The Hidden Blade (6 page)

“Is this how you greet an old friend, my dear boy?”

Herb! In the three months since Leighton had last seen him, he must have lost at least a stone in weight—his Adam’s apple protruded and there were hollows under his cheekbones—but his smile was as wide and brilliant as ever.

And then that smile wobbled and faded. “Will you not say hullo, Leighton?”

Leighton realized he was staring. He put down the shotgun, climbed over the window ledge, and leaped ten feet to the ground below. Herb had him in a tight embrace almost before he’d straightened from the landing.

“My dear boy,” Herb murmured. “My dear, dear boy.”

“You didn’t go off to India!” Leighton blurted out.

“Not without you, my dear boy. And not without your father.”

Leighton stood in his embrace for a little longer—all was right with the world again. Then he took Herb by the arm and they ran toward the front door. “Why didn’t you cable? We had no idea you were coming.”

They almost collided with Father, sprinting out of the house. There was a sheen of tears in Father’s eyes. When he shook Herb’s hand, he grasped the latter’s forearm too.

“I hoped you would come.” Father’s voice quavered with gratitude.

“You knew I would,” said Herb, “the second you sent word.”

They gazed at each other. It was only for a moment, but Leighton suddenly felt as if he ought to be elsewhere.

“Father, may I go do some shooting by myself?” he asked.

“Of course.” Father beamed. “Make sure you are back in time for dinner. Tonight we shall feast.”

Leighton strode away from the house—no one would notice that he didn’t have his firearm with him. And he didn’t want to shoot anything; he only wanted walk and run and savor this burst of brightness in his heart.

Which was followed by a gnawing fear: Did Father and Herb truly risk eternal condemnation?

He walked for a long time before the cloud in his heart dissipated: He knew nothing about eternity, but he was certain that if they could
not
be together, then they were condemned for this life.

He was glad that Father had asked Herb to return. He was glad that Herb would remain in their lives. And he would never be anything but glad and grateful that they were now a family again.

Leighton cocked the air rifle, aimed, exhaled, and pulled the trigger.

“Excellent,” came Herb’s voice behind him. “Bull’s-eye.”

“It’s all right,” said Leighton, though he was quite pleased with the shot. He was using an archery target that he had found in one of the outbuildings on the estate, and his pellet had struck dead center.

“No shooting today?”

“Doesn’t seem fair to disturb the grouse day after day.”

“You are as kind as your father,” said Herb, his eyes shining.

To grouse, maybe. To people, Leighton wasn’t so sure. He didn’t have Herb’s easy embrace of others, nor Father’s ready compassion.

"And you must have grown two inches since I last saw you,” Herb went on.

“Only three-quarters of an inch.”

His increase in height had been much remarked upon the past few weeks, especially on Sundays, after church. Usually the comments embarrassed him and made him feel like a puppy that had sprouted a second tail. But Herb’s observation was friendly and matter-0f-fact, reminding Leighton that he did rather relish becoming taller.

They began walking in the direction of the house—it was almost tea time.

“Do you know what I did this summer?” asked Herb. “I gave my jade tablet for appraisal.”

Decades ago, Herb’s father had brought back two nearly identical tablets from China—two out of the three clues to the location of the treasure, if one believed the legend. Herb had given one to Father and kept the other for himself.

“Were you going to sell it?” Leighton’s voice was more alarmed than he had meant for it to be.

“No, absolutely not! Before they were…Well, they were once my father’s engagement present to my mother. I was thinking of the British Museum.”

Leighton exhaled. “Oh, that’s all right, then.”

“That’s what I said to myself: It’s quite all right if it ended up in a temple of art and history, admired by millions. But before I could do that, I needed to make sure that it really was a valuable antique, and not just on my father’s say-so.”

“What did the appraiser say?”

“Ah, the appraiser. I’m sure I proved quite a trying client—he had to write me three times before I returned to speak to him. Two weeks ago I called on him at last, and he told me that he would put the tablet at about a thousand years old, dating from the middle of the ninth century.”

A true antique, then.

“And remember the legend about the treasure?” Herb went on.

“Did the appraiser know about it?”

“No, he didn’t. But when I mentioned it, he was able to provide some historical context. The persecution the Buddhist monks feared actually came to pass. After a tremendous flourishing of the religion earlier in the Tang Dynasty, there came an emperor who both hated foreign influences and needed his treasury replenished after a costly border war. Almost all the monasteries in China—nearly five thousand in number—were destroyed, their wealth seized, and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns forced to return to lay life.”

Leighton stumbled a step—he wasn’t looking where he was going, but at Herb. “Are you sure?”

“I am faithfully repeating what the appraiser told me. According to him, the persecution didn’t last terribly long—the emperor was on the throne for only five or six years—but the damage was quite thorough. Buddhism in China never quite regained its former glory.”

And the legend, which Leighton had thought endlessly glamorous, was actually nothing of the kind, but a story of heartache, desperation, and unimaginable tyranny—the despotism of one man destroying the hopes and dreams of so many.

“Quite something, eh?” said Herb, looking at him.

“Yes, quite something,” answered Leighton, almost mechanically.

The monks of a millennium ago had been apprehensive. They might even have been afraid. But the wholesale annihilation of their entire way of life must have exceeded even their worst fears.

It could happen, the upending of life as one knew it.

It could happen anytime.

Leighton, however, did not expect the upending of their lives to take place only three days later.

They had gone for an excursion to the coast and camped overnight on a stretch of cliffs overhanging the sea. And in the morning they had risen early and picked their way down to the beach below to watch the sunrise.

“The world is such a beautiful place,” Herb said, his voice full of joy. “How fortunate we are to be here together.”

Leighton wanted the moment never to end, standing barefoot on the beach with his father’s hand on his shoulder, the murmur of the sea in his ears, and the majestic curvature of the sun breaching a horizon that was all scarlet and gold.

In the first light of this wonderful day, they rebuilt the fire from the previous night and roasted sausages for breakfast. Afterward they held a footrace on the beach, swam, and dug rather incompetently for clams. They returned to Starling Manor in time for a slightly late luncheon, after which Father and Herb both pleaded fatigue and retired to their rooms for an afternoon nap.

Leighton, not given to naps, climbed up the big oak on the far side of the trout stream. Where the main trunk divided into a dozen branches, there was a depression that made for a decent seat. On warm summer days he liked to read there, under the shade of the boughs.

The book he brought was
Voyage au Centre de la Terre
—an English translation was available, but Leighton wanted to read in the original French, and Herb had obliged. Leighton did not entirely believe the book’s premise—a vast ocean many miles under the surface of the earth? Hadn’t he read somewhere that it became hotter and hotter as one descended? That subterranean ocean would boil the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus that supposedly swam in its waters. All the same, the story was fast-moving and enjoyable, and he stopped reading only when he realized he had forgotten to bring a canteen and had become quite thirsty.

As he approached the house, he saw a fair-haired woman handed into a waiting carriage by a man. The man nodded as the carriage drove off.

Recognition came like a kick in the kidney. The man was
Sir Curtis
.

Leighton sprinted for the service entrance. Mr. Mims the butler would put Sir Curtis in the drawing room and serve him tea and biscuits. And while Sir Curtis waited, Leighton could run up unseen from the service stairs and warn Father and Herb.

But when he reached Father’s apartment the door was wide-open. Father’s bed was all smooth counterpane and perfectly fluffed pillows. No one had napped in it—no one had even put a hand on the bedspread.

And then Leighton saw the fireplace, one end of which was now a foot and a half from the wall. He didn’t know about this particular hidden passage, except to instinctively grasp that the last person who had passed through could not have been Father, who would not leave such a secret out for everyone to see.

That was when he remembered that both Father and his estate had been under Sir Curtis’s guardianship for some years. Sir Curtis could very well know the house as well as anyone did—and the idea filled Leighton with anxiety.

He was halfway to Herb’s room when he heard the sound of something like a sack of flour being thrown against a wall.

He stopped. He was too late. Sir Curtis had come upon Father and Herb.

The door opened, and out spilled Herb’s words. “Please, sir, you must not punish Nigel. He has been the very example of goodness and rectitude. I am the one responsible. I am the one at fault.”

“Of course you are the one at fault,” said Sir Curtis, one foot in the corridor, his face turned back toward the inside of the room, his voice thin but perfectly clear. “It is too bad Nigel’s previous institutional stay did not cure him. This time I will spare no expense—and no treatment—and he will emerge from the sanitarium a new man, no matter how long it takes. You, Mr. Gordon, on the other hand, are going to jail for your rampant homosexuality. And I will see to it that you stay there a very long time. I daresay society would heave a sigh of relief were you to die there. Indeed, if you should do me the courtesy of returning home and firing a bullet into your head, I would be much obliged.”

The ease and maliciousness with which Sir Curtis suggested that Herb
take his own life
—Leighton felt as if he had been trampled under a stampede.

And Father…That “previous institutional stay” that Sir Curtis had mentioned so cavalierly—no wonder Father was so afraid of Sir Curtis. He must have locked Father up and subjected him to…treatments, treatments that made people lower their voices when such words as “Bedlam” and “asylum” were mentioned.

Sir Curtis emerged fully into the corridor looking energetic, purposeful, and not particularly disturbed, as if he weren’t about to send Father to one kind of prison and Herb to another, but had only scolded a pair of footmen for their lack of punctuality.

His glance fell on Leighton as he passed, but he said nothing. Only as he reached the stair landing did he turn around and admonish casually, “See that you do not become like them.”