“Why, do you think youdeservekilling, Cutty?” he said conversationally. “Got something on your conscience? Or do you think killing would be easier than merely haunting you for the rest of your life? Leaping out of nowhere and so forth? You’ll never,neverknow where I might turn up. I’m perfectly willing to do either one.”
Cutty was mulling his choices.
“Well, I really don’t want to die.” Cutty’s voice was trembling now.
“Nobody does, Cutty,” Lucien said with great faux sympathy. “Nobody does. That is, I certainly didn’t. And yet one moment there I was, happily drunk, heading home from a club with one of my dearest friends—that would be you—and the next I heard your voice say ‘NOW...’”
Cuttweiler’s Adam’s apple undulated in his throat with a hard swallow.
“—and just like that, these two mongrels, two brutes, appeared from nowhere, got hold of my arms and legs before I could get hold of my weapon, and threw me into the drink. The mostremarkablething.” He furrowed his brow in faux amazement. “You’d have thought that everyone involvedwanted. Me. To. Die.”
He issued those words with an icy ferocity and banged out each one with his walking stick.
Cuttweiler flinched every time.
He was now greenish around the mouth. His words clicked out aridly, in stuttering bursts. The battalions of sweat beads ranked at his hairline began to make their way down his face. “Awf-awful thing, Lucien. I was gutted. I tried to save you. I, er, shouted for help, I did.”
Lucien snorted. “Come now, Cutty, even that lie lacks conviction.”
For a moment they stood in a silent stalemate. Cutty seemed trapped in Lucien’s remorseless stare.
“If you’re going to kill me, I wish you’d do it sooner rather than later, Bolt,” he said. With great noble suffering. His voice was hoarse now.
“Why oh why would I kill you? Have you a guilty conscience, Cutty? Two men are standing here, and only one of them is a murderer. Here’s a hint: it’s not me.”
Two white dents lay alongside the man’s nostrils and Lucien could actually see the little hairs fluttering in them as he siphoned in shallow breaths.
“Even when I shot a man in a duel I made a point ofnotkilling him.”
“Lucien...”
“Even when I stabbed a pirate to death boarding the cutter I was on, it wasn’t murder, given that he was trying to kill me. I certainly know how to do it in a number of ways, but it isn’t pleasant nor is it precisely easy to kill a man, Cutty, not if one isn’t evil. And I’m many things, but I’m not that. Although...” Lucien drummed his chin. “I suppose it’s easier to kill someone if your only job is to say ‘Now.’”
Cutty blinked through all these words as if they were hailstones landing on him.
And then he was silent.
The fight had gone out of him. Then again, the quotient of fight in him was probably minute to begin with. He was waiting this encounter out the way a man waits for his turn at the gallows.
“Why, Cutty? That’s what I want to know. Then we’ll discuss how you’ll make restitution.”
Had a word ever sounded so sinister as “restitution”? It certainly made Cutty wince.
“Lucien, I have scarcely slept a night since. The remorse has been a blight upon my life. I have missed your company. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it.” He did sound sincere. Cutty hadn’t the sort of subtlety that went into making convincing liars.
“Well, I imagine you feel that way now since your murder didn’t quitetake.”
Cutty turned his head toward the water. He was probably wondering whether jumping in was more advisable than standing here.
Lucien was growing weary of the conversation. He’d once counted this man as a friend and he didn’t know why, except that “friend” meant very little back then—someone with whom to drink and gamble and exchange prurient anecdotes about women, he supposed. Cutty had been good for a laugh and he hadn’t cared that Lucien was a reckless bastard, and that had mattered, too.
It was a singularly lovely day. A feathery white cloud hovered above them in the blue sky; the surface of the river was a blinding, rippling silver beneath the sun.
“Isn’t it ironic that we’re right here next to the water, Cutty, where last we saw each other? I’m not adverse to doing a little damage to your person in order to get the answers. Perhaps tipping you over the side. I like the poetry of it. You’d sink like a stone now. Clearly you’ve been so distressed by my death that you haven’t had a bite to eat since.”
Lord Cuttweiler sighed bleakly. “Fine,” he said evenly. “Do what you will, Lucien. I understand. I deserve it. I know the kind of man I am and so do you—a weak one. But I was desperate. You knew the kind of debt I was in. I would have ruined my family, my prospects, my future, theshameof it. And Bolt, she paid my debts.”
Lucien went still. “She...”