Chapter 29 #2
Instead of taking off towards one of these shelters, I nipped to one side and threw myself down at the foot of the hedge itself, only a few paces from where I had burst in.
Shadows welcomed me. My threads prickled. I had little fear for Pretoria—she had escaped worse, even with another Starlight present. Perry, in all practicality, I had not had enough time to attach to, not to a self-sacrificing degree.
Lewis burst through the hedge, followed by another soldier. They divided, the stranger heading off in one direction while Lewis, pistol lowered, moved cautiously in the other. The two of them exchanged several glances and gestures, then the stranger slipped from sight, and Lewis progressed past me.
I shifted to one knee and levelled the rifle again.
Lewis turned. I stood. Muzzle to muzzle, we faced one another across a row of red-leafed, hip-high bushes.
“Did you betray me?” I hissed.
In the same breath he said, “Run with me.”
We stared at one another for an interminable moment, then he holstered his pistol and, instead, offered me an open hand. There was tension in every line of him, awareness that we stood in open view if his companion was to return, but he stood straight and tall and stalwart, fingers extended.
“How can I trust you?” My voice cracked, the question directed to both him and myself.
“The Guild intercepted a telegraph from Mr. Stoke to myself,” he said rapidly, pleading in his eyes. “I was shipped immediately back to Harrow, where the Guild was waiting for me.”
“Madge?”
“And her new husband. He read our letters, Ottilie. He knows everything.”
I stared, eyes so round they ached. “What?”
“Run with me. Ottilie, please.”
“Run where?” The question was vast, edgeless, and devouring. “If Moran knows—”
His response was immediate, impassioned, and accompanied by pleading eyes. “Anywhere but here.”
Reason swiftly deserted me. I was over whelmed by the want that the sight of him elicited in me. Want to trust. Want to be seen. Want to be held, to belong, and to run, run, run.
A shout rose beyond the gardens. “Illing!”
Lewis’s gaze shot from the sound to my rifle, then he leapt the bushes. All at once I was sprinting beside him, out of the hedges and into the university’s main sprawl.
Tall, lofty buildings and ancient halls spread around us. We passed a dry fountain, its tall, humanoid statue shrouded for the coming winter. Our footsteps echoed, but there was no help for that.
We reached the university’s outer wall, some ten feet tall, half stone, half decorative wrought iron.
“Help me over,” I panted, slinging the rifle across my back.
“Still terrible at climbing?” he quipped. It was the first emotion he had shown other than pleading and intensity, and my blood skittered through my veins at his flash of a smile.
The reader may wonder, at this juncture, why I had decided to trust him.
Allow me to reaffirm the earlier departure of my reason and the fact that, despite my attempts to distract myself with Harden, I had been in love with Lewis Illing for years.
That bond, his simple familiarity, and the desperateness of the situation combined to leave me with no true choice.
Trust, then, is perhaps an inadequate word. I still had questions, questions that required answers. But the bonds between us had reasserted themselves, and I was helpless in their grasp.
Lewis clambered onto the top of the wall and reached back down, his boot providing a foothold and his hands grasping my upper arms. When I straddled the top of the fence he dropped down the other side, landing firmly on the stone ledge, and took me by the waist.
This ostensibly romantic gesture was ruined by the fact that I lost my balance. I dropped straight into him, knocking the pair of us off the wall and onto the hard cobblestones on the other side. The rifle clattered and swung, discharging with a deafening crack.
I was cushioned by Lewis’s chest. Lewis was not so fortunate.
He made a breathless wheeze and lay there for a stunned breath. I scrambled to my feet and put an arm under his shoulders, helping him upright.
“Sorry!” I hissed.
“Fine—I’m fine,” he wheezed, still doubled over.
“Ho, there!” a voice shouted up the street.
We turned. Despite his breathlessness Lewis stepped partially in front of me, drawing his pistol again. I swung my rifle back up. The chamber was empty, but even after the audible shot, the newcomers wouldn’t necessarily know which weapon had fired.
“Guild rat,” the voice said, speaking as if to a third party.
Several more figures peeled from the night.
Then even more. Eight men, four women, armed with clubs and bearing a look that chilled me to the bone.
Their expressions were something between hunters and drunkards, giddy and arrogant in their joint purpose.
Several had coils of rope over their shoulders.
Zealots.
The speaker leaned out, peering around Lewis towards me. “Aw, and his chit. Better run, love, I’ve got my eye on you.”
The tension in Lewis’s posture changed to something else then. Something more dangerous, more at ease. Something… resigned.
He shot the man in the knee. Before the Zealot could so much as stagger, Lewis fired again and again, each at a different target, each on the heels of one another.
The Zealots did not charge. Instead they scattered with shouts and curses, dragging wounded comrades to safety.
I grabbed Lewis’s arm and pulled. For a second he resisted, a pillar of stone, then together we ran.
Shots chased us—the Zealots had more than clubs. One pinged off the stone just behind us before new voices entered the streets, the shouts and whistles of police.
Whether they would have proved friend or foe became irrelevant as we sprinted off, round the university wall and down an alleyway.
I did not have Harden’s intimate knowledge of the back ways of Harrow, but I knew enough to lead us away from the university and towards the west river. Towards the museum.
My lungs burned and my mind raced. Pretoria and Perry would either head there, as previously intended, or back to the hotel.
I did not consider any alternatives—that they had been captured or killed. No, thoughts of that nature would do no good.
I glanced at Lewis, rifle still cradled to my chest. The streets around us had quietened, eerie and windblown, and the only sounds of life were distant. He was alert, stoic, but with an intensity under the skin that left me uneasy.
I took Lewis by the arm and pulled him into a shadow. He regarded me calmly, as if he had expected this, and put a little space between us.
“I have been in Harrow for ten days,” he said. “Madge insisted on keeping me close, believing you would surface. And you did, at the opera. I saw you leave with that man. I did not know to intervene, and I hardly wanted to turn you into the Guild. So I let you go.”
Startled as I was, I sensed he had more to confess. I held my tongue.
“Guild spies learned that Baffin had captured an Adept and intended to hand her over to Incarnadine. We intervened, as you saw, and I let you go, again.”
“That much I know,” I murmured.
“Madge sent me after you tonight,” he revealed. “She told me to take you somewhere safe, and keep you away from Mr. Moran.” Something else entered his eyes then, something probing. “She did not say why.”
I recalled Madge sending me away, so unexpectedly. I remembered Moran’s interest, his fixed gaze.
Madge was protecting me. Then, and now. It was more painful than consoling. But precisely what was she protecting me from? What did she fear her husband would do?
It did not bear thinking about, just then. I had to settle matters with Lewis and get to the museum before Baffin.
“Give me your hand.” I jerked off my glove and held out my bare fingers. “Now.”
He pulled off his own glove and did so. His hand was warm, almost too warm, and patterned with sweat. I barely felt either.
Memories came to me, fleet and clear. Lewis shooting at the Zealots. Lewis shaking the hand of another Guild soldier. Lewis with his hand on the back of Madge’s chair at the opera, surrounded by music. Lewis shaking hands with Mr. Moran, standing on a pier with the river wind in his hair.
It was that last I held onto. I felt Lewis’s reluctance. I felt a spike of panic too, and dread. I followed that feeling and found another, connected memory—that of him sitting in a carriage across from Madge, her leaning forward.
“We both want the best for her, Mr. Illing,” my sister vowed. “Trust me, in this. And tell my husband nothing.”
Frustration. Injustice. Powerlessness. Indecision. Lewis’s raw, unfiltered response to my sister’s words were a blazing fire behind a barrier of ice as he calmly replied, “Thank you, Mrs. Moran. I will not let you down.”
One last memory came, drifting to the surface as the carriage and Madge disappeared. It was Lewis striding down a familiar hallway in Golden House. To one side of the passageway, a Silver Guild soldier saluted. On the other, the door to my prison lay.
In the memory, his eyes drifted to the door. His steps faltered, if only just. And the feeling inside him—the swell of worry, of need, of affection he felt at the thought of me on the other side of that door?
I took what remained of my reserve and hurled it into the river.
The alleyway came back to me, along with the feeling of Lewis’s fingers in mine. I quickly dropped them and pulled my glove back on, but not before his gaze, which had lingered on my face, dropped to my engagement ring. He seemed startled to see it.
“I believe you,” I said, gathering myself. It was not easy. I was shaken. Actually, I was shaking, quite literally, a shiver not only in my hands but in the core of my bones.
Lewis cared for me. It was not quite love, but it was something, and it was powerful and confusing and persuasive.
“I am with you,” he assured me. There was a vulnerability behind his eyes just then that prodded at my careworn heart, and I was truly done for when he added, “I still want the future we planned.”
“Even if Mr. Moran knows of it? If he will try to stop us every step of the way? We certainly cannot sail out of Harrow or the Sunrise Isles.”
“It was always going to be hard,” he said, and I sensed he was reassuring himself as much as me. “It changes little. We can leave tonight, Harden will get us out. Where have you hidden our funds?”
My stomach dropped. “About that…”
“Ottilie,” another voice drifted towards us. Between one blink and the next Pretoria appeared, shedding a skew of time with a ripple in the air, like hot sun on stone. She surveyed Lewis while, behind her, Perry became visible. He held Maddeson’s assistant by the arm.
“Illing,” Pretoria said caustically. “What are you doing here?”
I took a half step between them. “Tori, all is well.”
Lewis’s hand still dropped to his pistol. “Rushforth. I am here for your sister.”
“In what capacity?” she asked. “As Guild dog?”
Lewis rankled. “I am no one’s dog.”
“Let us test that,” she said, holding up a finger. With her other hand she dug around in her pocket. “I have a biscuit here somewhere.”
“Pretoria, the museum,” I reminded her. My own hackles were rising, incensed on Lewis’s behalf. “Now.”
“Oh, you told the hound about that?” She pulled out a smattering of pocket lint and puffed it at Lewis. “Now, sit, boy.”
“I was about to,” I snapped, brushing stray lint off my shoulder.
Lewis bore all this with a clenched jaw. He picked more lint from his moustache as he said, “Ottilie has verified my story.”
“Hm.” Pretoria studied us a moment longer, then dusted her hands. “Well, we haven’t time to waste. If you betray us, Illing, you will never see the sunrise.”
“Unoriginal,” he muttered.
“You know Perry, and this is Geoffrey. He is our prisoner.” Pretoria flapped a hand behind her, to where Perry and Maddeson’s assistant stood.
“Shall we carry on? That other Starlight may prove a nuisance if we do not keep moving. Did you recognize her? Loretti. Always a tedious girl, never an original thought. Ottilie, you can apprise Lewis of the situation en route.”
I nodded stoutly. “Let’s be off.”