Chapter Fifteen
Arden left the regatta only a minute after the race’s surprising finish, staying just long enough to feel the shift in the air.
It had been remarkable to see the Lack boat nose ahead of its Luster competitors, but Arden sensed the unease that worked its way through the Luster crowd.
He’d felt it a few times before back in Strall, like when the first Lack family moved into a mansion on Glynn Street—a home once owned by the Weatherbys before their finances became dire enough that they were forced to sell.
He felt it when the Alcourts’ bank, a Luster financial institution for centuries, was bought out by a Lack-controlled bank.
Several families closed their accounts, preferring to keep their fortunes under their own roofs rather than in a bank vault alongside Lack money.
The world was changing, and perhaps the prospect of that change would have unnerved Arden more if he hadn’t already been so humbled by financial ruin, but as it was, he found himself more intrigued than anything else.
For all his magic could do, Thaddeus Mayles could only speed along a single boat for a short time, but the engine the Lack boat used could be replicated and improved upon.
How long would it be before passenger and cargo ships could sail across the ocean just as fast?
A person—any person—would be able to travel the world in a fraction of the time.
Wouldn’t that be a kind of magic in and of itself?
He thought about the story Mavis had shared with him, of her childhood in the Low City.
Though it was a scant couple of miles from where he’d grown up, they had been worlds apart.
Oh, Arden couldn’t quite see how a fast boat might bridge those worlds, but he knew it was a piece of that bridge all the same.
As Arden approached the steps that led up to his aunt’s house, he realized that something was wrong.
A man and woman were standing by the doorway as he reached it, both of whom he vaguely recognized from Mavis’s engagement ball, though he’d been introduced to so many people that night that he couldn’t recall their names.
“Good morning.” He bowed his head at each of them in turn.
The woman was middle aged with a pinched expression and nut-brown hair threaded with silver while the man beside her was near Arden’s own age, his bowler hat pulled low over his brow.
It was the man who spoke first, extending his hand to Arden.
“Theodore Ruteledge. This is my mother.” He gestured to the woman beside him.
“Belinda Ruteledge,” she added, inclining her head, though her expression remained tense.
The Ruteledges lived next door. His aunt had mentioned them his first night here—distant cousins of the Kitzenger family in Strall, with a gift for healing. Aunt Phi said that they helped her through her heart troubles. His stomach dropped.
“Is my aunt all right?” he managed to ask.
“My younger son is with her now,” Belinda Ruteledge told him. “She had another spell, but when we left her in Bertram’s care, she had recovered and seemed, more or less, her usual self.”
Relief coursed through him, but his worry didn’t abate entirely. “When I saw her at breakfast, she seemed the picture of health.” As soon as he said it, though, his aunt’s words came back to him: I’ll be ninety-four before the year is out—if I’m the picture of anything, it’s old.
Some of the tension leached from Belinda Ruteledge’s face as she glanced at her son, and Arden recognized the pity that passed between them—pity directed at him. He understood now why it drove his aunt so mad, to be pitied.
“Mr. Ryskamp,” she said, her voice softening. “I’m not sure how much your aunt has told you of her condition, but I suspect she’s hidden the true effect it’s been having on her. Philomena has always been a stubborn soul for as long as I’ve known her.”
“She won’t abide pity.” The words came out hoarse, and Belinda Ruteledge smiled slightly.
“And I wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on her, but the point remains that she is very ill, and as these episodes become more frequent, they are also becoming more intense. Each one weakens her heart more.”
“If not for my brother and the strength of his power, this one might have killed her,” Theodore Ruteledge added, the words blunt, but Arden found he was grateful for them.
His aunt had never made a secret of the fact that she was dying.
She’d made light of it, yes, telling jokes and even dangling her inheritance before him like a carrot with a wink and a nod.
But it was only now the reality of it hit him, just how close she was to the end of her life, just how little time she had left.
He barely knew the woman, but that, too, seemed a tragedy.
He had no family left, and neither did she—only him, a stranger who deigned to visit because he was desperate for her money.
He remembered what Mavis had said that night at Montenari’s: You have some nerve, shaming me when you’re here to con an old woman out of her fortune.
Arden denied it at the time, but Mavis was right.
“I’m glad he was able to save her,” Arden told the Ruteledges, but the words felt hollow.
Theodore shook his head, his mouth tightening. “My brother is more skilled with healing the heart than anyone in five generations at least, but even he can’t defeat death, Mr. Ryskamp, merely postpone it. And death has a habit of becoming . . . impatient the more he is put off.”
Arden swallowed. Theodore Ruteledge’s warning was clear despite the soft edges he tried to give it. “How impatient?”
Belinda Ruteledge answered before her son could. “A fortnight.”
A fortnight. Arden expected her to live to see summer’s end. Part of him expected she would outlive them all, no matter what she claimed. A fortnight was the blink of an eye, a stuttered breath.
“What can I do to make her comfortable?” he asked when he found his voice.
Theodore Ruteledge shifted uncomfortably. “The sherry seems to help her. I’m not keen on recommending libations to patients but, well . . . it won’t make things worse at this point.”
“I’ll keep her glass full, then,” Arden promised. “Can I see her?”
Belinda Ruteledge nodded. “She was demanding your presence when we left. I’d bring the bottle of sherry with you to quell her temper if I were you.”
Aunt Philomena almost disappeared in her large oak-framed bed, her pale skin blending in with the white linen comforter that was drawn up to her waist. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows and awake, her twilight-blue eyes as sharp as they ever were, snapping to Arden as he walked through the door.
She was alive. Despite the reassurances of the Ruteledges downstairs, it wasn’t until Arden saw her with his own eyes that he felt the iron grip on his heart ease. His relief, however, was met with a scowl from his aunt.
“Yes, yes, not to worry, Arden—I haven’t died yet.” Despite the acid in her tone, her voice came out thin and fragile. “Though I would suggest you hurry things along if you want my money.”
Arden knew his aunt meant the words as a joke, an attempt to shift attention from her own mortality into something she was far more comfortable with, but it made the shame that had nestled into Arden’s heart burn hotter all the same.
A thin young man with overgrown dark-brown hair coughed awkwardly, drawing Arden’s attention to where he stood at the foot of his aunt’s bed.
He looked to be barely out of the schoolroom, with the wide eyes of a startled animal, though Arden wondered if that was due to how difficult he’d found it to help his aunt during her episode or if it was, in fact, Aunt Philomena herself who had terrorized the boy while he’d been treating to her. He suspected it was the latter.
“Bertram Ruteledge, I presume?” Arden said, ignoring his aunt’s jab and holding a hand out to the boy, who shook it with a weak grip and a ghost of a tremor.
“Your mother and brother informed me about my aunt’s bout of ill health.
I’m grateful you were able to arrive so quickly and assist her—they told me you saved her life, and both she and I owe you our gratitude. ”
Bertram muttered something under his breath that sounded like of course, but his aunt drowned his words out with a scoff.
“Shouldn’t you be off tinkering with toy trains, Bertram?” She didn’t look at either of them, focusing instead on the quilt as she picked at the stitches with intent focus.
Bertram’s round face turned pink, and he inclined his head.
“I’ll leave you in the care of your nephew, Mrs. Gellis, but I must insist you stay in bed for the remainder of the day at least. And I’ll leave instructions with your cook for a tea you should drink with every meal that will soothe your nerves.
As I said, stress should be avoided at all costs. ”
“I’ll drink it with breakfast,” his aunt told him. “I only drink sherry with lunch and dinner, and doing otherwise would cause me great stress indeed.”
Bertram’s eyes widened.
“Mrs. Gellis, I must insist—”
“Give the recipe to the chef, Mr. Ruteledge,” Arden interrupted. “I’ll see that she drinks it just as you instruct.”
Too petrified to respond, Bertram managed to give a brief nod before scurrying from the room.
“A child,” Aunt Philomena said when he was gone—though not, Arden suspected, before he was out of earshot. “I will not take orders about my health from a child who just last year was building sandcastles in front of my house in his short pants—nor from you, Arden.”
Arden felt relatively certain that hadn’t been only the year before, but he took his aunt’s point for what it was. Bertram Ruteledge was young, and he couldn’t imagine how his aunt felt, putting her life in the hands of a young man whom she’d watched grow up.