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

are to turn on me as you did last night, let it be at the end, not scarcely a sentence in."
"You have my word."
    The archway in the hedge to the left of the column opened on an herb garden, whose spindly overgrown plants ranged in small beds about a pond full of aimless fish. As they sat down on the raised edge of the pool, one of the under-gardeners—who had been cutting down a half-dead stand of wormwood in the corner—packed up his tools, knuckled his forehead and took himself out of the way. He was red-haired, freckled from too much sun, and Charles watched Jasper watch him with a new, imperious jealousy that he almost enjoyed.
    "Well then." Jasper dangled his fingers in the water. The carp swum close to lip at them, and he smiled. "I've always been able to see things other people cannot see," he said, stroking the grey fins and silver gilt sides of the fish, making them dart away back into the deep water. "My mother's people say that a boy child born with a caul over his head is destined to become a witchfinder. He has strange powers."
    He ducked his head as if to evade a blow. "If a sense one cannot be rid of qualifies as a power, then they may be right. Certainly, when I came here to live with my guardian it was the Latham ghosts I met first. The white lady. The burning boy. The voice in the walls. The charioteer. They are old, most of them. The charioteer, indeed, is pre-Roman, much faded. I don't think he will last much longer—another generation, another hundred years. I don't know. But I do know this, they are newly angry, and a house full of angry ghosts is not a healthy place for the living."
He looked up to gauge Charles' reaction, and seemed not too much dismayed by the numbed, disbelieving stare.
    "I have no idea where to start." Charles sat on the edge of the pond and watched the glide of tarnished silver fish beneath water lily pads bearded with algae. "Can any of that be true?"
"I realize as a papist my word may not be worth a great deal."
    Facing one another as they sat by the water side, it took only Charles edging forward an inch before their knees touched. At the little press of cuff and stocking Jasper raised his eyebrows. He had, it seemed, an almost inexhaustible fund of small, cynical smiles—this one had a softness to it that undercut its insult. "I'm not sure you know your own mind, Mr. Latham. There's no wonder you can't begin to fathom mine."
"I thought you were a vampire."
    Jasper threw back his head and laughed in earnest, all his soft quietness dissolving for a heartbeat into such openhearted hilarity Charles found himself joining in. "And you balk at ghosts?"
"It isn't very logical, is it? My professor would rend his clothes in horror."
"You studied philosophy?"
    "And politics. My father…" Still the sense of disbelief, the sideways jerk of his mind like a horse refusing the rein, at the thought that his father was dead. He reached up and combed his fingers through the little tuft of hair that stuck out, brushlike, from the bottom of his queue. The powder came off on his fingers. "My father wanted me to run for Parliament, but on discovering I was a follower of Locke and Swift he changed his mind. Withdrew his support. I have been trying to think of something else to do that might please him…"
    Some shadow of wariness was removed by Jasper's laughter. He caught Charles' gaze with sympathetic eyes. "I'm sorry for your loss."
    And it seemed natural, inevitable, to tell Jasper what he had not thought to whisper to another living soul. "I don't… I don't seem to care. I try to find grief and all that comes is curiosity." Do you think there is something vital missing in me? Am I damned?
    Jasper leaned forward, a pressure of warmth on Charles’ knee, solidly reassuring. For the first time in their acquaintance Charles found himself thinking the clergyman’s suit looked right on the man. It was easy to imagine him in a cassock, with the grill of the confessional slanting light across that