Page 72 of Baron Bolt

Not the promise. He was not running through a drowned county because of the promise.

Not for Edward’s hand closing on his.

Not for the words a dying man had spent his last clear minutes extracting.

Not for duty. He had served duty his entire life, and duty had never once made his chest do this.

For her.

For Ophelia. The beautiful English rose, and the gamester hidden underneath it that was his alone to know. A pack of cards going through her fingers by firelight, quick and soft as a conjurer.

The first joke he had made in a year. He could no longer even remember the joke. She had laughed, delighted, and dealt him in.

Her straight spine.

Her nerve.

The way she stood on her own two feet in a world that kept pulling the rug from under her.

The child she carried, that he had sworn to a dying man to shelter, and had come to think of as his own. He could not name the night that had changed. Only that it had.

He loved her. As much as a creature of the undead such as he could love, he loved her with all that he was.

He did not break stride.

Hard behind it, uglier, came the rest. The belief that had marched him out of that house tonight, out of her light and into this rain, was the very belief he must reject. Word for word. The thing from the cellar is not a man. It has no claim to a house, a name, a wife, a living future. It belongs to the slab.

Damian had kept the faith that he was monstrous, unholy, unnatural, undeserving. Every collar buttoned to the throat had been an article of that creed. Every locked door. Every night he had neglected her. Every inch he had put between his scars and her hands.

No more. The words came down with his heel in the flooded road, and again, and again. No more. No more. No more.

One way or the other, the secret died tonight. He would stand in that drawing room and put it into words to her. Or perhaps the anatomist would end the argument with powder and ball, and the secret could bleed out of him onto the floor with everything else. Either road led to the same destination. He was done. He had died once in the company of fifty thousand men, and he had been living ever since in solitary confinement, but no longer.

The brook at the park’s edge had left its banks and taken the footbridge approaches with it. He went through rather than around. Thigh-deep. The current dragged at him like hands, but he had the strength to push through it. He hauled himself up the far bank by a fistful of alder and took the park pale at the top of it. Wet stone under both palms. Over. Down. He never quite came to a stop. Where the doctor went, the manservant went. If he was out here, let him witness. Let him count the gates his master’s creature cleared, and run ahead, and report what was coming up the drive.

Then the meadows. His meadows. The soft green fields he had dreamed across France lay drowned under a black sheen of water, throwing the lightning back at the sky in broken silver. He crossed them at a full run. The house rose ahead of him. Dark. Every window dark. His home standing in the storm as if it were holding its breath.

He came onto the gravel of the sweep still at speed, and made himself stop.

Made himself stand. Chest heaving. Rain hammering the drive to white spray around his feet. He gathered the run back into himself. Not because the body needed it. Because he would not come to his creator’s table at a run, like something whistled for and fetched. And because a startled madman’s finger on a trigger was death. Not his own. His own had ceased to signify. Hers. So he must walk. Up his own sweep. Up his own steps. The hardest thirty yards of patient walking he had done in his life.

The great doors stood ajar.

Rain was blowing in across the threshold of his house, puddling on the flags where generations of Archers had stamped the mud off their boots. That open door. That violated dark. The wrongness of it burned colder than anything the storm had managed all night. He pushed the door wide and stepped through. The tempest went muffled behind stone, dropping from cannonade to a vast dull sea-roar in the walls. Inside, the loudest thing was Damian and the slow beat of his heart. Even now, slow, as if he had barely exerted himself. Water ran off him, and he walked in.

Down the long dark of the hall, the drawing room door stood rimmed in gold.

Candlelight lay out under it and along its edges. Through the door, low and even, came a man’s voice, going over and over something in a language that was not English. The same phrases, circling, the way a man speaks when he has stopped speaking to men. And beneath it, from her, there was nothing.

Which meant she was listening. Which meant she was counting the table. Which meant she was playing.

Hold your cards, my love. I am joining the table.

Behind him the sky split white from end to end, flooded the doorway, and threw his shadow the whole length of the hall. Long. Black. Enormous. Up the door itself. The storm that had stood over his making, now lighting his way to her. He could almost have laughed. Perhaps God had not forsaken him after all.

Damian walked down the hall of his own house toward the door. Water ran off him onto the flags. Each step left a dark print that the dark took back. He was going to deliver it. The body. The secret. The whole haunted battlefield of what he was. And bury it there in front of witnesses, one way or the other, tonight.

He knew what was waiting behind that door. He knew what it would cost.