'You never let me see that far,' Will countered.
Rosa's eyes were back on Will, blazing. 'I want to be back there,' she said. 'I want to see-'
She didn't have time to finish. Steep caught hold of her arm and pulled her away from Will. Her response was instantaneous. She wrenched her arm from his grip and struck Jacob in the face, almost casually. The blow caught him off-balance. He staggered back, more surprised, Will thought, than hurt. 'Don't you dare lay a hand on me!' she spat at him, turning back to finish her interrogation of Will. 'Tell me quickly what you know,' she said. 'You help me, I'll help you, I swear it!' She was genuine in this, Will saw. 'I told you, I'm not cruel,' she went on. 'Jacob wanted your father dead, not me. He wanted you weak with grief.' Behind her, Steep let out a growling din. She ignored it, and kept talking. 'We don't have to be enemies. We both want the same thing.'
'And what's that?'
'Healing,' she said.
And then Steep took hold of her again, more roughly this time, hauling her out of his path. This time she didn't strike him, but turned, loosing a curse at him. What happened next? It was so quick it was hard to tell. Will glimpsed the knife between them, moving as it had in the copse, like lethal lightning. Then it was gone, eclipsed by Rosa as she turned, its blade sinking into her chest. He heard her expel a breath, which turned into a sob; saw her turn her face to Steep, who in that same moment dropped his gaze to the place where the knife had gone. Drawing a second sobbing breath, Rosa pushed her assassin from her. He went, empty-handed, and she teetered for a few seconds, raising her hands to snatch at the blade, which was still buried in her to the hilt. Her fingers found it, and with a cry that surely woke every patient sleeping in the hospital, pulled it out of her flesh and cast it to the ground. A strange fluid came with it, copiously, spreading down her blouse and into her skirt. She looked down at its progress with a kind of curiosity on her face. Then, lifting her head to fix Steep afresh, she stumbled towards him.
'Oh, Jacob,' she sobbed. 'What have you done?'
'No, no-' he said, shaking his head, tears rolling down his cheeks. 'That wasn't my doing-'
'Hold me!' she said, opening her arms and swooning towards him.
It was plain by his expression that he didn't want to touch her, but he had no choice. His body moved to catch her, his arms opening like a mirror of hers, then locking around her, the violence of her fall carrying them both to their knees. He didn't protest his innocence now. He simply lay his sobbing head on her shoulder and said her name, over and over.
Will didn't want to see the end of this. He had a moment to escape, and he took it, giving the pair a wide berth as he crossed to the gate. On his way, his eyes alighted on the murder weapon, lying in the dewy grass where Rosa had dropped it. His instinct was quicker than his doubts. In one motion he stopped and scooped it up, its weight exciting his hand as he went on his way. Only when he'd cleared the gate, and felt safe from pursuit, did he turn to look back at Rosa and Jacob. The pair had not moved. They were still on their knees, Steep clasping the woman to him. Was he sobbing? Will thought so. But the din of the birds, rising everywhere to get about the business of the day, was so loud his grief was drowned out.
CHAPTER X
0until the years, Will had needed to polish his powers of deception until they were virtually flawless - talking his way into places he was not supposed to go to document sights he was not supposed to see. They stood him in good stead in the hours following the confrontation in the rose-garden. First in the hospital, minutes after the stabbing, signing the paperwork that allowed his father's body to be tagged and taken away, then in the car with Adele, heading back to the house: through it all he pretended a calm, subdued demeanour and carried it off unchallenged.
He didn't repeat Rosa's confession to Adele, of course. What was the use? Better that she believed her beloved Hugo had died contentedly in his sleep than be troubled with the truth, in all its grotesquerie, especially when that truth brought with it so many questions that Will could not answer. Not yet at least. Enough had been said in the garden for him to dare believe he might yet decode the mystery. Row's talk of Rukenau as a living presence (as impervious to the claims of age, it seemed, as she and Steep), and the notion that he was somehow a healer of her pain (had she been foreseeing the wound she was about to sustain?) were both new elements in the story. He had not yet put the pieces together, but he would. What he'd felt in the garden he felt stilclass="underline" that Lord Fox remained in him, its spirit effervescent. It would sniff out the truth, however many carcasses it was hidden beneath.
No doubt that would be a dangerous process: whatever murderous intentions Steep had harboured before dawn were surely multiplied a hundredfold now. Will was no longer simply an error of judgment; a boy with a hole in his head who'd grown into a too-adhesive man. Not only did he possess information (very little, in fact, but Steep didn't know that), he'd also witnessed the wounding of Rosa. As if all of that wasn't enough, Will now had the knife. He felt it tapping against his chest as he drove, secure in the inner pocket of his jacket. If for nothing more, Jacob would come to reclaim it.
Given that fact, Will wanted to separate himself from Adele as soon as possible. Plainly Steep had little compunction about harming people who got between him and his quarry; Adele's life would surely be forfeit if she was in his path. Luckily, she was already in her pragmatic her tears all dried, at least for now, as she listed all the things she needed to do. There was the funeral director to contact, and a coffin to choose, and the vicar at St Luke's had to be told, so that a service could be arranged. She and Hugo had found a nice plot, she told Will, near the west wall of the churchyard. Strange, Will thought, for a man who had scowled at any profession of religious belief, to eschew the clean ease of cremation in favour of burial amongst the God-fearing elders of the village. Perhaps Hugo had done it for Adele's sake, but even that in its way was remarkable: that he'd put his own feelings aside so as to accommodate her wishes. Especially this decision, this last. Perhaps he had felt more for her than Will had thought.
'He made a will, I do know that,' Adele was saying. 'It's with a solicitor in Skipton. A Mr .. . Mr ... Napier. That's it. Napier. I suppose you should be the one to contact him, because you're next of kin.' Will said he'd do that straight away. 'First, some breakfast,' Adele said.
'Why don't you go down to your sister"s place for a few hours,' Will said. 'You don't want to be cooking food
'That's exactly what I do want to be doing,' she said firmly. 'I've been happier in this house-'they were driving up to the gate as she spoke -than any other place I've ever been. And this is where I want to be right now.'
She was plainly not going to be moved on the subject, and Will remembered her stubbornness well enough to know that further pressure would only entrench her. Better to eat some breakfast and assess the situation when he'd filled his belly. He had a few hours of grace, he suspected, until Steep made another move. There was Rosa's body for Jacob to deal with, for one thing; that was assuming she was dead. If she wasn't, he'd presumably be tending to her. She'd sustained at very least a grievous wound, delivered by a weapon that carried more than its share of fatal capacity. But she had outlived a human span by many decades (she'd been there on the banks of the Neva, two hundred and fifty years before) so she was clearly not as susceptible to death as an ordinary human being. Perhaps she was even now recovering.
In short, he knew very little, and could predict even less. In such circumstances, eat. That was Adele's recipe, and by God, it worked. Both their moods brightened as she cooked and served a breakfast fit for suicidal kings: bacon, sausage, eggs, kidneys, mushrooms, tomatoes and fried bread.