cherished. And I spared no details from my account of meeting Benjamin—not my own failures as a witch, nor what he’d done to Phoebe, not even his final, parting threat.
“If I hadn’t hesitated, Benjamin would be dead.” I’d been over the event hundreds of times and still didn’t understand why my nerve had failed. “First Juliette and now—”
“You cannot blame yourself for choosing not to kill someone,” Matthew said, pressing a finger to my lips. “Death is a difficult business.”
“Do you think Benjamin is still here, in England?” I asked.
“Not here,” Matthew assured me, rolling me to face him. “Never again where you are.”
Never is a long time. Philippe’s admonishment came back to me clearly.
I pushed the worry away and pulled my husband closer.
“Benjamin has utterly vanished,” Andrew Hubbard told Matthew. “That’s what he does.”
“That’s not entirely true. Addie claims she saw him in Munich,” Marcus said. “She alerted her fellow knights.”
While Matthew was in the sixteenth century, Marcus had admitted women into the brotherhood. He began with Miriam, and she helped him name the rest. Matthew wasn’t sure if this was madness or genius at work, but if it helped him locate Benjamin, he was prepared to remain agnostic. Matthew blamed Marcus’s progressive ideas on his onetime neighbor Catherine Macaulay, who had occupied an important place in his son’s life when he was first made a vampire and filled his ears with her bluestocking ideas.
“We could ask Baldwin,” Fernando said. “He is in Berlin, after all.”
“Not yet,” Matthew said.
“Does Diana know you’re looking for Benjamin?” Marcus asked.
“No,” Matthew said as he headed back to his wife with a plate of food from the Connaught.
“Not yet,” Andrew Hubbard muttered.
That evening it was difficult to determine who was more overjoyed at our reunion: Jack or Lobero. The pair got twisted in a tangle of legs and feet, but Jack finally managed to extricate himself from the beast, who nevertheless beat him to my chaise longue in the Chinese Room and leaped onto the cushion with a triumphant bark.
“Down, Lobero. You’ll make the thing collapse.” Jack stooped and kissed me respectfully on the cheek. “Grandmother.”
“Don’t you dare!” I warned, taking his hand in mine. “Save your grandmotherly endearments for Ysabeau.”
“I told you she wouldn’t like it,” Matthew said with a grin. He snapped his fingers at Lobero and pointed to the floor. The dog slid his forelegs off the chaise, leaving his backside planted firmly against me. It took another snap of the fingers for him to slide off entirely. “Madame Ysabeau said she has standards to maintain, and I will have to do two extremely wicked things before she will let me call her Grandmother,” Jack said.
“And yet you’re still calling her Madame Ysabeau?” I looked at him in amazement. “What’s keeping you? You’ve been back in London for days.”
Jack looked down, his lips curved at the prospect of more delicious mischief to come. “Well, I’ve been on my best behavior, madame.”
“Madame?” I groaned and threw a pillow at him. “That’s worse than calling me ‘Grandmother.’”
Jack let the pillow hit him square in the face.
“Fernando’s right,” Matthew said. “Your heart knows what to call Diana, even if your thick head and vampire propriety are telling you different. Now, help me bring in your mother’s present.”
Under Lobero’s careful supervision, Matthew and Jack carried in first one, then another cloth wrapped bundle. They were tall and seemingly rectangular in shape, rather like small bookcases.
Matthew had sent me a picture of a stack of wood and some tools. The two must have worked on the items together. I smiled at the sudden image of them, dark head and light bowed over a common project.
As Matthew and Jack gradually unwrapped the two objects, it became clear that they were not bookcases but cradles: two beautiful, identically carved and painted, wooden cradles. Their curved bases hung inside sturdy wooden stands that sat on level feet. This way the cradles could be rocked gently in the air or removed from their supports and put on the floor to be nudged with a foot. My eyes filled.
“We made them out of rowan wood. Ransome couldn’t figure out where the hell we were going to find Scottish wood in Louisiana, but he obviously doesn’t know Matthew.” Jack ran his fingers along one of the smooth edges.
“The cradles are rowan, but the stand is made from oak—strong American white oak.” Matthew regarded me with a touch of anxiety. “Do you like them?”