Chapter Forty-Five Nina
Through the thin walls, I thought I could hear the other rooms thrumming, sleep evading us all.
I imagined Theo wrestling with himself on the settee, Patrick on the other side of the wall I was curled against, knuckles still pulsing. His father languishing on the mattress, strangely subdued since his foray into town.
I glanced over at Polly beside me on her own bed. Her eyes stuck on the ceiling, her lips moving in spell work, or prayer perhaps.
I simply dwelled. I knew I was right to cut the tie between Theo and me. He imagined a time and place where war wouldn’t touch me. Where I could make choices that wouldn’t impact all of Belavere. What he failed to understand was that I was a runaway train. The collision was imminent.
“He loves you, you know,” Polly whispered to me.
She was holding what looked to be letters to her chest. Her fingers moved over them.
“Spoke about you nearly every hour we waited together in Kenton Hill.” She went quiet for a time, and I prayed she would say no more.
“I just thought it should be said, in case he hasn’t yet found the courage to say it out loud. ”
She turned over then, and I was spared further barbs. I didn’t sleep a wink, and when dawn came, I felt as though the sun taunted me, rising unhurriedly.
The rooms beyond the walls roused.
We met in the living room once properly dressed. Theo’s brow was lined in deep thought, and his gaze met mine immediately. I shirked it. John leaned against a china cabinet. Polly clasped a cloak around her throat, and Patrick took the coin from his pocket and gripped it tightly.
“Every half hour, Theo will exit the library to the front steps. He will send the signal that all is well. If he comes out early, then something is wrong. If he’s late…
” Here Patrick glared at Theo. “Then we can assume they’ve been apprehended in some way.
” He looked to the book in Polly’s hand.
“If that happens, Polly is to try and leave the Testament behind somewhere, along with her translations, for us to find later. But above all, Theo, if someone comes for Polly or you, then you ought to fight your way out.” He handed Theo a gun.
There was a second as it traded hands, when Theo pulled and Patrick refused to let go.
But then it vanished into Theo’s coat pocket, and neither traded another word.
“Will there be anyone at that library who recognizes you?” Patrick asked Polly.
She shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a big city, a big library. Easy enough to stay hidden in the stacks.”
“Then you’ll be quick,” Patrick implored her. “Done by nightfall at the latest, or we’re comin’ in.” It sounded more like a threat than a promise.
We departed Trunk Antiques gradually, and I gave the old woman a tight hug before I left in case we never returned. The piano played a somber farewell.
Patrick accompanied me into the lane a fair distance behind John and a bigger distance behind Theo and Polly. We each bled into the tide of Lavnonshire patrons, trying to look normal.
Shop doors opened and shut, the first wagons and horses pushed up the street, and streetlamps were snuffed out by hand. Gulls swooped in lazy circles overhead, and in all the activity, the ocean’s roar was never quite drowned out.
I was dressed like an Artisan, and Patrick like a Crafter, and so we walked with a careful space between us. Anything closer might have drawn suspicion, even in Lavnonshire.
The Artisan quarters had already started to envelope the Craftsman precinct when Patrick finally spoke. “If you wanted to run away with him, I wouldn’t stop you,” he said. A horseless coach intersected us then, but even when it had passed, my face remained dumbstruck.
“What did you just say?”
“I said, if you feel safer runnin’ off with Teddy,” he spoke with a tick of his jaw, “then you should go.”
I looked across the lane at Patrick like I’d never heard of anything more ridiculous and almost collided headlong with a wagon.
I shook my head and stomped around it, walking too quickly now. “If that’s not the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me—”
He drew a cigarette and wet the end on his lips. “Well, never claimed I was smart, did I?”
I made a scathing noise. “Maybe Theo and I will laugh about it one day with our many children.”
His eyes flashed momentarily. “If that’s what you want, then you should have it.”
I scoffed. “Shut up, Patrick.”
“He kissed you,” he said now, flicking ash to the pavement.
I quickened my pace. It annoyed me that he didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up. “And?”
He sighed. “And I flew off the handle. It wasn’t my place. I’m tryin’ to apologize for it.” He looked up at the sky, at the roiling clouds. “Damn it if you don’t make it fuckin’ difficult.”
“Me?” I growled, frustrated now. “No, Patrick. You. You make it difficult. My life grew exponentially more difficult the moment you arrived in it.”
He pointed at me with his cigarette. “Now, ain’t that the bloody truth of it?”
I laughed again, tempted to cross the space and shove him hard enough to make him stumble. “And I suppose I’ve made your life so completely unbearable?”
“Unequivocally,” he said darkly.
“Then we’re a pair. A more intolerable man I’ll never meet.” I spoke like I was spitting rocks. “Every night, every waking minute of the day, I think of you. And yet you think you know what I want? I’m so damn tired of men pretending they know what’s best for me.”
We walked silently after that, Patrick seething with something he did not voice, and me stomping down the Artisan quarters toward the library with fire on my heels.
The library was made of stone and ranked in high columns, a verse from the Book of Belavere etched into its cornices, pigeons spilling shit into the lettering.
It sat along one side of a town square with a clock tower in its middle.
There were Crafters selling newspapers, tea, charm trinkets that gave the beholder good luck, as though an Artisan ever grew short of it.
Theo and Polly were already ascending the stone steps to the library entrance in the distance. One last flash of Theo’s dark hair, and they disappeared inside. A volley of other Artisans swallowed the space they left behind.
Patrick looked to the clock tower at the square’s middle, its face cloudy with salt. “Top of the hour,” he said. “Thirty minutes starts now.”