Nettleblack, page 33
I nodded dazedly. “Oh – of course – yes – and – no – I – I mean – you’re not – villainous – you just – erm – talk very fast – ”
Mercifully, they laughed, eyes wide with bemused surprise. “Oddly enough, I have been told. But – thank you, all the same. And if I ever can do something to your advantage, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
They swept the scissors away with a flourish. “Done! Never mind a thousand ships – with that hair, Division Sergeants aplenty will throw over golden fleeces for you. Now, I would detain you longer, but I fear I have arrangements and ferrets to be getting on with. Let’s see if that uniform of yours is wearable again, shall we?”
They swirled up off the floor, caught my elbow and lifted me with them, spun me to face one of the marble-painted walls. Except – quinces – golden-seamed in the midst of the paint, there was a mirror, old and bruised and cloudy-edged from the steam – and blinking out from the centre of that mirror –
Was that me?
Fading bruises. Stark bones, staring eyes. Hair – short – shining with water – trimmed to frame a sharp jawline, a high pale forehead with a curling fringe to it. That figure looked like nothing so much as Burne-Jones’s Demophoon – like they ought to have a Phyllis, springing out of an almond tree to clasp hold of them. Unquestioningly, unequivocally, they would have sent my eldest sister into fits. But in that one startling moment, they didn’t in the least frighten me.
“Which reminds me,” Property remarked, disappearing out of the glass behind me, “I’m afraid I threw your chemise on the fire. Don’t squeak at me, Hylas, you know as well as I do that it was unsalvageable.”
And all my hubris quite fell off, as the mirror-face’s stare promptly spasmed into a grimace of appropriately unsalvageable horror.
I spent the better part of the trudge back to the Division simply holding myself together – quite literally! The loss of my corset had been bizarre, but the absence of the chemise was nothing short of perturbing. My shirt buttons were a freezing line of nails down my chest – nails, or crude metal stitches, as if Property had prised me open and botched the job of fastening me up again. Was this how it felt for Rosamond, lounging about in her Morris fabric? Was it noticeable, to the few scowling passersby I darted away from? Was it the provocation for the spitting, and the dark looks, and the sudden shove that knocked me breathless against the tincture-laden windowpanes of Mr. Ballestas’s apothecary?
I clung to the window until the pane almost warmed against my forehead, gasped my way to a more sensible rationale. It was far more likely that this was more of the general animosity towards anything in a Division uniform, the same sharpening mistrust that had heckled me and bruised Septimus and sent those civilians sprinting out of our reception. Peaches, but that felt infinitely worse than a gaggle of objections to my increasingly irrational dress.
The Director was at the desk when I stumbled through the doors, sickled awkwardly over the side to fish out a spare inkwell. She sprang upright, delved instinctively for her taut smile – then remembered, presumably, quite how much I’d disgraced myself, and simmered to a neutral stare instead.
“You’ve been gone for a while, Miss Hyssop.”
“I – erm – sorry – ”
“Some of us,” she added coolly, with the slightest twitch of her head to the corridor, “have been rather in doubt as to the question of your return.”
I gaped at her. I’d feared the same, but to have someone else eke it into words and fling it at my head was more alarming than my own hysterical speculations. “What? But – I – of course I – ”
“You left no word indicating as much.” She sighed, her voice dipping like a candle-flame. “After the events of earlier, you would not have been without precedent for an abrupt escape. With all of the cases still unsolved, and Matthew’s resignation – ”
“I’m quite not leaving!”
It was a giddyingly impossible promise for me to make, and I knew it – but not enough to keep it back. Not in that darkening room with its dimmed gaslights and dying wood-burner, and the wind plucking at the jagged glass in the broken window. Not with the Director too quietly wretched to conceal the danger of our situation. Not with Septimus shuttered in her office, thinking the building a sinking ship, and me already vanished into the night. Not with all the louche liveliness of Property’s patterned house still sprawled in my mind, striking a horrendous contrast with the drab desperation flickering before me now.
“I’ve – the ferret – he’s gone – and I’m – I can’t apologise copiously enough – and – and I’d very much like to stay – if you’ll still have me – and that’s quite that!”
The Director arched an eyebrow. She had evidently not been expecting words, least of all that many of them. I’d not had her scrutinise me so intently since the damp haze of my first arrival – since then, she had been more interested in my transcription than my face – and it smarted me crimson. I may have tidied my appearance more thoroughly than ever before, but would that matter to her? What was she looking for? Resolve? Trustworthiness? Or – ?
She pushed off the desk, slid towards me on two seamless strides, clamped my shoulder steady. “As you say. I’ll let Septimus know. And you have a place here, as long as you wish us well. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, if you wished us well. Remember that. After all – ”
– and – was that – a flash of a wink in one golden eye, close enough to blur at my temple? –
“ – Matthew hasn’t found you yet.”
Greengages.
She rolled her eyes to see my jaw drop, whisked about on her heel. “I do hope I shan’t end up regretting that. Good night, Miss Hyssop.”
To which I can only append with a feeble scrawl of – not even of how (for it was hardly an improbable deduction for someone of her capabilities to make), but simply – why? Why say that – and walk away? Why not collar me on the instant, and solve a case, and snatch back the attendant credibility?
Either she’s too kind, or she’s too clever, and there’s some elaborate forward-thinking I’m too frazzled and delirious to puzzle out. Or – or she’s both.
She wouldn’t tell Septimus – would she?
And – on that topic – what am I to tell Septimus – of my haircut, my absent ferret, my disappearance?
Oh, cranberries – tomorrow! If it were only possible to compel my thoughts into imitating the Director – and stepping back from the frenzy – and sauntering away into the shadows – and leaving me be!
16.
IN WHICH INCONGRUOUS
ELATION IS THE ORDER
OF THE DAY
Casebook of Matthew Adelstein
Pertaining to the Nettleblack affair
This is war.
So the truanting wretch thinks she can counter my efforts by striking at Nicholas – at Nicholas’s rats – at Nicholas’s entire rat-breeding business! As if she hasn’t doomed herself infinitely more by doing so! Her murderous creature-weapon is the missing link (hadn’t thought of that, had you, Nettleblack?): the elder sisters have also lost what Edwina Nettleblack refers to as an ermine, and it’s been gone since the night of the youngest sister’s departure. I can only surmise that calling the beastly ferret what it is was far too commonplace for the insufferable family to cope with. They must all be so singular, mustn’t they, these wealthy ladies with their eccentricities?
So! ‘Henry Hyssop’ has a ferret, as well as more than a trace of a Welsh accent, and a suspicious past itinerary, and a face the very shadow of the family portrait! Septimus has clearly reprised her idiocy and thrown her lot in with the mustelid-toting madwoman, everyone sharing that hideous dormitory with her must have known about the ferret – and Keturah Ballestas, who should have known better than all of them, simply sat back and let the subterfuge run wild!
Very well. I am at liberty to dispense with my previous concerns viz. preserving the Division’s reputation. If the Division does not want my help, so be it. If Edwina Nettleblack chooses to shatter the place, well – they can hardly say I didn’t try to prevent it, until they left me with no other choice!
I shall write to Miss Nettleblack the elder at once. An amended version of my previous notes on the case will suffice for evidence, provided any mention of Nicholas is taken out. I won’t highlight the Division’s behaviour (I suppose I owe them that), but neither will I conceal their failure to report the dangerous heiress lurking in their midst. I’ll also be firmly advising Miss Edwina to have her so-called ermine taken out and strangled forthwith.
I would call on her straightaway, but I can’t leave Nicholas alone. The damned ferret bit him – I could strangle it myself! – and he refuses to so much as bandage the wound until his decimated rodents are afforded some retrospective dignity. He’s in our back garden, damp in the downpour, holding a spontaneous funeral for the slaughtered rat. His past and future professions colliding, as they never should have had to. I told him I’d join him before the hour struck (it was the only way I could get him to consent to having his injury looked at), so I’ll have to be quick.
His injury – that she gave him, just to thwart me – and the rain lashing down on him in the garden – and his bite still not tended to –
Right. Right. I shall gather up every bottle of Nettleblack’s Tincture in the house, and I shall line them up on the banisters and push them off one by one, and – then, perhaps, I shall be calm enough to write a sensible letter.
Addendum
Something of a change of plan. Post came as I was smashing the bottles. It can’t wait.
First, a letter from my erstwhile Director. Dire straits, will I come back, and so forth. I shan’t. Ballestas hasn’t even had the presence of mind to dismiss the little imposter. Instead, she’s removed Septimus from the Division’s most important case and hurled her desk-bound daughter into the field instead – why? To make some sort of point? As if this will ameliorate anything! The present strain must be warping her judgment.
(Not that anything of the sort is warping mine.)
But – more pressingly – Ma and Ta.
They want to come. Here.
They’re only twenty minutes away in Gulmere. They could arrive at any moment. Most maddeningly of all, they haven’t given a reason. How am I supposed to dissuade them, without a reason?
And there must be a reason. It could be nothing more sinister than Saturday, and Shabbat Mevarchim, and summoning me to the service. But then – why would they not specify? And why come to me?
Edwina Nettleblack shall have to wait. I must tell my parents that the Division is in crisis, and that I simply cannot host a family visit. But – if I tell them I’ve resigned, they are bound to ask why, and I can hardly confess I did so out of spite over a dead rat and a distraught rat-breeder –
And that wasn’t all of my motivation, was it? It was something far more sensible than that.
Wasn’t it?
Right, never mind. I’ll have to tell them I’ve completed the case, and that the attic building-work has already started.
But then, if they miss my letter, or turn up regardless –
No. I must tell Nicholas to write to Lawrence Tickering. That was my plan, for his alternative accommodation – just in case –
But I as good as threw Tickering’s sister off the Head-Hider case! And Nicholas’s rats were instrumental in the skirmish! Why would he help us, after that?
And how can I even think of making Nicholas do anything, when his ferret-ravaged forearm is still resoundingly unattended to?
Damn it! Damn all of it!
Addendum to the addendum
I’ll go to Gulmere myself. Tomorrow. It is not in panic: if it is Shabbat they mean, I will have to be there on Saturday regardless. There is absolutely no need for them to come here. If worst comes to worst, I’ll tell them that I am still affiliated with the Division, and that in the present climate I fear for their safety in Dallyangle.
Is that too drastic?
No. Mrs. Ballestas was right about one thing in her frantic little correspondence: the Division is certainly dancing with its own demise now.
Myself, rather stunned
Sweet rampant figs I have absolutely no idea what day it is
I must be a target in earnest. Mr. Adelstein, newly resigned, hasn’t anything to do with himself but hunt me down. And I feel far too much like one of those wooden targets I used to shoot through, up on the Pobbles cliffs with Rosamond. She’d tug me out of our nettle-wrought gate, insist on carrying my pistols in their gleaming box – Eddie said to give you useful skills, bach! – and prop up the targets, rough boards left over from her filthy-nailed attempt to build a garden shed. I’d been petrified by the very idea of wielding a weapon (and I can only imagine the sentiments of our steward), but even my trembling nerves didn’t alter the fact that the shots went precisely where I intended them to, every time, until I could pattern out a H and an N in so many bullet-holes –
But did I truly have to begin this entry with a dissertation on my most incongruous accomplishment?
The morning’s weather was as inauspicious as I’d come to expect. The rain struck in a deluge, slapping against the windows, too dark to see beyond the splatters it left on the panes. My new, ratless bedsheets quite hadn’t warmed from a night of sleeping in them, and with the dormitory back door still propped open I doubted their chances of ever managing it – though someone had at least stuffed a bucket into the door’s gap to catch the churning downpour. Millicent and Oliver lit the mirrored candles against the gloom, strange and solemn and subdued with not a scrap of song, every other breath a darting squint to Gertie’s bed. Gertie was awake, and more or less dressed (in that she’d slept in her clothes), but she sat hunched and glowering on the edge of the mattress, draped in the yellow folds of her lambswool blanket, a bright heap of reproach.
She was avoiding my gaze, as she’d done yesterday. Calloused fingers pushed through the ends of her drooping plait.
Well. Plums. Yesterday, I had been desperate to dash into reception and meet Septimus, too flustered by that prospect to strike up a conversation with anyone else. The guilt twinged in my throat, set me blurting into the stiff silence –
“I – erm – Gertie?”
She started, a tremor beneath the blanket, but she raised her eyes. There wasn’t a scrap of a smile on that raw-lidded face, muddied to shadows in the murky room, and her voice was quite as flat and guarded as I’d feared.
“Hyssop.”
A scuffle on the floor tugged my gaze away, as if Mordred had snuck back in for another snarling brawl. Millicent and Oliver were hurrying towards the door, catching every creak in the boards with their boots, pausing only to flick a brace of eyebrows to where Gertie sat. What were they thinking? What did they imagine I planned to inflict on her?
There was nothing to do but begin, regardless. “So – I – erm – about – when – what happened – erm – at – at Checkley’s – ”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” she muttered, scraping me with a pitying look. Her words were terse, fragile, balancing shakily on each other’s edges. “Look, Hyssop – it was my mistake, alright? I thought you were – more like me.”
“I – I’m sorry?”
She shrugged. The blanket slipped, trickling to her elbows, stray skeins clinging to her cardigan sleeves. “’S not your fault. It was a bit of a reckless guess.”
“I – what? I – I mean – erm – not – but – just – ”
“Stop panicking, will you?” she snapped. “I only ever meant it friendly with you. I’m not going to try and woo you, or anything – ”
“Gertie!”
I dropped to my knees, and the draught clambered through the fabric of my skirt. If it brought her face closer, gave her the chance to squint through the candle-mirrored gloom and stare me out in earnest –
“If you think that I – that – that I’m in any way – erm – repulsed by your – erm – inclinations – or that I’m not like you – I – you – you quite couldn’t be further from the point!”
Finally, her face slackened. Shock plucked at her eyes, tipped her forward on the mattress to whisper at me. “You – what?”
Infinitely overdue, a scrap of blazing certainty sprinted across my forehead. Tell her. Not everything, of course – just – a sketch, perhaps, of that quiet resolve I’d glimpsed in Property’s mirror. Strung between the new-trimmed folds of my haircut, surely I could manage enough to reassure her of my sentiments, my sympathy, the wild untruth of her worst-case scenario. She couldn’t think I despised her. She quite wouldn’t.
I needed the word. Rosamond’s word, of two days and a lifetime ago, when I had Septimus’s fingers at my cheek and the first pangs of that certainty in my teeth and not a dismembering ferret in sight –
“Sapphist!”
I hadn’t entirely meant to shriek it. The heat shot up my neck in flat defiance of the freezing room, lashed about my face, dragged my eyes from Gertie’s to wilt amidst the rickety floorboards. She was gaping at me, unabashed and deservedly so.
“I – I don’t know if that’s – but – if that’s what it – erm – means – to – to – ”
“To be sweet on women?”
“Yes!” I cried – lemons, and she jumped again. “I – that is – I mean – I – that’s what I am – yes. Most definitely. Yes. Quite.”
A tentative glance up, shaky with my gasps, gave me Gertie’s open-mouthed astonishment. I quite couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t in the least asked for spontaneous confessions, and she didn’t seem remotely steady on how to respond to them. Her half-gloved fingers slumped on her knees, tumbled down from her plait.
A hopeless coda was my final gambit. “So – please don’t worry – about that – I’m only sorry that my – erm – that Rosamond was so ghastly to you – ”
