Conflagration (29 page)

Harriet laughed. “And Gideon was away in his own cleverness.”

Cordelia’s expression became bleakly unfocused. “Colonel Gideon fucking Windermere does not know how to squire a lady.”

“Many of us have learned that the hard way.”

Cordelia gestured across the dark cavern of the room to where Argo and Raphael, shirtless and not caring, were laying on an elevation of cushions, with three girls and another young man. One of the girls had her skirt hiked up practically to her waist, and Raphael, uncharacteristically bold, was kissing her thighs. “I mean, there are the so-called men of my group disporting with local floozies, and I was just sitting at a table getting fictional from pills and liquor.”

Harriet Lime’s knowing smile broadened. “You feel shortchanged on the disporting?”

“I think I do.”

“So why don’t you join your friends? They probably have room for one more.”

“I was hoping to be disporting with Colonel bloody Windermere by now.”

Lime grinned. “Believe me. He’s glorious when you can pin him down. And very inventive.”

“You’ve had him?”

“Naturally.”

“Naturally?”

Lime corrected herself. “Well … maybe a little unnaturally. But, like I said, the trick is pinning him down for long enough. He has this fixation that he’s required to save the world.”

Cordelia pouted determinedly. “I fully intend to pin him down.” She was aware, however, that this was extremely bold talk. Right at the moment, she was having trouble focusing her eyes, although she would never have admitted it. Harriet Lime brought out the competitor in Cordelia.

“Although…”

This section of Madame de Wynter’s party was progressing to random and seemingly anonymous fondling, groping, and much deep breathing. Or was the word degenerating rather than progressing? Either way, Cordelia doubted she would have resisted, or even complained, if a reasonably personable stranger had put a hand on her or worse, but the presence of Harriet Lime obliged her to remain on her feet, and at least minimally maintain the honor of Albany. If she was going to abandon herself and her identity to all the hands and mouths that moved around and below her, Lime would have to abandon herself as well. In addition to being bored, inebriated, and annoyed at being virtually ignored by Gideon Windermere, she was also irritated by the way that Lime so totally insisted that her opinions were the right ones. In the center of the room, fresh and more fiendish-looking devices were being readied by the torturer’s assistants. The boy hung limply from his cuffed wrists, panting for breath, eyes closed and chest heaving. Four distinct trickles of blood ran down his back from where welts of the whipping had crossed and the skin had broken. Lime made a casual gesture that seemed to indicate that the boy’s discomfort was more theatrical than real.

“His name’s Crowley Vane. He’s Anastasia’s nephew, and the town’s most notorious pain-slut. I mean he’s very pretty and everything, and also disgustingly rich from the munitions business, but that’s not nearly enough for young Master Vane. His need to be noticed is so intense he will suffer just about any excruciation as long as he’s the center of attention.” Lime turned back to the preparation for the next round of torture. “You could join in if you felt so inclined.”

Cordelia blinked. “I don’t think so. I think I’m a little too drunk for wielding a lash.”

Lime placed an understanding hand on Cordelia’s shoulder. “A whip can be a dangerous thing in the grip of the intoxicated.”

Lime’s hand on her shoulder was casual, companionable, or perhaps sisterly, but then her fingers started to stroke and caress, and the mood changed. Even so, Cordelia was hardly ready for the kiss. It was sudden and deep, and Harriet Lime’s red lips were anything but tentative. Cordelia did not pull away, but, afterwards, she could only respond with a wide-eyed expression of surprise. “Miss Lime.”

Lime drew back and looked Cordelia full in the face. “Major Blakeney?”

As drunk as she was, Cordelia no longer had any uncertainties about the woman. Harriet Lime was a mischief-maker, probably a libertine, and definitely an instigator, but an instigator who should both be accommodated and emulated. Accordingly, Cordelia twisted her fingers in Lime’s hair and, with a certain authoritarian roughness, pulled the woman’s mouth back to hers.

JESAMINE

Jesamine closed the door behind her, took two paces across the thick pile of the luxury hotel carpet, and dropped to her bare knees with a deep sigh. She could do nothing else. She was helpless and enthralled. Alone in the backseat of the government automobile, she had been physically shaking, but now her body had turned to helpless, acquiescent liquid. She knew that the alcohol and the yellow benodex had opened doors to long-buried needs and desires. She wanted to worship and love him, she wanted to prostrate herself at his feet and shamelessly serve him. She wanted to use all her acquired skills and corruptions to transport the two of them to new and undiscovered sensual summits. She who, as well as any, knew the full horror of slavery, wanted Jack Kennedy to enslave her. He was her monarch; he could be her god.

“Oh, Jack…”

Kennedy was standing in the middle of the room, facing her. A gulf of two paces separated them. His robe of dark burgundy silk, and the fact that his mane of gray hair was still damp, indicated he had recently bathed. When he moved to her he smelled of practical unscented soap. Her hands were immediately inside the robe, running up thighs that were still muscular even though he was old enough to be her grandfather. Mouth open, tongue crawling, she kissed his body. Her lips circled him. She wanted him to stiffen in her mouth, as confirmation that she did have the power to make him notice and lust for her. She realized that this was the moment she had been waiting for all night. The one that she had craved all through the craziness of the reporters on the dock, the train journey, the reception, the interlude with Madame de Wynter, and then her party with all of the drinks and finally the capsules. But now the moment had come, and she could feel him growing and his blood rising. After all the waiting, she had his attention. She paused to sigh from deep in her breast, maybe from her soul.

“Oh, Jack…”

“You don’t have to…”

“Oh yes I do. Believe me. I do have to.…”

Impatiently she leaned back, still on her knees, and pulled the blue dress from New York over her head, not caring if she ripped it, and flung it to one side. Now she was naked but for her scanties and shoes. He could do what he liked with her. Reaching around with both her hands, she pulled his body back to her hungry mouth as though she wanted to consume him. She felt his legs start to quiver, and then he groaned. “Slow down, my dear, I am not as young as I used to be.”

She disengaged from him long enough to gasp. “I think you’re immortal.”

Her hands went to the fabric belt on his robe, untying the simple knot. As the robe fell open, she ripped the belt loose from its loops and held it up to him, hands extended, wrists crossed. “Tie me.”

“Your hands?”

“Tie my wrists. Show me that I’m yours.”

“A lover’s
takla
?”

“You know?”

Kennedy smiled and quoted. “
‘A lover’s takla, while the night lasts
.
’
I have spent my time among the Ohio.”

Kennedy took the belt. “It’s not blood-red hemp, but we will make our own
Quodoshka
.”

Was Kennedy seeing the visions in her head? Her inner vision had flashed back to that night in the lodge of the Ohio, when Jesamine had held out her arms for a scarlet cord to be cut and another
takla
severed by Oonanchek’s polished steel hunting knife. Her honey-nude skin had glistened with sweat, and the air in the wickiup had been thick and sweet with smoke and sexual magic. In the present, Jesamine did not question what Jack Kennedy saw or what he only guessed at and understood. She was creating her own sexual magic. “It will serve to bind me.”

The room was turning as Kennedy looped the burgundy silk around her wrists, and the hallucinations were even more insistent than on the ride there. The car had roared through London streets that had been nothing more than gas-lit flickering stage sets for a drama that was wholly beyond her imagination and equally beyond her control. Even the leather upholstery of the automobile’s dark interior had crept and crawled beneath her as though anxiously alive. Then, as she had hurried through the hotel lobby, tripping on her heels, clacking on the marble, running to Jack Kennedy, ignoring the puzzled looks of the commissionaire, the desk clerk, and the bellboys, she could have sworn that she saw Yancey Slide leaving by another exit. He had discarded his stained duster for a long and immaculate pearl gray overcoat of much the same cut and with a black velvet collar. In an instant of shock, Jack Kennedy had almost been pushed from her mind. Slide was not supposed to be in London. He had gone on to Oslo. That’s what they had been told. Did his sudden presence mean something terrible had happened, something terrible maybe to Jack?

She had ridden in the creaking electric lift in a state of apprehension so extreme that it verged on dread. But then Dawson, Jack Kennedy’s civilian valet/bodyguard, had let her in. Jack Kennedy had been standing there in his burgundy robe, and everything was alright. That the oriental design of the wallpaper in the Prime Minister’s suite had taken on a serpentine life of its own didn’t matter, nor that the ornate moldings on the ceiling would start to move if she stared at them too long. Jack Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Albany, with unexpected strength for a man of his advanced age, was gathering her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed, and, holding her with one arm, whisking off the top covers, and laying her on the cool white sheets. With her arms above her head, she undulated her hips, and slowly and wantonly spread her legs, showing him, with no space for error or misunderstanding, that she wanted him inside her right there and then. But, as he entered her and she let out a heartfelt groan of delight, the fingers of her bound hands accidentally discovered the cold metal barrel of the heavy revolver under Jack Kennedy’s pillow, and the shock of inevitable death and danger violently invaded her ecstasy.

ARGO

Argo’s eyes were remarkably large in his head. He was drunk, and drugged, and using every last reserve of his control to stop himself swaying and stumbling. The reception at the Palace of Westminster now seemed as though it had been days ago instead of earlier the same night. His mind was reeling, not only from what he had consumed, but from the gauntlet of experience he had been running over the last few hours. Had his equilibrium been more under control, he might have asked more questions when Daphne, Estelle, and Nell announced that they were taking them to the Turret Room. He probably would have asked more questions when it became clear that Spinrad was being left behind, and whatever awaited them in the mysterious place was reserved for just him and Raphael. Estelle, Daphne, and Nell, adjusting their own clothing, had indicated that the boys should put their shirts on and come with them. Lacking any will to argue, Argo had done as he was told. Nell and Daphne had each taken one of his hands and commenced to lead him away, while Estelle brought up the rear with an equally unhesitating Raphael—past Cordelia kissing Harriet Lime, in a public display of passion that Argo did not care to contemplate.

They had ascended a broad flight of stairs that brought them to the second floor of Deerpark, and, after walking a lurching zigzag course past a number of vigorously occupied bedrooms, they reached a cast-iron spiral staircase that curved round the outside of what looked from below like a wide chimney of mortared stone work. Daphne started up the steps, but when Argo didn’t immediately follow, she turned and looked back. “Is there a problem?”

Argo was walking reasonably well on flat floors, but to go after Daphne was something of a challenge. “A spiral staircase requires some consideration in my current condition.”

“Just walk straight on up.”

“Walking straight may be the core of the problem.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

Argo put his foot on the first step but experienced an instant of alcohol vertigo. “Are you sure about this?”

“You could do it with your eyes shut.”

“I might have to do it with my eyes shut.”

As it turned out, Daphne was quite right. Negotiating the spiral was easier if he did not think. The climb worked best when he put one foot in front of the other and kept leaning to the left. He only once came close to spilling to humiliation and maybe disaster, but he was able to right himself in the nick of time, and did not crash down on top of Estelle, Nell, and Raphael, who were following closely behind. Finally they reached a small landing that confronted a heavy oak door, reinforced with medieval iron nails. As they halted, Raphael looked around curiously. “This place makes me feel like I should be a carrying a sword.”

Nell laughed. “This place has seen its share of swords.”

Daphne rapped on the huge door and it opened with an unexpected lack of creaking or grinding. The five of them entered a circular room of perfume and smoke, curtained and mysterious, where a hundred candles were burning. Some sections of wall were nothing more than bare masonry, while others were curtained in damask and brocade. Overhead, in the conical space formed by the eaves, a tame raven sat reflectively on a beam. Incense rose from censers and curled in the light rays from what Argo assumed was some form of camera lucida that projected dim images of the activities in the other parts of the party, only to have them distorted by the unbroken curve of the brickwork. A hunchbacked technician crouched in a narrow alcove under a faux-arrowslit window, with phones clamped to his head, and his face dimly illuminated by glowing wireless tubes. He was alternatively listening and making notes on a pad, then tapping an electric key to send messages in what sounded like Standard Hamilton Code. The effect was that they had entered some inner sanctum that was part boudoir and part fortress, and that spoke of deeper designs than just sex, absinthe, nighttime archery, and novelty masochist waiters.