Authors: Kate Moore

To Tempt a Saint (29 page)

BOOK: To Tempt a Saint

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A clock began to chime with sour bronze notes. The last thing he heard was that smooth, chill voice. “Put the trash out, gentlemen.”

Chapter Twenty-two

A
LL warmth rapidly drained from the day. The slushy snow would soon be a slick crust of ice. Xander did not need the ringing of distant bells to tell him the time, and still no Will, no Runners. Xander had counted on the search closing in from both ends of the street.

The children kept up their game. The men about the fire stared into its glow, an advantage to Xander, as their eyes would have to adjust when they looked away. The gloom deepened, but no lights appeared in the windows above the taproom. No one seemed to be home on the lower half of the street except the untended children.
Damn, where was Will?

Xander had been sure March would hold Cleo in Number Forty, but as the minutes ticked away, his suspicion fell on the closed tap. To be wrong was unthinkable, to wait another minute impossible. He slipped along the edge of the street through the deepening shadows.

At closer range, he heard a new element in the children’s game. In the moment of pause at the window, an answering tap came from inside the cellar, like metal against glass, like a man at a dinner party, calling his guests to order to make a toast. Someone was in the cellar of that deserted building.

As his mind narrowed on the cellar window, talk stopped around the bonfire. The bullyboys peered from its glow toward the court where Nate Wilde came into view, unmistakable in his cap and wide grin. He stopped, outlined by the glare of the fire, and looked Xander’s way. He turned and waved his cap at an unseen person up the street. Then he was off at a run up the court.

In front of Xander the children froze and dropped their sticks. The small boy nearest the cellar window leaned down, pressed his face to the glass, and cried, “Now, miss. Go now.”

Cleo!
Xander was in motion before the thought fully formed in his mind. He burst out of the shadows and hurtled across the stone doorstep, throwing his body against the chained doors, feeling old wood give under his shoulder, but not enough.

A booming voice yelled. He’d been spotted. The street filled with the thud of heavy footsteps and curses coming his way. Xander slammed his shoulder against the door again, and rotten wood pulled away from rusty hinges, opening a wedge between the door and its jamb, but the chain and padlock held. Two of the frontrunners barreling Xander’s way went down in a heap of flailing limbs on the ice, but others still came on.

Then from the top of the street came a deep clap of sound, like the bellow of a great beast. It nearly knocked Xander off his feet. For long seconds it held him and all Bread Street in a jarring vibration that pressed in on him from all sides, shaking his bones. It made a sharp pain in his bad ear as the vast roar of it rumbled off across London.

Released, the tide of men veered away from the public house in a mad stampede down the hill, and the children disappeared in the black open doorway opposite Xander as if they had been sucked up a chimney. In their place stood a lean youth in a loose, hooded black cloak, like a figure from a masquerade ball. The youth shouted a name snatched away in a roar like a cataract and raised a fist holding an iron rod. He tossed it, and Xander snatched the iron from the air, turning to pry the rotting door from its hinge.

A rumbling as if the very street were being ground in a mill filled Xander’s ears and shook his limbs as he rammed through the door into the dark, the floor shaking under him. By the faint gleam of the beer handles and the darkened mirror above the bar, he made out the cellar entrance and plunged down shallow steps to the cellar with its slit of a window.

Narrow walls squeezed his shoulders; a low ceiling forced him to bend his head. He pressed forward, a roar in his ears and only blackness in his eyes until he slammed against solid wood, and a world of damp and rot closed around him, cutting off his senses. He forgot how to breathe. His mind went dark.

Then a word rose up from some deep place in him.
Cleo
. He howled it out in the blackness, pounding on the barrier. In the black cave of sound, the wall gave way, and her hand found his and took hold. In a roar of splintering wood and tumbling stone, her lips touched his ear, and he heard her urgent cry, “Up.”

Blind but for memory, his feet found the steps. He hurtled up them, pulling her in his wake, into the paler gloom of the taproom and up another flight of sagging steps to the apartments above as a frothy black tide burst in the doors.
Beer, a raging torrent of beer.

Xander would have laughed, except that wood and glass splintered below them in a churning mass, threatening to sweep away the rotting stairs and suck them into the hissing vortex. The stairs groaned and swayed beneath their feet, and Xander pushed himself harder and pulled tighter on the hand in his.

They reached a landing lined with closed doors. Xander aimed for the front of the house and kicked down the last door. He tore through the empty dark for the window, already open a crack. The building shuddered and rocked under them.

“We have to get to the roof,” he shouted over the roar. He threw up the sash and started to swing a leg through when it dropped with guillotine-like violence on his thigh. He wrenched it up and freed his leg, turning to scan the dark room for a stick or block of wood, when Cleo handed him a short iron rod clutched in her hand. He jammed the length of iron into the rotting sill and pulled himself out on the narrow roof of a protruding bay. Clay tiles crumbled under his boots and dropped into the hissing, foaming flood below, but an iron pipe, clamped firmly to the building where it joined its neighbor gave him a hold. Xander gripped the pipe and pulled Cleo out onto the ledge. From there it was an easy step onto the steeply sloping roof where it met the neighboring building. They climbed from the roof of the public house to the flat roof of a neighboring tenement. For a moment they stood breathing raggedly, clinging to each other.

The building shook beneath them as the dark tide surged on, breaking windows and sending objects slamming against brick and stone. Above them only the faintest pink tinged the clouds.

Xander turned and captured his wife’s face in his hands. They were both shadows now, but he thought he could still see light in the green of those eyes. He kissed her slowly and deeply, a kiss to undo all the violence and terror of the flood below with his unspoken love. He had not lost her. He pulled her close, and she rested in his arms, his bedraggled bride.

Minutes later, she pushed free and kissed him again with fierce impatience. “I was afraid.”

He nodded. She had been trapped in a hole in the ground.

“Afraid I would never have the chance to tell you I love you.”

His throat closed around a reply, and he answered with kisses, until he realized the roar of destruction below them had subsided. He lifted his head and settled her against his side.

“What just happened?” she asked. “The whole world smells like beer.”

They turned then to look below. Xander pointed up the street to the top of the rise. Even in the dim light he could see the change in the shadowy contours of Bread Street. Empty dark air yawned to the west at the top of the street where the brewery wall and three huge vats had stood moments before. “The brewery’s tanks broke. There was enough beer in them to make a river.”

“An accident?”

Xander shook his head. He didn’t believe it was an accident at all. He didn’t know how the tanks had been broached. “March planned it. A trap for you.” Xander found it hard to speak of March. Rage choked him. The whole street had known something was up. That was the meaning of the closed tap, the empty houses, and Nate Wilde’s signal. Everyone else would have a slim chance of escape. Only Xander’s wife was meant to suffer an accident, to be drowned in a hole. He had almost lost her before they even knew what they had. Cleo shuddered beside him, and he fit her securely in his arms and held tight.

When he lifted his gaze from the drowned street, he saw more shadows like himself and Cleo. On an opposite roof a group of phantoms huddled around a tall youth in a long flowing cloak. They clung to his garments or pressed against his legs. His hands rested on the shoulders of a child not half his height. He looked steadily across the gulf between them, until he caught Xander’s gaze.

Xander felt his whole self go still.

The youth leaned down to speak to the children, who loosed their hold on him with obvious reluctance. He came to edge of the roof, and the last light caught his pale face and fair hair above the dark garments. He raised a hand in salute.

“Kit,” Xander breathed. He found his voice. “Kit!”

The shadow youth waved again, sadness in the gesture. Forgiveness or blame? Then he turned away, chose darkness, and with him the band of shadows disappeared over the edge of the roof.

Xander stood stunned by it; only his wife’s hold kept him anchored to the roof.

He tried to bring his mind to order to understand what he’d just seen. All his dreams of finding Kit had ended in thumping hugs, mad celebrations, in that delayed supper of beef pies and porter, in all of the brothers together in their mother’s house laughing at the world.

Beside him his wife placed a steady hand over his heart. “You found him alive.”

Xander swallowed the pain in his throat. “He knew you were in the cellar?”

Cleo nodded. “We talked through the window. He gave me a broken rod to work the lock.”

Xander took it in. “How did he know you were there?”

“The children were outside the house this morning when March took me. They must have followed the hack and seen me carried into the cellar.”

Xander let out a shuddering breath that turned to white vapor in the wintry air. His chest ached. “Kit meant to save you. He tossed me an iron rod to break in the door.”

“Xander, he comes to your house most nights. He hides in the garden and watches over you, over us. I thought at first that he was one of March’s spies. I didn’t suspect who he was until after your arrest.”

Xander swore. “Why? Why doesn’t he come home? You saw it. He’s free now.”

“But not safe. Yesterday your father came to the house to warn you that you have enemies beyond March, enemies who do not want you to find Kit.”

“Always such fatherly concern for me.”

“Actually, yes. He accused you of presumption and of being a dreamer and a fool, and I had to invite him to stand closer to the fire, he’s so cold. He’s haughtier than the prince, I think, but there was a moment.”

Xander kissed the top of his wife’s head. “Now you are the dreamer.”

“Xander, your father remembers the dragons and goblins rhyme. Why would he remember that? It must be twenty-five years or more since he—”

“Abandoned me.”

“Sat beside your bed. He must have done that once at least.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Liar.”

The tide below them began to subside. Voices could be heard coming from the court, and lights appeared in upper windows along the street. The snow had been washed away, and now every crevice, every cellar was filled with black pools of beer with its eerie hissing foam. Three women appeared from the court, holding up their skirts, wading through puddles. Each carried a pint pot, and stopped to fill it from the receding flood.

All of sudden Bread Street came alive again, men, women, and children intent on filling pots and mugs with the unexpected flow of spirits. No one paid any attention to the two on the roof. It was a while before Xander could speak.

“What I remember is that I have a different bed now, and a wife to warm it. Let’s go home. Tomorrow I’ll look for your murderous uncle and my living brother.”

Chapter Twenty-three