C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

“Not to my knowledge. But then, I did mention I try to stay away from the woman.”

“Yet she knows you.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She told me I look like you.”

“Ah.” Knox reached for his ale and took a long, slow sip. He was silent for a moment, as if thoughtful. Then he said, “I hear someone tried to kill you the other night.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

The tavern owner wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of one hand and smiled. Then the smile faded. “Does Priss Mulligan know you’re looking into her?”

“She does. Why?”

“There was a smuggler named Pete Carpenter tried to cheat Priss a few years back. He had a wife and two sons. The little boys weren’t more than four or five. He came home one day to find them chopped into pieces, with the bits deliberately positioned about the house-a head sitting up on the mantel, a leg on the kitchen table, a hand under the bed-that sort of thing. He never did find his wife.”

Sebastian felt the tavern keeper’s words wash over him, raising the hairs at the back of his neck and sucking the moisture from his mouth as the horror of the tale-and its implications-hit his gut. He focused his attention on taking a long drink of his ale and swallowed, hard, before saying, “I take it you’ve heard about Preston and Sterling?”

“I have.” Knox drained his own tankard and set it aside with a soft thump . “Some people are just flat-out evil. Priss Mulligan is one of them. If I were you, I’d be careful. Of yourself, and of your family.”

Sebastian sat beside his library fire, a glass cradled in one palm, his gaze on the golden-red glow of the coals on the hearth. The house lay dark and quiet around him.

He took a sip of the brandy, felt it burn in his throat. He was drinking too much lately and he knew it-a slow, dangerous slide back into the self-destructive hell that had nearly consumed him in the months after he’d first returned to London.

The clock on the hearth chimed two and then fell silent. In its wake, the stillness of the night felt like a heavy presence, oppressive and soul sucking, and he was aware of the long, grueling hours of darkness stretching out ahead of him. He’d gone to bed with his wife; made slow, desperate love to her, then held her in his arms as she eased peacefully into sleep. He loved her with a tenderness and a passion that humbled, awed, and frightened him; he was closer to her than he had ever been to anyone. Yet in some vital, inexplicable way he found himself feeling more alone and disconnected than ever. And so he’d slipped from her side to draw on his breeches and dressing gown and come here.

He took another sip of the brandy, his unnaturally acute hearing picking up the sound of her door opening far above, her light footsteps on the stairs. He held himself very still. He did not want her to find him like this. Didn’t want her to see his weakness and his fear and his uncertainty.

She came up behind him and leaned over the chair to slip her arms around his neck and rest her linked hands against his chest. “You’re thinking about them, again, aren’t you?” she said. “The women and children of Santa Iria.”

“Yes.”

“You need to stop blaming yourself. You’ve dedicated years to making amends for a wrong that others did. But the past is past, and nothing you can do will ever change that. You can’t keep torturing yourself like this.”

He tipped back his head to look up at her. Her face was golden in the firelight, the strength of her features accentuated by the shadows and framed by the heavy fall of her dark hair.

He said, “I didn’t tell you everything.”

She brought up a hand to run the backs of her fingers down his cheek. “I know.”

In the silence that followed, he heard the fall of ash on the hearth and the endless tick of the clock. Then she came around to sit on the rug beside him and rest the side of her head against his leg.

He touched her hair, felt it slide soft and silky smooth through his fingers, and expelled his breath in a long, painful rush. “I watched the French kill them.”

“You don’t need to tell me.”

He shook his head, kept his gaze on the fire. “I knew the French captain and his men had left their camp a good half an hour before I managed to escape. But I rode to the convent anyway. It was as if I couldn’t believe that I was too late to warn them. To save them.”

He felt an ache pull across his chest. “Some of the children had been playing in an orange grove at the end of the valley when the soldiers came up. The French must have galloped at them with sabers drawn, because the earth around them was trampled by the hooves of the horses. And the children. .”

She touched his hand. “Sebastian. .”

He swallowed, remembering how he’d stopped and knelt beside each slashed, bloodied little body. “Two of the littlest ones-a boy and a girl-couldn’t have been more than five or six; big brown eyes, baby-soft light brown hair. They looked enough alike that they were probably brother and sister-maybe even twins. They were still holding hands. They must have held on to each other when the soldiers rode down on them.”

“They were dead?”

“All of them.”

“And the French?”

“I could hear horses neighing, men shouting, children screaming, women praying to God to save them. So I rode on. The convent was ancient, surrounded by a high sandstone wall. But the French had left the gates open. I could have ridden inside. I almost did. But at the last moment, I turned into a copse of trees at the edge of the road. I stayed there and watched them kill everything and everyone inside that convent. Babies in their cradles. Cattle. Chickens. Dogs. Everything.”

“And if you had ridden in? What do you think you could have done? You’d have been killed in an instant.”

“Yes. But it seemed right that I should die with them. I wanted to die with them.”

“Oh, God, Sebastian; no.”

He shook his head. “The only reason I didn’t was because I knew that if I stayed alive, I could avenge them. I planned to start with Sinclair Oliphant, but by the time I made it back to headquarters, he was gone-recalled to England on the death of his brother. So I set out after the French soldiers instead. I went back to the convent and tracked the troop that had done it until they were in a vulnerable position. And then I betrayed them to the Spanish partisans. The Spaniards knew what those men had done at Santa Iria. The soldiers’ deaths were not easy or quick.”

“And the captain?” she asked, her voice cracking.

“I’d meant to let the partisans have him too. But when I saw him again, I couldn’t stop myself. I. . beat him to death.” He realized he’d clenched his fist and forced himself to open his hand. “I tell myself he deserved to die. But what I did was little short of murder. And when it was over, I found I had no pleasure in his killing. The truth is, I live with his death and the deaths of his men as surely as I live with the deaths of the innocents of Santa Iria.”

“It was war.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was revenge. Those women and children deserve justice. But there is no real justice in murder.”

He saw her sad smile, the almost imperceptible shake of her head. She drew the line between right and wrong in a different place than he. It was one of the ways in which they differed, one of the ways in which she was very much her father’s daughter.

He touched her face, ran his fingertips along the curve of her cheek. “I believe those who die violently at the hands of others deserve justice. We owe them that. The problem is, by going after ruthless men-and women-I run the risk of putting you in danger. You and Simon too.”