The Lord of the Faerie made a sound partway between exasperation and surprise and walked over to where Jack held Grace, Malcolm following close behind the Faerie Lord.
Walter stayed at the stump. He appeared completely indifferent to what was happening at the edge of the clearing, concentrating instead on cleaning the instruments he had brought with him and putting them neatly back inside a leather satchel that he had kept to one side.
Jack was not sure whether to be angry or disturbed. He had grasped Grace by both her wrists, the sleeves of her coat pushed up to reveal her scars, his hands holding tightly enough that she couldn’t pull away, but not so tight that he would injure her. She appeared frightened. Her face was white, her blue eyes brilliant and wide, her pulse jumped under his fingers, her breath was fast and shallow.
Jack wasn’t prepared to go by appearances. Grace played the innocent well enough, but she was also a Darkwitch and a Mistress of the Labyrinth, and “innocence” did not sit well with either.
“Why are you here, Grace?” he said.
She swallowed. “I wanted to see what you and…Harry…”
Jack wondered why she wouldn’t refer to him as the Lord of the Faerie.
“…were up to. I knew something was up, and—”
“How did you know ‘something was up’?” Jack said. The Lord of the Faerie had moved very close now, alternating his concerned gaze between Jack and Grace.
Malcolm stood slightly to one side, holding Jack’s shirt, jacket and shoes and socks, and looking considerably less worried than either Jack or the Lord of the Faerie. Indeed, he looked mildly amused.
Grace tried to pull away and Jack tightened his grip.
“How did you know ‘something was up’?” he repeated, his voice harder now. “Why track me down, first at Faerie Hill Manor and then here? How did you know?”
Malcolm made as if to say something, but Jack shot him a hard glance, and Malcolm shut his mouth.
“I had seen you with the Lord of the Faerie, with Harry, talking. I—”
“We never talked of this before you,” said the Lord of the Faerie. His entire being had tensed, and he had subtly aligned his body with that of Jack’s.
“Yes, you did,” said Grace. “You spoke of it over the breakfast we shared at Faerie Hill Manor.”
Jack didn’t know what to think. How had she known it was tonight?
“My parents knew about it,” Grace went on, “but they did not speak of it to me. Oh gods, I just knew, Jack! Not any specifics, just that…there was something happening. I could sense it.”
To one side, Malcolm smiled again, very slightly.
“Why not just ask, Grace?” Jack said. “Why sneak about? Why hide behind the trees? Why didn’t you just walk out and say, ‘Here I am, may I watch?’”
“Because you would have sent me away,” said Grace softly, and in this statement, at least, Jack could see truth.
“And so what did you think, Grace?” he said. “What did you make of what you saw?”
Again she tried to pull away from him, and again he had to tighten his hands. Her eyes flickered over his upper body, and he could feel her tension.
“That you are very strange,” she whispered, “and that I am very much afraid of you right now, and of what I may have done.”
“What you may have done?” said Jack.
“Everything, everyone I touch is corrupted with Catling,” said Grace. “I tie their fate to hers.”
“My fate is already tied to Catling’s,” Jack said. “I can’t imagine anything you could do that would further damn me. The marking was perfect, Grace. It has not been ‘corrupted’.”
He could see she didn’t believe it, and he wondered again how much of this frailty was genuine, and how much an act. For gods’ sakes, he should never forget that she was a Darkwitch.
“I’m sorry,” said Grace, “but you should know…Catling was here, too. She witnessed this.”
To one side, Malcolm was looking anywhere but at Jack or Grace.
Jack’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t immediately say anything. He was certain very little went on that Catling didn’t know about. She was the Troy Game incarnate, after all, and her tendrils probably spread under most of the land by now. She would have known, in any case.
His silence had obviously further disconcerted Grace, for she stuttered on as if to fill the void: “She said…she said that…that I was doing only what was needed. By watching…I think.”
“Well, then,” said Jack, “at least we haven’t annoyed her, have we?”
“Jack?” said the Lord of the Faerie.
Jack did not reply, looking only at Grace. “Who are you?” he said, very softly. Then his hands tightened about Grace’s wrists so that she gasped, and the marks on his upper body blurred, and then shifted.
They moved, flowing down both his arms like living lines of ink, circling his wrists, then cascading over his hands and onto Grace’s flesh.
She cried out and jerked back, but could not free herself from Jack’s grip.
Malcolm, his face intense, stepped forward, the Lord of the Faerie also moving closer. Both men had their eyes riveted on Grace’s wrists.
Jack’s marks encircled Grace’s wrists and then seeped into her scars, filling them with their liquid blue-black.
Grace cried out once more, and renewed her twisting, but Jack held her so tightly she could not free herself.
Then the liquid blue-black receded, climbing back over Jack’s hands, up his arms, and, within a moment, reverting to their faded appearance about his upper body.
Abruptly, Jack let Grace go, and she stumbled back a pace or two, rubbing at her wrists.
“You are a mystery,” Jack said, his voice puzzled. “I cannot make you out. Either you are completely shuttered, or you are utterly transparent. I cannot for the life of me understand you. But the marks see no harm in you. No harm at all.”
“Of course not,” said Malcolm. “Is that not what I discovered?”
Jack shot him a glance that was part exasperated, part irritated. Then he looked over to Walter. “You have your car here? Yes? Then will you drive Grace back into London?”
“I have no obligation to you any more,” said Walter. “I have done what you asked. I am free of you.”
“Indeed, you have no obligation to me,” Jack snapped. “I am asking this of your goodwill only, not from any sense of damned obligation owed!”
Then he looked back to Grace. “Go back to London, Grace. Go home.”
“Jack,” she said, “I’m sorry about Catling.”
“Everyone is sorry about Catling,” he said. “It is not a burden you need to carry alone.”
She opened her mouth to speak again, but Jack tipped his head towards Walter. “Go,” he said, and Grace nodded, and walked over to Walter.
Within a moment they were gone, walking westwards through the forest towards the main road.
Jack finally took the shirt Malcolm had been patiently holding and slipped it on.
“Coel,” he said to the Lord of the Faerie, using the man’s ancient name, “why was Grace so unsure of you in this form?”
“Grace has not been to the Faerie since she was a baby,” the Lord of the Faerie said. “She has not seen me as the Lord of the Faerie for a very, very long time.”
“Why has she not been back to the Faerie, Coel?”
“We thought to keep her away because…”
“Ah,” Jack said softly, doing up the buttons of his shirt. “In case she further contaminated you, yes?”
The Lord of the Faerie’s face tightened, but he did not respond to Jack’s jibe.
“And now, Jack?” he said.
“Now I need to go see Catling,” Jack said. “Wait for me in Faerie Hill Manor, Coel, and ask Noah to meet with us there at dawn. Malcolm. My shoes, if you please.”
EIGHT
The Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral
Sunday, 10th September 1939
Jack walked back to Faerie Hill Manor with the Lord of the Faerie, and from there drove his Austin convertible down to London.
He did not see Walter’s car on the road—he and Grace were likely half an hour ahead of him.
London was quiet: blacked out and shut down against the expected air raids. Jack drove slowly—unlike his earlier wild drive through Epping Forest—with only a sliver of light seeping out from the guards over the car’s headlamps. There was almost no one about. A few blackout and ARP wardens, the occasional giggling couple heading home from a dance hall, an early milkman driving his horse-drawn van along Aldersgate.
St Paul’s was as still as a headstone.
Jack parked his car in Paternoster Row, one street to the north of the cathedral. He got out slowly, buttoning his jacket against the pre-dawn chill, closing the car door quietly. He stood in the road, looking upwards at the dome of the cathedral looming above the intervening buildings, and lit a cigarette, drawing slowly on it as he thought.