This time I understood my uncle’s name and something about “violence.” The other man stood silent, waiting behind his mask. “Mary,” I said, hoping these men had no more English than I had French, “we will move toward the hall, away from … from …” I didn’t want to say “Uncle Tully.” Mary nodded, still gripping me hard. We took one small side step, together, toward the corridor.
“This way,” I said, very loud and clear. I pushed Mary slightly, and we took another step toward the hall, and then another. I bumped my hip hard as I moved around a workbench, eyes on the arm with the dagger.
The man shouted again, and we had taken three more steps before I realized that the silent one was moving, coming fast across the room. In one movement, he had vaulted the workbench between us and yanked Mary by the arm, tearing her away from me. A small pistol cocked, the muzzle disappearing into her tangle of braids.
Mary screamed, yelling as if she’d been shot already, and my arm moved instinctively, acting on an eruption of pure, unthinking fear. I threw the oil lamp.
It was a decent shot. The lamp hit the man and exploded, leaving lines of streaking flame as the base skipped across the carpet. Mary broke free, pushing herself away from the blaze, stumbling over backward as the man dropped the pistol; his arm was on fire. I reached out for Mary and was jerked from behind, cold metal touching the warm skin of my neck. I sucked in a gasp.
I clutched at the viselike arm around my chest, pinning me from behind as the burning man struggled to rip off his jacket. The sharp point of the knife pressed into my throat. I squeezed my eyes closed, terror giving way to a sort of cold surprise. This was not how I’d thought I would die. Had not been part of my meticulous plans when I’d pulled on my nightgown and climbed into bed. There were this month’s ledger books waiting on my desk, and the new plastering to start tomorrow in the ruined lower wing. That rent to be mended in my white stocking, and the walls of Uncle Tully’s new workshop, rising stone by stone from the riverbank …
My eyes flew open, widening at the sting of the knifepoint as it entered my skin. Lane would come back to Stranwyne Keep, and I would not be here to meet him.
And then the mouth at my ear grunted, the body behind me jerked, and the knife fell away from my throat. I spun, hand on my bleeding neck, and saw the masked man folding in on himself, like badly starched laundry, crumpling to the floor with an almost imperceptible thud.
My gaze traveled up and found Mary, each freckle dark on her pale and sweating face. She had a hammer in her upraised hand, its blunt end bloody in a flickering orange light.
I coughed and looked behind me. The burning man was gone, the hall door open, the air a haze. The jacket blazed in a ball of fire on the carpet, the flames inching outward.
“Water, Mary!” I yelled, stumbling to the drapes, hearing her throw down the hammer as she ran for the bathing room. I ripped the rods from the windows, dragging the heavy cloth over tools and torsos of clockwork, knocking them to the floor until I could pile the drapes onto the fire on the carpet. Smoke billowed. I stomped, beating the fire beneath the drapes with bare feet as Mary threw water onto both the cloth and me before running for more.
A few minutes and the fire was gone, the air around us a poisonous fog. Mary’s face was blackened, her watering eyes laying a white stripe on each cheek. She thrust a wet cloth into my face to breathe through as I staggered toward the naked window. I tried to turn the latch — an act that had likely not been attempted in more than two hundred years — and when it would not yield I picked up a metallic arm and smashed the windowpanes, sending sprays of glass down into the gardens below. The cool autumn night sucked at the smoke.
I took a breath of the purer air, the burn of it like fire itself, and turned away from the broken window, stumbling through the wreckage of machinery, past the twisted shape on the floor, a dark stain spreading halo-like from around his head. The soles of his shoes were smoldering. And then I broke into a run across the workshop, scattering a bucket of screws and tearing my gown on a jagged piece of iron before I burst through the door in a cloud.
“Uncle Tully!” I yelled. “Uncle!”
I searched the bare and tidy room with streaming eyes. But my uncle was not there.
2
Mrs. Cooper put a cup of boiling tea in front of me on the kitchen table. I was sitting in what I thought of as “my chair,” the one I had claimed more than two years ago, the first day I’d stepped inside Stranwyne Keep. I felt much the same now as I had then: frightened, uncertain, and steaming with an anger that set the heat of my tea to shame — my inevitable reaction to anything beyond my control. But I was a different girl from the one who had sat here brazenly baiting Mrs. Cooper — Mrs. Jeffries, then — with a bravado that only partially covered my fear. I counted that day I’d come to Stranwyne as the first of my life, my real life; the person I’d been before it was hardly worth remembering. I held my anger in check.
Mrs. Cooper put another cup of tea in front of Mary, nattering on and on as she did it, calling her “duck” and “poppet” and a “right good girl,” the rags tied in her hair fluttering like feathers above a white cotton nightgown. I was wearing her dressing gown, the faded blue she kept in the kitchen for baking, pulled close over my wet and sooty nightdress. I reached for the little jug in front of me.
“Cream, Mary?” I asked, steadying my hand.
She didn’t answer, just stared stone-faced while I poured it, her unnatural silence hurting me so much more than the small, throbbing cut at the base of my throat. She should not go back upstairs tonight. Maybe she should go home with Mrs. Cooper, or to her mother’s in the village. I smiled gamely at the still-blathering Mrs. Cooper, an expression I knew would give her comfort, and then my gaze lifted past them both, into the far corner of the room and another source of chatter. And like the cream pouring into my over-hot tea, my anger cooled, sweetened by an exquisite sense of relief.
My uncle sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, his attention directed like a beam of light on a broken pocket watch, a trinket I had tucked away for just this purpose, to bring about distraction when needed. I had found him in his nightshirt, wandering in the ticks of his clock room, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the upper reaches of Stranwyne. The bright eyes were innocent still, intent as he hunched over the watch, alternately listening and then peering at its innards.
“Would you like some tea, Uncle?”
“One, two, three, click,” he muttered. “Spin, spin, four, five, click …”
“Or some milk?”
“Yes, yes. That is just so. Just so …”
I did not think he was speaking of milk. “Or …”
“I am not sleepy, Simon’s baby!” The light of his attention had focused suddenly on me. “I am not sleepy. The clocks were ticking, but you came before they could tell me when.” He cocked his head, accusations now over. “You know about the clocks, don’t you, little niece? You like the ticks. You know how to listen to the when?”
“Yes, Uncle.” I understood it perfectly. I smiled as his face relaxed in relief. How I wished I could go to him, give him one fierce hug to assure me of his safety. But only crisis or exhaustion had ever induced Uncle Tully to accept affection, and right now he was conscious of neither. He was sighing happily.
“My little niece knows. Lane knows what is right, and my little niece knows the when, and what we should do. This one does not tell me when. Right now, it cannot say. …”
