Chapter Nineteen Nina
I welcomed sleep, yet the first evening spent in The Mistress was restless.
The stairwell was irregularly filled with frantic footsteps, drunken murmurs, and once, howling laughter. The walls of the building seemed to hold the echoes of bedsprings and headboards, and I heard the knocking well into the night.
Theo and John had taken the floor above, while I remained in The Menagerie and Patrick in the room next door. The two were conjoined, I realized after the fact, by a door near the wardrobe. I wondered, in the absence of sleep, if Patrick had yet seen it there, if he had locked his side of the door.
I had eaten, washed, painstakingly combed the snarls of my hair until the curls did not resemble a nest, and now I lay atop the blankets in a pale-blue lace-trimmed slip. I didn’t dare ask Tamir where it had come from.
Fever had set in, and I felt alternatingly hot and cold to my marrow. I’d discarded the dirty bandages. My arms lay on the mattress, ghastly and swollen, and though I wanted nothing more than to sleep for an eternity, I rose instead and went like a ghost to the adjoining door.
Before I could reach it, a sharp knocking came from the other side of it. I faltered, squinting at the door, wondering if I’d succumbed to delirium.
But when I pulled it open, Patrick stood there, dressed in clean clothing, smelling of soap, his brow so furrowed he appeared decades older.
I frowned, confused. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Far longer than I’ll tell you,” he said. Immediately, he noticed the sheen of sweat on my skin. “What is it?” he asked, eyes widening.
I blinked slowly. “I’m… unwell. Infection, I think.” I held up my sliced arms. “I’ve cleaned them, but they were already starting to swell.”
Patrick’s jaw rolled at the sight of them. He nodded to the bed over his shoulder. “Sit,” he said.
I hesitated. “I—I don’t want to impose—”
“Lord, just sit down on the fuckin’ bed, Nina.”
I went in tentatively and sat on the edge, noticing how high the hem of the slip rose up my thigh. Wishing I’d thought to don a robe, I blinked again and the room doubled.
Patrick was pulling something from his wardrobe. My eyes roamed over the expanse of his back, watching the muscles flex beneath his shirt.
He returned with a vial, half-filled with black swill. “Take it,” he said.
He loomed above, doused in lamplight. I found myself disconcerted again. Not by fever this time, but simply by him.
Patrick sighed. He leaned down over me until I could see nothing else. “Drink it,” he said. “Or it’ll be done for you.”
A shiver assailed me. I downed the contents, feeling the immediate flux of my mind, stretching and reshaping. The bluff would spread through my blood within a few minutes, curbing the fever.
Patrick backed away and crouched, hands coming together between his knees. Watching me carefully.
“I’m not about to keel over,” I told him. I pulled at the hem of the slip.
“Leave it alone,” he said.
I looked down at my hand, confused. “Why?”
“ ’Cause it’s hard enough keepin’ my eyes where they ought to be.”
I flushed.
His eyes skipped to my arms now, both mottled in injury. He looked at the Artisan brand I had melted from my body, undeterred by the scar.
“What did you use,” he asked slowly, “to get rid of it?”
“An iron press,” I said, distracted. Relief was finding me.
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Broke into a washhouse here in Morland and held it on the plate for as long as I could. A Crafter woman found me passed out cold the next morning. She gave me a job.” It was easier to speak to him, there in the dim.
In the quiet. Time felt illusory in the earliest hours.
He hid his expression from me. “What happened to her? The Crafter?”
“Shot, I think,” I murmured. “She was harboring women fleeing Gilmore, and the police came.”
Patrick grimaced. By now, there were a hundred stories the same. A thousand. “But you escaped,” he said.
“I hid. We all hid, actually, in a cellar beneath the steam ovens. Everyone except her. She covered the door behind us, and we sat like cowards and listened to the police officers scream at her and beat her and carry her away.”
Patrick listened intently, lost as I was, in the strangeness of the night. “Tell me the rest of it,” he said, not a command, but a plea, and I did.
I told him about my time in Trent, bartering art for a train ticket, then the china shop in Hesson, where the foreman had his hired guards search our pockets after every shift.
I told him about Dorser, where I’d come the closest I ever had to starving, and was saved by two elderly gentlemen who took me into their kitchen and fed me poached quail.
Then I came to the day in Delfield, where I’d lived above a pub in a waterlogged flat for all of three days before the infantry marched in.
I told Patrick of how the landlord’s eyes had always lingered on my face, of how he’d sold the whereabouts of the earth Charmer to save his own family, and how I couldn’t possibly, even now, blame him for it.
I spoke of how I’d woken in the National House, Tanner hovering over me.
“He paraded my mother in,” I said, my voice thinning. “And I didn’t recognize her straightaway. That’s strange, don’t you think? For a daughter not to recognize her own mother.”
Patrick shook his head, entranced it seemed. “You hadn’t known her in many years.”
“It was more than that,” I muttered. “She was… changed. Not herself. She hummed a song she used to sing for me when I couldn’t sleep, or when my dad was shouting and she wanted to hide the noise from me, but she wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t speak. She’d already lost her mind, I think.”
There must have been tears on my face. I could feel them dripping off my jaw.
“Tanner told me… he told me that she’d left Scurry for me.
Somehow, she’d learned the secret, and she’d learned that servants of the House were rewarded for keeping it.
Their children made Artisans. That’s why she left me.
She was trying to barter a better life for me. ”
Patrick was sitting at his careful distance, one arm around his knee, the other hand weaving a coin through his fingers. The ropes of his tendons were rigid.
He didn’t move from this position. He only listened, an unnameable expression on his face.
“They told me to go to Kenton and find the Alchemist, and there was no other choice in it. I couldn’t let them kill her.” My voice wavered. I wondered if he could see all the guilt I was made of. “I was weak,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Patrick didn’t nod, or rise, or shout. Didn’t lift his eyes from mine. The coin ceased its turning. Several long moments of silence stretched. “You could’ve told me everything,” he said.
I sniffed and nodded.
“But you didn’t.”
To that, I said nothing.
“And I can only presume it was because of your friends, Theo and Polly, and what might happen to them, should they be implicated.”
I nodded once.
“Or perhaps you were worried for yourself,” Patrick said. It felt like an accusation. “Perhaps you thought I’d throw you into a canal if I knew the truth.”
I bit my tongue. I could still see the barrel of his gun pointed at me.
“Ah,” he said, reading my expression. “So it was fear, then. You were scared of me.”
I stiffened. “I was scared to lose you.”
“Yet I was devoted to keepin’ you,” he said now. “I vowed it, told you I was in love. You didn’t believe me.”
No, perhaps I hadn’t. “Some loves die when tested,” I said, voice fading.
He nodded. “That they do.”
We sat in silence for a while, the night passing by, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the room, couldn’t bear to stay.
“Did you give ’em my name, Nina?” he asked. “You can tell me the truth now. Reckon I’ve earned it.”
I was mere whisps of myself. I felt he could pass right through me. “Of course not,” I said. “I’d changed sides. I’d told you that I loved you.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “Not really.”
“I told no one about you,” I said, more forcefully now. “Not even Polly.”
He ran the tip of his finger over his lips, then nodded, as though to himself.
“I was going to tell you everything, Patrick,” I said, fresh tears falling. “I waited all night for you to come back. I waited…” I could say no more. I was suddenly bone-tired. When I closed my eyes, images pervaded.
I heard him sigh heavily from his place on the floor. Then he stood. He went to get a fresh bowl of water and a damp washcloth and came to where I sat. He knelt before me and took one of my forearms into his hands to clean it. The cold water stung.
“I believe you,” he said, his voice low and close. He moved from one arm to the other. “But I told you once that there should be trust between us.”
“And you don’t trust me,” I finished for him.
“You didn’t trust me,” he corrected. “I told you I’d protect you. Keep you safe—”
“Patrick—”
“—and it’s clear to me now that you could betray me in the worst ways, and I’d forget every code I have to defend you.” He finished his ministrations, wrung the washcloth dry. “A bigger weakness, I can’t forsee. So there are lines I can’t cross with you again, do you understand?”
My eyes cinched closed, if only so I didn’t have to see his perfect face when I asked, “Can you never forgive me?”
I felt him breathe once, twice. “You’re already forgiven, Scurry girl, but it don’t fix much.”
I opened my eyes, and his face was far too close to mine. And I wondered how he could suffer the remaining distance. How he could ignore the compulsion to close it.
“Patrick, do you ever regret going into that cellar?”
After a moment, he said, “Despite it all, I still can’t say I do.”