Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Read online

  “Imagine him then at eighteen, before his marriage, before the lash of pain had laid him open so many times. Imagine all that fire, if you will, burning wild.”

  “Oh, I can imagine it,” she said wryly, taking another swallow of the whiskey and relishing the heat that spread through her chest in its wake.

  “Yes,” John smiled, “perhaps you’ve drunk at that fire more than any.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked, feeling the dreaded flush flooding up her neckline to stain her face.

  “Because, other than his wife, you are the only woman I’ve known him to truly and deeply love.”

  “Oh,” she said, because there seemed little else to say. John merely quirked a grizzled grey brow at her and took another swallow of his drink.

  “Every March, just before his birthday, he would host a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It was the event of the year, and one was just as likely to find a homeless fiddler there as the cream of Oxford society. Jamie never did discern between classes and he forced anyone else in his society to give up such notions too.

  “The one I remember in particular was not only a mad tea party, but also the occasion at which Jamie stood and delivered a very blue variation on The Hunting of the Snark.”

  “All eight fits?” she asked, smiling.

  “What do you think?” Jonathan returned the smile with interest. “And, of course, everyone there was in fits by the end of the first fit, and it flew downhill from there.”

  She could well imagine, having been the recipient of some rather blue, if elegant, verse from His Lordship’s pen herself.

  “In the middle of the party, he got up on the table, feet neatly placed between the butter and the tea, a large top hat on his head and the most dreadful purple velvet bow tie askew around his neck, and said the whole thing in a stream, with toasts to various people he’d included in the body of the poem. I leave it to you to imagine, if you will, what such a spectacle set up in each person.”

  She could see it only too clearly, and knew the effect Jamie had on others, how just to see him was to set up a craving that swiftly became a yearning that threatened to engulf one’s life. That this effect was entirely unintentional on his part only increased its potency.

  “He would lead everyone on a merry chase—it was such a time of enchantment—picnics in the country with champagne and strawberries, floating down the river in punts as though we all belonged to another time, one gilded in mellow golden light. A time that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world, ever. One’s own time is never a gilded age, after all. Sometimes he’d be on a reckless adventure for days, and then he’d disappear down the rabbit-hole as he so eloquently put it, often for days, and no one would be able to find him. Then he’d turn up at my door with that hollowed-out look and I’d put him to bed and knock him out with some sort of medicine until it seemed safe for him to re-emerge.”

  “He had to trust you deeply to allow you to see him when he was so fragile.”

  “He did, and I never betrayed that trust—not even once. I would rather die, frankly.”

  Jamie’s friendship did that to people, made them pledge all in the name of it because it was a charm that could not be resisted and once warmed there, one could never find the equal elsewhere.

  “Everyone found him irresistible, but when he was fully manic, he was a fire that drew every moth in the vicinity. It seemed even he couldn’t control it. Others are inevitably singed by such fires. And as hypnotizing as such a conflagration is, it was very bad for him and he would regret his actions afterward, but it was too late. The damage had already been done, you see.”

  She stood, nodding to John so that he would not interrupt the flow of his narrative, re-filling his glass and adding a splash to her own. Any more and she knew her head would start to feel as if it was detaching from her shoulders.

  “When he would listen, I would do what I could and say what I might to encourage him to keep himself as stable as possible. I’m sure you know the sort of thing I’m talking about: regular hours, proper diet, avoiding extremely emotional situations, avoiding the drink. I never could get him to take his medication, but I understood why he hated it so.”

  “He told me once he feels half-dead when he takes it, as if he’s seeing the world through a thick film.”

  “Yes, but it’s a very deadly fire he holds in his hands when he doesn’t take it. He’s wedged between Scylla and Charbydis constantly. Andrei only stoked that dangerous fire, threw fuel upon it, and it would leave Jamie wrecked in its passage. I hated Andrei for that, but Jamie had drawn a very solid line between the two of us and refused even to discuss Andrei with me.”

  He paused and gazed into the fire, and for a moment there was a silence in which the soft hiss of the burning peat was audible.

  “His father was rather hard on him, considering that Jamie gave up his dreams for the man. Jamie was living in the most dreadful little attic outside of London, writing the most glorious poetry and prose, and his father came and told him he must come home. It was Jamie’s last stab at rebellion, I think. But his father was in the midst of a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized shortly after Jamie came back here so I suppose it was inevitable no matter how one looks at it.”

  “He doesn’t sound much like Jamie,” Pamela said, feeling a sudden anger at the man Jamie had called ‘Dad’.

  “As I understand it, Jamie is much more like his grandfather, a light that draws all comers. His father was far moodier. I think the manic depression was more about the depression for him and he didn’t experience too many of the manic highs. Jamie has always experienced both extremes. When he’s in his manic phase, he’s incredibly productive and he can write for several days straight without sleeping or eating. Of course, the crash afterward is particularly brutal, but the manic phase is a bit like an addictive drug—worth the pain to have the joy.”

  “Once he came home—was that when he married Colleen? I know they were young when they married.”

  “Yes, I think they married before the year was out. During his time in England, he never told me about Colleen. I think he wanted to keep her separate from the rest of his life, and I think he needed that time to burn before taking up his real life.”

  “I don’t think that is Jamie’s real life—the business and the day to day. I think he would say the life we live in our heart and mind, regardless of outward activity, is the true life of a man.”

  “Yes, I imagine he would in his more impractical moods, but reality does have a way of intruding on one’s finer emotions, have you not found?”

  She laughed, knowing no answer was needed. She got up, put more peat on the fire and re-filled both their teacups. The study basked in the low light, a place of comfort and peace. It hurt to think of Jamie being able to find neither at present, or perhaps beyond the… no, she cut the thought off firmly. He was alive. There were no other alternatives. He was a man of infinite and surprising capabilities who could survive things that would reduce other men to dust in a matter of weeks.

  “At first, marriage agreed with Jamie. Colleen steadied him the way a rudder would a storm-tossed ship. Then the babies started to come and she was never the same, nor was Jamie. She shut him out, and his strength has always lain in his ability to help those he loves. She might as well have opened his veins and left him to hemorrhage, because what she did had the same effect.”

  “You didn’t like her?” Pamela asked.

  “Actually I rather did. I just didn’t like what she did to Jamie. I know you will say I can hardly blame her. With such tragedy visited upon a woman, one should hardly have expectations of her as a wife. Yet I never thought she was the right woman for Jamie. She was a bit provincial and out of his league and she knew it on some level, despite how much she loved him. She knew it and took the first opportunity to bolt—oh, you needn’t raise your eyebro
ws at me. I’m an old man and I’ll tell it as I see it and spare you any false politenesses. Now you, you wouldn’t have left. You would have allowed him the balm of taking care of you, of allowing his love to help you heal.”

  “I haven’t always allowed my own husband that so I can’t say I would have been any stronger than she was. What did she look like?” she asked, thinking it would be wise to steer the conversation off these imminent shoals.

  John smiled, acknowledging her segue.

  “She was lovely—very pale, made me think of something steeped in moonlight, so very fair and still yet somehow lacking the necessary fire. Something I believe you,” he tipped his whiskey glass in her direction, “aren’t lacking in at all.”

  “My husband would say,” she admitted ruefully, “that I’ve more than an ample amount.”

  “Something I’ve no doubt he truly appreciates.”

  “Oh, most of the time he does, but not always. How was Colleen toward you?”

  “By that you mean—I’ve called her provincial and you think it was personal reasons that made me say so. Well, she was very wary of me. I visited them a few times over the years and was always made welcome, but I could tell she was never comfortable around me. I came from a world that she was certain would take Jamie away from her. I think she still worried that it would claim him.”

  “You can hardly blame her for that,” Pamela said, feeling sorry for the woman who had been Jamie’s wife.

  “Then, as you will know, the next several years seemed to contain little but heartbreak for Jamie and Colleen. I don’t think anyone was surprised when she left, only that they had managed to survive with one another that long. She left for the convent and Jamie threw himself into work and drink with a vengeance. And after that… after all that… his father took his own life and Jamie didn’t come up for air until after the funeral and your arrival on the scene.”

  “His relationship with his father sounds so different from what he’s said—though he’s said little.”

  “There were, I think, many good moments for the two of them. Jamie loved the man dearly, so there must have been. I always thought his father was jealous of Jamie, envied him the grace and beauty and the lightning-ordered mind that seemed to catch glimpses of God now and then while the rest of us only saw the world around us. Of course, the beauty Jamie experiences is always on the razor’s edge, both perilous and savage, and yet I still long to see the universe, if only for a moment, through his eyes.”

  “But are any of us willing to pay the price for that glimpse of heaven?” Pamela asked softly, having seen how steep was the cost of Jamie’s gifts.

  “I have thought at times that no price would be too high,” John replied. The answer of a born poet, Pamela thought, but not a man of sense. He stood up then and retrieved a box he had left by the study door. He placed it at her feet.

  “I’ve brought this for Jamie. Perhaps you can put it aside for when he returns home.”

  Inside the box was a welter of paper and leather-bound notebooks bundled together, some tied with twine to keep them from bursting their seams and spilling with papered profligacy across the floor. There were also a few hardback books, cloth-bound, all in the same rather lurid lilac tone, with rough-cut edges and gold-lettered titles. She picked one up and glanced at the title, raising an eyebrow.

  “Ah, yes,” John said, “the works of the redoubtable Professor Swansea—purple prose and lascivious verse—but very well done if I do say so myself.”

  “Professor Swansea?” Pamela said, thinking about the small lilac book that she had in her own possession which had come to her via a Jewish translator in Dublin some years ago.

  John merely raised one of his own bristly eyebrows and looked at her over the rim of his whiskey tumbler.

  “I had no idea… Jamie wrote these?” she asked, pulling out another lilac tome with the title The Adventures of a Bodleian Boy in the Orient. Inside the flyleaf was a list of at least five other entries in this particular series.

  “They’re collector’s items in the world of erotica,” John said. “The bloody boy wrote them on a dare to begin with and then they were snapped up by a publishing house. They still sell very well to this day, but those are all first editions and will be worth a fair bit someday.”

  “Oh my,” Pamela said, having opened one to the halfway point.

  “ ‘Oh my’ is an understatement, but I know what you mean.”

  “How much do you think—” she began and then halted, realizing the question was hardly appropriate.

  John merely laughed. “Well, I don’t know to be honest. Jamie has never been one to kiss and tell, but there was a dreadful amount of smoke during his time at Oxford for there to have been no fire at the base of it. He looked like a young god and was well practiced in Dionysian behavior as well. It does lead one to wonder,” he mused, turning the cover of one of the thicker volumes, “how many of the Professor’s scenes were the product of his fertile imagination and how many were purely autobiographical. There was a real scandal his second year. He had a not entirely discreet affair with a high-ranking parliamentarian’s wife, that much I do know for truth. It was an utter disaster, because while he was sowing and dallying, she fell in love.”

  “Of course she did,” Pamela said, still leafing through the lurid lavender tome and stopping here and there to grasp the nugget of a particularly evocative sentence. “Poor woman.”

  “Yes,” John said with a sigh. “Poor woman, indeed.”

  “Why are you returning all this? I imagine he gave them to you, didn’t he?”

  John didn’t answer at once, but stared into his whiskey as though deciding what to tell her. When he raised his eyes to meet her own, she saw a weariness in his face that aged him markedly, even in this low light.

  “I’m not well and I wanted to be certain that I returned his things to him just in case something should happen. You know how people come picking like corbies over a carcass when someone dies. I’d rather that certain papers of Jamie’s weren’t left vulnerable. I know I can trust you to keep them safe here for him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, seeing now what should have been obvious had her worry for Jamie not been so paramount.

  “I’m not dying, dear girl, just not well, and with some of the things you’ll find in that box, it’s better to be safe rather than sorry.”

  The subtext being, Pamela thought, that the answer to Jamie’s disappearance might well lie within those books and papers.

  “I don’t know where Jamie meets him. I don’t know where they go or what they do. I don’t know a damn thing and I’m sorely regretting how intransigent I’ve been all these years on the subject of Andrei.”

  “Does it still hurt when you see Jamie?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Only when I breathe, dear girl, only when I breathe.”

  A puzzle piece clicked into place suddenly. “Gold is his aspect, gold his nature, his love given not… but that I think gold, too,” she said quietly and saw the answer in John’s face.

  He replied, however, by quoting Donne. “I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.’

  “It’s a beautiful book. I keep it at my bedside for those nights when I can’t sleep. It’s always reminded me of Jamie and now I understand why.”

  “I didn’t trust Andrei, and I made the mistake of telling Jamie that he shouldn’t either. Still, I don’t think I was wrong, but it drove a bit of a wedge between Jamie and me. There was a coldness in Andrei, a darkness to that fire of which I have spoken that Jamie did not see, or didn’t fear as perhaps he should have.”

  “What do you think it was that drew the two of them together?”

  “They were well matched,” John said, “in intelligence, in beauty, in madness, two sides of the same coin. Only Andrei is the dark s
ide and Jamie the gold. And Andrei resents the hell out of Jamie for that, only Jamie could never see it. Andrei is a dangerous man, and that’s what frightens me most.”

  “You think he would deliberately cause Jamie harm?”

  John took a long moment before answering. “Deliberately? I’m not sure of that—but if harm should come Jamie’s way, I don’t know how much Andrei would do to prevent it, or to fix the damage afterwards.”

  “What did your contacts have to say?” she asked, for they had discussed on the phone the means and ways by which they might discreetly trace Jamie’s whereabouts.

  “My enquiries haven’t led me to anything concrete either. As best I can ascertain, the last person to actually lay eyes on Jamie would be the secretary, Robert. There has been verifiable correspondence since then, but as it turns out it was all pre-arranged. It was almost as if Jamie was readying himself to disappear, and didn’t want anyone to realize it for a good long time.”

  “If that is the case—why?” she asked.

  “That, my dear girl, is the million dollar question, isn’t it? But don’t despair, I have contacts, people who have reason to want him found, to whom I can appeal. I do agree with you, though, that it’s time we started looking.”

  She heard a bellow from the kitchen that told her the evening, for her at least, was over. She smiled. “That’s my son, I’d better go. It’s time I was headed home. I just want to say that though Jamie isn’t here, spending time with you has been like having him here for a bit, in spirit if not in body.”

  He nodded. “And with you as well.” He took her hand in his own warm, dry one. “It was nice to speak aloud about him. Thank you, my dear.”

  She felt a pang leaving him on his own but he seemed a man used to solitude—by choice or otherwise, she did not know. Another bellow from Conor swept all concerns other than those maternal aside, and she left John where he sat, gazing out the study windows into the dark beyond.