"Where the daemon goes, the man must follow," Roger Wilmot mused in his letter, responding to Lucien's good wishes and inquiries with his usual thoughtful good humor. Surely even you have heard the saying, Blake. Daemons are not so very different from people, you know. Most of them are not quickly intimate with strangers, but then again most of them, under the right circumstances, will at least be friendly to strangers. By the time a person has noticed a particular affinity in their daemon, that affinity will itself no doubt have already lodged in that person's heart; proximity, and time, these things make us fond. You describe the people in question as being only briefly acquainted with one another, and yet they are acquainted enough for you, an outsider, to take note of the behavior of their daemons. Perhaps these are two people who have been spending rather a lot of time around one another, however casually? A doctor and his housekeeper, perhaps, living in the same home and treating one another politely? Maintaining a veneer of distance, while the daemons themselves reveal the truth? If the soul is fond, the heart, too, must be fond; it is no mystery, my friend. Perhaps the only mystery here is why you do not see it for yourself. Perhaps you do not wish to, eh? Nevermind me. I am a busybody to the last, and you well know it, and any meddling I undertake I do so only with your best interests in mind. It has been too long since you were last happy. Write me back and tell me that I am a fool, and I will laugh and accept the title, but only tell me also that you are well, and glad to be home. And if you are not, you have my home address, and a standing invitation to join me at the pub for a pint whenever you wish.
I remain, your friend,
Roger
Lucien stared for a moment at the page, bewildered. Roger was right, of course; if the daemons in question had belonged to anyone else he would have smiled warmly and thought to himself that a wedding most be soon in the offing. If he had watched another woman's daemon light upon a man's shoulder he would have smiled, thinking here was a piece of love, and trust, and goodness in the world. If he had watched another woman reaching for a man's daemon, touching it gently and praising its virtue, he would have smiled, thinking here was kindness, and joy, and care. If it had not been him and Jean at the center of this quandary, there would have been no doubt in his mind that the behavior of the daemons meant love, and he would have been glad to see it.
But surely, it was not love that bound him and Jean.
Was it?
Oh, he was fond of her. She was clever, and beautiful, and capable, and brave. But she was prickly, too, and disapproving of his more untidy habits, and too mindful of propriety for his tastes. No, he thought, that wasn't quite right; Jean was more mindful of propriety and the opinions of their neighbors than he, but someone ought to be, worried about his reputation and his career and his standing in the town, and her concern kept him out of trouble. Not all the time, but some of the time. She rescued him when he needed it, and a time or two she had even made him laugh. And the curve of her hip in those smartly tailored skirts drew his eye whenever she danced by him in the kitchen, and sometimes those bright eyes of hers quite took his breath away, and-
"Bloody hell," he grumbled to himself.
"What is it, Lucien?"
He had not forgotten that Nemea was with him; he did not ever forget, for she had been with him every minute from his earliest memories, was as much a part of him as his own hand. They had been separated for a hellish time in the camp, forty days while Lucien was left starving in a hole in the ground and Nemea was kept, chained and raging, in a shed just out of his reach, but apart from that he had never been without her, and did not ever wish to be. He smiled as she came padding over to him; while he read over his correspondence Nemea had stretched out on her belly just in front of the threshold to his office, blocking the doorway and guarding him with her heavy bulk even while she lounged, content, at home. The sound of his voice had roused her, however, and she made her way over to him, rested her chin on his thigh and closed her golden eyes happily when he reached to scratch her gently just behind the ears.
"What is it that you like about Halcyon so much?" he asked her, curiously. Might as well go to the source, he thought, for it was Halcyon and Nemea's behavior that troubled him at present, and no one would know better than they the reasons for it.
"He reminds me of you, when you were small," Nemea said, cocking one eye open and looking up at him calmly. "He is kind, and his heart is full of questions, and he does not possess one ounce of guile. He simply is who he is, and what he is is gentle, and good."
That was not at all what Lucien had expected her to say. Had he been that way, once? When he was a child, before maman was taken from him, before he was shipped off to school and cut off from any sense of love or kindness, had he too been good? Perhaps he had been, then. He wanted to be good now, too, and did his best to look after people, but his past was a ledger splashed with blood, and it was hard to be good when he was drinking himself into insensibility just to keep the ghosts at bay.
"What brings this on, Lucien?"
"I really can't say," he answered. "Only…"
"Maybe you ought to talk to Jean," Nemea said, and as she spoke she lifted her head, both her eyes open now, her mouth quirked into the closest thing to a smile the lioness could manage. "She always seems to set your mind at rest."
"Yes, well, thank you for that," Lucien told her, grinning.
"You're a clever man, Lucien," Nemea told him, making a show of stretching before she began to pace back towards the doorway, vigilant, as ever, for some sign of danger threatening to take him from her. "But sometimes that clever brain of yours seems determined to make simple things seem so complicated."
But they were, complicated. Whatever Lucien's feelings for Jean might have been - and he was not yet ready to concede that those feelings might even have been in the same neighborhood as love - he was her employer, and she would not abide the scandal of it, and she surely wouldn't accept any overture from him, and he did not know what had become of his wife, and even now, so many long years later, a part of him still clung to the hope that Mei Lin still lived. If she did not, perhaps a romance with Jean might be in the cards at some later date, should Jean reveal herself to be willing. But to dream of a new love that could only come at the expense of the old seemed a damned cruelty, and he balked from it. It had been seventeen years since the war's end, and in all that time he had found no sign of his wife, but he had never given up hope, and he had not yet met the woman who was beguiling enough to merit the sacrifice of that hope. He had clung to the memory of her, and the memory of the vows he made to her. What sort of man would he be if he forgot them? And what would happen to him should Mei Lin one day return, as he had for so long dreamed that she might, only to find him mixed up with someone else? It didn't bear thinking about.
No, Lucien's heart had been spoken for long ago, and his hands were tied, and whatever connection existed between Nemea and Halcyon - and whatever Roger Wilmot might have to say on the matter - he would not turn aside from his devotion to his wife. Not even for a woman as lovely as Jean.
There was a letter from Mr. Kim in the post as well, and perhaps it might contain the answers Lucien sought, and so he opened it, then, and read it quickly.
I have found a man who thinks he has seen your daughter, Mr. Kim told him. In a village near Shanghai. I am making plans to travel there, but will need you to send funds at once to assist in my endeavor.
That news alone was sufficient to put all thoughts of daemons and Jean from his head. There was a chance, however small, that his daughter was still living, that Mr. Kim might find her, and perhaps find Mei Lin, too, or at least find out what had become of them, and it was the news that Lucien had been waiting for, for so long now. All the bleak, sleepless nights, all the tears he had wept, all the time he had spent gently trailing his fingertips along the weathered old photographs that were his only memory of their faces; all the hope, and the sorrow, all the grief and fear and pain, all of it, all of it, had been leading him here, to this moment. He would send funds to Mr. Kim; he would empty his bank account, sell his house, cut off a limb, if that's what it took, just to find his girls again. Tears clouded his vision, and his hands began to shake, and across the room from him Nemea spun around suddenly to face him, her eyes bright and afraid.
"Is it time?" she asked him, as if she knew. As if without his having to say a word, she understood precisely what had just happened, as if she had felt the titanic shift within his heart despite the distance between them.
"I hope so," he told her, and his voice cracked on that word hope.
Hope. For so long now hope had been the only thing that sustained him. The hope that one day he might hold his child again. The hope that all his old sins might be forgiven. The hope that he was not alone, and damned. Now, clutching that letter in his hands, he was beginning to feel as if all the seeds of hope he'd planted in his heart were bursting into bloom at once, and he did his very best to ignore the bitter voice in the back of his mind that counseled him to restraint, the voice that told him perhaps Mr. Kim was only looking to make a profit off him, or that he might not find anything in that village at all, or worse he might find them both dead. When night fell and he retreated to his room he would let those grim, terrible thoughts claim him. For now, though, the sun was shining, and he had hope.
