C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

“Aye, my lord.”

Leaving the hackney in the shadows of a line of darkened, dilapidated shops, Sebastian slipped down the street. The air here was heavy and wet, and thick with the pungent odors of the nearby tan yards and glue manufactories and breweries. On the flagway beside the church’s ancient medieval tower, he paused, a cold wind billowing the mist around him.

He could see them now, three mist-shrouded figures: the magistrate’s form tall and bulky; the Frenchman small, agile; the girl dragged along with one frail arm gripped in Leigh-Jones’s meaty fist as they worked their way through the sunken, crowded graves. The moon had utterly disappeared behind the thick, bunching clouds.

The wall surrounding the churchyard was built of stone and low and crumbling; Sebastian climbed it easily. Hunkering down, he was slipping cautiously from one tomb to the next when the girl’s voice, sounding surprisingly strong, stopped him.

“This is it,” she said.

“You’re certain this time?” snapped Leigh-Jones, raising his lantern to peer at the tomb before them.

“I think so.”

The Frenchman gave a scornful laugh. “That’s what she said before she wasted ten minutes digging around the foundations of the last tomb where she insisted she’d hid it.”

“It ain’t easy to see in the dark! Maybe if we could come back tomorrow when it’s light, I could-”

Leigh-Jones said, “Just shut up and dig.”

The Frenchman pulled a pistol from his waistband and pressed the muzzle against the girl’s temple. “Only, make certain you have the right tomb this time, ma petite . No more games, hmm?”

Jenny Davie froze, the moist wind curling the honey-colored hair around her fine-boned face and flattening the skirts of her ragged dress against her legs. Unlike the two men, who were muffled in greatcoats and hats, she was bareheaded, her arms covered only by the thin stuff of her dress and wrapped across her chest for warmth. She stared back at the Frenchman, as if evaluating the seriousness of his threat. She must have decided he meant it, because she jerked her head toward a tomb that lay closer to the long wall of the church’s nave. “I think maybe I made a mistake and it’s over there.”

The Frenchman grunted.

She led them to a tomb so old the weathered, moss-covered stones were cracked and crumbling, the top tilted at a forty-five degree angle. Crouching down near one end, she began to dig at the base, the rush of the disturbed, falling rubble sounding unnaturally loud in the fog-shrouded night.

At some point, she’d obviously brought the diamond here, to the place where she’d played as a child, and hidden it. As Sebastian watched, she hesitated in her digging. Then her left hand swooped into the rubble to close over something just as her right seized a chunk of stone the size of her fist. He could see the tension in every line of her body, see her gathering herself like a sprinter ready to run.

Leigh-Jones had set the lantern atop the tomb and now stood slightly off to one side, while the Frenchman had positioned himself nearby, his pistol held in a slackened grip. As Sebastian watched, Jenny drew back her hand and chucked the jagged rock at the Frenchman’s head.

“Mon Dieu,” he swore. He tried to duck, lost his footing, and went down with a grunt.

Darting up, Jenny took off running across the darkened church-yard, toward the ancient ruined gatehouse shrouded by mist in the distance.

“Don’t just stand there, you fool,” shouted the Frenchman, scrambling to his feet. “After her! She’s got the diamond!”

Leigh-Jones started off down the slope in a lumbering trot. “For God’s sake, just shoot her!”

Taking careful aim on the girl’s running figure, the Frenchman was tightening his finger on the trigger when Sebastian barreled into him.

The impact knocked the Frenchman flat on his back, the pistol exploding harmlessly into the air as it flew from his hand and spun out of sight into the high grass.

Rolling nimbly away from Sebastian’s grasp, he reared up into a crouch, a knife gleaming in his fist. “You again,” he spat.

Leaping to his feet, Sebastian snatched the horn lantern from the tomb’s cracked surface just as the Frenchman lunged, blade flashing.

Pivoting, Sebastian smashed the lantern down on the Frenchman’s hand, plunging them into darkness and sending the knife clattering against the side of the tomb. As the Frenchman staggered back, Sebastian swung the lantern again, this time at the man’s head.

The Frenchman ducked, then came up with an explosive kick that drove the heel of his boot into Sebastian’s right knee.

Sebastian’s leg collapsed beneath him in a fireball of pain. As he fell, the Frenchman kicked at him again, aiming this time for Sebastian’s head.

Hands flashing up, Sebastian grabbed the French agent’s boot with both hands and twisted.

Caught off balance, the Frenchman fell back, his head making an ugly thwunking sound as it struck the edge of the tomb. He slithered down the side of the moss-covered monument in a disjointed sprawl, then lay still, an ugly sheen of dark wetness staining the weathered stone behind him.

Staggering to his feet, Sebastian gritted his teeth and set off in an ungainly lope toward the ancient abbey gatehouse at the base of the churchyard. Every step sent an excruciating jolt of agony radiating up from his injured knee, so that by the time he reached the rubbish-strewn cobbled court before the ruined gatehouse, a cold sweat filmed his body and his breath was coming ragged and fast.

Built of coursed rough stone, the gatehouse rose a story and a half above its central vaulted archway. Once, the recessed arch had been richly ornamented with carvings, the mullioned windows above embellished with a vinelike tracery. But the passing centuries had battered and crumbled the stone, while the smoke and grime of generations had blurred and obliterated the details of what remained.

To the west of the gatehouse ranged a long, two-story stone building that might once have been an attached guesthouse or almonry but had long since degenerated into mean lodgings. Now the buildings stood vacant, windows and doorways gaping, roof tiles broken and missing, their supporting timbers collapsing. All other traces of the abbey had vanished long ago; beyond these few ruined fragments stretched only market gardens and open fields, empty beneath the wind-bunched clouds scuttling and thickening across the black sky.

Jenny Davie and Bertram Leigh-Jones had disappeared.

Pausing in the shadows of the gatehouse’s arched passageway, Sebastian stood still, listening. He heard the scuff of a heavy tread overhead, a girl’s frightened gasp. Then came Leigh-Jones’s voice, pitched to a coaxing croon that did little to disguise the gruff anger roiling beneath. “I’m not going to hurt you, girl. All I want is the diamond. Just give me the diamond and I’ll let you go.”

“Ye take me fer a flat?” yelled Jenny, her voice high-pitched with fear and defiance. “Don’t ye come near me!”

Moving quietly, Sebastian crept up the tightly wound medieval staircase that opened to one side of the vaulted passage. The old stone treads were worn into such deeply sunken grooves in the center that the awkwardness of each step twisted his injured knee and stole his breath. By the time he reached the single chamber above, it was empty.

At one time, this had been a grand space, with oak-paneled walls and a sandstone fireplace built into the opposite wall. But much of the paneling had been torn down and burned for firewood, while part of the chimney had collapsed into a cascade of rubble strewn across the room’s scarred wooden floor. At the far end of the chamber, a crude ladder led to the loft above. Sebastian had one foot on the first rung when Jenny screamed again.