"Why would you come to me?" I asked at last, turning from the plaque.
He looked faintly surprised.
"Because of who you are." His lips curved in a slight, self-mocking smile. If one seeks to sell one's soul, is it not proper to go to the powers of darkness?"
"You really think that I'm a power of darkness, do you?" Plainly he did; he was more than capable of mockery, but there had been none in his original proposal.
"Aside from the stories about you in Paris, you told me so yourself," he pointed out. "When I let you go from Wentworth." He turned in the dark, shifting himself on the stone ledge.
"That was a serious mistake," he said softly. "You should never have left that place alive, dangerous creature. And yet I had no choice; your life was the price he set. And I would have paid still higher stakes than that, for what he gave me."
I made a slight hissing noise, which I muffled at once, but too late to stop him hearing me. He half-sat on the ledge, one hip resting on the stone, one leg stretched down to balance him. The moon broke through the scudding clouds outside, backlighting him through the broken window. In the dimness, head half-turned and the lines of cruelty around his mouth erased by darkness, I could mistake him again, as I had once before, for a man I had loved. For Frank.
Yet I had betrayed that man; because of my choice, that man would never be. For the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children…and thou shalt destroy him, root and branch, so that his name shall no more be known among the tribes of Israel.
"Did he tell you?" the light, pleasant voice asked from the shadows. "Did he ever tell you all the things that passed between us, him and me, in that small room at Wentworth?" Through my shock and rage, I noticed that he obeyed Jamie's injunction; not once did he use his name. "He." "Him." Never "Jamie." That was mine.
My teeth were clenched tight, but I forced the words through them.
"He told me. Everything."
He made a small sound, half a sigh.
"Whether the idea pleases you or not, my dear, we are linked, you and I. I cannot say it pleases me, but I admit the truth of it. You know, as I do, the touch of his skin—so warm, is he not? Almost as though he burned from within. You know the smell of his sweat and the roughness of the hairs on his thighs. You know the sound that he makes at the last, when he has lost himself. So do I."
"Be quiet," I said. "Be still!" He ignored me, leaning back, speaking thoughtfully, as though to himself. I recognized, with a fresh burst of rage, the impulse that led him to this—not the intention, as I had thought, to upset me, but an overwhelming urge to talk of a beloved; to rehearse aloud and live again vanished details. For after all, to whom might he speak of Jamie in this way, but to me?
"I am leaving!" I said loudly, and whirled on my heel.
"Will you leave?" said the calm voice behind me. "I can deliver General Hawley into your hands. Or you can let him take the Scottish army. Your choice, Madam."
I had the strong urge to reply that General Hawley wasn't worth it. But I thought of the Scottish chieftains now quartered in Holyroodhouse—Kilmarnock and Balmerino and Lochiel, only a few feet away on the other side of the abbey wall. Of Jamie himself. Of the thousands of clansmen they led. Was the chance of victory worth the sacrifice of my feelings? And was this the turning point, again a place of choice? If I didn't listen, if I didn't accept the bargain Randall proposed, what then?
I turned, slowly. "Talk, then," I said. "If you must." He seemed unmoved by my anger, and unworried by the possibility that I would refuse him. The voice in the dark church was even, controlled as a lecturer's.
"I wonder, you know," he said. "Whether you have had from him as much as I?" He tilted his head to one side, sharp features coming into focus as he moved out of the shadow. The fugitive light caught him momentarily from the side, lighting the pale hazel of his eyes and making them shine, like those of a beast glimpsed hiding in the bushes.
The note of triumph in his voice was faint, but unmistakable.
"I," he said softly, "I have had him as you could never have him. You are a woman; you cannot understand, even witch as you are. I have held the soul of his manhood, have taken from him what he has taken from me. I know him, as he now knows me. We are bound, he and I, by blood."
I give ye my Body, that we Two may be One…
"You choose a very odd way of seeking my help," I said, my voice shaking. My hands were clenched in the folds of my skirt, the fabric cold and bunched between my fingers.
"Do I? I think it best you understand, Madam. I do not beseech your pity, do not call upon your power as a man might seek mercy from a woman, depending upon what people call womanly sympathy. For that cause, you might come to my brother on his own account." A lock of dark hair fell loose across his forehead; he brushed it back with one hand.
"I prefer that it be a straight bargain made between us, Madam; of service rendered and price paid—for realize, Madam, that my feelings toward you are much as yours toward me must be."
That was a shock; while I struggled to find an answer, he went on.
"We are linked, you and I, through the body of one man—through him. I would have no such link formed through the body of my brother; I seek your help to heal his body, but I take no risk that his soul shall fall prey to you. Tell me, then; is the price I offer acceptable to you?"
I turned away from him and walked down the center of the echoing nave. I was shaking so hard that my steps felt uncertain, and the shock of the hard stone beneath my soles jolted me. The tracery of the great window over the disused altar stood black against the white of racing clouds, and dim shafts of moonlight lit my path.
At the end of the nave, as far as I could get from him, I stopped and pressed my hands against the wall for support. It was too dark even to see the letters of the marble tablet under my hands, but I could feel the cool, sharp lines of the carving. The curve of a small skull, resting on crossed thigh bones, a pious version of the jolly Roger. I let my head fall forward, forehead to forehead with the invisible skull, smooth as bone against my skin.
I waited, eyes closed, for my gorge to subside, and the heated pulse that throbbed in my temples to cool.
It makes no difference, I told myself. No matter what he is. No matter what he says.
We are linked, you and I, through the body of one man…Yes, but not through Jamie. Not through him! I insisted, to him, to myself. Yes, you took him, you bastard! But I took him back, I freed him from you. You have no part of him! But the sweat that trickled down my ribs and the sound of my own sobbing breath belied my conviction.
Was this the price I must pay for the loss of Frank? A thousand lives that might be saved, perhaps, in compensation for that one loss?
The dark mass of the altar loomed to my right, and I wished with all my heart that there might be some presence there, whatever its nature; something to turn to for an answer. But there was no one here in Holyrood; no one but me. The spirits of the dead kept their own counsel, silent in the stones of wall and floor.
I tried to put Jack Randall out of my mind. If it weren't him, if it were any other man who asked, would I go? There was Alex Randall to be considered, all other things aside. "For that cause, you might come to my brother on his own account," the Captain had said. And of course I would. Whatever I might offer him in the way of healing, could I withhold it because of the man who asked it?
It was a long time before I straightened, pushing myself wearily erect, my hands damp and slick on the curve of the skull. I felt drained and weak, my neck aching and my head heavy, as though the sickness in the city had laid its hand on me after all.
He was still there, patient in the cold dark.
"Yes," I said abruptly, as soon as I came within speaking distance. "All right. I'll come tomorrow, in the forenoon. Where?"
"Ladywalk Wynd," he said. "You know it?"
"Yes." Edinburgh was a small city—no more than the single High Street, with the tiny, ill-lit wynds and closes opening off it. Ladywalk Wynd was one of the poorer ones.
"I will meet you there," he said. "I shall have the information for you." He slid to his feet and took a step forward, then stood, waiting for me to move. I saw that he didn't want to pass close by me, in order to reach the door.
"Afraid of me, are you?" I said, with a humorless laugh. "Think I'll turn you into a toadstool?"
"No," he said, surveying me calmly. "I do not fear you, Madam. You cannot have it both ways, you know. You sought to terrify me at Wentworth, by giving me the day of my death. But having told me that, you cannot now threaten me, for if I shall die in April of next year, you cannot harm me now, can you?"
Had I had a knife with me, I might have shown him otherwise, in a soul-satisfying moment of impulse. But the doom of prophecy lay on me, and the weight of a thousand Scottish lives. He was safe from me.
"I keep my distance, Madam," he said, "merely because I would prefer to take no chance of touching you."
I laughed once more, this time genuinely.
"And that, Captain," I said, "is an impulse with which I am entirely in sympathy." I turned and left the church, leaving him to follow as he would.