Page 52 of Angel of Vengeance
Out here, the voices were much clearer: they were coming from a room at the end of the hall, from which also came light that, it seemed to Woodstock, must be the result of many candles. He listened to the exchange going on beyond the door.
“Why, Reverend, I don’t think I should.” A giggle, half-awkward, half-coquettish. “I mean, given what we’ve said, what we’ve done—”
“And what we have still to do, Anna. Remember, please call me Percy.”
“It seems sinful to do so. But then everything feels so sinful—I mean, we only met three days ago, and—”
“And that makes me the luckiest man on earth. Imagine, if I hadn’t been there by the train station, and you hadn’t been on your way back to your father’s flax mill in Greenwich, we might never have met.”
“And I would still be a good girl.”
“No, Anna, no—you would have been, pardon my saying so, an ignorant girl, unaware of all the sensations that God in His goodness confers on us… if we only open ourselves to them.”
The four had been creeping toward the door during this exchange, and now they formed a half circle around it: Biscuit, Longshank, Tom, and Woodstock. Through the partially opened door, Woodstock could glimpse only a portion of what was indeed a bedroom, spare and severe, but with a massive church candelabra of brass, with its candles throwing off a mellow, flickering light.
“Is that from one of your sermons?” Another nervous giggle.
“No—although there’s no reason it couldn’t be. God works in mysterious ways, as He is doing here with the two of us—and with your art.”
Biscuit looked at them each in turn, making sure they were ready. He held up three fingers, then lowered one of them, silently counting down.
“What do you mean?” came the female voice.
“I’m showing you how to express yourself in a new medium—oil paints instead of yarn. As for me, I have an excellent exemplar in John Donne. He was dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and a most excellent cleric. But he also wrote several elegies that would make the saints in that cathedral’s whispering gallery blush despite their marble skins. One in particular, ‘Going to Bed,’ is particularly apropos: ‘To teach thee, I am naked first; why then / What needst thou have more covering than a man?’”
But this quotation was punctuated by the splitting of wood as Biscuit kicked open the door and the four of them poured into the room. The sight that greeted them, however, gave even the unflappable Biscuit pause. A woman of about twenty sat before a painter’s easel, one hand holding a brush up to the canvas, the other holding a palette. She was entirely naked, hair down, a chemise gathered carelessly at her ankles. A somewhat older man—apparently the model, and most certainly the reverend Considine—reclined on a nearby settee, naked as well. Although the man was thin, his body looked surprisingly strong, its chiseled musculature brought into high relief by the candlelight.
Woodstock took all this in during the fragment of a second when everything remained still. And then, instantly, all was sound and motion. The woman screamed, dropping the palette; the man leapt off the settee with remarkable speed, threw the silken coverlet on which he’d lain over Biscuit, then plunged a knife that appeared out of nowhere into the coverlet—once, twice—and yanked the coverlet off again as Biscuit sank toward the floor, blood spurting from his neck. Throwing the easel in the path of the onrushing intruders, the naked man seemed to vanish into the walls. The remaining three halted, frantically casting about, frozen in shock, while Biscuit writhed on the floor. The naked woman fled down a far hall. And then, suddenly, Considine appeared again, now in a billowing silk robe, darting out from, apparently, a hidden entrance. Instinctively, Woodstock whirled and threw a knife; the man dodged it, then yanked the knife from the wall and, with an odd spinning motion that looked almost like ballet, cut Tom’s throat from ear to ear. Woodstock skipped backward, raising the other knife and aiming for a second throw, but with a bound Considine covered the distance, grabbing Woodstock’s wrist with one hand and twisting it with the other, breaking the bone. “Mind if I borrow this?” he whispered as he wrenched away the knife, flipped it round, then thrust it into Woodstock’s eye with the soft pop of a rupturing grape.
Woodstock staggered back with a hideous scream and fell upon the hard floor just in time to hear Longshank’s own gurgling screams begin to rise. In agonizing pain, Woodstock coiled himself into a fetal position, both hands cupping the blade that protruded from his eye, joining in with the other screams, hoping this was just a bad dream and, given all the noise, he would soon wake up.
47
D’AGOSTA COULD SMELL MRS. Cookson’s heavenly dinner rolls baking in the oven—but he could not find the housekeeper herself. It was his habit to let her know each time he went out to pick up Joe at school, despite the event being as regular as the tides on nearby Godwit’s Beach. He never bothered looking for Mr. Cookson—that scarecrow could be anywhere about the house or the outbuildings. And so he left the mansion through the servants’ main-floor passage as usual, locking the door, ducking his head against the bitter wind, and making for the Seal Harbor schoolhouse a mile and a half away.
When he arrived, he was surprised and alarmed to learn Joe was not there. He had dropped Joe off in the morning as usual, and the teachers confirmed he had been in school until the final bell—but now he was nowhere in the vicinity of the red-painted structure.
D’Agosta paused outside the schoolhouse door to look around. The last thing he wanted was to cause a fuss and draw attention. Scanning the winter landscape revealed nothing. He had not met Joe along the way. Had he gone off with some newfound friends—sledding, perhaps? Or was this some small rebellion of independence? Earlier, Joe had complained about D’Agosta walking him to school, saying it was making him look bad to the other kids.
Or could something worse have happened?
D’Agosta hurried back toward the cottage to see if Joe had turned up, setting off up the frozen lane at a faster pace than he’d come down it. But when he entered through the servants’ entrance, there was no sign of Joe—and the kitchen was full of smoke and the smell of burnt bread.
An icy foreboding gripped his heart.
“Mrs. Cookson!” he called as he walked through the back quarters of the mansion. “Joe? Joe!”
Only echoes returned.
He ran up to Joe’s room; it was as he’d left it when they’d set off for school that morning. The Cooksons’ rooms were also empty. He went back outside, scanning the horizon, now in a full-blown panic. He quickly checked the barn and carriage house—nothing there either. They had all simply disappeared.
Was it possible Leng had tracked them here? His policeman’s training reasserted itself—anything was possible. He next searched the mansion from attic to basement—maybe Joe was ghost hunting again—but the building was empty. He looked outside for fresh tracks in the snow—nothing.
Returning to the first floor, panting for breath, he considered what to do next. God damn this nineteenth century and its lack of communication. There was no way to contact Pendergast, or anyone else for that matter, beyond the slow and truncated telegraph system.
He was turning, ready to head for the back exit again, when he saw something outside the large windows of the parlor. A man, at the reins of an old wagon, its top covered and tied down with canvas, was approaching the mansion up the private lane.
In all the time he’d spent on the island, D’Agosta had never seen a stranger drive up to the cottage. Mrs. Cookson did the marketing herself, and Mr. Cookson took care of the milking and the limited livestock on the property. But nevertheless this alien wagon was coming closer by the minute, the driver holding the reins and sitting back in his seat as casually as if he were going to Sunday-morning service, wearing a well-brushed homburg and covered in a long, tailored trench coat of black leather. He must have caught sight of D’Agosta staring at him out of the window, because now he raised a hand in greeting, then gestured he was going to take the horse around to the servants’ entrance. Without bothering to wave back, D’Agosta left the parlor, checked that the front doors were bolted, took out his revolver, and went back into the heated section of the mansion.