“Of course,” Sophia replied, pausing for a moment. What an interesting thought. Perhaps she and Madame would have more in common than previously anticipated. “Have coffee with Tom and me tomorrow at middlesun,” she said. “Or make that the day after tomorrow.” She started toward the pantry door, and then looked back at René and Tom. The other door was beginning to splinter. “Are you coming? Either of you?”
René jumped up and they both followed, Sophia careful not to set a pace that Tom couldn’t keep. She shut the pantry just before she heard the dining room door burst open, sidestepped quickly through the dusty storage room, opened a trapdoor, and slid through a short access tunnel into the closet below. René came through next.
“Now, just so I have this straight, my love,” René said, turning to catch Tom’s legs on the way through. “Where are we going?”
“To our wedding. Just as soon as we find the vicar. I hope he’s at home.”
“That is what I thought was happening. But it has been a strange day.”
They got to the stables, which were not being watched—Sheriff Burn was a nice man, just not particularly good at his job—and rode at a gallop for the vicarage, Tom on his horse, René behind Sophia, setting the rookery to flight in their haste. Tom was the first to get there, startling the vicar from the loo as he came thundering into his yard. There was a sleek landover waiting out front.
“Tom!” the man said. “And Miss Bellamy … What?”
“We’re in need of a wedding, Vicar,” said Tom. “Right now, before the sheriff finds us.”
Who they found waiting in the vicar’s dark-paneled study was Mr. Halflife, at his ease in a leather chair.
“Miss Bellamy, my dear,” he said. “How good it is to finally greet you. I had a feeling you and your charming fiancé might be coming here after the to-do that was going on in Bellamy House. I am very sorry, Monsieur, to know that your mother has such a weakness for drink.”
Sophia and René glanced at each other. He must have run into Madame wandering the halls. What could she have said? There really was no telling. But it must have had something to do with a marriage. Here he was.
Tom and the vicar were at the desk, doing the paperwork, Tom with one eye on the window and the view of the A5. Mr. Halflife had no power to arrest Tom on his own, and as soon as they were married, the sheriff would have none, either. Tom would have the money, in the form of a plastic bottle, in hand.
“So I assume, Monsieur Hasard, that you are able to pay the marriage fee after all? I had heard your family was in financial difficulties.”
His posh accent was jangling every one of Sophia’s nerves. She answered before René could. “Why, yes, Mr. Halflife, there is a fee. So I’m sorry to tell you that the Bellamy land stays as it is, and Parliament will not have a port. Not on our coast.”
Mr. Halflife smiled. “But I am afraid a port on your section of the coast is going to be paramount to the safety of the Commonwealth, Miss Bellamy. Have you never considered—but of course you haven’t—what would happen if there should be war between the Sunken City and ourselves? The Parisian shores are only a short boat ride away. Or we might wish to expand beyond our own shores one day. One never knows.”
Sophia looked at Halflife with his non-Wesson jacket and slicked hair. Her father had been right, she realized, not to give the Commonwealth the Bellamy fire. The secret would go with her to her grave.
“But you also forget, Miss Bellamy,” said Halflife, satisfied by her silence, “that no matter what happens today, your brother must prove his fitness for inheritance before the Bellamy land is secure.” He glanced at Tom, standing beside the vicar, still prison thin and limping. “Do you think it is likely he will do so? I am not sure he will.”
Sophia smiled at him. “Is that a threat, Mr. Halflife?” She knew it was. He was going to make certain Tom had no opportunity to prove his fitness at all.
“Monsieur …,” René said. Sophia looked at him sharply. He had taken the seat opposite Mr. Halflife, leaning back elegantly, and all at once, there was the man of the magazine. She didn’t understand quite how he was pulling that off. You didn’t even notice the untied hair and the mud.
“You were asking about the financial matters of my family,” René went on, “which interests me, because I am wondering who could have mentioned this to you. My cousin, perhaps? The same cousin, just perhaps, who was paying you for information about what was happening on the Bellamy coast? And were you, just perhaps, using Mrs. Rathbone to find out these things that my cousin was paying you for? Letting her know of little opportunities that might come her way, like denouncing the Ministre of Trade that was opposing your plans for a Parisian port, a port Parliament says is for shipping goods, but that they will use for their own interests? Like invasion?”
He smiled at Mr. Halflife’s expression. “And would I be right in thinking that Mrs. Rathbone does not want Bellamy House as much as she wants to be the wife of a Parliamentary member? That perhaps she is under the impression this will occur rather soon, when the Bellamys are removed?”
Sophia stared at René. He was right. And he looked every bit the smooth-talking, daughter-stealing smuggler that she knew he was. How she loved him.
“But please, let me advise you, Monsieur,” he continued. “Mrs. Rathbone has been arrested in Bellamy House. Something to do with a dead man, and as you know, she is very much the talker. Also, Allemande is dead, and my cousin is no longer Ministre of Security. The revolution is over. When you go to Manchester, you will hear all that you wish to, I am sure. But I think it might also interest you to know that my cousin LeBlanc’s paperwork will very likely become public. Soon. Of course, I am sure you have been doing nothing illegal …”
“Sophie! René! We’re ready,” Tom called. The vicar was picking up his book. Mr. Halflife sprang to his feet.
“I wish you joy, Monsieur. Miss Bellamy.” And Mr. Halflife ran from the vicar’s study as if St. Just had been nipping at his heels. René stood and stretched, looking very smug.
“So just how much of that was true?” Sophia asked.
“Enough to make him run, yes?” He smiled with half his mouth. “I have hesitated to ask, my love, but do you normally wear spectacles?”
“Oh!” Sophia jerked off the glasses. They were made with clear lenses, and she’d completely forgotten their presence on her face. “They were just for delivering soup.”
“Ah.”
She pulled the kerchief from her head as well, running a hand through wild hair. “I never thought I would marry,” she whispered. “Especially in Orla’s old dress and with dirt on my nose.”
He took her hand, bringing her close and putting his lips on the inside of her wrist, paying no attention to Tom or the vicar. “I love you best that way,” he whispered. “When you come down the stairs with your painted eyes and caramel skin and you make every man stare, I still think of you with mud in your hair and a sword strapped to your thigh and a rook feather in your hand. Are they not both one and the same?”
Yes. Just as he was the man of the magazine and the smuggler and also the man of the roof who had stood on the scaffold. She looked into the fire-blue of his eyes. “Do you think this was meant to happen?”
Was it meant to happen, or could he have chosen differently, LeBlanc wondered, his hands tied behind him. Or was the world one great, repeating pattern destined to flow in the same lines? That was the teaching of Fate, the cold mistress that had taken Luck from him, that cared nothing that he was lying here, head on a block, surrounded by the faces of the Sunken City and a new premier. A female premier! Sanchia, reading his charges …