Nettleblack, page 45
Persimmons, if anything could have dragged me out of my daze –
“The Sweetings – they – erm – what are you doing about them?”
Rosamond and Property blinked at me as one – still cheek to cheek, reddened at the lips, eyebrows a very proscenium of bemusement. I had undoubtedly not lost my slack look, the blaze under my eyes. Strung on their gazes, I felt quite unbearably young, and no amount of new backbone could have ameliorated it.
“Scuppering them, in theory,” Property muttered. “Maggie and Norman are under the impression, courtesy of my own good self, that these antics tonight are some grand revenge orchestrated for their benefit, against the Division that seems so resoundingly to have wronged them over the past few days. I mean to keep them stationary and thinking as much until the Division arrive – at which juncture, even they’re bound to spot that I’ve resigned my role as their pleasant-voiced plaything.”
They dropped to a hiss, dark with disdain. “After tonight, if I ever see that motley pair again it’ll be too soon.”
Rosamond smirked. “See, Pip? You’d be an excellent criminal mastermind!”
Property rolled their eyes. “I prefer cravat designer under coercion.”
My sister ignored the correction. “Right! Henry – here’s something I can fix for you, eh? Imagine that! You just sit tight in here while Pip and I sort it out. Better lock the door, in case the stairwell ghouls come prying. We’ll just be – oh, however long it takes until your rescue comes!”
I’d no retort to that beyond open-mouthed bewilderment – but neither of them seemed inclined to wait for me. Property laced their fingers through Rosamond’s, whilst their free hand slipped across their waistcoat, along the golden gleam of what I’d assumed to be a watch-chain, drew it out until it roughened into a brace of keys. Rosamond – and it struck me quite as much as the kiss – beat them to the lock, fished an identical key from her coat pocket and twisted the door wide. Either one could have locked me in, once they had both vanished into the peaty darkness of the landing. They could have done it together, and kissed as they turned the key, pallid hands pressed against olive skin and starched collar –
“Rosamond – wait! Listen to me! Edwina – Edwina needs you! She’s engaged – to a lyric tenor – and our family tailor – same person – I quite can’t explain how I know that, but – I – I just do! And Lady Miltonwaters wants to ruin her for it – and – and Edwina’s going to need – at least one of us – to help her – and you’re the only one she won’t try to force into marriage – so it has to be you!”
It froze them both in the doorway, as I had desperately hoped it would. Property’s face jerked into an incredulous smirk, bemused and half-disbelieving, their eyes flicking to Rosamond. And – figs – Rosamond – she didn’t doubt me. If anything, the revelation seemed to settle her, until she was perfectly, unnervingly still. Hand-in-hand with Property, wide-eyed and motionless in the scrawny wooden doorframe, she didn’t look a whit like any version of her I’d ever known. Not daredevil Gower Rosamond, not decadent Surrey Rosamond, not even the Rosamond who’d sat with me outside Checkley’s Tavern and dipped an ear to my infatuation. She was just solemn, and steady-voiced, and resigned.
“Well,” she declared. “Da iawn. That would explain it.”
“Quite! So – erm – you see – ”
“I see she doesn’t want us involved, not as anything other than convenient little pieces in her perfect plan. If that’s all we can do to help her, then – no. Let her have her life, and pob lwc to her, but not at the expense of mine.”
“But – Rosamond – ”
She squeezed Property’s hand – and then she was beside me in three swift steps, slender fingers gripping my sleeves. “Me going doesn’t have to mean you staying, chwaerlet. Edwina clearly won’t accept help from either of us. If you don’t feel safe going back, don’t go back. I’ve made sure you’ll never have to, and you should know I hate myself for the way I had to do it.”
“What? I – I don’t – ”
“Exactly. You don’t. You don’t have to do anything for Edwina, not anymore. Edwina took as much from me as she could, as long as I let her – my home, my freedom, my former self, almost my language – and if you rush off to help her, with your sympathy and your kindliness and your sisterly loyalty, she’ll only do the same to you. And you’ve got things you don’t want to lose now! Don’t give them up at her insistence, and don’t let her leech them out of you. Addo i mi.”
She read my confusion in an instant, dredged a weary sigh. “I asked you to promise me, Henry. If it weren’t for her, you might have understood that.”
And she stalked from the room with Property at her side.
24.
OF CONTINGENCY PLANS
To continue my catastrophe
I couldn’t say how long they left me waiting. I staggered over the floorboards, examined every scrap of the rickety room for something to do, something that wasn’t a swift descent into abject despair, or tumbling too thoroughly through Rosamond’s last words. There was a pile of spindly firewood for the filthy hearth, though the blaze was slumping into its embers now. The rag-rug, on closer inspection, was all cravat: scraps of discarded patterns plaited into colourful chaos. The skylight was the only window, the broad pane of glass clouded to its own patch of fog. I shoved it open just to check that I could, stood up on the bed to poke my head out – though the moment I had it gaping to the night I confess I backed away. I didn’t dare try climbing through it in the darkness. It was true country dark out there, utterly stripped of streetlamps – just the fields and the coppices and the river before them, hissing as it slapped against its weedy banks.
I have to admit it – I wanted Rosamond back. I wanted her to sit beside me on the frail metal bed and explain herself in full. I wanted her to blotch up all the rents in my knowledge, and trust me to comprehend them, and steady the ground for me to make my next decisions – not just leave me with cryptic half-confessions, and bitterness, and scraps of broken Welsh! What had Edwina done to her – what had she done to Edwina? Where were she and Property going? Would I ever see her again, once they’d both left me behind?
I was curled on the bed, my knees to my chest, my head locked in my elbows. My thoughts veered off at dead-end angles, or folded in on themselves. Rosamond and my family, Septimus and the Division, me and my alias – had I lost that? Would I lose it now? Or had Mr. Adelstein, if he’d not forgotten me, already given me up, and I simply didn’t know it yet?
Either way, how did any of that translate into action, in this immediate wretched moment?
“Septimus,” I whispered, fast, to choke off a sob. “You – you’d know – ”
“Henry?”
Pomegranates.
That quite wasn’t my fevered mind. That was entirely real.
That was ten bloodstained fingers, clinging taut to the lower frame of the skylight, wrenching until the straggling remnants of a chignon rose into view.
I sprang uncoiled, hurled myself at the window.
She had just enough strength to drag herself up and over the skylight’s edge – she hardly needed my frantic scrabbling at her shoulders – before she crumpled down onto the bed, both hands clasped to her face. Quite beyond hesitation, I grabbed her elbows and tugged her upright, across the room and onto the rag-rug, as close to the fire as I could get her. She was stiff and shivering from the freezing night, and the shock of warmth on her skin set her gasping anew.
Beyond that instinctive competence, I could only stare. There’s quite not enough rage and terror and desperate protectiveness in horrified to encompass it –
I’d seen her angry, scared, helpless. It didn’t twitch a candle to this. Her hair was toppling out of its neat folds, shards of heavy chestnut crumpling over her trembling shoulders. Her uniform was filthier than mine had ever been: torn and grey with dust at the elbows and knees, bristling with splinters and mortar – she truly had just climbed the back of the building! – crusted at the sleeves with the dried remnants of blood. And – her face – and how she flinched, and coloured, and dodged my gaze when I prised her hands away from it – her impeccable face was livid with bruises, streaked along her cheekbones, under her eyes, across the crooked bridge of her broken nose –
“Figs,” I spluttered out – there weren’t better words, or any words – and flung my arms round her.
She started, almost enough to knock me away. I would have hesitated – or asked her permission, or anything more decorous – but with both of our situations so resoundingly unhinged, I’d quite lost the ability. Then she jolted towards me, her forehead pressed to mine, her frozen hands clasping welts of cold into my back. Sharp through my jacket buttons, the bolting rattle of her heartbeat jarred against my ribs. My lips were at her cheek, shuddering on her skin. There wasn’t time to consider what I did, whether my convulsive twitches were gasps, or sobs, or kisses –
She flinched, and I could cheerfully have wrenched my own head off. Every touch to her face must have been a shriek of pain. I prised myself back, as gingerly as my nerves could stand, until I could meet her eyes, wider and more terrified than I’d ever seen them. Beneath her bloodied nose, her lips were bitten almost to shreds.
“You were right,” I heard myself stammer. “About – about Property – and everything – they want to run away – and – ”
She spat a wretched groan. “Oh, Henry, that ain’t even the half of it.”
She grabbed my shoulders, freezing fingers clinging to me with all the strength left in them, and she told me quite everything. The deadline for catching the Sweetings, about to be missed. Cassandra and her unknown revelation. The Director, alone in her room, refusing to so much as glimpse her own badge. How she had hidden behind the door, on the Director’s orders, watching in petrified silence as our leader strode out to meet intruders in the Division. Then her voice cracked, though she cleared her throat with a frantic jerk of the chin: she had left the building, as ordered, and now there was no way of knowing what new threat the Director had to face without her support.
It flung the remnants of my worries over Rosamond out of my head. Figs, of course it did! This was – it couldn’t be – it was surely too heightened to credit, too desperate to be true – but even the wildest bout of wishful thinking would have been punctured by her stricken face –
“But she’s got a plan,” she added suddenly, squeezing my shoulders. “The Director. And we’re part of it. Or – you – you are. I ain’t had more orders than what she’s given me, but there’s a message from her to you.”
I gaped at her. My expression must have been question enough.
“Your writing.” She swallowed, cleared her throat again. Her voice sat strange in her skull, straining to match its usual shape. “She wants you to go back to the Div with it. Something – she said – what you are, but more importantly, what you do, and you can use it. And it has to be right now. I assume that means something to you, that it don’t to me?”
She was too urgent to sound exasperated, even when facing down this new gap in her knowledge. Whatever it is, I don’t care, I can help – and she’d quite meant it.
Except that now, apparently, it was me who had been appointed to do the helping. And – what – what did the Director expect me to do? If she was confronting something fearsome within the Division building, how could my writing possibly ameliorate the situation? Did she want my journal – the journal which was still hidden in the dormitory? Was it my identity? And for what?
All the while, Septimus was staring at me, teeth biting down in her bloodied lip, straggles of hair snagging on her eyelashes.
“If she – I can only presume she’s referring to – my journal – and it’s in the Division – as she says – and there’s a back door into the dormitory – ”
“Then we’ve got to get you there,” she muttered, wincing into a frown. “And – look – never mind Property. If they’re running away, must mean they’re breaking with the Sweetings – and it ain’t a moment too soon for that. I won’t just abandon the Director. Any threat to the Div ain’t for her to face alone.”
But Rosamond – if she leaves the country, Edwina will only double down on the search for me – and she’ll never have the chance to undo whatever made her so resoundingly cavalier about abandoning our family –
I thought it all, stark and fierce as a burn, as the smart in my fingers when they dashed against the metal on the Division’s wood-burner. I thought it – and then I blinked, ran my fingers along her arms and clenched her hands in mine.
“Quite.”
Behind me, the door rattled against its lock.
“Right!” – and Septimus was on her feet, shaking fists curled up, shunting me behind her. “We’ll be out now, Henry, and no damned fop in a suit’ll stop us – ”
“Oi! Boss! Open up so we can see Morfydd, why don’t you?”
Septimus froze. My thoughts were whirling, quite parallel to hers. Property she could have got us past, but the Sweetings were entirely another matter. I’d never get close enough to snatch the pistol this time. For all we knew, the gun was right on the other side of the door, already trained on us –
“You go,” Septimus spat through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Go!” she snarled, skidding about to hold my gaze. Her hand fumbled at her pocket, wrenched out her notebook and shoved it deep into mine. “There’s a map in this that’ll get you back. I’ll distract ’em – all of ’em – follow you when I can. You’ve got to go – get your journal – it’s you the Director needs – ”
“I’m quite not leaving you!”
She snatched my arm, dragged me to the bed and the open skylight. All the while, the door-handle juddered and shook. “You’ve got to trust me. Please. Out the window so I can shut it. Don’t you fret for me – there ain’t time.”
I opened my mouth to inform her that this was lunacy, that under no circumstances was I abandoning her to the mercies of the criminals who’d already maimed her once this evening – but I didn’t make it through so much as the first syllable. She still had my arm – she tugged me close – closer – until she was warm breath and the sharp tang of blood – and then she dashed her lips against mine for innumerable giddying seconds – sweet figs, she kissed me – fierce and deliberate and entirely indisputable –
Then she hooked an arm under my knees, flung me out onto the roof, and slammed the skylight window behind me.
Well. Quite. Had I not been scrambling over a rooftop in numbing darkness, dodging slates as wobbly as loose teeth, praying I’d survive the skitter down onto the lower floor jutting beneath me, I would have swooned myself to consummate oblivion, and no criminal alive could have reasonably stopped me.
I never would have managed this climbing feat in reverse, even in culottes – injured as she was, her athletic daring shall perpetually amaze me – but lowering myself down the storeys was just about possible, and the windows had candles enough to light my way. The tenement got wider as it got closer to the ground, in a kind of oversized staircase. The whole building was composed primarily of boxy rooms with flat roofs crammed onto the back, swallowing up the square of unkempt garden. In a scrap of luck, it wasn’t raining, but – nectarines! – it was cold.
I toppled face-first into the damp grass, shoved myself back to my feet. The rush of the river hung close on the air. I’d been too dazed for fear the whole way down, too dazed for anything but squinting concentration and –
I confess it: and elation.
The icy breeze cracked my lips, stiffened them to a grimace, but I could still feel the throb in them – she’d kissed furiously enough to bruise. But – persimmons – had I, in all my astonished inexperience, managed to sufficiently return it? How was I supposed to communicate, with no words and five seconds and a hallway-ful of criminals about to riddle us with pistol-shot, quite what her kiss had done to me, and how ferociously intent I was on reprising it when I next saw her? To imagine kissing her – to blush and wonder and hesitate myself out of it – that was one thing – but it had happened, and it could happen again – and I wanted nothing more than for it to happen again! In that instant, as I sprinted through the house’s narrow brick passageway and wrestled open the latch of its brittle back gate, you could have struck a match alight on me!
The ring of the cobblestones through my boots knocked me back to composure, or at least as close as I was going to get. She would escape – she had to – as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t an alternative. And I – I had my bewildering orders, never mind that I’d still not the faintest what effect they were intended to have. Get into the Division in a suitably surreptitious fashion, find my journal – or, more ideally, find the Director, work out what she wanted me to do with the aforementioned writing, assuming that she was in any position to –
No! A fig for these wretched worst-case scenarios! Not until I knew something for certain!
Fortunately for my unravelling nerves, it was the work of a few gasping moments to discover just where in Dallyangle I was. Now that I had extricated myself from the shadowy passageway and the gloomy back garden, I was back in the realm of streetlamps, able to wrestle Septimus’s notebook from my pocket and tip the map to the light until its geography made sense. Beyond its pages, there was the carriage, parked awkwardly in front of the narrow tenement, the horse eye-deep in a bag of oats, a heap of blankets and a slouching hat propped on the seat in rough imitation of a waiting driver. I’d neither skill nor desire to steal it, but the Divisionary bicycles leant against the opposite housefront were another matter entirely. Septimus must have balanced mine alongside hers, heaved them both through the streets, set the two side by side for our hasty getaway. My footsteps struck up a pealing echo as I staggered towards them – it was the church-bell, tolling nine o’clock from the very direction the front wheels jutted towards. That way to the town centre and the market square.
