Read Online The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online

Isabel Cobb and I joined in.
    When the laugh faded into a comfortable silence between us, he said. “I remain interested in your views. We can speak later.”
    “I look forward to it,” I said.
    “You are invited for the weekend, of course.”
    Without giving me even a moment’s chance to reply to this, Stockman did an about-face and quickstepped to Isabel. Without a look at me, she tucked her hand into the crook of his offered arm and the two maundered off toward the house. I followed.

7
    This brief passage toward the castle door surprised me in the claw-scrabble of unease it started up in my chest. We entered the castle through a reception hall with twin suits of armor flanking the door, helmets closed, occupied by a couple more of his tough guys for all I knew. Stockman stopped Isabel and half turned to me and said, “Martin will show you the way.” His driver loomed up beside me and extended an arm toward the inner door and swept it to the right. I went where I was told, while my mother and her leading man swept out to the left.
    I heard her voice and footfalls fading into stone-echoes behind me, and I realized this was what my unease was all about, my mother and me separating in this place. If Stockman and his boys were what we suspected they were, she could well be in over her head. Alone here, I could be too. I always figured I could handle anything. I wasn’t so sure about her.
    But it was all very polite. Even Martin was polite, in a silent way. Nonchalant even. If he was a hired tough guy, I had no sense he was under orders to intimidate me or even to keep a special eye on me. He led me along a corridor hung with fox-hunt Aubussons, and ahead was a massive stone staircase, which we were approaching from its great, gray, triangular wedge of a side. As we reached it and began to turn, Martin flipped a forefinger toward an open doorway at the base of the steps. “Billiards,” he said. “You can play.”
    His English—these four words were, I suddenly realized, the first I’d heard of it—was not British in accent, was oddly not accented at all but clipped and precise. I thought: a carefully trained German.
    We’d made the turn now and the staircase was simply a wall face beside me, but my mind went up these steps. The castle was complex in its layout and I knew I had to simplify what I took in, what I memorized of the layout, or I’d get lost. This staircase seemed worth noting. I reckoned that it ascended within the five-storey parapeted tower.
    Martin said, “The stairs lead into the private family wing of the house. I am sorry that guests are invited no farther than the billiards.”
    His seeming to read my mind was vaguely unsettling, but his treating me like a regular, well-intentioned guest was vaguely reassuring. If I were an ill-intentioned guest his comment would only be an invitation to snoop. As, indeed, I was and it was.
    We passed through the Great Hall, its abrupt three-storey lift to a vast hammer-beam roof giving it something of the same heady kick of a big-league church. But Martin was talking again and I focused on him. “That’s the library,” he said, motioning to a door in the east wall. “The billiards and the books. These are for you to enjoy until we collect you at about five. You may dress casually tonight, as the public will be here for festivities and we will be serving high tea alfresco.”
    “Are there other guests for the weekend?” I asked.
    “A dozen,” he said. “Many are here now. You’ll have competition.”
    I assumed he meant at billiards.
    At the far end of the Great Hall we entered the arched colonnade of a screens passage and turned left into a staircase. We climbed to the second-floor bachelor corridor of the castle, laid out over the kitchen and pantries.
    When we reached my room Martin opened the door and stepped back for me, as if in deference. He even pulled his hat off, showing a spiky crop of wheat-chaff tan hair. He was consciously playing a