them looked at Jack, who sat twisting his napkin in his hands.
* * *
After tea, while Sebastien sat paging through onionskin sheets covered with Abigail Irene's shorthand scrawl, she came to him and settled in a chintz-covered chair. "Richard's wife is divorcing him," she said. "On grounds of infidelity."
"He'll lose the duchy." Richard only held the position through Jacqueline. Her sister's son would inherit.
Abby Irene nodded. Under her powder, color rose across her cheeks. "I resigned for nothing."
"You resigned on a point of honor." Sebastien set the folder aside. It wasn't telling him anything he could not have guessed, and he agreed with Abby Irene's instinct that information was being withheld. He wished he could interview this Detective Inspector Pyle. "And he'd already put the matter before your king."
He watched indirectly, but carefully. Her shoulders eased as she breathed in and out, once each with great concentration. "If only Henry had been the older brother," she said, with an air of bitterness he thought unlike her. And then her hand flew to her mouth, and she pressed the knuckles against her teeth, jaw working as if she bit down.
It was treason, what she'd just said.
"What else was in the telegram?" he asked. "Richard wants you back?"
"He offered to marry me," she said. And dismissed it with a flip of her hand, as beneath even consideration. "I'm afraid I know him rather too well for that."
Despite himself, Sebastien laughed, and caught her hand when she dropped it from her mouth. "Then what will you do?"
"It's too soon to tell," she said. He felt the tendons working as she made a fist in the blue corduroy of her skirt. And he felt her start, as well, at the toll of the doorbell.
Sebastien glanced at the window. The sun was below the horizon, he judged, though the sky still shone pewter and indigo. He stood, giving Abby Irene one last pat, and went to the door with a good idea who he might find.
Jack was on the stairs by the time he turned the latch, and Abby Irene had risen from the chair, her wand half-concealed in her hand. She nodded when Sebastien caught her eye; Jack merely stood relaxed and ready for whatever might follow. Phoebe was nowhere to be seen.
"Hello, David," he said to the man on the stoop.
"Hello." David leaned on a rosewood walking stick, his shoulders contracted under the dove-gray jacket. "Since you're not going to invite me in, will you come out?"
"I have a date tonight," Sebastien said.
David slipped an engraved watch from his pocket and consulted it, glanced at Sebastien, bit his lower lip, and consulted it again. "As it happens, so do I. Am I to presume that conferring on the stoop with wampyr might be the sort of thing that is not done among Bostonians?"
"You might," Sebastien said. He glanced over his shoulder; Abby Irene returned a small ironic smile, and he wasn't about to argue in front of David. He was not meant to hear Abigail Irene whisper in Jack's ear, "Are we all blond?"
Or Jack's murmured answer. "Evie was dark."
David, of course, heard it too, and he knew perfectly well who Evie had been. And that Evie had chosen to burn. Sebastien read it in his smirk. Irritated, but unwilling to admit it, he stepped outside and jerked the door shut, hearing it latch.
He was hatless, bereft of a walking stick, without an overcoat—not that the cold could bother him, but remaining unremarked was a chief strategy of the blood. David's smirk widened, dripping mockery; Sebastien descended the steps, took David's elbow, and pulled him around on his heels. "All right. Walk with me," he said, propelling David forward.
David did not stagger, but paced him comfortably, giving no appearance of haste. Sebastien listened, but did not hear the door open behind him. So they had some sense, contrary to other evidence.
The two wampyr had gone half a block before David said, "If you want me to beg, Sebastien, I'll do it."
A typically cryptic comment, hurtling over layers of dialogue. Fortunately, though Sebastien was no longer habituated to David's conversational leaps, he recalled their management. "You want my protection."
"It's your city," David said. "I'm within my rights to ask."
It's not mine, Sebastien thought, but caution kept him from a too-facile denial. To refuse to acknowledge power could be as deadly as claiming it unwarranted. Instead he asked, "What do you need protecting from?"
David shrugged. "I left my share of enemies in the old world.