Why Kings Confess

Chapter 41

Hero spent much of the morning in the offices of the Times, talking to John Walter, the editor who was publishing her series of articles on London’s working poor. She handed him her latest piece on the city’s brickmakers. And then she asked him, with studied casualness, if he’d ever heard of a convent in Portugal called Santa Iria.

He stared back at her, his face unusually grim, his eyes blinking several times before he said, “I have, yes. Why do you ask?”

“I want to know what happened there in 1810.”

He pushed up from his desk chair and went to stand at the somewhat grimy window overlooking the fog-choked street, the fingers of one hand worrying his watch chain. “It’s not pretty,” he warned her.

“Tell me.”

And so he did.

• • •

She arrived back at Brook Street to see Devlin standing outside, at the edge of the rear terrace. He had his back to the house, his gaze on the fog-shrouded, winter-browned garden that stretched down to the mews. He still wore his caped driving coat, and she suspected he’d only just walked up from the stables. But there was a brittle tautness to the tilt of his head that reminded her in some indefinable way of the nights she’d awakened in the hours before dawn to find him bedeviled by dreams of a time and place he could not forget.

He turned when she let herself out of the house and walked up to him, her arms wrapped across her chest for warmth. She could see the strain of too many sleepless nights in the hollowness of his cheeks and the dark, bruiselike quality of the flesh around his strange yellow eyes.

She said, “You’ve been talking to Alexi Sauvage again.”

A breath of amusement flickered across his features. “How did you know?”

She shook her head. “I wish to God that woman had never come back into your life.”

He stared out at the thick, killing fog. “It’s not her. She’s simply. . a reminder.”

“I found out today what happened at Santa Iria. You went there, didn’t you?” She kept her gaze on his hard profile. “After you escaped from the French camp. You went there, and you saw what the French had done.”

He nodded, his jaw set hard, his gaze still fixed on the rain-trodden garden below. “I suppose I knew in my heart that I was too late, but. . I kept hoping I might somehow be in time to warn them. To stop. .”

She tried to say something, anything, only to find that she could not.

After a moment, he continued. “I was too late, of course. Major Rousseau and his men had already attacked the convent.” He wrapped his hands around the stone balustrade before him, the wind flapping the shoulder capes of his driving coat. Hero found she could not look at his face. “Santa Iria wasn’t just a convent; it was also an orphanage. The French killed everything that moved, then set fire to the buildings. There was nothing left alive. Not a goat, not a dog, not a babe in its cradle. Nothing.”

From the distance came the crack of a whip, the thunder of hooves from an unseen carriage driven up the street, fast.

“And Antonio Alvares Cabral’s daughter?” asked Hero. “The abbess?”

“Rousseau tried to make her talk, except. . the poor woman knew nothing.” He swallowed. “You can imagine what they did to her.”

Hero suspected she probably could not imagine-did not want to imagine. The editor at the Times had been blessedly vague about the details. She said, “Your dreams. . That’s what you see?”

“Not always. But often. Sometimes I see them not as I found them but as they would have been. . before.”

She said, “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was. I’m the one who carried those false dispatches into French hands. My ignorance in no way excuses either my gullibility or my culpability. I knew what sort of man Oliphant was.”

“But-how could anyone have known what he intended? He deliberately sent the French against that convent, hoping that their brutality would drive Alvares Cabral into the arms of the British.” She hesitated. “Did it work?”

Devlin shook his head. “No. When the old man saw what the French had done-to his daughter, to the children, to the other nuns-he collapsed and died.”

Hero felt a deep and powerful rage building within her. “And Oliphant? What happened to him?”

“I rode straight from the blood-soaked ruins of the convent to our camp. I was going to kill him. I knew I’d hang for it, but I didn’t care.” Devlin huffed a soft sound devoid of any trace of humor. “He’d been recalled to headquarters. His older brother had died, and he’s now Lord Oliphant. Last I heard, he’s been appointed Governor of Jamaica. I’ve never seen him again.”

“And then you sold out?”

“Yes. Although it wasn’t only because of Oliphant and Santa Iria. That was simply the culmination of so much that had gone before. We like to think we’re more civilized, more honorable, more righteous than our enemies, but we’re not. Just ask the dead women and children of Copenhagen, of Badajoz, of Dublin, of a thousand forgotten hamlets and farms. And once you realize that, it does rather beg the question: Why am I fighting? Why am I killing?”

She rested her hand on his arm, felt the fine tremors going through him. She thought of the memories he carried with him always, the sights and smells and sounds, and the suffocating weight of guilt. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again. “The deaths of those women and children are on Oliphant’s head. On Oliphant, and the French major, Rousseau, and the English and French officials who put two such men in positions of power.”

But he only pressed his lips into a tight, strange smile and gave a faint shake of his head.

She said, “What happened to Rousseau?”

“He’s dead,” said Devlin. And she knew without being told that, somehow, before Devlin left the Peninsula, he’d tracked down the French major and killed him.

“Good.”

She touched her hand to his cheek, and he turned toward her, his arms coming around her to draw her close, his cheek pressed to the side of her hair. She felt his chest lift against hers as he drew in a ragged breath and held her tight. And then he said the words she’d long thought she’d never hear.

“God, how I love you, Hero. So much. So much. .”