Nettleblack, page 36
“Get the Nettleblack’s!” Millicent bellowed at them. Spontaneous pistol-wielding aside, it was still enough to make me jump. “And get the Director! The Sweetings’ve got a gun and they’ve shot Septimus!”
Septimus flung her an incredulous glance, opened her mouth for a raft of corrections – but the Director was already bursting from her office, fear sparking in her golden eyes, beyond even a vestige of her old serenity. “They – what?”
“I ain’t shot,” Septimus managed to blurt. Cassandra was frozen in place, whilst Gertie scrambled around in the desk-drawers for a tincture-bottle. “It’s worse – it – there ain’t time for this – ”
The Director snatched her at the elbows, tugged her forward into the gaslight, ran a shaking hand down her cheek. “You are alive. You are safe. Everything else can be worked out from that crucial starting-point. But you – your face – you are hurt – ”
“So she can’t go back out there,” Millicent insisted. “Tell her, Director!”
Septimus all but screamed with exasperation. “No! God’s sake, listen to me! Yes, the Sweetings’re armed – but it ain’t just that! I know I’m off the case, but – we found it. We found the missing head.”
Cassandra jolted on the spot. A sharp hiss scraped past her teeth.
“We’ve got to go back – quick – it’s where they jumped us – come on – ”
Persimmons.
Septimus spun on her heel and crashed back through the doors before soul alive could protest. I’d quite no intention of watching her sprint to her doom alone – a sentiment I apparently shared with almost everyone in the room! Gertie, Millicent, Oliver – even the Director herself – all but Cassandra hurtled parallel in Septimus’s wake – skidding across the market square, round the corners, the same route in reverse, another ghastly lap in this nightmare of sprinting and smarting and hammering one’s feet to numbed oblivion –
But I can’t in the faintest understand what we found.
The front door swayed on its hinges. The attic floor and the wooden stairs were speckled with tallow and blood and mud-splattered footsteps, right out into the street, and the Sweetings were long gone. The attic itself – it – well – it wasn’t entirely empty. Our hats were stacked, neat as teacups on saucers, in the corner of the room – soaked through, but spotless, and with neither tallow, blood nor mud anywhere near them.
The head itself was quite nowhere to be seen.
Now, everything has slipped into silence, but for the patter of the rain on the windows. Still, eerie, country silence. I’d not thought such a thing as silence could will itself back to existence, after that.
Septimus gave the Director as full a report as she was able: that we had rediscovered the head in the undertakers’, that we’d been on our way back with it when the Sweetings set upon us with their newfound weapon, that the Sweetings had dismissed the idea of taking the head for themselves – and, now, that it had disappeared into hands that likely weren’t theirs. I wasn’t consulted, wasn’t called upon to do anything other than lean against the wall outside the office and steady my breaths. After a while, their voices dipped too low for me to follow, and I’m not fully sure I didn’t slide into a doze, propped up by the wall and the gloom as I was. I jolted back when Septimus emerged, her face scrubbed of blood, sipping at a tinctured mug with the Director at her shoulder, and all was softened tones and anxious frowns as the clock rattled out three-thirty. We were to rest, and we weren’t to leave the Division until at least the next morning, and – and this largely to Septimus, with a meaningful eyebrow – everything else would be taken care of. The enigmatic sentiment seemed to satisfy Septimus, as much as anything could in the wake of that day; she slunk back to her office without further protest, both hands already plucking at the chaos of pins in her hair.
For my own part – well. I struck a guess on my way to the dormitory, and it worked: there was a fist’s-worth of cheese and three slices of bread left under the desk, and a shaken Cassandra professed to have no appetite for it. Once I’d devoured the plate, I glanced over my bed’s edge – Gertie had left her jug and bowl when she and the others had headed out, with a scrap of paper poking over the rim: feel free, Hyssop. It seemed a logical extension to carry the jug to the back door of the dormitory, fill it from the bucket until it was brimming with rainwater. Then – I was the only one in the room, and far too jittery to care much for decorum – I pinned the drapes over the windows, gasped out of my boots and stockings, poured the first round of jug into the bowl and plunged myself ankle-deep, clinging to the bedframe as the water squeezed my swollen feet. Once they’d stopped smarting – two changes of water later – I twisted free of my sodden clothes, draped them over the bedpost to dry, and crawled into the only things I had left: my old shirtwaist, creased like a carnation, the mud-hemmed skirt I’d left the house in, and the greatcoat, buttoned to my chin. I didn’t bother wrestling with the penny-collar; my cravat I wrapped round my neck like a scarf. I was still shivering, my feet bare – and I’d no other shoes or stockings – was it too much to borrow Gertie’s blanket too?
“Henry?”
A blister of candle-flame edged towards me through the beds (I’d not noticed how dark it had become), flickered into Septimus. She was lean and neat in her shirt and trousers, her hair so impeccably swept up you would never have guessed anything had dislodged it. All the same – the candle in her hand wasn’t entirely steady, quivering against the thickening gloom.
“I – erm – sorry – I – I haven’t any other clothes – ”
“Neither’ve I,” she admitted. The candle veered towards my bed, a gesture stiff with nerves. “Not here, anyway. But – look – we need to talk. D’you want to sit?”
After all we’d seen and known in the last few hours, her tone was absurdly formal, enough to twitch me into a startled smile. She stared, to see that, then darted her gaze away. Plums, she must have thought I was mocking her.
“I – of course – sorry, it was just – today’s been – ”
There quite wasn’t a sentence for it.
I perched on the bed first, tucked my feet beneath my skirts, felt the mattress contract as she dropped down beside me. The candle, in its tin holder, she’d balanced on Gertie’s bed, and its light was paltry at best. For a few shaky breaths, there wasn’t anything beyond darkness, and the sheeny beeswax smell of the taper, and the sudden warmth of her leg sliding against mine.
I flushed to my hairline, gripped the bedsheets to keep myself still. If I had twitched my leg, she would have moved.
Figs, let her not move.
“You saved my life,” she muttered suddenly, tremulous as the candle-flame. “They’d’ve killed us both if you’d not dropped the light on ’em.”
It caught in my throat, thickened, left me inches from a brace of sobs. The words fluttered against my teeth: of course I saved your life! I place tremendous value on your life! I’m entirely infatuated with you, whatever you may think of me!
“The Director ain’t sure what to do,” she continued, more brusquely. “There’s no precedent for it in the Div – shooting with a criminal’s pistol, even if you weren’t shooting it at ’em. With the head gone again, though, and the two of ’em still out there with that gun, I reckon it’s the least of her worries.”
Now I froze. “You – you don’t think she’ll dismiss me – ”
“Not if I’ve anything to say about it.” Her voice was low, fervent, clumsy with its own sincerity. “I’m your defence, and I’ve told her as much – and I’ll tell anyone else needs hearing, too. You had the pistol, and you could’ve got yourself out. You only stayed and fired ’cause of me. You ain’t going anywhere, Henry, I swear it.”
I gulped – she must have noticed I was blinking off tears – and managed a feeble nod. If I had only – anything, more, than a feeble nod! I wanted to latch my arms about her and kiss my thanks into her forehead – to plunge my face into her collarbone and gasp her in – to turn her towards me, and press our brows together, and hold her close until her hands stopped trembling –
“About Maggie,” she murmured, ducking her head to peer under my fringe. “Why’d she call you Morfydd? And when’d she lose her finger?”
This, at least, I could answer. “Oh – I – my ferret dismembered her – erm – and I gave a false name – when she took my hair – ”
She seemed more assured than surprised. “That bit I did know. The hair, I mean, not the – dismembering. Well – I suppose – ’least that ferret was good for something!”
We both smiled then, the sort of smile that has a faint sound to it. Her gaze snagged mine and stayed there, until I’d entirely abandoned my capacity for blinking – until I blushed, to find myself still staring, staring and managing it – and enjoying it, far too much. “Well – quite!”
She swallowed. Her smile was shrinking, turning her bitten lips to one sharp line. “I – look – what the Sweetings were saying to me – I owe you my life, so I definitely owe you an explanation. And it ain’t so different from what happened to you – I mean, more or less. But they tried to steal the hair off me once before, and they very nearly got it. I was – I’d been – ”
Her face twitched. By some startling force of will, she didn’t drop her gaze.
“I’d been tricked. I thought I was heading out to meet someone – to do – well – never mind what, something else – but it was all a set-up so the Sweetings could jump me. And I know it ain’t the worst thing by a long stretch, losing a bit of hair. Cut it all off in the orphanage, didn’t they? It weren’t that, that got to me. It was – I don’t know, the humiliation. The fact I thought I was safe. More’n that – I’d a job, I’d prospects, I’d my chosen name, I thought I had – never mind – anyway. Turns out I weren’t safe. I was just an idiot with her guard down. And I’d’ve been that again today – and worse – if you’d not been there.”
“Oh – you – please – you’re quite not an idiot – ”
“No, I am.” She sighed. “Lorrie and the Director both’ve said I’m too reckless, and they ain’t wrong. I would’ve gone straight back in there today if you’d not made me think about it. And not just to get the head, either. It’s – when they – last time – I assume someone’s told you this? Cassandra, most like?”
I shook my head. It brought her out in a startled frown.
“Oh. Right. Well. Wasn’t just me got hurt last time. The Sweetings went for me first, and I fought ’em, and they won, but then they – well. They left me to bruise and took stuff from other people instead. Burgled three houses that night, one of ’em Lady Miltonwaters’s. I was the only Divisioner out – the only one who could’ve raised the alarm – and I – I was – point is, I didn’t. I didn’t stop ’em. And no one’s ever forgiven me for it. And I – I’ve not forgiven me either.”
I opened my mouth – and I quite couldn’t speak. And I needed to speak. It didn’t have to be a triumph of eloquence – just enough for her to know that I didn’t mind – didn’t mind? – no – that I was honoured to have her share such things with me – that her confidence was already lodged between my ribs, and I had every intention of keeping it there – and that her self-hatred was entirely misplaced – and –
“Quite!”
What?
“I mean – erm – not – not quite, but – also – I – I don’t – I mean – I do – thank you – yes! – ”
I swallowed. Thank you, that was it. “Thank you – erm – for telling me.”
She blinked, wide-eyed, managed a nervous nod.
“And – about – what you said – you quite mustn’t blame yourself. You – you couldn’t know what they would do – and no one could expect you to fight them single-handedly – erm – especially not – if – if they had already attacked you – and how could you recover swiftly enough to – to prevent those burglaries? – and – ”
The words were there, flickering in my throat, oddly-arranged as ever. She was watching me silently, waiting for me to sort them out.
“And I know – erm – I know what it – I mean – how it feels – to think yourself a disappointment – and have the world agree with you – and – I – it – it quite doesn’t help anything. Particularly when – you – you aren’t a disappointment in the slightest! – and you never give up – even when it’s a scenario in which you can’t possibly be expected to emerge triumphant – so – yes – quite. Please don’t think it. I – I don’t think it – of you, I mean. Not at all. Quite.”
For a moment, we could only stare at each other. I’d run out of intelligible sentiments, and she didn’t seem able to summon any. She dashed her teeth over her lip, then prised them away and summoned a faint smile, dazed and lopsided under glinting navy eyes.
“Thanks. I – yes. Well. Right. Yes.”
She cleared her throat, one hand smudging hastily at her eyelashes. “Right! I was going to say – tomorrow, I’m going to drop in on Lorrie. Properly, this time. The head-hiding – it’s deliberate, we’ve seen as much today. Someone’s toying with the Div, and giving it, and stealing it back – and whoever they are, they ain’t him. So I – I’ll not be long, no longer than it takes to check he’s alright. That no one’s hassling him, or calling him a suspect, or anything. You don’t have to come with me – but in case you were wondering what – ”
“Of course I’ll come with you!”
I blurted it with desperation enough to set me squirming, straight into all manner of stammered appendices. “I mean – if – only – not if you don’t want me to – or – if I’d be in the way – erm – or – if you’d rather I – I don’t know – ”
“Then come with me.” A twinge of a smile. “If you want to.”
“I – I – if you want me to!”
She shot me a wry look. The smile was settling in earnest now.
“Well. Alright. Yes. And – I’ll talk to the Director about it tonight – so – if she says yes and you’ve a mind to it, we can cycle there. Quick lesson-on-the-job. Reckon it’ll be a lot harder for anyone to jump us if we’re scorching at speed. What d’you think?”
And – whether it was her smile, or her undeniable affirmative, or her valiant determination to fix my cycling ineptitude, or the darkness around us, or – passionfruit, heaven knows what – something unseen plucked at my sleeve, more a kind of delicate certainty than any especial boldness. I edged my fingers into the gloom, a tremulous inch above the fabric at her thigh, until I felt the sharp knuckles of her hand where it rested on her leg – where she wasn’t tugging it away – where her fingers twitched, ever so slightly, as mine slipped between them. Her eyes were wide and frozen on mine, and I’d quite not the faintest what my face must have been doing. If she moved – if she started back – if she left –
She blinked hard, plunged her gaze down into the shadows where our hands must have been. For one terrifying moment, she didn’t move – didn’t glance at me again, though my breaths were painfully audible, and my heartbeat shook my very eyelashes. Then – soft, but not so soft as to be imagined – her thumb brushed the length of my little finger, settled itself just at the knuckle.
I trembled.
We must have sat like that, as motionless as our shaky breathing allowed us to be, for full five minutes without daring to move. Everything was fragile, far too easy to shatter – but – at the same time – everything was calmer, and quieter, and steadier, than either of us could ever have imagined it would be. She curled up her fingers, folded them over mine in a careful clasp – and, eventually, we both conceded to believing we weren’t about to let go. The candle-wick plunged itself into the wax and sputtered itself out. There weren’t words. There was just the dark, and in the midst of it her hand and mine – and my every sense, and thought, and feeling, resting there between her fingers.
Our hold only broke when the silence did. There was a slam of doors and smatter of voices out in reception – Millicent and Oliver, chattering to Cassandra of unsuccessful searches and dismal weather, as the clock chimed some uncountable hour under their words – and it smarted us both to our feet. I couldn’t make out Septimus’s face, but her hand squeezed mine before it vanished, before a soft clatter accompanied her grab for the guttered candle, before her shadow slipped into the aisle and sprinted away through the door.
And – sweet figs – I know I’ve everything in this hectic village world to fret for – I know I ought to be worrying about the disappearing head, and the malign intent behind it – and the Sweetings, with their descent into overboldness and dangerous weaponry – and Mr. Adelstein, hovering above me like an owl about to strike – and Edwina, and aristocratic marriages, and all the horrors of my old life – but I quite shan’t. Not tonight. Not when I can wind my fingers round the hand she just held and press it to the sharp edges of my collarbone. I can’t answer for what I’ll dream of, if I dream once this entry’s concluded, but – I’m certain to the very marrow on the question of what I’ll think about, until the warmth and the comfort and the calm of it tips me into sleep.
18.
IN WHICH SCHEMES
ARE THWARTED
The Director’s Record
November 3rd 1893 (Friday)
MISSING HEAD. –– It’s a ploy. A deliberate ploy, someone unknown and malicious out to humiliate the Division – until the town loses confidence in our abilities, until those of us with more susceptible dispositions (I must refer to Matthew, and – though I hope not – Cassandra) concede to their self-doubt – until the criminals already taunting us grow bold enough to threaten our lives – until everything I have unhinged myself to create no longer exists, and can never exist again for the strength of its very failure. And they – whoever they are – actually believe that this insane scheme can succeed. That I won’t stop them. That I won’t do whatever is required to ensure that the Division outlives them – outlives me, if necessary.
