The Night Manager полностью

One hair. One long, soft, straight, beautiful chestnut strand of hair that should have been in a locket or a love letter or lying on a pillow and smelling of wood smoke. For a moment he was furious, the way explorers are furious when they reach some hellish end point only to find the hated rival's cookpot there ahead of them. You lied to me! You do know what he does! You're hand in glove with him on the biggest dirty deal of his career! The next moment it pleased him to think that Jed had been making the same journey as himself, without benefit of Rooke or Burr or Sophie's murder.

After that he was terrified. Not for himself, for her. For her frailty. For her clumsiness. For her life. You bloody fool, he told her, leaving your handwriting all over the job! Have you never seen a beautiful woman with her face punched off? A small dog ripped from stem to stern?

Curling the telltale hair round the tip of his little finger, Jonathan poked it into the sweat-soaked pocket of his shirt, returned the second file to its tray and was spreading out the papers from the third as he heard the scuffle of horses' hooves from the direction of the stableyard, accompanied by children's voices raised in protest and rebuke.

Methodically, he restored the papers to their rightful home and walked to the window. As he did so, he heard from within the house the sounds of fast-running feet, then Daniel howling for his mother as he came storming through the kitchens to the hall. Then Jed's voice yelling after him. And in the stableyard he saw Caroline Langbourne and her three children, and Claud the stablemaster holding Jed's Arab, Sarah, by the bridle, and Donegal the groom holding Daniel's pony, Smoky, who stood with his head hung in dudgeon as if he were disgusted by the whole display.

* * *

Battle bright.

Battle calm.

His father's son. Bury him in uniform.

Jonathan slid the camera into the pocket of his shirt and checked the desk for careless traces. With his handkerchief he wiped the desktop, then the sides of the filing trays. Daniel was yelling louder than Jed, but Jonathan couldn't hear what either of them was saying. In the stableyard one of the Langbourne children had decided it was time to join the chorus of complaint. Esmeralda had come out of her kitchen and was telling Daniel not to be a silly boy now, what would his Papa say? Jonathan stepped into the dressing room, closed the steel-lined door to the den and relocked it with the pick, which took a little longer than it should have done because of his anxiety about violating the escutcheon. By the time he reached the bedroom he could hear Jed stomping up the stairs in her riding boots, declaring to anyone who cared to hear that she would never never take Daniel riding again in her bloody life.

He thought of retreating to the bathroom or returning to Roper's dressing room, but hiding didn't seem to solve anything. A luxurious inertia was descending over him, a desire to embrace delay that reminded him of making love. So that by the time Jed appeared in the doorway in her riding gear, minus her crop and hard hat but flushed with heat and anger, Jonathan had placed himself before the coffee table and was arranging the shipping flowers because they had lost something of their perfection on the journey upstairs.

At first she was too angry with Daniel to be surprised by anything. And it impressed him that her anger made her real.

"Thomas, honestly, if you've got any influence over Daniel at all, I wish you'd teach him not to be so absolutely bloody wet when he hurts himself. One silly little fall, no damage to anything except his pride, and he makes an absolute ― actually, Thomas, what the fuck are you doing in this room?"

"I brought you some shipping flowers. From our climb yesterday."

"Why couldn't you have given them to Miss Sue?"

"I wanted to arrange them myself."

"You could have arranged them and given them to Miss Sue downstairs."

She glared at the unmade bed. At her yesterday's clothes flung over the chaise longue. At the open bathroom door. Daniel was still yelling. "Shut up, Daniel!" Her eyes returned to Jonathan. "Thomas, actually, flowers or no flowers, I think you've got a fucking cheek."

It's the same anger. You simply switched it from Daniel to me, he thought, while he went on tinkering distractedly with the flowers. He suddenly felt deeply protective of her. The lock picks were lying like a ton weight against his thigh, the Zippo camera was practically falling out of his shirt pocket, his story about the shipping flowers, dreamed up for Esmeralda's benefit, was wearing pretty thin. But it was Jed's appalling vulnerability that he was thinking of, not his own. Daniel's howling had stopped while he listened for the effect.