Apollo had loathed him on sight.
He stared into his sister’s eyes—thankfully the dark gray of their mother’s—and waited.
She took both his hands, giving him strength as she said, “He’s dying.”
Chapter Five
The king saw what his wife had birthed and drew back his arm to kill the monster, but his priest stayed his hand. “It is rumored that the people of this island once worshipped a god in the shape of a great black bull. Better, my liege, to let this thing live than risk offending such an ancient power.”…
—From The Minotaur
Captain James Trevillion glanced at the small brass clock on the table next to his chair. Four fifteen. Time to return to his charge. Carefully he placed a lopsided cross-stitch bookmark between the pages of the book he was reading: The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow. He picked up his two pistols and shoved them securely into the holsters of the wide leather bandoliers that crisscrossed his chest. Then he reached for the cane.
The damnable cane.
It was plain, made of hardwood, with a wide head. Trevillion leaned heavily on the cane, bracing his crippled right leg as he heaved himself to his feet. He paused a moment to adjust to standing, ignoring the ache that shot through the leg. The ache was bone-deep, which made sense, since it was a bone of that leg that’d been broken—not once, but twice, the second time catastrophically.
It was the second break that had cost him his army career in the dragoons. The Duke of Wakefield had offered him another job instead—although Trevillion still wasn’t entirely sure if he should be grateful for that offer or not.
He glanced out the window as he waited for the ache in his leg to die down. He could see several gardeners laboring over a crate in the back garden. As he watched, the top was pried off, revealing rows of what looked like sticks packed in straw.
Trevillion raised his brows.
He pivoted gingerly and limped out his door and into a hallway in Wakefield House—the duke’s London residence. His room was at the back of the house, at the end of one of the corridors. Not a servant’s room, certainly, but not a guest’s, either.
Trevillion’s mouth quirked. He lived in a strange limbo between.
It took him five excruciating minutes to negotiate the stairs down to the floor below. Just as well that the duke had been so generous with his living situation.
The servants had the topmost fifth floor of Wakefield House.
He could hear feminine laughter now as he laboriously approached the Achilles Salon. Quietly he pushed open the tall, pink-painted doors. Inside, three ladies sat close together, the ruins of a full tea service on the low table before them.
As he began limping toward them, the youngest, a pretty, plump, brown-haired girl, turned in his direction a full second before the other ladies looked up as well.
He marveled at how Lady Phoebe Batten was always the first to be aware of his presence. She was blind, after all.
“My warder comes for me,” she said lightly.
her eyes had been filled with sick despair.
He took out his notebook and wrote, Don’t want you to be seen by the other gardeners and Indio.
She frowned over his words as he dug into the wicker basket she’d brought with her: a new shirt—thank God—some socks and a hat and a smaller, cloth-wrapped parcel filled with lovely food.
After Bedlam, he’d never take any sort of food for granted again.
“Who’s Indio?” Artemis asked, quite reasonably, as he bit into an apple.
He held the apple between his teeth—ignoring his sister’s wrinkled nose—as he wrote: Small, very inquisitive boy with a dog, a nursemaid, and a curious mother.
Her eyebrows shot up as he crunched the apple. “They live here?”
He nodded.
“In the garden?” She glanced around at the charred, crumbling walls of the musician’s gallery. In front of the gallery was a row of marble pillars, which had once supported a roof over a covered walkway. The roof had caved in during the fire, leaving only the crumbling pillars. Apollo had plans for those pillars. With a little scouring, and a judicial blow from a mallet here and there, they would become very picturesque ruins. Right now, though, they were just gloomy, blackened fingers against the sky.
He’d commandeered one of the rooms behind the gallery, where once the musicians, dancers, and pantomime players had prepared for their performances. Here he’d propped a big, oiled tarp over one corner to keep out the rain and wind, and brought in a straw mattress and two chairs. Spartan accommodations, certainly, but there were no fleas or bedbugs, which made this heaven compared to Bedlam.