The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online

his own image lurked beneath the dead lids to confront him.
    Charles led the way into the tiny, grilled off room which had once been the Lady Chapel. The Madonna’s headless, handless statue still presided in its niche over a stone altar from which every saint had been laboriously chipped. The body that lay on top beneath a fresh lawn sheet looked too small for Ambrose Latham. As he lit the candles at its feet and head, a sense of deep wrongness, like a mortal dread, made his fingers tremble. He approached the corpse as if walking through tar.
    The sheet was stained with faint yellow-brown exudations. He put his hands out to turn the material down around the head, and drew them back twice, suddenly very glad for George’s mocking presence at his shoulder.
    His skin crawled as he finally touched the damp fabric, and his spirit seemed to do the same. He looked down at his father’s face, the jaw bound up in more linen, the sunken, sweaty, waxy white of it, and felt only a conviction that whatever this was, it was not Ambrose Latham.
    The eyelids felt like thinly rolled cold pastry, and the eyes beneath had turned white, mucus-milky as semen. George still watched, so he stifled disgust and leaned forward. The scent of the thing was rotten-sweet.
“Well?”
    Not even his own reflection showed in the spheres of cold jelly. He covered the corpse back up again with less reverence. “Nothing.”
    Blowing out the candles, they left their father’s body in the dark. As George closed the chapel door behind them, the cockerel crowed in the kitchen garden.
    “Are you satisfied?” George asked, softly.
“Not really. No.”
    “Then permit me to give you some advice: learn to be. You seem to have forgotten, Charles, that I am the head of the family now. I don’t brook disobedience, and I want this dropped. Do you understand me?”
    “No. No I don’t.” He looked at George’s thin lips, the crevices of disapproval that newly bracketed his mouth, and added quickly, “But I am trying.”
c
hAPteR five
“Wait!”
    The shadows of the yew walk lay inky dark on the neat clipped grass of the path. The morning tasted of autumn, moist and cool. A faint mist veiled all distances, brought the world intimately close. At the back of the house the gardener burned the first crop of fallen leaves and the scent of smoke spoke of winter to come.
    Jasper hesitated, walked a pace further, hesitated again, his head down and his back braced, waiting for the inevitable insult. A wide-shouldered, strong back, Charles couldn’t help but notice, set off by the flare of coat skirts. His calves beneath them looked almost indecently exposed in their clinging skin of silk.
    When he turned it was with the air of a bear who has suffered the taunts of one too many dogs.
Charles stopped in his tracks. His night had been sleepless and sticky with the memory of that kiss. Something he had only dreamed about had been made real before him, fantasy given flesh, and he could not stop reliving it. Over and over, each time with the same shock of disbelief and delight. No wonder the world forbade this as a sin! If not restrained, no one would ever do anything but sit and picture it, and let the world go hang.
Now, though his eyes were scratchy and raw, and his legs weak from fatigue and wet dreams, it swept over him again—ravenous delight. How had he not been aware, before, of the height of this man? Of the way his neck joined his shoulder in that perfect fluid line? Of the way the black waistcoat with its jet buttons clung tight about his powerful chest? Struck by the personality, how had he failed to be aware of the body that contained it, until now?
“Mr. Latham?” The raw, dangerous look faded slightly as Jasper watched Charles stand with his mouth open, looking—he imagined—like a codfish on a slab. “Are you well?”
“I don’t…” Charles shook his head. Jasper shouldn’t ask complicated questions like that. Am I well? “I don’t know what I