The door that closed off the ascending stair was
being rattled and shaken, while from behind it a
man’s voice shouted: “Mistress! Master! Denis, are
you all right? What’s going on?”
The master of the house cast down his long iron
ladle. He stood for a moment contemplating his
own bloodied hands as if he wondered how they
might have- got that way. Denis saw an unprece-
dented tremor in those hands. Then Courtenay
drew a deep breath, raised his head, and called
back, almost calmly, “It’s all right, Tarim. A little
problem, but we’ve solved it. Be patient for a
moment and I’ll explain.”
In an aside he added: “Denis, help me get these
. . . no, you’re hurt yourself. Sit down first and bind
that up. Barb, you help me with these visitors. Drag
’em around behind that bench and we’ll throw a
tarp over ’em.”
Denis, in mild shock now with his wound, took a
moment to register the unfamiliar name. Barb?
Never before had he heard the master, or anyone
else, call the lady that . . . it wasn’t going to be easy,
he realized, to bind up his own arm unaided. Any-
way, the wound didn’t look like it was going to kill
him.
Courtenay, while keeping busy himself, was still
giving orders. “Now close the street door.” He
dropped a dead man where he wanted him, and
pulled out a heavy tarpaulin from its storage. “No,
wait, let Tarim see it standing open. We’ll say some
brigands got in somehow, and…”
Tarim and the other awakened staff were pres-
ently allowed to come crowding in. Whether they
fully believed the vague story about brigands or
not, they took their cue from their master’s manner
and were too wise to question it. The outer door was
closed and barred. Tarim himself had to be dis-
suaded from standing watch in the workshop for
the rest of the night, and eventually he and all the
others were on their way back to bed.
Alone in the workshop again, the three who had
done the fighting exchanged looks. Then they got
busy.
Courtenay began a preliminary clean-up, while the
mistress applied a bandage to Denis’s forearm,
following his directions. Her small fingers, soft, white,
and pampered, did not shrink from bloody contact.
They managed the bandaging quite well, using some
of the cloth that had been brought for the first patient.
When the job was done, her fingers held his arm a
moment more. Her dark eyes, for the first time ever
(he thought) looked at him with something more than
the wish to be pleasant to a servant. She said, very
quietly but very seriously, “You saved my life, Denis.
Thank you.”
It was almost as if no woman had ever touched him
or spoken to him before. Denis muttered something.
He could feel the blood flowing back into his face.
What foolishness, he told himself. He and this lady
could never . . .
A quick look at the stranger now occupying Denis’s
bed showed that the fight in the next room had not
disturbed him. He was still unconscious, breathing
shallowly. Denis, looking at him, came round to the
opinion that nothing was likely to disturb this man
again. With two wounded men now on hand, the
mistress announced that she was going upstairs to
search more thoroughly for medical materials.
The master said to his lady, “I’ll come up with you,
we have to talk. Denis can manage here for a few
moments.”
The two of them climbed in thoughtful silence, past
the level where Tarim and other workers slept, past
the next floor also. Reaching the topmost level of the
house, they passed through another door and entered
a domain of elegance. This began with a
wood-paneled hall, lit now by the flame of a single
candle in a wall sconce. Here the lady turned in one
direction, going to rummage in her private stocks for
medical materials. The master turned down the hall
the other way, heading for a closet where he
expected to find a fresh, unbloodied robe.
Before he reached the room that held the closet, he
was intercepted by the toddling figure of a kneehigh
child, an apparition followed almost immediately by
that of an apologetic nurse.
“Oh sir, you’re hurt,” the nurse protested. She was a
buxom girl, almost a grown woman now. And at the
same time the child demanded: “Daddy! Tell story
now!” At the age of two and a half, the little girl
fortunately already showed much more of her
mother’s than her father’s looks. Brazenly wide
awake, as if something about this particular night
delighted her, she waited in her silken nightdress,
small stuffed toy in hand.
The man spoke to the nursemaid first. “I’m all right,
Kuan-yin. The blood is nothing. I’ll put Beth back to
bed; you go see if you can help your mistress find
what she’s looking for.”
The nurse looked at him for a moment. Then, like
the other employees, wise enough to be incurious
tonight, she moved away.
The huge man, who for the past four years had
been trying to establish an identity as Master
Courtenay, wiped drying gore from his huge hands
onto a robe already stained. With hands now steady,
and almost clean, he bent to carefully pick up the
living morsel he had discovered he valued more than
his own life.
Carrying his daughter back to the nursery, he
passed a window. Through genuine glass and rainy
night he had a passing view of the high city walls
some hundreds of meters distant. The real watch
were keeping a fire burning atop the wall. Another
light, smaller and steadier, was visible in a slightly
different direction; one of the upper windows glowing
in the Lord Mayor’s palace. It looked as if someone
was having a busy night there too; the observer could
only hope that there was no connection.
Fortune was smiling on the huge man now, for he
was able to remember the particular story that his
daughter wanted, and to get through the telling of it
with reasonable speed. The child had just gone back
to sleep, and the father was just on his way out of the
nursery, shutting the door with infinite care behind
him, when his wife reappeared, still wearing her
stained white robe.
“We have a moment,” she whispered, and drew him
aside into their own bedroom. When that door too had
been softly closed, and they were securely alone, she
added: “I’ve already taken the medicine downstairs to
Denis. He thinks that the man is probably going to die
. . . there’s no doubt, is there, that he’s the courier
we’re expecting?”
“I don’t suppose there’s much doubt about that, no.”
The lady was slipping out of her bloodied robe now,
and throwing it aside. In the very dim light that came
in through the barred window from those distant
watchfires, her husband beheld her shapely body as a
curved warmed silver candlestick, a pale ghost hardly
thickened at all by having borne one child. Once he
had loved this woman hopelessly, and then another
love had come to him, and gone again, dissolved in
death. Sometimes he
still saw in dreams a cascade of bright red hair . . .
his love for his darkhaired wife still existed, but it was
very different now.
As she dug into a chest to get another robe, she told
him calmly, “One of those we killed tonight cried out,
something like: ‘Greetings to Ben of Purkinje, from the
Blue Temple.’ I’m sure that Denis heard it too.”
“We’re going to have to trust Denis. He’s proved
tonight he’s loyal. I think he saved your life.”
“Yes,” the lady agreed, in a remote voice. “Either
trust him-or else kill him too. Well.” She dismissed
that thought, though not before taking a moment in
which to examine it with deliberate care. Then she
looked hard at her husband. “And you called me
Barb, too, once, down there in his hearing.”
“Did I?” He’d thought he’d broken himself long ago
of calling her that. Ben-he never really thought of
himself as “of Purkinje”-heaved a great sigh. “So,
anyway, the Blue Temple has caught up with me. It
probably doesn’t matter what Denis overheard.”
“And they’ve caught up with me, too,” she reminded
him sharply. “And with your daughter, whether they
were looking for us or not. It looked like they were
ready to wipe out the household if they could.” She
paused. “I hope they haven’t located Mark.”
Ben thought that over. “There’s no way we can get
any word to him quickly. Is there? I’m not sure just
where he is.”
“No, I don’t suppose we can.” Barbara, tightening
the belt on her clean robe, shook her head
thoughtfully. “And they came here right on the
heels of the courier-did you notice that? They must
have been following him somehow, knowing that he’d