A Far Better Thing, page 5
Then he had returned to London, murdered his changeling, and disappeared. It was almost certainly an attempt to escape the fairies, the only one I had ever heard. The only question was whether or not he had succeeded.
Lucie was asking me something; I had to ask her to repeat it.
“I asked if you knew Paris.”
“I do. I studied law in Paris, a long time ago.”
A smile curled her perfect mouth. “It can’t have been that long, Mr. Carton. You aren’t that old.”
I laughed. “Well,” I amended, “it feels like a long time ago, and I feel older still. Did they know your father before his time in prison, these Defarges?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said. “I was young at the time, and didn’t know all the particulars. My understanding was that they had simply heard of his case, and felt sorry for him.”
“They sound kind,” I said, with a certain amount of irony. In my experience, nobody was that kind.
“They do, don’t they?” I think Lucie had missed my irony, but I couldn’t be sure. “The thing is, I don’t believe they were. It sounds terrible to say it. But I always felt their help came from hatred rather than compassion.”
“Hatred for whom?”
“The prison, perhaps. The Ancient Regime. The nobles who put men and women away at a word. I think their help was an act of revenge. It’s like that in France sometimes.”
“It’s like that everywhere.”
“Perhaps.” She gestured before I could say anything more. “We’re just through here.”
“We.” I discovered as I followed Lucie outside, encompassed Charles Darnay himself—as well as Dr. Manette and Mr. Lorry. It was the first time I’d seen my double since the trial, though I’d kept an eye on him and knew he’d been working as a French tutor nearby. I was unpleasantly struck by how neat and clean he looked: dark hair caught back from his face, clothes well-fitted, shirt and cravat crisp despite the heat. I had come from a sleepless night by way of the mortuary, so looked very far from the same. But he was courteous, as always, and even seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“Mr. Carton,” he said. “I was only saying to Dr. Manette that I hadn’t seen you in some time. How nice to find you here.”
“It’s very nice to find myself here,” I said, and surprisingly, amidst everything, it was true.
I had taken tea under the plane tree before (it was always “the plane tree” to the Manettes, though it was the only tree in the courtyard). On that day in particular, perhaps because Stryver wasn’t there, the rustling leaves and curving branches overhead made me feel a thousand miles from London. I stayed far longer than I meant to, and relaxed and talked far more than I meant to as well.
By the time encroaching darkness moved us inside, the storm was almost there. We waited for it by the open windows. Lucie sat next to her father on the sofa, with Darnay beside her. I leaned against the window frame, and let the cool wind blow against my face and tease my hair. The heat had grown no less oppressive as the rain drew closer.
Dr. Manette watched the gathering clouds, his thin face unreadable. “The storm comes slowly.”
“It comes surely,” I said.
We spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people watching and waiting for lightning always do.
That house, I’d noticed before, was remarkable for echoes—the Manettes’ rooms were below street level, so that even when there was nobody in sight, the sitting room often reverberated with footsteps. Now, as people on the streets above dashed for cover and for home, the room thrummed as though with the erratic beat of a drum.
“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” Darnay announced, and though I was trying to be charitable, I couldn’t help but think what a foolish thing it was to say.
Lucie’s eyes glowed. “Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” I sensed that in some way, for her, the echoes were hers. “Sometimes, I have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied—but even a fancy makes me shudder tonight, when all is so black and solemn.”
“Let us shudder too,” he suggested. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing, really.” She went on, though, after a pause. “I have sat sometimes alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be all the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-by into our lives.”
“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,” I said. The thought was a strange thrill; I caught Lucie’s eye, and saw that she felt it too.
My changeling had not caught the power of the idea. “Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette?” he said, smiling. “Or are we to divide them among us?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Darnay,” Lucie said, a little defensively. “I told you it was only a fancy, but you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my life, and my father’s.”
“I take them into mine!” I declared. In the brooding of the storm I felt as though I was casting a spell. “I ask no questions and make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette, and I see them—by the lightning!” A vivid crash of lightning threw the room into sharp relief. I saw Miss Manette’s face, alight with wonder.
The thunder came a moment later, like a rumble on the wind.
“And I hear them!” I added. “Here they come, fast, fierce, and furious!”
All at once the heavens opened. The room roared with the sound of the rain, no longer merely like footsteps but like gunshots and voices, the howls of the wind like screams. Lightning and thunder clashed and rolled in rapid succession, over and over, and we could scarcely hear our own sounds of wonder over the tumult. The candlelight cast a sheen on the blanket of rain, as if we were behind a sheer curtain, and a battle was being waged outside it.
“Good God!” Mr. Lorry exclaimed.
He had good reason, though he didn’t know it.
It was the Wild Hunt.
I’d heard the Wild Hunt three times before. The first time was in the Realm, as Ivy and I were crossing a stretch of forest. They weren’t after us, but we knew they would kill us at a glance. We threw ourselves under the carpet of ferns, and clung to each other as they howled and shrieked overhead. It was a long time afterwards before we stopped shaking—even Ivy, who wasn’t afraid of anything.
I will not talk about the second time, not yet.
The third time was at Shrewsbury, a few years after I left the Realm. I was sixteen, all long limbs and dark hair and dissatisfaction, and I was sitting awake in the dormitory at the dark turn of midnight. The Hunt’s passage woke up the other boys. Their usual bluster dissolved at once; their cries and sobs were lost beneath the hunting screams that swirled about the halls. Stryver crawled under the bed and lay there, whimpering like an infant. I made no sound this time. I sat upright, heart pounding, and prayed to anyone that would listen that they were not coming for me. I wanted to die sometimes, especially in those days, but not like that. Please, not like that.
The following night, after the storm had passed, they found a vagrant lying dead in the fields not half a mile away, his face a white mask of terror. They said he’d died of exposure and fright. In fact, his heart had been devoured from inside his chest, without leaving a mark on him. Fairies can do that at the last, and the Wild Hunt do it all the time. It was just sport, I believe, that time. Shropshire is fair game to the fairy hunters, as are men caught wandering in woods or fields at night.
This time was different. I’d never heard of the Hunt in London, and the sun was barely setting. They were here for a purpose. I heard their shrieks and trumpets, their hoofbeats and ululating calls, furious and overwhelming. I should have been terrified, but I looked across at Lucie Manette, and I was not. Some vague public school memory came to me of Romeo shouting to the heavens “Then I defy you stars,” of Hamlet declaring “We defy augury,” and the words fit the feeling rising in my chest. My heart thrummed with the primal joy that comes from setting oneself against fate.
They were after Barsad. They had to be. Which meant, incredibly, that he truly had escaped. His changeling had been dead for days, but they were only searching now, when the body had been found, and they were searching London, when he was almost certainly thousands of miles away. Whatever Shadow was planning, it had opened an impossible door for him—a door that led to freedom. I had no interest in freedom for myself. It was too late for me. But if Barsad could escape our captors, then perhaps revenge wasn’t as far out of reach as I believed it to be. Perhaps there was a flicker of hope.
“What can you hear that we don’t?” I thought I heard Lucie’s voice say, and when I looked at her she was looking up at me. Nobody else heard her over the noise, and I doubted the strength of my own voice to ask her what she meant.
* * *
IT WAS after midnight by the time the storm died, and approaching one o’clock when Mr. Lorry, Darnay, and myself emerged from the house into clear air. The night outside seemed dazed, as though not quite sure what had just hit it.
“Well, good night, Mr. Carton,” Mr. Lorry said to me as we parted, for the first time with real friendliness. I always felt friendliness towards him, though I may not have shown it; tonight, I could almost feel it for Charles Darnay as well. The storm had bound us together. I suspected Lucie would like the idea of a friendship being baptised in thunder and lightning. Ivy would have.
“Good night,” I replied. “And good night, Mr. Darnay.”
Just for that moment, I was happy, and I had never thought to feel happy again.
* * *
IT’S HARD to see a fairy at night. Something about the elusive quality of the shadows, or the lack thereof. I don’t know how I managed it when I was also dull with mental and bodily exhaustion, but when I returned to my rooms in the early hours of the morning, the shape was clearly visible.
“Oh God,” I sighed, slumping down on the sofa and letting my head fall against the back of it. For once, my unconcern was real. I was still riding the elation of the storm—a fairy visit was unwelcome, it always was, but it weighed as little more than an annoyance against my newfound knowledge that they could be tricked. “Not tonight.”
“It’s no longer tonight, Memory,” the fairy said. “It’s today.”
I yawned. “Tonight, today, dawn, dusk—it’s all a trick of the light. Not now.”
“Now.”
Far too late, I recognised that amused note. A cold trickle went down my spine. “It’s you, isn’t it? Shadow?”
“It is.”
I sat up slowly, every nerve in my body stiffening at once. I should have known. A fairy visit on the same night I learned of Barsad’s escape? Of course I should have known. But in all my years in the mortal world, I had never before been visited by the same fairy twice.
“I told you we would speak again,” Shadow said into the silence.
“Does this have anything to do with the Wild Hunt?” I kept my question as innocent as I could. “I heard it go through Soho Square tonight. I don’t think I’ve heard it in London before.”
“Don’t concern yourself with the Wild Hunt.”
“So with what should I concern myself? What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to murder the Marquis de Saint Evrémonde,” Shadow replied.
Suddenly, I was wide awake.
CHAPTER 4
IN WHICH I MURDER THE MARQUIS DE SAINT EVRÉMONDE
I KNEW now how it felt to be Charles Darnay. I barely recognised myself reflected in the glass of the carriage window as it passed through the Paris streets—a carriage, I should add, far more opulent than any I could have dreamed of affording. My hair was neatly brushed and tied, my clothes were clean and the cravat knotted perfectly. I was even relatively sober. It was miserable.
Paris was even hotter than London that summer: a low, heavy heat, under brooding grey skies. Under other circumstances, I might have been interested to come back to my old student haunts, and see how the streets had grown shabbier and dirtier under the new king. I might, under other circumstances, have been interested to be Charles Darnay. This time, however, I was planning a murder. I was also planning an act of treachery against fairykind. I didn’t have a lot of time for scenery.
* * *
A MURDER is not the worst task a mortal servant can be asked to do. I know this from bitter experience. But on the night of the Manettes’ storm, a few weeks earlier, it had been a new one, and it had shaken me in a way I thought I could no longer be shaken by fairy commands.
“The Realm has never asked me to kill anybody before,” I said, foolishly.
“There are a great many things that we’ve never asked you to do before,” Shadow replied. “Did you think that meant we would never ask you to do them? We have no regard for mortal lives, Memory. We own you.”
I knew that, of course. I couldn’t believe, in that moment, I had ever been dreaming of revenge.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, and rested my head in my hands. There was a metallic taste in the back of my throat, and I suspected I could be sick with very little provocation. The worst of it was that I knew even then that I would indeed kill the Marquis de Saint Evrémonde, whoever he may be.
“If it helps,” Shadow said on the other side of my hands, “he is a very bad person.”
“What else is he?” I raised my head to look at the fairy—or what I could see of him. “Who is he to you?”
“You don’t need to know who he is to us. He is one of the richest landowners in France, he is a tyrant and a murderer. He is also Charles Darnay’s uncle.”
The full implications of that took a while to sink in. I was glad I was sitting down. “You mean he’s my uncle.”
“I mean he is the uncle of Charles Darnay, born Evrémonde. His brother, now deceased, was Darnay’s father. He has been estranged from his nephew for many years. He has written to Darnay asking his nephew to call on him at his château—the chateau Darnay is to inherit upon his death, along with a poor but vast estate. Charles Darnay has not replied; he has no wish to see his family. You will go to the chateau instead, in the guise of Charles Darnay, and you will kill the Marquis.”
“And Charles Darnay will be hanged for his murder?”
“How can he be? Charles Darnay will be in an entirely different country at the time—a poor tutor, instructing his students in French at the very time of the murder. Charles Darnay will inherit the estate.”
“Is that why you want the Marquis dead? So Darnay will inherit?”
“No,” Shadow said.
My head spun. I tried another deep breath. “But if Darnay is—” I shook my head, and gave up. “Hold on.”
Shadow waited as I stood, went to my bedside table, and poured from an opened bottle into a dirty glass. By the second refill my hands were shaking less.
This had to be something to do with Barsad’s escape. The timing was too perfect. It had to have something to do with Lucie Manette as well. But I was no closer to finding out what, and I was a lot closer to something far worse.
“You’re going to destroy your use to me,” Shadow said, as I poured a third glass.
“That isn’t my plan, but it would be a good one.” I swallowed, and closed my eyes as the warmth spread throughout my body and numbed the worst of the nausea. “I intend to ignore the information that I’m French nobility by birth. It’s very unlikely to matter, given that I’m no longer that person. Let’s return to the murder. I’m well aware that Charles Darnay will have an alibi. How, though, will the mysterious impostor sleeping at the Marquis’s house on the night of the murder—myself, by the way—be able to avoid apprehension and charges by the French police?”
“You’re very clever, Memory,” Shadow said, “and you know the law. You will think of something.”
“You won’t tell me why you wish him dead?”
“No,” Shadow said. “You know us better than that. You do what we instruct, and you do not ask why. That is the price you pay for your life here.”
“What happens if I refuse?”
“You spent one day in a fairy prison after Ivy’s death,” Shadow said calmly. “You can imagine an eternity spent there, formless and alone. Why? Do you plan to refuse?”
I closed my eyes. The weariness was creeping back, aided by the wine, and I actually welcomed the deadening sense of just not caring. The fairy would be gone sooner if I agreed without question, and I could lie down. That was all the power I had in this. “Of course I won’t refuse. You know I can’t refuse.”
“Yes,” Shadow said. “I know. When do you intend to do it?”
“That’s to be my decision?”
“To an extent. It will have to be soon.”
The terrible thing was, I could do it. Even still reeling with horror, wine, and lack of sleep, I could plan a murder. “The long holiday’s about to start in a few weeks. I can go then. I’ll write to this Saint Evrémonde in Darnay’s hand—I have a sample of his writing from the trial. I’ll tell him to expect me. Where is he, by the way?”
“He will be at his country estate in summer,” Shadow said. “A few hours’ journey east from Paris.”
“You’ll have to be more specific than that.” I spoke ironically, but at the mention of Paris a thought had belatedly caught me.
Under normal circumstances, I would find it difficult to go to France. The fairies didn’t deny us travel entirely—I had, after all, been allowed to study in Paris—but they liked us to remain where we could be useful, and Shadow certainly seemed to have specific plans for my future. But being sent to France by Shadow would give me a chance. If I was very careful, there was no reason why I might not make it plausible to find myself in Saint-Antoine. If I were more careful yet, I might just be able to find out exactly what business Barsad had there.
It wasn’t much, but it gave me something to hold on to in the dark. My despair retreated an inch or two.
