Defending Angels Read online

  “Be good to have live people around the place again,” Lavinia said.

  “I’ll be off, then.” She bent down and ran her hand gently over Sasha’s head. He flopped back against the second tread with a sigh of pleasure. One of the brightly painted Renaissance angels with silver gilt braids peeked out between his ears.

  “Guarding him, like,” Lavinia observed of the painted figure. “You hurry up and get better, dog, so she can get back to guarding the rest of us.”

  “I’ll be back for him before six,” Bree promised. “You and the angel take care, now.”

  She jogged down the brick steps, smiling at the old woman’s fancies, delighted that her day was beginning so well.

  Her landlady was right about Second Hand Rows. She found a comfortably worn leather couch and chair, an old chest that would make a useful coffee table to put magazines on—for all those waiting clients—and a big oak table only slightly foxed from age. “Picked that up from when the old library over on Hudson Street closed down,” the laconic cashier said. “You don’t find tables that size no more. Gotta be twelve foot if it’s one.” He shifted his toothpick from the left side of his mouth to the right with an expert roll of his tongue. “Anything else I can do you for?”

  “A desk,” Bree said, “if possible.”

  He shook his head. He was tall and skinny, with the concave chest of a smoker. Bree could barely make out the Grateful Dead logo on his faded T-shirt. A paper label with a sticky back sat on his right sleeve that read: HELLO, MY NAME IS HENRY. “Fresh out of desks.”

  Bree pulled out her credit card. “Then we can settle up, if you wouldn’t mind, Henry.”

  He nodded, punched the totals from the price tags into the register, and slid her card through the machine.

  “You think you could deliver these things for me?”

  “Free-delivery-on-large-items-less-than-ten-miles-from -the-store,” Henry recited, clearly having said it before. “You setting up a new apartment or what?”

  “Or what,” Bree said. “It’s an office. In a terrific old house by the cemetery on Angelus. I’m a lawyer, just starting out.”

  He stared at her. “That a fact. Angelus, you say. Mrs. Mather send you?”

  “Are you familiar with it? It’s that little old place right in the middle of the cemetery. Kind of an odd place for a law office, I thought, but then, it’s close to the Market, and the rent’s about right. I’m making the living room into a client waiting area. It’s got wood floors, a fireplace, wainscoting. It’s really quite, quite professional.”

  “It’s not me you need to convince, lady.”

  Bree smiled at him, and laughed a little. “You are absolutely right. I think I’m a little nervous about it. It’s my new clients I have to convince, if,” she added anxiously, “I’m to have any.”

  “Angelus Street, huh? Got something over here you might want to see.” He slouched toward the jumble of boxes and racks of clothes, pots and pans and dishes at the rear of the store. He scrabbled in the pile farthest in the back, and emerged with a picture in his hands. He held it high, the cardboard back facing Bree. It was quite a large frame, at least forty inches square. Bree took a breath, prepared to be charming about her absolute refusal to have clown faces, or black velvet Elvises, or dogs playing poker over her vintage fireplace.

  Henry flipped the painting around to face her.

  Bree stumbled backward, as if from a blow. A fierce rush of light and sound crashed down upon her like a stupendous wall of water.

  It was the landscape of her dream. The dark and bloody water roiled among the out-flung hands of the drowned and drowning. The dim hulk of a ship heaved on the horizon, and on the deck, the dark-haired, pale-eyed woman with her face obscured in shadow flung her hands out in despair. Over all, a giant bird spread its wings, a call to death and destruction. It was a cormorant, she realized, the Fisher King of birds. And for some, an avatar of the devil.

  Bree fumbled for her cell phone in her purse with shaking hands. She had to call someone, she had to ... what?

  Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip! She pinched herself hard, then again, hard enough to draw a bead of blood from her forearm.

  Henry, oblivious, peered down at the painting. “It’s the ocean,” he said. “Kind of a shipwreck, I guess, with all them hands in the water.” He looked up. “Kinda gruesome?”

  Bree sat down on a battered metal chair and put her head between her knees. The first time and only time she’d fainted, she’d won a bet with her sister about who could bike up Market Hill the fastest. There wasn’t going to be a second. Not if she could help it.

  “You ain’t pregnant or nothin’,” Henry said in a kindly way. “Took my wife like that with our first kiddie. Just the first coupla months.”

  “I’m fine,” Bree said as evenly as she could. She smiled a little. “And I’m perfectly unpregnant.”

  He flourished the painting. Bree faced it, the nightmare ocean in her dream, and said steadily, “Thank you kindly, Henry, but I think I’d better wait until I get all the furniture in place before I start adding . . . art.”

  “Had some fella in here the other day, said this painting was by some guy named Turner. Or a copy of one, anyways.”

  “He must have meant The Slave Ship,” Bree said. She was proud that her voice was level. “It’s a very famous painting by J.M.W. Turner, an English artist. In the late eighteenth century, the captain of a slaver threw all the slaves who were sick or injured overboard to drown. It was a terrible tragedy. Turner immortalized it.” She forced herself to look more closely at the painting. Maybe it was a copy of that grave and terrible work of art, and not the nameless ocean of her dreams, after all. The sky flamed with hellish red, orange, and yellows. The sea boiled with angry color. The ship looked like a coffin.

  No. It was her ocean. Her nightmare. She was sure of it. For one thing, there was that shadow of a huge bird with outspread wings hanging in the sky. If fear had a form, it was that bird. And the drowned and drowning faces in the sea were all the colors of mankind. Not The Slave Ship, but something very like it.

  She turned around and walked out of the store on trembling legs.

  Ten minutes later, she found herself sitting outside the School of the Arts coffee shop at Liberty and Abercomb with a cup of Java Jolt. It was too early to order wine. A glass of wine before lunch didn’t mean she was a raving alcoholic, did it? Of course it didn’t. She wouldn’t even think about trying to find a bar this early in the day. Even though she was pretty sure Hooligan’s on Liberty Street was open and would serve her something even stronger. She took a shaky breath, laughed at herself, and ignored the concerned, sidelong stares of the two students sitting at the table next to hers.

  When her cell phone rang, she grabbed it with hands that felt arthritic, and the sense that somebody had just thrown her a life preserver.

  “Miss Beaufort?”

  “Professor Cianquino!” She sank against the back of the metal chair. Calm. She had to be calm. She dug her nails into her knee and the momentary pain helped her focus. “I’m so glad you called,” she said cheerily. “I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the thought behind your lovely gift.”

  “So it arrived last night,” he said. He had a calm, light tenor voice. When something struck him funny—and not many things did—he had an unexpectedly high-pitched giggle. That, and his compact, perennial air of youthful muscularity, occasionally reminded her of that action star, Jackie Chan. Mostly, though, he made her of think of Michelangelo’s sterner representations of God. Professor Cianquino’s commitment to intellectual discipline and rigorous scholarship was total. At law school, his public lectures attracted a standing-room-only audience. But only a handful of students dared to take his seminars. Those who did, and survived, usually went on to become distinguished scholars in their own right. Bree squeaked through his courses with gentleman Cs, and felt lucky to have done that.

  “UPS brought the package right to my door,”
she said. “I hope you got my message thanking you? And I would just love to take you out to lunch.”

  “I’m afraid I’m housebound these days,” he said. “A recurrence of an old problem.”

  “I’m truly sorry to hear that.” Bree paused, slightly flummoxed. Professor Cianquino was a reserved and formal man. There was no way she could flat out ask about his health. But he’d said housebound, not bed-bound. He lived at Melrose, out on the river. She’d been there once before at a group seminar, and despite Professor Cianquino’s courtesy, she hadn’t liked the place, which was stupid, because it was gorgeous and the professor an excellent, if reserved, host. She shook off her hesitation. “May I drop by to see you?” His apartment, she recalled, had a garden patio out back. “If it doesn’t come on to rain, I might come by today with a small picnic?”

  “I’d like that,” he said, a little distantly. “It sounds quite pleasant. About twelve thirty would be fine.”

  “And is there anything you don’t care to eat these days?”

  “It’s my leg that’s troubling me, Bree. Not my digestion,” he said crisply.

  Bree bit back a “yes-SIR” and fought an impulse to salute the cell phone. “About twelve thirty, then.” She clicked off and made a face. Among the students at that long-ago Melrose seminar was Payton McAllister. Payton the Rat. She’d fallen in love with him while sitting in the rose arbor at the back of the house. He conducted a lengthy, erudite, impassioned defense of the Sullivan Anti-Trust Act, while pacing up and down the allée in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that showed enough muscle to fire Bree’s imagination about the rest of him.

  She wasn’t up to facing those memories now.

  Not only that—something about the house itself had made her edgy even then. Maybe it’d been the last of her common sense trying to tell her Payton was going to break her heart. Maybe she’d been coming down with the flu, and she’d confused the fever and chills with a bad atmosphere. For whatever reason, she’d only been truly comfortable there in the presence of Professor Cianquino himself. The rest of the place gave her the creeps. And did she really want to talk to him about the events of the past twenty-four hours while dodging memories of Payton’s lips, eyes, and hard, muscular chest?

  Maybe she could help Professor Cianquino and his limp into her car and take him out for lunch. If he’d been housebound for a while, he’d probably appreciate it.

  “Dimwit!” she said aloud. Lack of sleep, that was her problem. The return of the old nightmare, after she was sure she would never have it again—that was part of it, too. Not to mention having to confront Payton himself if he was the jerk behind the phone call from Skinner.

  Wimp. She was a wimp. She shook her head in disgust, to the snickers of the students sitting next to her at the coffee bar, and went off to find a suitably delicious picnic lunch at the Park Avenue Market. If she got a case of the Payton willies or the Melrose blues, she’d either attach herself to the poor professor like kudzu or go straight on home.

  Five

  That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to man.

  —Paradise Lost, John Milton

  And malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.

  —“Terence, this is stupid stuff,” A. E. Housman

  Professor Cianquino’s apartment sat on the ground floor of Melrose, an eighteenth-century plantation house that faced the Savannah River. The original Melroses were slave owners, cotton growers, and among the first to join the Confederate Army during the War Between the States. After Appomattox, Francis Melrose sold the house and acreage to a banker from Chicago and flounced off to Jamaica with his wife, sister, and two daughters. There he went into the sugarcane business and died a heartless old man at ninety-six.

  The banker from Chicago, finding Savannah society icily unwelcoming to an unreconstructed Yankee, sold the house to a suffragette Baptist who opened a Bible school for gentlewomen. Melrose changed hands many times after the school closed. In the sixties, an architect from New Jersey meticulously restored the handsome old house and went bankrupt from the cost. A retired judge picked the house up at an auction for taxes and then divided it into six expensive apartments. He rented them to people like Professor Cianquino—tenants who valued the view of the river, the seclusion, and the quiet.

  With a sackful of picnic food on the seat beside her, Bree drove up the long drive to the mansion and came to a rolling stop. It looked just like its photograph on the tourist postcards, with the air of a place that had come to a relieved and contented old age after a stormy past.

  Of course, the house was haunted, although she refused absolutely to believe that her unease with the place had to do with ghosts.

  Without having the slightest belief in the hereafter or in any of the departed who were supposed to live there, Bree loved Savannah’s reputation as the most haunted city in the United States. Most of the ghosts drifted around the old houses and cemeteries of the Historic District, although a fair number occupied old plantations like Melrose on the outskirts of town. She couldn’t remember the exact number of ghosts who were supposed to haunt Melrose, but there were at least two. There was Marie-Claire, the noisy one. She was the cast-off mistress of a river pirate and had drowned herself from grief when the pirate turned respectable and married a judge’s daughter. Then there was the truly creepy son of the original Melroses, who’d ended his days in an insane asylum after a murderous rampage among the slaves. Of the two, she would prefer to meet Marie-Claire. The two of them could commiserate over their lousy taste in men.

  Bree sat in the car, and fought a perfectly irrational desire to turn around and drive home to Raleigh. The drive up to the house was lined with live oaks swagged with Spanish moss. The gardens surrounding the house rioted with late roses flowered into bursts of deep yellow, pink, red, and creamy white. Saint-John’s-wort bloomed in huge spheres on either side of the brick walk leading up to the green-painted front door.

  The place was beautiful. If there was grief and misery there, it was from her own heart and mind, and not from wood and stones.

  Bree got out of the car, went up the brick walkway, juggled the paper bags from the Park Avenue Market from her right arm to her left, and pushed the front door open. The house smelled like lemon Pledge and old books. The entryway was floored in wide pine planks, polished to a honey gold. Huge Oriental vases filled with dried hydrangea sat on either side of a beautiful old mahogany breakfront against the back wall. The sweeping staircase at the back of the foyer led up to the apartments on the second and third floors.

  Professor Cianquino occupied apartment #2, the former ballroom, on her right. She pushed the doorbell, wondering if she should try the door or wait for the poor professor to limp across the wide expanse of his living room to open it for her. She had her hand on the doorknob. Before she could know, it swung open to reveal Professor Cianquino, not with a crutch but in a wheelchair.

  She bit back a gasp of alarm. He looked very ill. Bree had attended his lecture on Medieval Church Law not six months ago with a couple of friends. She was shocked at the change in him. He’d lost weight. His hair was completely white. And he’d grown a thin, elegant beard that gave him the look of a Confucian ascetic.

  Bree concealed her shock with a smile and a flurry of greetings. She walked with him as he rolled the wheelchair back across the living room to his kitchen. “I stopped at the Park Avenue Market and decided I’d like nothing better than their chicken-curry salad and some of that fruit sorbet that’s so refreshin’.”

  He looked up at her and said dryly, “You’re getting quite Southern on me, Bree. That only happens when you’re off balance. You need to keep your composure, my dear. Particularly now that you’re on your own. You’re going to be presenting cases in court.”

  “Yes. Well.” Bree set the bags on the kitchen table. “You’re right, of course. I’m just a little concerned about you, is all. You do look a little poor ... that
is, as though you’ve spent some time recuperating.”

  He frowned in a reflective way and asked with interest, “Have I changed so much since you saw me last?”

  “You’re quite a bit thinner,” Bree said bluntly. “And your hair’s gone all white. And then there’s the beard.” She bit her lip hard. Antonia had a T-shirt that read “Help me! Help me! I’m talking and I can’t shut up!” She should have put it on this morning to remind herself not to babble.

  “Things have become a bit ... difficult. But we’ll get to that in a moment.” He eyed the grocery bags on the table. “There’s a delicious smell coming from those bags. And it’s a chicken-curry salad, you say? I have a Caber-net Franc that ought to go with it nicely. And perhaps a Pinot Gris with the sorbet?”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Bree said, because it did. “Shall I set the food out in the garden?”

  He smiled up at her. “I’m sorry to say that we won’t be able to linger over the meal. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind setting up in my office. We’ve quite a bit to discuss, and not a great deal of time. I’ve some information in files I’d like you to see. I have a client I want you to meet.”

  Bree was surprised. “I didn’t know you actually practiced law.”

  He smiled faintly. “I’ve kept my hand in, over the years.” He wheeled his chair around with an expert twist of his wrist. “You know the way?”

  “I don’t believe you invited us into your office when we were last here.”

  “At the far end of the living room. To the right of the fireplace. The carved wooden doors. I’ll return with the wine in a moment.” His gaze met hers for a brief instant. There was kindness there, and a fierce intelligence, and something she had never seen from him before. Regret, maybe? She wasn’t sure. And what would he have to be regretful about?