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.
I wrenched out the smaller bicycle, its pedals scouring into my ankles in the old visceral greeting. Septimus’s I left where it was. She’d still have need of it.
Figs. Cycling. I had done more today than ever in my life, and I quite wasn’t about to forget the knack now.
The voice from the lamplit gloom nearly struck the wheels out from under me. I had only just hit the market square, pedalling as fast as I dared between bouts of map-squinting – wary not just of the terrifying speed, but of the rattle of the bicycle on the cobblestones, horrendously loud against the cottage-windows. I had met not a single human soul on my inexpert scorch past the candlelit homes, but sneak was rather of the essence, and I was determined to be careful. My plan had been to cycle past the Division and double back on foot from the farthest side of the building – the one with the back door into the dormitory. The bicycle could be hidden behind Checkley’s Tavern, and I’d lose no time trying to tiptoe the full length of the Division.
But a pale shadow sprang out from the log-shed before I could cross the market square, until my choice was either to clutch at the brakes or run it down. Septimus could have swerved and scorched on, of course, but it was quite all I could do to manage regular turns, never mind emergency skidding.
The bicycle shrieked for me, jolting to a halt so violently I almost pitched clean over the handlebars. The pale shape before me gasped, settling into a face – a corpse-candle of a face, hovering above a dowdy grey gown and a lace collar the very hue of polished bone. Only several dazed blinks turned it from ghoul to girl. Even so, she was distinctly ghoulish in her look: lank wavy hair in a bun, too ashy to really call blonde, and stark green eyes with an eerie paleness to the lashes.
It was a measure of my addled state, perhaps, that my first squinting stare into those eyes gave me the vaguest impression of Rosamond. But Rosamond hadn’t followed me, and now the stranger was speaking.
“Division?” she asked briskly. Her eyes didn’t follow her voice, detached and staring and quite motionless. “Are you one of Cassie’s assistants?”
It was a vain endeavour to stop myself gaping at her. I knew her now, though I’d only ever had the one real glimpse. She was the governess, that terrifying young child-minder of the family Ballestas, who had stared me into trembling across this very same square only a matter of days ago. The same governess Septimus and I had been chasing through our pursuit of Lady Miltonwaters, before the Sweetings had blundered in and shattered our original plan. And here she was again, freezing Cassandra’s name in her icy voice – Cassandra, who not a matter of hours ago had believed her inextricably connected with some dastardly plot against the Division. At least, that was as much of Septimus’s frantic explanation as I could recall –
I swallowed. The governess’s face was younger than mine, but she was still half a head taller, even with the teetering height the bicycle gave me. It was the easiest thing in the world to widen my eyes, to pinch words from an intimidated stammer and offer them up to her.
“I – erm – quite – I’m sorry – who – ?”
She blinked at me. Slowed her voice, glacial, as if my answer had been far too stupid to merit a riposte at normal speed. One of her pallid hands reached out to steady my shaking handlebars, long and sharp-nailed at the fingers, searingly cold where her skin brushed against my thumb.
“You must be new. I thought I saw you before, but evidently you didn’t notice me. I work as a governess for the Ballestas family – not Cassie, obviously, but her younger brother – she must have mentioned me? Adelaide Danadlenddu?”
Persimmons.
And I was crouched under the Nettleblack drawing-room window again, with Edwina’s voice spearing out into the night. I obtained Adelaide Danadlenddu a respectable post with Lady Miltonwaters some years ago – I advised her not to anglicise her name – I did not think it would be appropriate to have a maid in Lady Miltonwaters’s house calling herself Adelaide Nettleblack – but with Rhys as her father I doubt she will remain content –
This – and that – and – and I’d not even had the wit to make the connection! What a comfort it had been, to think of some vaguely villainous governess aiming her bolts somewhere that wasn’t me – and to think of Adelaide Danadlenddu, if I thought of her at all, as a family ghost that no longer applied, a spectre flung off with the Nettleblack surname!
But I clearly wasn’t sufficiently devoid of the surname to stop Adelaide Danadlenddu from thwacking me round the head with her mere existence. She was my cousin. She had a post in Lady Miltonwaters’s house, courtesy of Edwina. And even if she now worked for the Director, she would have been Lady Miltonwaters’s first.
There was Cassandra’s link!
But what did Cassandra want to do with the link?
Sweet unplucked sloes, Adelaide Danadlenddu was still watching me.
“Oh – erm – of course,” I gasped. “Henry – erm – Hyssop – I – yes – I – I work with Cassandra – ”
I quite don’t know what stopped Nettleblack skidding across my tongue. Those frozen eyes, that steady face – the girl could have leeched truth from a stone. It would have been perfectly natural to crumple beneath the familiar green of her eel-eyed stare, and give her my name, our kinship, in a desperate bid to draw her into some cooperation with me. I had just lost Rosamond – and Adelaide surely shared my position as a walking inconvenience to Edwina’s arrangements – and being sent to work for Lady Miltonwaters was no guarantee of anything – and a thousand other such half-plausible reasons –
But, as much as it stung, I couldn’t be sure of her. Not until I knew what she meant to tell me, when she dashed up to stop my bicycle. Not with Septimus, and the Director, and the Division, and more than I entirely feared I understood, all hanging on every paltry word I gave her.
Adelaide dropped her hand from the bars, curled her fingers around her elbows, slender arms crossed over her dull gown. “Henry Hyssop. Of course. Well – Cassie has a message for you, and it can’t wait.”
I tugged at my face until it shaped a smile. My heartbeat shivered in my throat, scaldingly fast. “I – erm – what message?”
Her voice quickened, unmistakeably impatient. “A tip-off, about the Head-Hider. She says to go to Gulmere and knock on every house on Stavinge Lane – she doesn’t know which one – but the right one should know you’re coming. They should have some information. She wants you to go immediately, though. Apparently there isn’t much time.”
I blinked at her. There was only one test for it.
“Should I – erm – should I report to the Director first – or – or just go straight there?”
“Straight there,” she returned, with not a single twitch of hesitation. “Why else do you suppose she sent me out to watch for you? My young charge is with his father, and the case takes priority over all – such is the Ballestas world. But perhaps you’ve not been in the Division long enough to get used to it.”
Was it desperately foolish of me to feel it like a slap?
“I – yes – no – I mean – that – I’ll get right on it – if that’s Cassandra’s plan and she knows I’m – right – yes – quite – very good – very helpful – thank you – erm – Miss Danadlenddu – ”
Just for a moment, her eyes shifted, narrowing as they pinched at my face. I’d quite no intention of waiting out the reason. My feet scrabbled for the pedals, kicking them into my shins, nearly driving the bicycle over her toes as I dragged it around –
“Idiot,” she hissed, springing away from me. Her voice was so low, and the clattering of the bicycle so cacophonous, I suppose she imagined I couldn’t hear her. “At least that’s the last of them.”
One final frantic kick got the bicycle moving. I kept it going, shaking all the more for the jab of her contemptuous glare in my back, until I rounded the opposite corner of the market square, and the Ballestas apothecary started out between us, its stack of tincture-bottles blocking me from her sight. Then, brimful of the smarting and the shattered hope and the sheer simmering rage that I quite couldn’t permit myself to set into words, I shoved my feet down and sped up. Across the bruised cobbles of Angle Drag, towards where the town’s largest houses and their lavish windows swelled out of the gloom.
Figs, but I wasn’t in the least headed for Gulmere!
What you are, and what you do, the Director had said. Well. If I couldn’t get near the latter with my traitorous relation guarding the door, the former – and all I could wrangle out of it – would have to suffice.
I knocked. Sharp and vigorous as Septimus had done, enough to flake a little more of the paint. The lights on the upper floor were blazing away above my head; Mr. Adelstein was quite evidently in residence.