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“We know,” she said, staring at him from large, suddenly tear-filled eyes. “Do you hear me? We know.” Then she was gone, the sound of her unsteady steps a ragged drumbeat on the parquet floor.
There was a brief, awkward silence between the two men. Grey cleared his throat just as Philip Twelvetrees coughed.
“Didn’t really like cousin Edward,” he said.
“Oh,” said Grey.
They walked together to the yard where Grey’s horse browsed under a tree, its sides streaked with parrot-droppings.
“Don’t mind Nancy, will you?” Twelvetrees said quietly, not looking at him. “She had . . . a disappointment, in London. I thought she might get over it more easily here, but—well, I made a mistake, and it’s not easy to unmake.” He sighed, and Grey had a sudden strong urge to pat him sympathetically on the back.
Instead, he made an indeterminate noise in his throat, nodded, and mounted.
“The troops will be here day after tomorrow, sir,” he said. “You have my word upon it.”
GREY HAD INTENDED TO RETURN TO SPANISH TOWN, BUT INSTEAD PAUSED on the road, pulled out the chart Dawes had given him, and calculated the distance to Rose Hall. It would mean camping on the mountain overnight, but they were prepared for that—and beyond the desirability of hearing firsthand the details of a maroon attack, he was now more than curious to speak with Mrs. Abernathy regarding zombies.
He called his aide, wrote out instructions for the dispatch of troops to Twelvetrees, then sent two men back to Spanish Town with the message, and two more on before, to discover a good campsite. They reached this as the sun was beginning to sink, glowing like a flaming pearl in a soft pink sky.
“What is that?” he asked, looking up abruptly from the cup of gunpowder tea Corporal Sansom had handed him. Sansom looked startled, too, and looked up the slope where the sound had come from.
“Don’t know, sir,” he said. “It sounds like a horn of some kind.”
It did. Not a trumpet, or anything of a standard military nature. Definitely a sound of human origin, though. The men stood quiet, waiting. A moment or two, and the sound came again.
“That’s a different one,” Sansom said, sounding alarmed. “It came from over there”—pointing up the slope—“didn’t it?”
“Yes, it did,” Grey said absently. “Hush!”
The first horn sounded again, a plaintive bleat almost lost in the noises of the birds settling for the night, and then fell silent.
Grey’s skin tingled, his senses alert. They were not alone in the jungle. Someone—someones—were out there in the oncoming night, signaling to each other. Quietly, he gave orders for the building of a hasty fortification, and the camp fell at once to the work of organizing defense. The men with him were mostly veterans, and while wary, not at all panicked. Within a very short time, a redoubt of stone and brush had been thrown up, sentries had been posted in pairs around camp, and every man’s weapon was loaded and primed, ready for an attack.
Nothing came, though, and though the men lay on their arms all night, there was no further sign of human presence. Such presence was there, though; Grey could feel it. Them. Watching.
He ate his supper and sat with his back against an outcrop of rock, dagger in his belt and loaded musket to hand. Waiting.
But nothing happened, and the sun rose. They broke camp in an orderly fashion, and if horns sounded in the jungle, the sound was lost in the shriek and chatter of the birds.
HE HAD NEVER BEEN IN THE PRESENCE OF ANYONE WHO REPELLED HIM SO acutely. He wondered why that was; there was nothing overtly ill-favored or ugly about her. If anything, she was a handsome Scotchwoman of middle age, fair-haired and buxom. And yet the widow Abernathy chilled him, despite the warmth of the air on the terrace where she had chosen to rece
ive him at Rose Hall.
She was not dressed in mourning, he saw, nor did she make any obvious acknowledgment of the recent death of her husband. She wore white muslin, embroidered in blue about the hems and sleeves.
“I understand that I must congratulate you upon your survival, madam,” he said, taking the seat to which she gestured him. It was a somewhat callous thing to say, but she looked hard as nails; he didn’t think it would upset her, and he was right.
“Thank you,” she said, leaning back in her own wicker chair and looking him frankly up and down in a way that he found unsettling. “It was bloody cold in that spring, I’ll tell ye that for nothing. Like to died myself, frozen right through.”
He inclined his head courteously.
“I trust you suffered no lingering ill effects from the experience? Beyond, of course, the lamentable death of your husband,” he hurried to add.
She laughed coarsely.
“Glad to get shot o’ the wicked sod.”
At a loss how to reply to this, Grey coughed and changed the subject.
