“What did you say?” Doc asked. “It must have been a thoroughly dreadful moment for you, poor child.”
“It was, Doc. By stone and water, it was!”
“Go on.” Ryan’s mind was only half listening to the young woman’s story, since he already knew how it was going to turn out. Obviously she blurted out the murderous secret, yet she must have escaped. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here with them now. He was more worried that what she’d done once she might do again.
And there was the strange locked section at the rear of Baron Sharpe’s mutie collection to worry about.
Emma had just explained how she’d gasped at the horrid specter, saying what she’d seen. “It was like I’d spit in everyone’s face. The baron turned white as a fresh-laundered sheet and broke the glass in his fingers, the white wine tinted pink with his blood. For once, I recovered faster than any of them and broke and ran. Threw myself on the back of Bluegrass Prince and snatched loose the reins from a thunderstruck groom and was away.”
“They chased you?” Jak had got up off the bed and was walking around the room, brushing his long pale fingers across the tops of the furniture.
“Nobody could catch the Prince. I rode the poor beast until he frothed and foundered, bloody-lunged, full forty miles away from the ville.”
“And came wandering east.” Krysty shook her head. “It’ll happen again, you know, Emma.”
“I know it. I try to hide it, but it’s like having a dagger of ice thrust into your heart. Anyone would cry out.”
“Got take triple care.” Jak sat by Emma again and took her hand.
“I know. It’s a horror to me. Like spending all of your life with a naked ax blade suspended above your head by a single human hair.”
“Let the wrong word slip and you can get yourself chilled,” Krysty said.
Ryan shook his head. “No, lover. Wrong word slips and she can get us all chilled.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Supper with Baron Sean Sharpe passed without any problem. The food, as before, was dull at its heart. A haunch of mutton, steamed with cabbage, turnips and okra, was the main course of the meal.
During a watery soup with shredded eggs and fragments of gristly bacon that preceded it, Baron Sharpe seemed to be almost asleep. He asked what they had thought of his collection that they’d visited during the afternoon, but hadn’t even bothered to make the pretense of listening to their answers, cutting off Krysty in midsentence.
“Yes, I know all this. And like so much else in this wretched life, I find it ineffably boring. Joaquin showed you all the animals, did he?” He looked across at his sec chief, who shook his head in a barely perceptible movement. But Ryan noticed it and wondered at the message that lay behind it.
“Yes, he did. But I won’t bore you further, Baron, with my poor thoughts on them.”
“Better, yes, better. Well, well, better. That is the most amazing hair, Miss Wroth. I don’t suppose it conceals any strange skills, does it?”
“What kind of skill?”
He leaned back in his carved oak chair and belched, not bothering to stifle it with his hand. “Any sort of. unusual skill, my dear.”
Ryan stepped in quickly, seeing the hazardous direction that the baron’s thoughts were taking. “I don’t think any of us have any special skills worth mentioning. Though we’re all fair hands with a blaster or with a knife, as your sec man, Joshua Morgan, can testify.”
“What of the snow-headed lad?”
“What of me?” Jak asked, laying down his soup spoon. “What of me, Baron?”
Sharpe shook his hands wearily. “You outlanders are all so eager to take offense when none is intended. I still have a slight curiosity. Such pale skin and eyes that glow like the embers of a fire. Do you see in the night? That might interest me a little, if you did.”
“See bad in sun, Baron,” the teenager replied.
Halfway through the eating of the stolid main course, Sharpe showed a peculiar change in his personality.
He pulled a face of disgust and spit a mouthful of meat onto the floor at his side.