She got up, taking the glass. “What’s this for?”
“Celebrating,” he said. “Mostly the fact that we’re all still alive, to varying extents. Let us condole the knight; for lambkins, we will live. Come and be sociable.”
Cranswell was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a drift of wrappings and boxes, playing with Ruthven’s new phone. Both he and Greta were wearing the clothes Ruthven had bought to replace their ruined things, and all in all she had to admit there was a very Christmas-morning feel to the air. The dark jeans and sweater she had on were quite a lot nicer than anything she had previously owned, and fit perfectly.
Ruthven was pouring more wine; she picked up a second glass and drifted over to where Varney sat by the windows. He opened his eyes, blinking up at her. In the moonlight they were not just metallic, those eyes, but iridescent; she found herself thinking of black pearls, oil-slick rainbows, the sheen on a raven’s wing.
She offered him the glass, and he took it—without breaking eye contact. Greta could feel the faint shimmery edges of his thrall, just for a moment, there and then gone again. “Thank you,” he said, and sounded as if he meant more than for this nice glass of fizzy wine.
“You are most welcome,” she said, and sat down on the arm of his chair, and Varney caught his breath. Beyond her, Ruthven had settled into the corner of one long white and gold sofa, draping himself aesthetically against the cushions, and raised his glass.
“If I may,” he said, drawing their attention. “I’d like to propose a toast.”
“To what?” Cranswell wanted to know. “‘No more crazy monks—cheers’?”
“To absent friends,” Ruthven said, mildly. “Greta, you spoke to Nadezhda earlier?”
She nodded; she had called Dez back and spent half an hour on the phone going over case management. “Kree-akh and his people are going to be all right. A couple of them are still at the clinic, but everyone is going to pull through, and Anna’s been released from hospital.”
“Thank God,” Varney said, and Greta looked down at him and saw that he apparently meant it. The weariness in his face was still there, but subtly lessened. He looked more … present, in the world, she thought. Less of a disinterested observer.
She thought of him asking why do you do this job. Thought of him putting groceries away, hypnotizing Halethorpe with his eyes, bending over her hand to brush his lips lightly over her skin; thought of him lifting Ruthven over his shoulder without apparent effort. Of him saying sufficient unto the day is the worry thereof. Saying her name. No one had ever said her name quite like that, quite the way he did.
“And I understand that Fastitocalon is in the best of hands,” Ruthven continued. “So: to absent friends, who are dearly missed but safe, and to present ones, whom I appreciate rather a lot just at the moment.”
“That I will drink to,” said Cranswell, and leaned up to clink his glass with Ruthven’s. “Cheers.”
“To friends,” said Varney, apparently tasting the word like an unfamiliar delicacy, and looked up at Greta. She smiled, sore but illogically happy, and touched her glass to his, and drank; for a moment absolutely nothing else needed to be said.
It was Cranswell who broke the spell. He yawned, leaning back against the edge of the sofa, and swirled his champagne to watch the bubbles glitter and fizz. “What are you going to do now, Ruthven?” he asked. “I mean, where are you gonna live?”
“Once my flat has been decontaminated,” Varney said, “which I expect to have to pay quite a lot to have done, you have a standing invitation to stay there as long as you see fit.”
“Thanks,” said Ruthven. “I very much appreciate the offer, as I appreciate your current generosity”—he gestured at the suite’s elegant furnishings—“but I think I might take the opportunity to travel.”
“What?” Greta looked up from her glass, distracted. “You’re leaving? Where?”
“It is going to take many days for the insurance people to do their business, and many weeks for the various builders to come and go and do what they need to do in order to render the house even slightly habitable,” he said. “And while I love this wretched city a great deal, for all its faults, I think I could stand to be somewhere other than London for a few weeks. I have now acquired the bare necessities to keep body and soul together, thanks to Sir Francis’s generosity.”
“Not at all,” said Varney, eyeing a bag full of Bumble and bumble hair products with a doubtful expression.
“And the next thing I think I shall buy,” Ruthven went on, “is a first-class plane ticket. Four, in fact, if you three would care to join me.”
“Where?” Greta asked again. The idea of Ruthven making travel plans was something of a shock; as far as she knew he hadn’t spent much time out of the country in nearly two hundred years, not since the awkward and much-publicized business with Miss Aubrey.
He was smiling a little, as if contemplating some private joke. It was an expression that she hadn’t seen on that face for a while now: not quite serenity, but contentment. Satisfaction. He didn’t look either anxious or angry—or bored.
In the past week she had seen him both absolutely enchanted and coldly furious, both confident and more helplessly miserable than Greta had known he could look, but in all the terror and exhaustion of the whole miserable adventure, not once had she seen boredom cross his face. It was remarkably beautiful in its absence.
“Well,” he said, and met her eyes, still smiling. “I’ve heard that Greece is delightful, this time of year.”
EPILOGUE
The afternoon sun turned the old Cretan harbor of Chania into crushed sapphire, glittering with tiny wavelets driven before a freshening wind.
It had in fact rained three of the five days they’d been here, but at least the rain hadn’t been London rain, and had fallen vertically instead of horizontally, failing to rime everything with ice. Ruthven, philosophically, had remained indoors with the hotel’s balcony windows open and the gauze curtains blowing, filling the rooms with the smell of sea salt and petrichor.
Crete in the off-season was refreshingly devoid of holidaymakers towing shrieking infants or getting noisily drunk. Stripped of the throngs, the island itself was revealed: an old and strong place, its bones showing, sleeping in the sun. Ruthven went around in a wide-brimmed floppy hat and enormous sunglasses, and was pleasantly aware of feeling for once very much younger than his surroundings.