“With this hand?”
“Well, I’ll help. Or else I’ll create a diversion. I’ll go down there and draw out as many of them coppers as I can, and you can slip past me. I’ll take on the whole bloody Met if I have to.”
“They’d kill you, you crazy fool.”
“Please let me do this for you,” says Robert, seriously. “What am I for, if not for this?”
Precious considers, then looks over the side of the building at the drainpipe. “There might be a way down for us, if you help, Robert, and if, together, we carry Tabitha. Are you up for it, Tabitha?”
“You know me, Precious, love. I’ll do anything.” She winks at Robert.
Robert blushes.
Precious takes Tabitha by one arm, and Robert raises the other. Precious is unsure whether any of this will work, but perhaps if Robert goes first, there will be a way to lower Tabitha down.
“Stop,” says Tabitha.
Precious thinks she must be accidentally hurting her. “I’m sorry, love. But we really should hurry.”
“No,” says Tabitha. “We need to stop.”
Robert already has one foot over the side of the building, ready to take the first step down. “What is it?” he asks.
“Can you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Precious is beginning to think the loss of blood is affecting her friend’s perceptions.
“The tremors,” says Tabitha quietly.
Precious stands very still. So does Robert, though he has less idea what is going on. He is still hunched over, holding his chest, panting heavily. Then Precious feels them too. She feels a trembling in the soles of her feet, through the thin fabric of her slippers. The trembling is subtle, but it gets fiercer. She feels her legs begin to shake. There is a low rumbling, deep within the earth. The pitch is so low, she can hardly hear it. It is something she feels rather than hears. She feels it in her ribs. It creates a funny, hollow feeling in her lungs and it jars with the rhythm of her heartbeat.
Precious looks over at Robert, who has felt nothing. He is looking between her and Tabitha as if the pair of them are speaking in tongues. Tabitha is beginning to move back, towards the intersection between their neighbors’ roof and their own. Tabitha uses her good hand to grip the wall, taking care to avoid the contra-avian spikes. She and Precious climb up onto the other roof, and continue to move back, beckoning for Robert to follow.
“Come this way, Robert,” Precious urges. Robert is utterly baffled. He stays where he is. He is clutching at his chest. He still hasn’t properly caught his breath from climbing up.
Then the shaking begins in earnest. Tiles fall from the roof. There is a creak as seventeenth-century timbers bend and snap; the trunks of magnificent oak trees that grew in vast forests, that were harvested and bent to the shape of the city—oak trees the like of which don’t exist anymore, haven’t been seen for centuries. The timbers warp, then break in two. Precious and Tabitha are now on the neighbouring roof. They hold on tightly to a chimney stack and watch as the old building falls away from them, and crumbles. Robert slips out of sight.
Gravy
The pie has a buttery crust that flakes when she digs. The meat is smooth and cut easily with the side of a fork. The best part is the gravy. Agatha has stood by the stove and watched Valerie make it many times. She roasts the meat on the bone, places it on a plate to rest, then puts the roasting tin, still hot, onto the gas hob. She scrapes at the fats with a wooden spoon, loosening the parts that have formed a dark crust. She sprinkles on flour and blends it together with the residue. She adds hot water, stirring all the time. She stirs and stirs and simmers, and the gravy thickens slowly then all at once.
Agatha feels relaxed. Her mind is quiet, focused on the room, the company, the taste and texture of the meal. It isn’t a sensation she is used to but it is one she likes. She decides this is how she ought always to function. She will reject anything cerebral. She will always put sensory experience before any other consideration. She will allow her mind to follow her eyes, her ears, her tongue, her nose, her fingertips. Her senses will inform all her decisions.
Roster presumably drove the boy home. Agatha left him in the bedroom and came down to the gatehouse. Valerie will have gone up for the night, but she never locks the door, and keeps a bed made up for Agatha, knowing her youngest sister sometimes likes to sleep down here with her rather than up at the big house on her own. Agatha has always had a room here with Valerie. She uses it less and less these days, feeling the need to sleep in the house she owns, as she should, but she has come down tonight out of a desire to leave the boy alone, and because she was hungry, and suspected Valerie might have something delicious lying around. She found the pie on the hob and has heated a slice.
When the pie is hot through, she takes it over to the kitchen table and begins to eat. Then she hears the floorboards creaking upstairs, the hinges of a door, the flush of a toilet and the turning of a tap on then off. She hears Valerie descend the narrow flight of stairs, then sees her in the doorway in an old burgundy dressing gown that reaches all the way to her ankles. She is wearing thick socks and navy-blue slippers, worn white with age.
“Oh,” notes the old woman. “It’s you.”
“We drove up this morning,” Agatha replies. “We were at the races. And afterwards I was occupied.”
“You’ll sleep here tonight?”
Agatha nods, her mouth full of pie.
“You helped yourself, I see. There’s sponge for afters if you want it.”
“Thank you, but this will
