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He let it.

The master of Hartleigh, deserting his post.

He had seen men shot for less.

CHAPTER 16

The lightning showed Luc the house.

It appeared out of the dark all at once at the head of its long park. Pale stone. Ranks of black windows. Bigger than anything honest men had ever paid for. Then the dark took it back, and there was only the rain in his eyes, and the iron gates, and the master standing at them with one hand on the wet bars.

Water ran down Luc’s cap, then funneled down his neck inside the collar. It felt like it had been running there for hours. His boots were pulp. The bag strap had chewed a groove into his shoulder. The house stood there as if it had been waiting for them.

Rain ran off Dr. Rochat as if off a roof. He never noticed weather anymore. The road had worn him so thin the lightning went through him rather than around him. In the flashes he was all edges, gaunt as the dead he used to cut. His eyes were the only fed thing in his face.

Thunder came down on top of the next flash. No pause at all. A crack Luc felt in his back teeth and in the old place under his ribs where fear lived.

And the master laughed.

“Of course there is a storm,” he said. He said it to the skies, not to Luc. He had not truly spoken to Luc in weeks. “There was a storm the night it stood up. You remember. Bien sûr there is a storm.” He pushed the gate. It swung open. “The heavens keep their appointments. They keep their appointments, Morel.”

Luc wiped the rain out of his mouth with the back of his wet hand and made his objection one last time, as futile as it was to do so.

“We could turn back.” The rain filled the words even as he said them. “There are ships. We could be in France in a week. We could live, doctor.”

He knew before he finished that he was not heard. There was a difference between being listened to and being merely nearby. Luc had learned that difference over the past months. The master was already through the gates, already walking up the drive, appearing and vanishing with the shadowed sky and flashes of eerie light. A black stick-figure printed on the white. Then nothing. Then printed again, farther on. Never once glancing back.

Luc sighed deeply.

The road behind him ran downhill into streaming darkness, toward the coast, toward ships, toward every place a free man might go. It was as black as the inside of a coffin. He stood in the rain and looked down it for the space of two breaths. The hangman’s noose came into his head the way it always did when he let himself look backward, and he put it away again, same as he had at the port.

Then he hiked the bag higher on his shoulder. The pistol inside it knocked against his spine, a hard, honest weight, the only honest thing either of them was carrying. He put his head down and followed.

The last flash before the steps showed him the house entire. Luc stopped in the rain. Water streamed off his cap into his mouth. His hand got halfway through the old sign of the cross before he made it stop. Superstition would not help him here. It had not helped him in the cellar either. God was aware of what he had done, of what he had aided in.

Open doors, past two in the morning, in the middle of a storm. A tall black mouth in the pale face of the house, rain blowing in over the threshold. Nobody standing in it, and no light behind it.

The master went up the steps without breaking stride and walked up to the great doors as if the house was inviting them in.

Perhaps, thought Luc with morose resignation, it had.

* * *

She could not stay in her bedchamber.

The bed was there, turned down and slightly rumpled. The cards were there too, still laid in their rows from before. The cheval glass stood by the window with a film of candlelight on it, and she could not be in the room with that glass. He had gone to stone in front of it. Whatever he had seen in that long white blaze of lightning, he had refused to look at it again on his way out. He had crossed the room with his eyes nailed to the door and would not give the glass another glance. She had noticed. She noticed everything.

Unclean.

So she had taken the candle and her shawl and gone down through the dark house. Past the sleeping doors. Her mother behind one of them, Lady Archer behind another. Both of them dreaming whatever the innocent dream.

The boards were cold through her slippers. The candle shook and then did not. She came into the drawing room because the drawing room had a card table in it.

The evening still lay on the green baize. Lady Archer had abandoned her hand after dinner and declared that thunder was ruinous to the nerves. Mama had gathered her winnings. Candied fruit, not coin. They played for candied fruit, for the love of heaven. Nobody had squared the pack.

Ophelia set her candle at her elbow, sat, and squared it now. The baize was rough under her palms. The room was cold, as the fire was gray. Outside the long windows the storm walked back and forth across the park. She shuffled. She dealt herself a hand of nothing against nobody.

Her father’s voice, two thousand miles away at some other table. When the game goes against you, girl, deal a fresh hand.