Title Stripped

The notice arrived on the twenty-fourth, in an envelope of heavy cream paper, borne by a clerk of the Lord Chamberlain's office who stood on the step of Wynmore House in the rain and read it aloud with his eyes on the doorframe.

Whereas it hath been represented to His Majesty's Council that Garrick Edmund Wynmore, commonly styled Viscount Wynmore, hath engaged in acts of piracy upon the high seas, and hath harboured and abetted persons convict of the unlawful arts, His Majesty is pleased to order that the said Garrick Edmund Wynmore be suspended from his seat in the House of Peers and from the exercise of all privileges pertaining thereto; that the estates of the said Garrick Edmund Wynmore be sequestered into the hands of the Crown pending inquiry; and that the said inquiry be conducted before the Court of the Lord High Steward at the earliest convenience of the Court.

The clerk stopped. He folded the paper and held it out. He looked, Garrick thought, as if he would rather have been reading a death sentence.

"Is that all?" said Garrick.

"My lord, I... that is, sir... there will be officers, tomorrow, to take an inventory of the house. They will want the keys."

"They shall have them."

"They are very sorry, I'm sure."

"I'm sure they are." He took the envelope. "Go and get out of the rain."

The clerk fled. Garrick shut the door.

He stood in the hall with the paper in his hand. The clock ticked. The staircase rose in front of him, with its carpet and its stern portrait in a ruff, and its smell of wax and woodsmoke and a century of Wynmores. It was the house in which he had been born. In the library upstairs were three thousand books, and in the gallery, seven generations of men in wigs. His grandfather's globe stood in the window. His father's coat hung in the cupboard under the stairs.

He waited for the grief.

It did not come. He felt only a distant, curious lightness, like a man who has been carrying a trunk for years and has been told he may put it down. He turned the paper over in his fingers and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling.

"My lord?" said Tobias, from the passage.

"It's all right. We have been sequestered."

"Sir?"

"We are to be turned out. The house, the estates, the title. All of it." Garrick put the notice in his pocket. "I should go and tell Mrs. Hatch."

"She knows, sir. She had it from the cook." The footman's long mournful face was working. "She says she shall not leave. She says she was here before the new roof, and she'll be here after."

"Tell her that she's quite right."

"Yes, my lord."

"And Tobias."

"Sir?"

"I'm not a lord anymore. Or I shall not be, by morning. You had better stop."

Tobias drew himself up. For a moment his funereal face took on a dignity that was almost beautiful.

"With respect, sir," he said, "I shall not."

…

He went up to the library.

It was dusk. The lamps were not lit. The room lay in a blue half-dark, the globes pale as moons, the gallery a black shelf against the ceiling. He crossed to the great oak desk, unlocked the drawer, and drew out a thick roll of vellum bound with a violet ribbon.

It was his copy of the commission.

He had never read it again after the first night. He had put it in the drawer with the other relics of that year, the sextant, the lead box, the pale blue ribbon from Odette's letters. He untied the ribbon now and spread the vellum under the window.

His Grace Alaric, Duke of Draymoor, Grand Master of the Meridian Society, to Garrick Edmund Wynmore, Viscount, greeting. Whereas it hath pleased the Society to lend its countenance to an expedition of discovery into the southern parts of the Atlantic Ocean, we do hereby commission and empower our well-beloved...

It was a beautiful document. The hand was elegant. The seal was a perfect violet disk, with a spiral and a star. It had taken him a month to earn it, with papers and lectures and flattery, and he remembered the glow in his chest when the Duke had given it to him, standing in the Orrery Room with the planets turning behind him. You will make us proud.

He read it to the end.

Then he took hold of the top edge with both hands, and tore it in two.

It was tougher than he had expected. The vellum resisted, with a sound like the creaking of a sail. He set his teeth and pulled, and it gave all at once, with a long rending sigh, and he tore the halves again, and again, until the floor around his boots was strewn with violet-sealed scraps.

He felt nothing at all.

Then, quite suddenly, he felt everything. It came up through his chest like a wave: the anger he had not allowed himself, the shame, the loss, the long exhausted fury of a man who has been played for a fool. He swept the scraps off the desk with his sleeve. He struck the surface with his fist, and then again, and the globes rang on their stands. He stood with his head bowed and both palms flat on the wood, breathing hard, and said into the silence, in a voice that broke like glass:

"Damn you. Damn you. Damn you."

The room listened.

When it was over, he stood for a time with his eyes closed. Then he took a clean sheet of paper and a pen and sat down and wrote, in his small neat hand:

Your Grace: I return the commission, with thanks. I shall not be at the Society on Friday. Nor shall the chart. G.W.

He sealed it with his signet. It was the last time he would use it.

…

Jory came in by the area door at nine that night, wet to the skin, with a basket on his arm and a battered hat pulled over his eyes.

He had been Garrick's cabin boy for two years. He was fourteen and wiry and resolute. He had spent the summer at the Albatross's mooring in the Pool with Brandt and the crew, and had come to Hartwell Square twice in the weeks since the arrest, ostensibly to deliver rope, in fact to sit in the kitchen with Mrs. Hatch and tell her tales of the river. He had been told nothing. He had worked it all out.

"Captain." He pulled off his hat. "You sent for me."

"I did. Sit. Eat. You look half-drowned."

"I'm all right." Jory sat on the edge of the kitchen settle and accepted a bowl of soup from the cook with the air of a man receiving a medal. He ate in silence, as boys do, for three minutes. Then he looked up with wary dark eyes. "Is it true what they're saying?"

"What are they saying?"

"That Miss Ixara's a witch. That she's got the Devil in her. That they're going to burn her." The spoon trembled. "That ain't right, sir. I know it ain't. She told me about my mum."

"I know."

"She said she was proud of me."

"I know, Jory."

"Then why—"

"Because there are some people in this world," said Garrick, "who cannot bear to be wrong." He sat down across from the boy. "I need something. It will be dangerous. I have no right to ask a boy of fourteen, and if you say no, I shall think none the worse of you."

"What is it?"

Garrick drew a breath.

"There is a woman," he said. "In Wapping. Her name is Eleanor Garrow. They call her Nell. She keeps a cutter called the Gull's Penny in the lower Pool, and she has a great many friends in the river trade. Sailors, lightermen, coal-whippers. Men who dig. Men who carry. Men who know where the tunnels run." He looked at the boy steadily. "They are called the Tidewater Men. Pike knew her father. He did some doctoring for them, years ago."

"Smugglers," said Jory.

"Free traders." A grim ghost of a smile. "I want you to find her. I want you to give her this."

He took a folded paper from his breast. It was small and sealed in plain wax, with no device. Jory took it, turned it over in his fingers, and slipped it inside his shirt without a word.

"What does it say?"

"That a man would like to speak with her about a shipment." Garrick's eyes were hard. "And that he is willing to pay."

"With what? Sir, I'm sorry, but they've taken the house."

"There are things they cannot take." He thought of the lead box, and the sextant, and the black ship at its mooring in the Pool. He thought of Odette's school-room, and the Wynmore plate in the strongroom, and the deeds in his bankers' vault in Fleet Street, and the great estate at Marlow with its farms and its mills and its eight hundred tenants. "A man who is about to lose everything is a man with a very great deal to spend."

Jory regarded him for a long moment.

Then he stood. He tucked the cap over his eyes, and buttoned his coat, and tugged the basket onto his arm. At the door, he turned.

"Captain."

"Yes?"

"If it comes to it. If you need a hand." The boy's chin lifted. "I can go up a mast in the dark. I can climb a wall. I've picked a lock since I was seven."

"I know you have."

"I'd go in with you."

Garrick looked at him. At the thin freckled face, the stubborn jaw, the wet dark eyes of a boy who had lost his mother and did not mean to lose anyone else.

"I know that, too," he said quietly. "Go carefully, lad."

…

He found Odette awake.

It was past midnight. The house had gone quiet. The rain had stopped, and a thin moon lay on the carpet through the half-drawn curtains. She sat up in bed with her knees drawn up and her shawl round her shoulders, and the small lamp burning on the nightstand, and a letter in her lap. She had been crying. He saw it at once, in the red eyes and the blotched cheeks, and the crumpled handkerchief clutched in her fist.

He stopped in the doorway.

"I heard," she said.

"Odette—"

"I heard all of it. Pike told me. Not on purpose; he was talking to Mrs. Hatch in the passage. I listened." She did not look at him. "I have been lying here for two hours trying to decide whether to be angry or sorry. I think I am both."

He came in and sat on the end of the bed. The mattress sagged. They sat for a time in silence, the brother and sister, with the moon on their hands.

"Tell me," said Odette.

"What?"

"All of it. From the start. Don't spare me." She lifted her chin. "I am not a child, Garrick. I am going to be eighteen this winter. If I am going to die, I should like to know why."

"You are not—"

"Garrick."

He told her.

It took an hour. He told her about the smoking-room and the sailor and the Duke. He told her about the ship, and the island, and the shrine, and the woman asleep on the dais. He told her about the gold. He told her about the long voyage, and the stowaway, and the envelopes; and then, because he had promised himself he would not hide, about the nights, and the child, and the cell. He told her about the Duke's laughter. He did not make himself smaller than he was. When he came to the end, he sat with his hands hanging between his knees and his head bowed, and waited.

For a long time she said nothing.

"You stole it," said Odette at last.

"Yes."

"From a person. A real one. A priestess."

"Yes."

"For me."

"Yes."

"You saved me," she said slowly, in a voice he'd never heard, thin, cold, fierce, "by hurting someone else."

He flinched.

"That is not what I—"

"It is exactly what you did." She was shaking. "Don't you see? Don't you see? I have lain here all these months, and I've been happy, I've been grateful, I thought you had found some wonderful miracle at last. I thought, he is so clever, he has done it, he has fixed it, it is all right. And all the while it was somebody's heart. A woman's. A people's." The tears were running down her face. "I took every breath, every day, on their life."

"Odette."

"Don't you dare say it was for me."

"It was for you."

"I know it was for me! That is the worst of it!" Her voice cracked and rose, and she pressed her fist to her mouth, and coughed. It went on a long time. He reached for her, and she struck his hand away, and sat doubled over on the pillows, gasping, with the handkerchief stained crimson in her fist.

When it passed, she lay back. Her breath whistled. Her face was gray and wet.

"I am so angry with you," she whispered.

"I know."

"I love you so much."

"I know."

"I think I hate it. I think I hate that you would do such a thing, and I love you, and I'd have done the same."

"Would you?"

"No." She laughed, a faint wet broken sound. "No. I should have been too frightened. That's the difference. You are brave and I am a coward and you do terrible things because you cannot bear to see me hurt. And I let you. I let you, because I wanted so much to live."

"There is nothing wrong with wanting to live."

"There is, if it costs a whole forest." She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. The great gray eyes were swimming, but they were steady. "What are you going to do?"

He drew a breath.

"I'm going to give it back," he said.

She was silent.

"I'm going to take it out of the Duke's vault and carry it to the island. I'm going to put it in the niche with my own hands, and I'm going to stand before the Ahtelan and tell them what I've done. And I'm going to get Ixara out of that cell first, if I have to tear the place down brick by brick." He kept his voice low, level, clear. "I won't have the Duke's promise anymore. I won't have anything. And I am going to have to ask you to understand that if the stone goes back, then the one chance I had of..." He faltered. "Of keeping you."

"I know."

"It was never a real chance. The Duke lied. But I'd still have..." He stopped. "I'd still have tried. And now I won't. Do you understand what I'm saying? If I give it back, I can't give it to you."

"Garrick."

"There's no other way. I've looked. I've looked everywhere."

"Garrick."

She took his hand. Her fingers were cold, light, almost weightless, and they closed round his with a strength that surprised him. He looked up. She was smiling, a small crooked radiant smile, the smile she'd had at nine years old on the observatory stairs, when she had said Hold on, I'll be right behind you.

"You great stupid wonderful man," said Odette. "You think I want to be saved at that price?"

"I don't—"

"I want you to do it." She squeezed his hand. "I want you to take it back. I want you to stand in front of those people and be ashamed, and then I want you to make it right, because that's who you are. That's the person I've been trying to love through all those silly equations." Her eyes shone. "Promise me."

"I can't promise—"

"Promise me. Do the right thing, Garrick." Her voice was soft. "Even if I die."

The lamp burned. The moon moved on the floor. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed one, and the sound fell through the quiet like a pebble into water.

He put his head down on his sister's knees and wept.