When Gods Die

Only, this was no hired guard. The Marquis of Anglessey himself had come to keep watch over the body of his beautiful young wife. He sat beside her tomb in a campaign chair, a rug pulled over his lap despite the warmth of the night. A blunderbuss lay across his knees.

“Devlin here,” Sebastian called in a clear, ringing voice. “Don’t shoot.”

“Devlin?” The old man shifted in his chair, his face contorting as he squinted into the darkness. “What are you doing here?”

Sebastian stepped into the circle of light cast by a brass lantern and hunkered down beside the old man’s chair. “I’ve something to tell you,” he said. And there, beside Guinevere Anglessey’s grave with the night wind soft against his cheek, Sebastian told Guinevere’s husband how she had died, and why.

When Sebastian had finished, the Marquis sat in silence for some moments, his head bowed, his breath coming slow and heavy. Then he lifted his head to fix Sebastian with a fierce stare. “This woman—this Lady Audley. You’re certain she’s dead?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. The wind gusted up, shifting the leaves of the oak tree overhead and bringing them the scents of the place, of long grass and decay and death.

“Do you believe in God?” Anglessey asked suddenly, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

Sebastian met the old man’s anguished gaze and answered honestly, “Not anymore, no.”

Anglessey sighed. “I wish I didn’t. If I didn’t, I would take this gun and blow Bevan’s brains out. It’s what I should have done before.”

“Perhaps if you can stay alive long enough you’ll be lucky and someone else will do it for you.”

Anglessey grunted. “The ones who deserve to die rarely do.”

He stared off across the graveyard to where the moonlight reflected off the high arched windows of the ancient stone church. “I was sitting here tonight, wondering what it would have been like if I had been born thirty years later—or if Guinevere had been born thirty years earlier. Do you think she would have loved me?”

“She loved you. I think in the end she came to realize you had given her the one thing no one else in her life ever had.”

Anglessey shook his head, not understanding. “What was that?”

“Your unselfish love.”

The old man’s eyes squeezed nearly shut, as if he were wincing at some deep, inner pain. “I was selfish. If I hadn’t been so obsessed with getting an heir—if I hadn’t pushed her into that young man’s arms again—she never would have died.”

“You can’t know that. I may not believe in God, but I’ve come to believe that there is a pattern. A pattern that works itself out in ways we can’t begin to understand.”

“Isn’t that just another way of describing God?”

“Perhaps,” said Sebastian. He was suddenly very tired. He felt a powerful need to hold Kat in his arms. To hold her safe and close forever. “Perhaps it is.”

HE CAME TO HER IN THE STILLNESS OF THE NIGHT, when the last carriage had rumbled through the streets and the moon was only a pale memory on the horizon. Moving restlessly in the unnatural heat of the night, Kat awoke and found Devlin beside her.

“Marry me, Kat,” he said, his hand shaking as he brushed the hair from her sweat-dampened brow.

She watched his face in the dying moonlight, watched until the hope began to fade and the hurt crept in. And when she could bear it no longer she leaned into him, her forehead pressing against his shoulder so that she couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see hers. “I can’t. There’s something you don’t know about me. Something I’ve done.”

“I don’t care what you’ve done.” He twisted his fingers through her hair, his thumbs slipping under her chin to force her head up. “There’s nothing you could have done that would make me—”

She pressed her fingertips to his lips, stopping his words. “No. You can’t say that when you don’t know what it is. And I don’t have the courage to tell you.”

“I know I love you,” he said, his lips moving against her fingers.

“Then let that be enough. Please, Sebastian. Let that be enough.”

TOSSING HIS CHAPEAU BRAS AND GLOVES on a table in the darkened hall, Jarvis walked into his library, kindled a small branch of candles, and poured himself a glass of brandy.

Smiling with satisfaction, he carried the brandy to a chair beside the fire. But after a moment, he set the brandy aside untasted and slipped Lady Hendon’s silver-and-bluestone necklace from his pocket.

Threading the chain through his fingers, he held it up to the light, the bluestone disk and its superimposed silver triskelion tracing a slow arc as it swung back and forth through the air. It was all nonsense, of course, the legend that had grown up around the thing; intellectually he knew that. And yet it seemed to him that he could feel the pendant’s power. Feel it, yet not grasp it.

“Papa?”

Looking around, he found his daughter, Hero, standing in the doorway. His fist closed over the pendant, stilling it.