The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay (summer reads txt) 📗

“It is the end,” Hunter said. “Go to her. Find her.”

“But…will she… Can’t she…”

Slowly, Hunter shook his head.

Jacob stood and wiped his eyes. As his senses returned, he was suddenly aware he had lost track of Madam Huxley. She was nowhere in the room. Jacob felt an ominous pull toward the open balcony, the hint of a memory just beneath the surface of his mind. The memory of a fleeting shape during the heart of the attack.

He walked through the exterior doors and looked over the rails. There upon the rocks was the broken form of Marianne Huxley, some three stories below. With her son dead and her legacy ruined, Jacob was quite certain she had thrown herself off. Though her body lay still, her lips continued moving up and down, her mouth forming the words of some final, unknowable prayer. He supposed he should feel pity.

But he did not.

“Go now, before it’s too late,” Hunter said.

Jacob found one of Thomas’s coats in the corner and put it on. Then he bent to pick up his flintlock.

The Indian shook his head again. “You won’t need that.”

Jacob picked it up anyway. “You said it yourself. It is the end, one way or another.”

Chapter 31

Her trail began in the field of violets and ran crosswise into the trees, an assortment of broken twigs, muddy footprints, and bloody leavings. It was not difficult to follow.

All round him came the sounds of the forest. Insects which should have been long dead in the cold. Frogs which should have been absent ’til spring. Birds which now sang to the moon instead of the sun. They had all come to sing her goodbye.

The ones nearest him scattered as he made his way through the wood, fleeing both from the boy himself and from the torch which he carried before him. Deeper and deeper he went, tracing Isabella’s path into the vast and unknowable wilderness. Then, abruptly, her trail disappeared. All signs of her presence evaporated. He searched the area, and quite by accident, stumbled over a thin piece of thread strung between the trees.

He held the light to it. The thread continued on into the forest, a low, red line trailing off into the night. He began to walk alongside it.

The thread became two threads. Then three, then ten, all of them woven together as they bent and curved into the darkness. He stayed with them until the stump of his leg began to ache, and the fire of his torch began to burn low. What would happen when it went out, he did not know.

There came a light ahead. A place where the trees broke and the moon shone down upon a small clearing. In its center was a crumpled figure, draped upon a log which lay felled upon the mossy floor. He swallowed once and stepped into the light.

It was the Isabella he remembered. Long, golden hair, frost-colored eyes, lips both pouty and stubborn. But the other Isabella was there too. The dark, dangerous creature he had first seen outside of The Fisherman’s Fancy. She was there within her skin, an apparition of light and smoke.

They were dying together, the two of them, their life blood draining upon the log. Strangest of all were the threads. They curved round the trees and over the moss, entering her body through the hole in her side, the place she had been pierced by musket fire.

She lifted her head and regarded him weakly from upon the log. At the same instant, the wind whispered through the trees, three words he knew all too well.

“My…servant…boy…”

Jacob dropped the torch and ran to her, kneeling at the log and taking her delicate body within his hands. He kissed her and kissed her, but no matter how much he wished it, his lips did not make her strong again.

“Please,” he said, looking to the heavens. “If anyone can hear me, please spare her this pain.”

“Believed you not in such things when you first brought her to the wood,” said a voice.

Jacob spun to find a dark-haired woman in a wine-colored gown at his back, watching them from behind the log. His mouth formed a single, bitter word. “You.”

“You did not expect to find me that first night. Otherwise, you would never have taken her. I suppose you brought her to make her happy,” the Lady said, moving round the log. “She told me much of you when she first arrived. More after I helped dispense of her betrothed. Glad to be rid of that one, she was. Still, I do not think she knew she loved you then.”

Jacob pulled Isabella closer, speaking to the woman without looking up. “What do you want?”

“I think you know.”

“I’m not interested in your games, woman.”

“I play no games. I offer only truth.”

“Truth?” Jacob spat. He laid Isabella down and snatched his flintlock from the ground. “Do not speak to me of truth.”

She began to pace a small circle, oblivious to his sudden change in temperament. “Is it not true that you could have taken her from this place long before she met me? Is it not true that it was you who brought the priest to her very door, when her father lay poisoned? Is it not true,” she added with some relish, “that it is your wound she now harbors within her body?”

He leveled the flintlock at her.

“Oh, my lovely,” she said. “What I could do with a soul that burns like yours.”

There was a time when Jacob would have never harmed another person for the greater good. When he would never have dispensed his own justice at the point of a flintlock. That time was past.

The woman spread her arms. “Do you not first wish to hear my proposal?”

Jacob pulled the trigger. There was a hollow click as the hammer fell upon an empty chamber. He stared at the barrel. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember if he had reloaded the weapon, and if he had…

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