Me again, in all manner of conceivable senses
What was the next step? Mr. Adelstein and Nick – it’s quite unbelievable to think that I’d ever imagined them infatuated with anyone but each other – off to deal with the bulk of the practicalities. To find Septimus, to round up Gertie and her contingent, to prepare themselves for – I don’t know – but Septimus would! Which left me some taut, frantic, not-quite-settled amount of time to follow the Director’s orders, and – but I didn’t dare think of the aftermath, not yet.
The orders! Think of the orders! And – pears, but now the orders made sense! The Director – she’d as good as told me she had deduced my identity. And then, as she had said to Septimus: she needed what I was, and what I do – namely, the clout of my family’s influence, and my inkstained ability to document things at feral speed. Quite what she proposed to do with either was beyond me, but I’d every intention of giving her the raw materials in veritable spadefuls.
Bear with me, then, and follow me. Round the corner of Pole Place, dragging the bicycle, past Mr. Adelstein and Nick on their front doorstep. Along the gloomy, gaslit, cobblestoned street until it curved and broadened into another street, where my footsteps rung out all the louder for the town-edging silence, catching in weird echoes on plaster pillars and bay windows and writhing brass door-knockers. Up to the green paint, gleaming a strange golden-black in the street-lights, and the nettle-thicket of a crest above the door.
There was a dim light glinting behind the drawing-room curtains. Mercifully, they were closed again. That light was a bridge to be dealt with after everything else was made ready – I was entirely not of a mood to fight past Edwina before the work had even begun.
I propped the bicycle against the front steps, and the shadowy recollection of Septimus whistled past my shoulders with an alternative route inside. I followed the memory, up and over the back wall in a scramble of sodden ivy. It hardly mattered that the effort tore open Lorrie’s stitches in my jacket, that the weedy grass was marshy with mud and water where Rosamond had given up tending it, that in the end I had to unlace my boots and leave them lodged in the mire. Not when the sash window beside the back door had only been pulled to – not when all the trembling strength in me was just enough to force it up and topple through. For a moment, I imagined I looked exactly as the Sweetings would have had me: bedraggled and felled and profoundly exhausted, crumpled in a heap of mud and stockings.
Figs, but then I got up.
I crept the stairs two at a time, oozing the garden like a revenant. Around the faint light and soft voices of the drawing-room – not now, not yet, not until I had everything I needed! – and across the upstairs hall, every footstep matting the carpet, feeling my way along the mossy flocking on the wallpaper. The gloom gnawed at the house and left everything hollow: the chandeliers doused and bristling as bird’s-nests, the portraits sharp frames with empty shadows inside, the door – my door – so murky I couldn’t even squint to make out the handle.
Inside, the curtains were shut, and the darkness was a very blindfold. There was nothing to do but stumble into it, grasping for edges to tug me in deeper. I found a snarl of carved wood for my bed, the jutting metal corner of a chest – there was the clink of handle against drawer, as I slumped into my desk – and then I reached the windows, grabbed for the velvet and wrenched the thin moonlight into the room. With that, it was a sprint to the cupboards – hurling the warmest fabrics onto my bed – matching colours as best I could in the silvery half-light. Kicking out of my slimy stockings, my culottes, my rough collarless shirt and my collapsing jacket.
Part one: a chemise.
I dressed for two rather incongruous purposes – stealth and extravagance. The shirt was oysterish grey, the skirt gloomy forest-green. It was perturbing to return to a skirt proper – so much that I was obliged to reassure myself in a whisper that the switch would not be permanent, that I would find my way back to a pair of culottes, that – that it wasn’t the end, even if everything in my known world presently suggested otherwise! I’d no inclination to a corset when I couldn’t ring for help, but I decked myself to distraction in every other respect: pearl cufflinks, silk stockings, glossy leather boots, a velvet collar to my coat. My hair I combed to some vague approximation of obedience. I stabbed a pin through Property’s cravat, fastened it taut to my shirt – whatever they’d done earlier, they were going to help me now!
I snatched up a new pencil, a sheaf of paper. Correspondence paper, with the crest tooled into the page – a hangover from Father’s Nettleblack’s Tincture days, when our so-called crest was merely the company logo. It would have to do.
For quite the second time in the last few feverish weeks, I scuttled out into the dark stairwell. No ferret (peaches, Property, good luck with him!) slinked up to intercept me. I stopped for Edwina’s study one door down, dived into a musk of leather and book-dust, on a hunt for the last bit of relevant sartorial elegance: the Nettleblack signet ring. Any Nettleblack signet ring would have served the purpose, whether it was hers slipped off, or Father’s preserved, or even – though this seemed unlikely – a copy obtained for future presentation to Rosamond or I. But nothing of the sort was forthcoming in the busy shelves and desk-drawers, and there wasn’t time to summon a light for a more thorough search. Back down the stairs it was, then, unsteady in longer skirts, determined to at least attempt a genteel exit through an actual door –
“But you said she left!”
That was – Lorrie. Strident-voiced, tenor-pitched and unmistakeable, his words slipping out under the drawing-room door.
Septimus’s brother, in my sister’s house. Bergamots, yes – I’m quite aware that there were greater relations between them to be astonished by – but the sheer physical presence of this one still struck.
“If Lady Miltonwaters couldn’t be bothered to wait for us – if she left the theatre before I’d even come off the stage – that’s got to be something, eh?”
A shuddering sigh. There was no one else it could have been – though the slumping fear was so far from anything I’d heard in Edwina’s voice, it hardly seemed her at all.
“It was the manner in which she left,” my sister groaned. “The girl calling her away. Elvira did not have five minutes to spare for me, because of some incentive provided by Adelaide Danadlenddu. That maid’s father tried to take my fortune from me before I even had any control over it – and I do not doubt his daughter intends to continue the tradition! And if Elvira is confiding in Adelaide – if she tells the girl that you are an ungrateful rogue and I the treacherous upstart who stole you from her – then Adelaide will know everything – and she – she might – ”
She broke off, gasped a breath. “Elvira already wants to ruin us both. To strip me of my reputation and you of your employment. And Adelaide will be all too eager to assist her. It was my arrangement that brought the two of them together – whatever she does will be my fault – ”
She stopped. Heart swollen in my gullet, I waited. A matter of seconds, and then the silence would snap, as it always did, shattered at the feet of Edwina’s composure. I’d heard it only days ago, when she chided Rosamond. She would break apart the quiet and rebuild herself above it, and when I was sure her panic had calmed I could slip away without –
But the silence held.
And Rosamond wasn’t coming back – and I couldn’t just –
“She won’t.”
I saw the movement in a daze, my soul swung out of my limbs and hovering level with the drawing-room chandelier. That velvet-lapelled creature beneath me – which could, against every scrap of logic, have only been myself – shoved the door open and hurled the words at Edwina with all the twitching swagger of another being. My sister was stood at the murky mantelpiece, with Lorrie hunched over his knees on Rosamond’s chaise, and it was entirely impossible to discern which of them looked the more profoundly bewildered.
“Because,” I added hastily, before either could stiffen into an incredulous exclamation, “If everything proceeds according to plan tonight – she – ah – well – both of them – are about to get quite trapped in their own criminal activity. Quite.”
“Henry?” Lorrie gasped. “But – I thought you were – ”
Edwina’s head jerked from me to him and back again, one hand brushing at the edges of her eyes. I knew the movement – I had traced it myself, but – figs – Edwina didn’t cry!
“Where have you been? What happened to you? Are you hurt? What – ?”
Not now. Not with the Director waiting.
“With all due respect – erm – I quite can’t stay. I don’t have long at all – I – I don’t know how much longer the Director can stall them – ”
“Who’s getting stalled?” Lorrie burst out. “Lady Miltonwaters? And this Adelaide girl? They’re at the Div?”
Edwina cleared her throat with vigour enough to set the curtains trembling. “Wait! Henrietta, I insist that you explain yourself. I cannot have you leave and tell me nothing – I do not think I can bear it again – ”
“I’m sorry!” – and I haven’t the faintest what wild desperation managed to thicken the reed of my voice, but it shocked her silent. “I – I promise I’ll explain – I just – I can’t at this exact second! You – erm – you would like Lady Miltonwaters and Adelaide Danadlenddu to be stopped, yes? Their suddenly being caught in the midst of some dastardly plot against the Division – that – erm – that would be convenient for you and Lorrie – quite?”
Edwina’s jaw dropped. “I – but – how do you know – ?”
Lorrie, I noted, was valiantly endeavouring to become one with the chaise.
“I – I simply wished to – ensure that you were – well – to reassure you – that your fears may be cut off before they’ve begun – but that entirely relies upon you trusting me now – because I’m quite going to do my job, with or without your permission!”
It clambered up my throat and burst out in a shriek before I could catch my voice, my nails sunk in my palms, every edge of me shaking fit to crack the floorboards. After that, I could hardly hold her gaze for my sheepish coda –
“So if I could possibly – erm – borrow your signet ring – yes – that would be – erm – very helpful – quite – ”
She folded her arms, drew herself up where the shock had slackened her, arched one pale yellow eyebrow. “You wish to represent the family? Why?”
I swallowed. “It – it might do someone else some good – at least, someone far cleverer than me seems to think so – and – if that’s her plan, I quite don’t intend to scupper it. But – I really do have to go now – so if you don’t want to give it to me, please do say – ”
It was consummately insane of me to expect that she would offer it. In the wake of the bravado that had tipped me through the door, I was wilting with every new second into a horrified realisation of quite what I’d done: the time that was being wasted with every question, the anger to which I must have been stirring my all-powerful sister, the awkward questions that would cluster about Lorrie. But I was closest to the door, and the bicycle was just outside. If I had to sprint, they wouldn’t catch me. The faint echo of Rosamond plucked at my sleeve, furrowing the rich fabric, urging me away. Edwina clearly won’t accept help from either of us – you’ve got things you don’t want to lose – don’t let her leech them out of you –
Then I blinked. Edwina’s face was set, a tight inscrutable scowl down at her hands – but she was slipping the signet from her fourth finger, jutting it out to me.
“I will need it back,” she added curtly. “But it seems you need it now.”
I stared at her. Lorrie did the same, though the little I could catch of his expression wasn’t startled in the slightest. He was grinning, nudging her on as she stalked across the rug and shoved the ring into my hand.
“I – erm – thank you – this will – yes – right – very helpful – good night – ”
“You must promise me that this discussion is not over, Henrietta.”
Edwina called it after I’d backed away, when I was halfway through the door with the signet shunted precariously up my index finger. “Lady Miltonwaters may have proved herself a disaster narrowly avoided, but you might still have a chance elsewhere if we act quickly. There may be others – ”
I set my teeth. As Septimus might well say: right.
“Thank you – erm – for your concern – Edwina – but I – I – I quite don’t want others. I – I can only apologise if I’ve not – erm – made that clear. But – I – well – what I do want is for you to respect my decision – and stop trying to arrange pheasant-based betrothals for me. I’ve entirely no intention of being a married woman – in fact, neither of those words fit me in the least. And – erm – I really should have said before – but – whilst it’s all springing forth – my name is Henry. Just that. Now – if you’ll excuse me – I have a part to play.”
I didn’t dare glance back. The front door was before me, and my task with it.
My second plan for breaching the Division was, at least, wildly better than my first. Devoid of Septimus’s map and battling my skirts, I cycled a demented loop, improvised from the scraps and recollections of my every trudge round the town: a weird parallel route along Dallyangle’s outskirts, where the fields lay flat and silent in the moonlight and a seam of housefronts masked me from the market square. I sliced a triangle of cobblestones between the Division and Checkley’s – the tavern was threadbare to its last waifs and strays, none of whom looked up from their shivering chats as I wheeled the bicycle past. I had to abandon it at the dormitory’s back door, still cricked open at its furtive angle.
I swallowed a gasp. Knelt, shadowed between the door and the gloom beyond, to ease my boots off. Uncurled myself into the first trembling step.
The floorboards inside were quite as cold as I had anticipated, a cold so sharp it seeped through my stockings like water. I had my boots pinched in one hand, my paper and pencil in the other, both arms splayed to force my balance steady as I skirted the boards’ creaks. The bolts over the windows hadn’t been pinned up, and sickly streaks of yellow street-light cut up the floor. Around me – beside me – behind me, as I crept further in – the dormitory beds were as disordered as they were deserted, sheets heaved back in crumpled huddles, blankets slumped over mattresses to trail on the floor. Gertie, Millicent and Oliver hadn’t been back, hadn’t had time to make them up.
Yet. But finding them was Mr. Adelstein’s responsibility.
“You truly imagine any more ledgers would alter my mind?”
I stifled a shriek with my fist, nearly stunned myself on the boots in my hand. Even with a door between us, that voice was horrendously impossible to mistake. Lady Miltonwaters, unfurling a sneer as heavy and stretched as a hallway rug.
“Do you really not understand what I am telling you – have been telling you for – goodness, over an hour? Are your stunted faculties so incapable – ”
Adelaide Danadlenddu’s voice knifed under the door, and the temperature shrivelled with it. “They understand you perfectly, Milady. This – this busybodying with the ledgers is simply a design to infuriate you.”
“Tush, child, they wouldn’t have the wit,” Miltonwaters scoffed – before her voice rose to a swell, atop a sudden clatter of footsteps. “You! Girl! What are you and your witless daughter trying to show us now?”
A tremendous thump set Gertie’s jug rattling in its ablutions bowl. I could have slumped for sheer relief to hear the Director – hoarse, a little breathless, her voice draped in the ragged remnants of her old serenity, but alive. “As you requested, Lady Miltonwaters – ”
Adelaide hissed. “She didn’t request – ”
“ – here, the Divisionary records for July of this year!”
Cassandra’s voice slipped in beside her mother’s, all the sarcasm scraped out, her words light and skittering over a nervous tremor. “And why shouldn’t Lady Miltonwaters request, Adelaide? Milady’s quite right – as a member of the town council and the niece of our nearest whole entire marquess, she’s of course entitled to examine our proceedings and receipts in the most scrupulous detail – ”
“She doesn’t care about your ridiculous receipts, Cassie,” Adelaide snapped. “Whatever you’re playing at, it isn’t going to change her mind.”
Lady Miltonwaters cleared her throat. “I think you are forgetting your place, Danadlenddu. Of course I still want the Division disbanded – I told them so, didn’t I? – but it shan’t hurt to gather even more evidence of their flagrant incompetence, and if these ignorant girls wish to offer it up to me – ”
Anger knifed through Adelaide’s retort, the most I’d heard my terrifying relation express. “With all due respect, Milady, you have been trawling through the Division’s receipts for the best part of an hour, a procedure which is entirely unnecessary when you intend to extract a resignation from its leader. What do you imagine you are going to find – new information to shake your resolve?”
“And what do you imagine you are about, speaking to me in such a tone?” Miltonwaters tossed back, her voice curdling. “You have done well, my little sham-governess, but you are still my servant, and I will not tolerate any further insolence. I have already been obliged to overlook your despicable ancestry this week – ”
“I am the heir to the Nettleblack fortune, Milady!”
“Precisely,” Miltonwaters snarled. “And the Nettleblacks are whores and witches unfit to manage any fortune whatsoever.”
Enough of this. The Director – how to get a signal to her? – to let her know that I’d deciphered it, that I was here, that it was time for her to pluck a confession out of the culprits for me to transcribe –
But anything I did – stuck in the shadows, behind a door, without even a window to gesture through – all of them, they’d spot it in an instant!
Silence again. This time, Adelaide wasn’t retorting.
“Very well,” Miltonwaters declared. “I will examine your ledger, but it shall be the last one I look at this evening. I trust, Mrs. Ballestas, that I have given you plenty to think on.”
Cassandra’s voice was a frantic blurt. “You’re not leaving just yet? We’re only at July, Milady – if you wanted to wait – ”
Sweet nectarines, but her panic was infectious, a visceral thing, seizing me by the hair and shoving me forwards. I quite didn’t think. I just unclenched my fist and launched my boots to the floor.
The shoes ricocheted into the yellow-streaked gloom, past my elbows, clattering to rest under Millicent’s bed. I flung myself flat to the side of the door, hands and paper and pencil all pressed to my mouth. Out in reception, the stalling prattle and snappish remarks had fallen silent, giving way to stomping footsteps. The door was creaking open, spilling gaslight over the beds, a shadowy silhouette splattered in cameo against the floorboards. If I had calculated wrong – if Adelaide’s unblinking stare peered round the door’s edge – she’d snatch me at my velvet lapel and drag me into the light, and all that effort with the ledgers would shatter like –
Cassandra blinked at me.
She was hollow-eyed and feverish-looking, her scarf pulled tight to her neck. Exhaustion simmered on every edge of her: in the straggly curls that slumped over her eyebrows, the sag in her hunched shoulders, the tremble of her fingers on the doorframe. Her gaze narrowed to a frown, pinched over everything in my hands – figs, the pencil and paper. Quick as a gasp, she rolled her eyes.
Then she turned away, casting about the shadowy room. Stalked for Millicent’s bed, scooped up my boots from underneath and ferried them to the doorway. Her voice was sharp, dour, not a scrap of that frightened syrup left in it. Greengages, but it was easy to conjecture who she was looking at.
“These fell off a bed,” she announced. “The bed itself’s in a state. Looks like Henry Hyssop’s.”
If there were immediate responses, I couldn’t catch them – she slammed the door so violently that my heart rattled in my ribs. I was shaking fit to dislodge veins, but even I had sense enough left in me to recognise her plan. Like it or not – and I’m not sure she did like it – she’d just proffered me my cue.
I sunk down, gently as I could manage, until I was on my knees at the door’s edge. My fingers crawled over the plastered wall – mercifully, it wasn’t damp – before I pressed my first page of paper flat to it, the pencil crooked across my palm.
“Perhaps Lady Miltonwaters is right, Cassandra,” the Director declared suddenly. My pencil sprinted after her, the faintest rustle of an echo. “She is not under obligation to read any more ledgers than she wishes to. But – before you go, Milady – would you remind me precisely what it was you wanted of me?”
At which juncture, it seems only fitting to give way to the moment, as it were, and offer you up what I actually transcribed.