Since the Surrender Read Online Free

recovering from drinking the night before.
    And then he went where the man pointed. The clerk peered down at his name as Chase left.
    And went still as a stone.

    Linseed oil and beeswax couldn’t completely banish the must of aging wood and upholstery, of old things moldering together in a crowded and dim space. Chase passed a room filled with Egyptian antiquities: saw sarcophagi propped along the wall, and tiny ancient glass bottles shining dully behind the newer glass of cases, slabs of stones with Egyptian letters etched into them, fragments of the stories of other people’s lives or perhaps codes of law. Another room made his soldier’s heart leap: here was armor, suits hammered both for horses and men. Italian armor he recognized quickly; another suit, he knew, hailed from the twelfth century. The Everseas owned several suits of the stuff, all apparently bequeathed by ancestors, all positioned strategically throughout the house and kept gleaming and oiled by the servants. They’d damaged one suit in an attempt to extract his brother Colin from it when Colin was thirteen years old, but to be fair, his brothers had all dared him to get into it. Judging from the armor, the men in the Eversea clan had been much smaller centuries ago. Doubtless they’d been forced to grow larger in order to defend themselves against the Redmonds.
    The thought amused him.
    He would treat himself to a look around this room one day. To make up for the fact that he would have to walk by…
    Puppets.
    He tried not to look, but there they were. Rows of them lined the walls on specially built shelves. Little bodiless hand puppets with their heavy heads and tiny little hands. Some suspended on hooks, like torture victims.
    And then there were the marionettes.
    When he was younger, his uncles had told them—because he and his brothers begged them to, as it was the nature of little boys to be gory—stories of medieval torture, about how accused criminals were strapped to a table and strategically stretched and stretched and stretched until their limbs popped from their sockets and dangled uselessly.
    This is what Chase thought of when he saw marionettes. Rattling, wrecked, unnatural things with screamy falsetto voices provided by invisible people yanking at strings. Evidently, people throughout the centuries had considered this entertainment. The first marionette performance he’d seen gave him a nightmare when he was six years old, and he had avoided them as much as he could ever since.
    If he’d ever told a soul how he felt about marionettes, he’d known he could expect his brothers to pool their allowances to buy him a marionette for every birthday; that he would likely never be able to go up to bed at night without wondering whether one was stashed beneath his blankets; that he would have been surprised by a puppet show now and again when he went to the loo, which meant he would have screamed and pissed everywhere.
    The Eversea boys were endlessly inventive. Chase was intelligent and excelled at self-preservation.
    He’d never enjoyed watching Punch swinging his stick at Judy, but marionettes were by far the most loathsome. And there was an enormous one perched up high in a chair, presiding dourly over this wing of the museum. Doubtless centuries old and priceless and a fine example of Czechoslovakian craftsmanship and all that, but it had bulging eyes painted white and dotted with minute blue pupils, had bulging eyes painted white and dotted with minute blue pupils, outsized grim ruby lips, and a nose like a petrified potato: enormous and misshapen. A deliberate wart sprang from it. Its face was carved into a scowl. Its legs and arms dangled impotently from a body covered in a white shirt and lederhosen.
    Chase spared this atrocity a killing glance, then pretended it wasn’t there at all, though he thought he felt its eyes on his back. And at last found himself in what appeared to be the East Wing, because cherubs and angels swam into