‘Please, ma’am.’ Mrs Pilley clasped her hands over Lydia’s, when Lydia would have torn up the note. ‘The poor man looked so desperate when he stopped me in the lobby just now. I’m sure he wouldn’t have waited half the morning here for you, just for foolishness.’
‘Are you?’ Lydia turned the note over in her black-gloved fingers. It sounded to her exactly like the sort of thing her most persistent suitor would do. She thought she’d glimpsed that tall, pot-bellied, awkward form scrambling up out of an armchair as she, Ellen, and Mrs Pilley had crossed the lobby with Miranda, after a morning spent walking with Madame Hautecoeur on the Tatar City’s walls. At the sight of him she had quickened her steps to the stair.
The effort to keep her mind from what she knew had to be taking place in the Western Hills – from the thought of Jamie tangling with the Others, who might or might not be asleep; from the knowledge that Simon would be sealed into the mine with them – had exhausted her. Annette Hautecoeur, for all her gossipy slyness, had maintained a gentle flow of harmless commonplace as they’d looked out across that eerily impressive sea of gray and green and crimson roofs, and had made no comment about Lydia’s distraction and silences.
A new-made widow, Lydia was finding, could get away with a lot.
Such forbearance would definitely not be encountered in Edmund Woodreave’s company.
‘Please.’ The little nurse’s voice almost had tears in it. ‘He has a faithful heart, ma’am, and loves you so much.’
‘He has debts of over five hundred pounds to his club, his tailor, his wine merchant, and Hoby’s in London where he orders his boots,’ returned Lydia astringently. ‘And he loves so much the thought of an independent income which would put him in line for promotion.’
Mrs Pilley’s face crumpled a little, her eyes pleading. Her own fondness for the clerk, she knew, would forever go unconsummated – without a marriage portion of some kind neither he nor anyone else could afford to look at her . . .
Another look at the nurse’s face confirmed her thought.
She sighed, feeling a little sick, and inspected herself in the parlor mirror. She retreated to the bedroom and repaired the ravages wrought by an hour’s sedate stroll under the protection of enough veiling to tent the grounds of New College – touches of rice powder, the tiniest refreshment of mascaro on the lids of her eyes (
Woodreave was pacing the lobby outside the door of the smallest of the private parlors when Lydia came down the stairs. She noticed in passing a Chinese workman deep in argument with the manager at the desk and three laborers standing next to a number of rolled-up carpets nearby. Woodreave came forward and took her arm with a reverence that almost concealed the pre-emptory anxiety of the gesture. ‘Madame – Mrs Asher – thank you for coming down! Truly I’m – I’m sorry for disturbing you this way, but I really had no choice . . .’
He conducted her into the private parlor with the blue curtains and closed the door.
Grant Hobart rose from beside the fire. ‘Mrs Asher—’
Lydia turned sharply on Woodreave; his face was filled with anguish and guilt. ‘Please, Mrs Asher, please forgive me! Mr Hobart needs very much to speak to you. He said you wouldn’t answer his letters—’
‘I wouldn’t answer his letters,’ responded Lydia, furious now, ‘because I do not want to speak with him. The man who lied about my husband? Who drove him into the situation which resulted in his death, rather than have him reveal what he’d learned about the blood on his own hands?’
‘Blood—?’ Woodreave threw a pleading glance toward Hobart, who crossed the little parlor in two steps to Lydia’s side. He looked frightful, Lydia thought, trying not to peer nearsightedly at him – haggard and feverish:
‘Ask him,’ said Lydia coldly. ‘Or was part of the money he offered you on the condition that you didn’t ask him anything?’
She was so angry that it took her an instant to identify the smell that clung to Hobart’s clothing. A breath of foulness, of fishy decay buried under nauseating French cologne . . . and something else, something chemical . . .
She turned to dive for the parlor door, but it was too late. Hobart grabbed her arm in a grip of terrifying strength and clapped a soaked rag to her nose and mouth. Lydia held her breath, kicked backwards at his shin—
And in the same instant, a Chinese man – respectably dressed in Western fashion – stepped from behind the curtains that half-concealed the alcove of the door, put one hand over Woodreave’s mouth and with the other drove a foot-long steel stiletto at an angle up through the larynx and into – Lydia guessed – the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum behind it. Which was, she reflected with her last conscious thought before blacking out, truly excellent aim given the circumstances.
Asher smelled the
Wondered where the sun was in the sky.
Ahead of him, Private Seki whispered, ‘
He checked the map. ‘Back this way. There’s a shaft down to a gallery below this one, then a shaft up again—’
There was a shaft – a few yards down a cross-cut that wasn’t as the map had described it – and a ladder with rotten rungs that cracked and whispered under the weight of the men, forty feet down into utter darkness. A gallery, the entire ceiling of which had sagged to within five feet of its floor, ankle deep in water in places, a slippery, hideous scramble.
Then, like the warning rush of wind that presages the storm, the skitter of claws on stone, the stink of rats.
Beyond the radius of the light Asher saw movement and a river of glittering eyes. He quickly unshipped the nozzle of his flame-thrower and lit the pilot (
It was. The rodents scattered, squealing, the charred and dying casualties a twitching carpet of stink and embers underfoot. They gave squishily as Asher strode forward, praying that there would indeed be the up-shaft that was supposedly at the end of the gallery and that the ladder there would still be able to bear weight. Tiny feet splished in water behind them in the darkness, scratched on the stones.
