Page 48 of Hazard a Guest
Freddy sucked in air through his nose and held up a finger, a finger that saidwait. He paced to the washroom and jerked the door open, flinging himself through it. It took a few minutes of rummaging, a few whispered curses and thumping rearrangements of things, and then he came back with the thing cradled in his palm.
It was a cross, Joe saw. It was Brigid’s cross.
They both stared at it for a moment that stretched far beyond the confines of true time.
“Will you give it to her?” Freddy finally asked, puncturing the silence, begging. “Will you do it, Joe? Please? I don’t think I can. I tried. I really did try.”
And he looked up at the other man, whose hand was shaking, whose face was streaked with sorrow, holding out the cross in the same hand, in the same way that he’d held out those cursed dice.
“Yes,” said Joe. “If you want me to, I will do it.”
Freddy sagged then. He let Joe lift the cross and then he sank all the way to the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest and sat there, looking like a little boy who had lost his parents in a crowd.
“Thank you,” he muttered. “Thank you.”
Joe went down to the floor and sat with him. They sat together for a long time, until it felt safe to stand again.
CHAPTER 17
He had expected to feel either rage or relief after his conversation with Freddy. Now that he’d done it, now that he’d heard what the other man had to say, he felt neither of those things. He only felt sick. And he felt sad.
And now he had an albatross ’round his neck, a literal cross to bear. Now he had far more than he’d set out to excavate.
There had been a man like Freddy back home in Shropshire. Not dice. Quakers didn’t gamble. It was rye.
Quakers didn’t drink either, he reminded himself. But the old man, a new member by the name of Peter Cophenagen, hadn’t been able to stop. When they’d tried to sit with him and force him through the craving, it had almost killed him. The doctor had been furious, kicking everyone out of the home where he’d attempted to find his recovery.
“Expelling a demon is not a simple thing,” he had told them later, at Meeting. “If it were, no one would hold it in such fear. Our Friend Peter is fighting his demon, but we cannot rip awaythe core of what he’s become in its company, or we will lose him too.”
Joe’s father had said, once they got home that night, that compassion was more righteous than rigidity and that none of them were safe from the mundane demons of this world, should they ever have the misfortune to stumble onto the ones built to fit their own weaknesses.
Freddy had met his demon. He had fallen to it. And without a community or a priest or a doctor, he had clawed his way free of it.
Joe thought that was miraculous. He thought it was, perhaps, the most monumental human achievement he’d ever borne witness to. More humbling than the spark and flame of revolution in Portugal, more harrowing than the passage of the law, and so completely, openly human that it hurt to bear witness to it.
He took the cross, brittle now from years of drying, crumbling a little where a thin layer of lacquer had worn from the tips, and he placed it where the dice had sat in the middle of the little table by his bedroom window.
He didn’t know how he was going to return it to her, how to frame what he’d learned in a way that would not reopen wounds that were finally healing and healing well.
He’d been watching them, of course, Freddy and Ember. He’d been seeing a broken bone knit back together, through exchanged glances and shared amusement and sometimes a quick barb or an assumption of understanding, unnecessary to articulate when one knew another so well.
He did not want to break that bone again. He did not want to take it from either of them.
But she needed this thing back, didn’t she? She needed to know it wasn’t lost, whatever it was to her. She needed to know that he hadn’t thrown it into the sea, even at his worst, at his lowest, because even when the demon was at its strongest, Freddy Hightower still loved his dearest friend.
He still loved his wife too, Joe thought. That surprised him.
Didn’t it?
He frowned, rolling back on his pillows.
Didn’t it?
He’d met Freddy Hightower the day his wife, Claire, had given birth. Silas Cain’s wedding day. He’d been tasked to sit in a carriage with this errant lord he’d been tracking all over Europe and to keep him from bursting out of that feeble prison and disrupting the festivities.
Freddy had stared at him like he wanted to kill him. He had demanded to know who Joe was and what right he had to keep him there. Joe had answered, and then, because it seemed the right thing to do and because hetrulywanted some answers, he had asked what had happened.
Where had Freddy been? How had he gotten there? And how had he come to return to London?
