to play in the poppy fields, the two of them running through the sea of flowers, leaping and laughing.

Tears fell down his cheeks.

“I asked Mrs. Everly about your father,” Mr. Colmes went on. “She told me it had been a tragic accident—that his pistol had accidentally gone off while he was cleaning it. But if you will forgive me, that is the excuse one usually gives for a suicide involving a firearm, is it not?”

Leighton nodded.

“Please don’t despair as your father did. Please don’t throw away your life. You are young, spring is here, and Sir Curtis, for his seeming omniscience, has not counted on my daughter’s courage. There is hope yet.”

There is hope yet.

At the beginning of their conversation Mr. Colmes had said something similar, but then those had been mere words, trite sounds that had no meaning whatsoever. Now, however, each syllable struck Leighton with the force of sunlight and blue skies.

There is hope yet.

He looked at Mr. Colmes, at this seemingly unremarkable man who had proved to be anything but the timid, useless scholar Sir Curtis had judged him to be.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice shaking only a little. “I believe you.”

Mother’s letter, the one that had been languishing on Leighton’s desk, turned out to also contain significant news.

My dear son,

I write to you from the great city of New York. Yes, we have made the voyage at last.

The passage was not easy for me, but Marland loved every minute we spent at sea. I am glad that our eventual destination is San Francisco, where he will always be within view of the ocean—or so I am told.

Mr. Delany has proposed and I have accepted. But we will make no announcements with regard to our engagement, and we will wait the full two years of my mourning. You may not believe me, but I have the greatest esteem for your father and would never bring whispers of impropriety upon his name—or yours.

I hear Marland. He has returned from Central Park Zoo and no doubt will have tales to tell. He asks about you a great deal. I hope you will write soon. He is always anxious for your news—as am I.

Love,

Mother

P.S. We depart for San Francisco next week, a trip that will take us by rail across the entire continent. Address your letters to the Grand Hotel in San Francisco and they should reach me.

P.P.S. I hope quite fervently that with the passage of time and the increase in distance you will have come to think more kindly of us.

Tears welled up again in Leighton’s eyes. They were in America. They were at the beginning of a new life. But more than that, she was reaching out to him. Despite all the cruel things he had said, she wanted him to know that they still considered him very much a part of the family.

There is hope yet.

He read her letter several more times. Then he walked to his window and yanked open the curtains. Spring had arrived here too, the moors a heart-stopping green, the stream in the distance a slender, glittering ribbon under the sun.

The bars were still on the window, but he was no longer a prisoner.

Now he had hope again.

Chapter 10

Chi

Every spring, accompanied by Mother, Da-ren traveled to the hills one hundred and fifty
li
northwest of Peking and ascended the Great Wall. They made a leisurely trip of it, taking as many as six or seven days, so that it would not be too demanding on Mother’s health.