Nettleblack, page 44
So – what to say to her now? Shape myself to simpering patter, and tell her everything’ll be fine? Wax on how brilliant she is – what a thing she’s managed – so commendable she gives up all her sleep to it – inspirational – pedestal-perfect – patron saint of provincial institutions? Oh, because that’ll drag her out of her isolation, won’t it! That’ll shove the weight off her shoulders!
“Now just you wait!”
I grab her hand, the one that’s at her eyes, wrench it down. She made me look at her – right! Well! My turn!
“It ain’t your responsibility to sort it all on your own. To protect us, protect Dallyangle, meet a deadline slapped on you by someone with no idea what we’re dealing with – everything. Look – I know where the Sweetings are, right now, and I need your help. I don’t need you to be perfect. I just – these ain’t things anyone should be trying to manage alone!”
I don’t have to make her look at me. She’s staring in earnest now.
“It was the Sweetings did this to me. They did it so Property could take Henry. And it ain’t the first time those three’ve worked together. I never told you, alright – I just let you suspend me – I was too ashamed – and scared – and it felt better to let you think I didn’t even see the Sweetings that night – better’n admitting just how much of an idiot I was! Property wanted to meet me – and I was on duty, so I shouldn’t’ve gone – but I did. It was all a trap – they’d arranged it so the Sweetings could ambush me for my hair. And when I couldn’t fight ’em off, Property stepped in – took me back to their house – told me to rest. By the time I woke up, the robberies’d already happened.”
It ain’t exactly the words I’d want for it. But it’s the first time I’ve said the whole thing aloud. I suppose I can’t hope for much better.
“And I – I’m sorry. I know that don’t fix it. But what needs fixing ain’t me – it’s Henry. The Sweetings’ll hurt her, and now they’re armed Property won’t be able to stop ’em. I need – whoever’s here – you, me, Cassandra, everyone we can find – to save her – and to get the Sweetings – because we do still have time, and I ain’t leaving her behind!”
Her hand’s trembling against mine, fingers clenching tighter and tighter into my palm. The pain in my face, when I stop, is giddying enough to set my ears ringing.
“You were too scared to tell me that you had been tricked and attacked?” she whispers. Sudden, abrupt, so hoarse it’s more a hiss than a question. “And what about yesterday, when it happened again? Would you have told me about that, if Millicent and Oliver hadn’t announced it first? What – what are you so afraid of?”
Then her face spasms, taut with new panic. My own must be a mirror for her.
“It’s me, isn’t it? Like Cassandra. You are afraid of me. Afraid that I will hold you to the same standards that I hold myself, and find you wanting.”
Every word’s a chokehold. “I – I only – you expect a lot – and – that ain’t a bad thing! – it just – ”
“Keturah Ballestas?”
The voice smarts on the air, shouted from out in reception.
I know it. So does she.
My first instinct’s to spring up and fling the door wide – ’til I remember my face. Another blow and I’ll be on the floor. I can’t fight anything, can’t scare anyone away. Terror skitters up my back, freezing me to the chair. The Director jabs her nail into my palm, lifts one finger to her lips.
There’s one creak – then another – it’s footsteps. Several sets of footsteps. Crossing past Cassandra’s desk – where the hell is Cassandra? – and stalking into the corridor.
There ain’t even time to dive across the office and dim the lights. Those footsteps, they’ll already’ve seen the glow under the door. They’ll hear the breaths, the dry-mouthed gasps I can’t get quieter, scraping through the broken silence. They’ll know we’re here.
“Come out, now. Quick as you can.”
I start, too much. The Director grabs my elbows before I jolt off the chair.
“Cassandra was right,” she murmurs.
A sharp rap at the door. “Or must we come in?”
That door. Not even locked. There could be someone – or more – pressed up against it, ready to shoulder it in. Could be armed. Could be – oh, God – and I’m as good as useless – but I can’t let her face it alone!
“A moment, please,” she calls back, shivering through the words. I stare at her, stiff with fear, helpless to stop her. “This is a conversation for a larger room, is it not?”
I snatch for her. She can’t – she can’t –
Then her arm’s at my waist, easing me silently off the chair, holding me close. Close enough for the lightest of shaky whispers at my ear.
“Henry Hyssop. Get her back here. Don’t worry about the deadline. What she is – no, more important, what she does – the writing – tell her she can use it. This is a chance I never dreamed we would have, and we will not get it again.”
I – but – what?
Another rap on the door, a brief rattle of the handle. I can despise myself all I like, but I nearly scream for it.
She moves. One hand tugs the makeshift bolt of curtain across the open window. The other marches me with her, step for step, ’til we get to the door, where she presses me against the wall. When she opens it – it opens inwards – it’ll hide me. Her last look to me, before she reaches for the handle, is as much an entreaty as it is a warning. I’ve got to trust her, but – and it’s clearly terrifying both of us – she’s also got to trust me.
“Well?” she declares briskly, swinging the door wide. In the last glimpse I get of her face, I see anger running taut along the edge of her jaw. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but this is not precisely a surprise. I think it about time you start explaining what you want with me – and what you have done to my daughter.”
No one answers, but she’s already going. There’s a breath or two, enough to make me hold mine – someone’s looking in – a rustle on the threshold –
The door slams.
I stay there, frozen and silent, ’til the footsteps clear the corridor. There’s still voices – but I can’t tell whose anymore. I step to match the sounds, inching across the office, dodging the creaks, shoving my notebook into my jacket. Lift the curtain in trembling hands. Blink to blunt the knife of breeze at my eyes.
I tip myself out in a heap, both hands tense around my nose. It hurts, but it works. If I’d gone feet-first, my boots would have clattered at the cobbles, but now all the sound’s swallowed up in fabric. I’ve got the way back to that tenement scribbled in my notebook. I’ve got fear, swelling in my gullet – and no plan.
I thought I’d be striding in there with the Div at my side. I ain’t got a weapon to match the Sweetings, and my strength for a brawl’s all but gone.
Henry – please – what in hell’s name do I do?
23.
IN WHICH EVERYTHING
IS INFURIATING
Myself, somewhat less than helpful
To continue the attic-based catastrophe
Rosamond. Property. Figs, but why not bring the Sweetings back in, and make one vast delirious carnival of it?
And beth sy’n bod? She met me here, on this threshold, doubtless aware to her very marrow that I had been dragged from the street by vengeful burglars with whom she was apparently perfectly prepared to associate – and yet she still had the audacity to summon her old comforting refrain by way of an opening gambit?
Summon! Call it desecrate!
I can only hope my seismic outrage provides something of an explanation for quite what happened next. I was slack-faced, fury-headed, gaping at Rosamond whilst she gaped at me – and something in her question struck a flame I wasn’t entirely conscious of remembering. Then the words were shrilling headlong up my throat, and they weren’t words I’d dared use for full six years.
“Mefus! Beth – wyt ti’n – gwneud? Wyt ti eisiau mynd adre – neu ble, Rosamond? – a pham ydw i yma – pam fi? Pam fi?”
To summarise the gist, it was incredulity to the eartips, and there wasn’t so much as an erm in sight nor sound. I don’t think I planned for an answer, and I very much doubt I was calm enough to understand one. The door was still open at Rosamond’s back, and I was far too furious to care what might sprint into my path beyond it – after all, Rosamond had clearly managed to get past the Sweetings without being seen! I was halfway onto the stairwell before either of my new tormentors had so much as drawn breath for a retort.
“Stop her!” Property spluttered – which must have been one of the most ungraceful things they had ever been forced to say – and leapt after me, just as Rosamond tossed her suitcases down and snatched for my arms. Either of them alone I could probably have had a fair chance against, but Rosamond only had to struggle with me for a gasp before Property caught up with us, and then I was resoundingly outnumbered. “Back inside, quickly, and lock the door!”
The two shoved as one – the raggedy floorboards thwacked into my knees – and the door slammed behind me again. I scrambled to my feet, but this time they were ready. Property splayed across the locked door like the most debonair of arachnids, gasping for breath, whilst Rosamond grabbed my hands and squeezed them together, as if she thought it remotely possible to calm me by clasp alone.
“Gracious, here’s fire!” – and Property may well have intended a sardonical grin, but they were rather too short of breath to manage it. “Now, Hylas, are you going to behave sensibly, or must we make this situation even more ridiculous than it already is?”
Rosamond pressed her thumbs into my palms, flung me a shaky smile. “Da iawn, chwaerlet. Didn’t know you remembered that much of the mamiaith.”
Was it too much, really, to howl traitor at her?
“You quite can’t do this!” I cried instead. “I – you – you don’t understand – you can’t leave! Not now that Edwina – look – you – you have to stay – it has to be you – you’re – erm – the best positioned to help her – ”
“Narcissus, what is going on?” Property demanded, slicing through the remnants of my explanation. “Why the devil are you clutching the little Divisioner like a Millais made flesh? Is this some quaint Welsh custom I ought to know about?”
An arch of the eyebrow from Rosamond, as she whirled to meet their incredulous stare. My sister seemed more mocking than indignant; plums, even the Welsh jibe hadn’t fazed her, not when it danced in Property’s drawl.
“Pip fach, dau gwestiwn i ti: un, why have you abducted my sister, a dau, why are you calling her Hylas? Casual seductions are all well and good, cariad, but probably best they aren’t related to me!”
My jaw quite dropped. If she was asking this – surely that meant –
“You didn’t know?” I heard myself stammer.
Property stiffened against the door, their teeth sharp and gritted beneath an impatient velvety whisper. “What didn’t you know, Narcissus?”
Rosamond blinked, green eyes flitting dazedly from face to face. “Ah. Well. Pip. It’s – it’s rather more what you don’t know – ”
“Is it?” Property was unabashedly snappish, the smirk fading, the last of their sardonicism straining at the edges. “Gracious! And I thought that, after all I’ve done to mastermind your escape from your family – from breaking into your house to lying to Edwina’s face to making sure we can leave – I’d be more due for abject gratitude than bilingual mockery!”
Peaches.
I knew the look this tirade struck up in Rosamond all too well. I had last seen it a week ago, just before she flung herself over the chaise, Morris fabric and feral hair and all. The glassy gaze, the languid half-smile, the indifferent amusement – and, this time, it wasn’t in the least directed at me.
“You told me,” she observed wryly, one skinny hand sliding out of mine to tousle her fringe, “that you were going to make sure the Division and the Sweetings didn’t chase us, even if Eddie tried to start a search. I had, I suppose, the vaguest of ideas that you were going to reconcile with the Division by giving them the Sweetings. But I’d no idea how you meant to do it – and, really, if the idea was to drag a Divisioner in as bait, I’m amazed you didn’t pick Septimus – ”
She quite knew how I felt! I’d told her, every word I could stammer out, and she’d squeezed my knee and called me chwaerlet for it!
“Don’t you – I quite won’t let you hurt Septimus!”
An irritable chuckle from the doorway. “Do forgive, Narcissus, Hylas is exhaustingly sweet on her.”
“Oh, I know,” Rosamond agreed cheerily. “I did tell her she was in for an amser anodd with that one – ”
“You entirely don’t get to lecture me now!” I snarled at her, snatching my hand from her half-hearted hold. I seemed to have discovered a capacity to snarl, and I confess in that maddening instant it was addictive. “I trusted you! I – why do I always trust you?”
It was more than a fair question, and for a moment I watched it strike home. Rosamond blinked at me, her pale lips shrugging off words with several panicky twitches – but she lost her nerve. Before I could demand anything else, she’d ducked my glare and swung her gaze back to Property.
“Well – anyway – Pip – you do rather seem to have snatched up my sister. Henry’s been living the vigorous working life as a Divisioner for the past week – ” – and, amazingly, her voice sharpened into mocking scorn – “ – so why she suddenly sees fit to judge me for wanting to get away from Eddie, I couldn’t say.”
I gaped at her. It hardly seemed the most appropriate moment to hurl my eldest sister’s impending ruin down my middle sister’s smirking throat, but neither had left me with anything resembling a better option. “I – I’m quite not judging you! It’s just – Edwina – she – she’s – ”
“Not again, chwaerlet,” Rosamond groaned. “Eddie’s a lost cause, and I can’t change that. Just leave it, alright?”
“Narcissus,” Property interrupted sharply, their voice a veritable knifeblade, “Do you mean to tell me that this roaring mouse is in fact Harriet Nettleblack? And – more to the point – that you didn’t warn me I might need to bear that in mind when dealing with the Division?”
Rosamond rolled her eyes. “How was I to know your melodramatic little mind would jump straight from lure in the Division to actual kidnap? And what’s the plan for when they all arrive, eh? I mean, I say all – you’ll probably get enough of them to outnumber the Sweetings – though they don’t have Mr. Detective anymore, and they’ve got about five hundred other cases – ”
“Thank you for your input now!” Property snarled. “Perhaps, if you had been willing to help me come up with a plan in the first place, my melodramatic little mind might have bowed in good time to your Cambrian genius! You do realise that Septimus will not simply give up, where I am concerned? Even if she won’t be direct about it, she’ll still chase me down to the ends of the known world unless I can find some means of stopping her! And now – maledizione – don’t you see? Now – now that I’ve essentially carried off two heiresses in the same night – she and Edwina have all the proof and reason they need to have me arrested!”
Property’s voice had risen and risen, clean out of sarcasm, up to a spiky pitch of terror that set me flinching. Their hands were clenched to talons around the edges of the doorframe, taut against the damp-softened wood. Rosamond, perpetually Rosamond, still had her eyebrow hooked up, her lazy sneer coiling across her pale lips – that defiant disdain, carved on with all the stiffness of a mask.
“Calm down, bach, you’ll figure something out – ”
“I can’t be arrested!”
It was all but a scream. Rosamond’s eyes shot wide.
“Think about it, Rosamond,” Property hissed. “Think. I will be eaten alive, and not for anything that’s happened tonight.”
Then, I confess, Rosamond astonished me. She slipped past her suitcase, snatched Property at the bow-tie – and quite entirely kissed them out of panic.
I gasped, but the pair of them ignored me. Rosamond had Property’s lower lip between her teeth, their foreheads dipping together, eyelids sinking into lashes. It was nothing I could have dared to imagine, or credit with the capacity for genuine corporeal existence. I had thought, before, that I wanted to kiss Septimus. I thought I’d the slightest idea what kissing Septimus might entail – and I had speculated that the sensation might be an enjoyable one – but – but –
I quite forgot where we were, what had happened, what I was meant to say, how much I’d been furiously intent on cleaving Rosamond into several traitorous pieces. I – I can’t say what possessed me – and my face was aflame – but I couldn’t in the slightest look away. I had never seen a kiss like this one. My youthful existence had shown me perfunctory hand-kisses, and the old half-smile brush of Rosamond’s lips against my forehead, and the chaste fervency of modern novels, and the puffy-faced embraces you could find in paintings from the last century. Not the sort of darting, daring manoeuvres my sister and her lover were currently excelling in – the glints of teeth, tugging at a lip, the fingers trailing up from tie to jawline –
And there were words, too, whispered between them. It was the gentlest I’d heard Rosamond’s voice in years.
“Calm, cariad. You’re alright. We’ll be alright. We’ll be away before anyone can stop us, and you’ll be beyond all the arrests in the country soon enough.”
Property sighed. “And this time, you intend to help me?”
“Just you watch me. Now – you’ve got Sweetings goblining up and down the stairs, but they were easy enough to sneak past. Let’s put my luggage next door with yours, and then we’ll sort Henry out – and then, what, be ready to escape when all the Divisioners rush in?”
“Surreptitiously,” Property added, shuddering. “I can placate the Sweetings until then, but I would rather they don’t notice our retreat.”
