'It should be, yes.'
'Then how does that represent a danger? And for whom?'
'For someone who encounters the woman off the stage and finds it difficult to distinguish the actress from the role she was playing.' She looked at him in the mirror, out from under the wave of a curl. 'Didn't your mother ever warn you about actresses, Arthur?'
'She must have felt there were more obvious dangers lurking about.' Doyle held her eyes steadily. 'I have seen you onstage, haven't I?'
'Yes, you have. After a fashion.'
A long pause followed. 'Miss Temple—'
'Eileen.'
'Eileen,' said Doyle. 'Are you attempting to seduce me?'
'Am I?' She stopped brushing. Her forehead crinkled. She
seemed as unsure of the answer as was he. 'Is that your impression, really?'
'Yes. I would have to say that it is.' Doyle felt surprisingly and utterly calm.
A poised thought flew over the plane of her face like the shadow of a flock of doves. She carefully laid the brush down on the table and turned to face him. 'What if I were?'
'Well,' said Doyle, 'I would have to say that if this does prove to be the last evening of our lives, and I, for whatever reason, remained resistant to your charms, it would surely be the most senseless regret that would soon enough accompany me to the grave.'
They looked at each other without pretense.
'Then perhaps you should lock the door, Arthur,' she said simply, all aspect of performance gone from her voice.
He did exactly as she requested.
DOYLE LEFT THE BEDROOM BEFORE FIRST LIGHT. ElLEEN WAS
sleeping restfully. He gently lifted her arm from where it lay lightly across his shoulder and kissed the sweet nape of her neck before rising. She made a small murmuring as he dressed, but it must have been a response to a dream. She did not stir again.
He was astonished by the absence within him of shame. That conditioned Catholic response to pleasure of any variety—let alone carnal—had never quite been rooted out. Perhaps this time would prove the exception; it had been what she wanted, he told himself, and lest he forget, what he had wanted as well. He had often seen surgeons similarly moved when among the dead and dying by the need to reaffirm the life coursing inside them. What did this mean with regard to his continued relations with her? He hadn't a clue. Having satisfied the physical insistence of the moment, with almost equal urgency he required some small distance to assess the repercussions to his emotions.
Doyle quietly locked the door and pocketed the key. He looked at his watch: nearly five. He would allow Sparks until nine at the very least to return, well past dawn, perhaps longer, directly countermanding his orders. He walked downstairs to see if a cup of tea could be found.
No one was in the kitchen, and he heard nobody moving below. The inn carried the expectant repose that settled the air just before dawn. Timbers groaned expressively. Looking out a window, he noticed that the clouds had lifted; when it came, the morning would be bright, clear, and cold.
She had been sweet and yielding and, yes, experienced, undoubtedly more so than he was, a powerfully tempting avenue for bad feeling from which he turned resolutely away. What had moved him most, what moved him now, was how real in that hour she had seemed, how tangible, reachable: how close. No artifice or barrier between him and a direct experience of who she was. She had wept at one point, silently, wiping away the tears but asking him with her touch and movement not to stop or pay attention. He had complied. What was he feeling now? That knowledge danced away, just out of his grasp. Why did his emotions always lag so infuri-atingly far behind his ability to reason?
Doyle felt slightly light-headed. He opened the door and stepped into the walled courtyard behind the public room. Snow covered the bricks that surrounded a gnarled, bare oak. The cold nipped through his shirt, but it felt clean and bracing. He breathed in the air deeply, greedily, trying to fill his lungs beyond their capacity.
'Fresh air is such a tonic,' said a voice behind him. A voice he had heard quite recently.
Alexander Sparks stood in the shelter of the oak. Wrapped in his black cloak, motionless, hands out of sight, only his face visible in the wan light spilling from the windows. Long and narrow, facial structure similar to his brother's—the resemblance ended in the flesh. He looked nothing like the man Doyle had met outside 13 Cheshire, and yet he knew immediately they were one and the same. Skin lay taut over the bone, shiny and white as parchment, as if a relentless internal heat had seared away all excess, all comfort, everything but necessity. His eyes were pale and evenly set under dark slices of brow, with long black lashes of surprising delicacy. Lank brown hair hung straight to his shoulders, swept back off a high, smooth forehead that receded into the folds of the cloak. Only his mouth belied the geometric austerity of the arrangement; the lips were full, rosebud, red, and moist. As he spoke, a serpentine tongue flicked out from behind the small, neat lines of his teeth, the only visible concession to insatiable appetites that lit the man's interior as starkly as a candle in a jack-o'-lantern. His presence in the courtyard felt magnetic and riveting but somehow weightless; he didn't seem to occupy space so much as hover inside it. Doyle was reminded how much power was generated by absolute stillness.
'Do you favor this time of the night, Doctor?' Alexander's voice was conveyed by a deceptive frequency that split itself into twin modulations; a second tone attached to the surface of his round, rich baritone, riding under the belly of the words, a buzzing or ringing below the conscious threshold that unpleasantly slithered in the ear of the listener like a thief.
'Not especially.'
Doyle lowered his hands and gently touched his pockets. 'I believe you've left your gun in the room. With Miss Temple,' said Alexander. He smiled in a way that might usually be described as kind.
Doyle flexed his hands. The adrenaline kicking into his bloodstream rapidly elevated his heart rate. He felt under a microscope and tried to suppress his alarm to undetectable levels. Wary the man might possess untold mesmeric abilities, he blinked often and avoided his gaze for any extended time. 'I must confess that meeting you in this way is quite strange, Dr. Doyle. I do feel as if I know you already,' said Alexander, with no small modicum of charm. 'Do you share that impression?'
'We have met before.'
'However unknowingly.' Alexander nodded slightly, the first movement he had made.
Doyle glanced casually around the yard. His only avenue of escape lay through the open door behind him, but that would expose his back for the time it would take to climb the
stairs.
'What do you want?' asked Doyle.
'I felt it time for us to effect a more formal introduction. I fear, Doctor, that my young brother, John, may have imparted to you some severe and perfidious misperceptions regarding myself.'
I don't want to hear this, thought Doyle instinctively, I mustn't listen. He did not respond with either word or gesture.
'I thought there would be decided value in our making an effort to know one another as, perhaps, a belated corrective to the more delusional of John's spurious inventions.'
'Do I have a choice?'
'One always has a choice, Doctor,' he said, smiling incandescently. The effect reminded Doyle of acid dripping slowly onto dark, polished wood.
Doyle paused as long as he felt able. 'I should like to get my coat. I'm very cold.'
'Of course.'
Doyle waited. Alexander made no move.
'Now?' asked Doyle.
'We shan't get far if you freeze to death.'
'It's in my room.'
'How perfectly reasonable.'
'So I'll go get it then.'
