Chapter 14 It Happens
It Happens
For two weeks I wandered about in a reverie. I half expected a letter from Pike—scolding me, perhaps, for breaking our agreement, or pleading for its renewal, or perhaps offering some excuse that explained away his failure to pay me my share.
There was no letter. He had been cheating me, that was all.
He knew that a gentlewoman in the Home Counties had no way to prove business fraud or even claim it.
I had moments of bitterness, of course, but I cheered myself with the reflection that Pike had cheated himself as well.
He had no idea how to make my dyes. If I managed to bring them to market with a new partner, he would certainly be sorry.
Very foolish of him. People are strange.
Give me a phial of prussic acid any day.
I awoke one night to a sound from my laboratory.
At first I thought I was mistaken. There was a storm outside. I lay for some minutes listening to the wind and rain outside. A clap of thunder nearly made me jump out of my skin—surely that was what had woken me?
No. From behind the hidden door in my closet, it came again—a muffled but distinct thump .
It’s probably just a squirrel , I told myself as I threw on my wrapper and lit a candle. Or maybe a family of wood pigeons taking shelter from the rain.
My assurances did nothing to calm the sickly pounding of my heart in my throat.
Even under the tumult of the storm, the creeeaaak of the secret door seemed unnaturally loud to my ears. Quietly as I could, I started up the stairs.
Thump. There it was again. The flame trembled as my hand shook. I seized my wrist with my other hand, and kept climbing.
THUMP. No squirrel or pigeon ever made that sound.
Despite my attempts at steadiness, the candle trembled violently when I reached the top.
It was all I could do to keep from dropping it, and the furniture in my little hideaway seemed to dance in the frenzied light it threw.
My eyes flew from one corner to another.
Turn back , a voice inside me cried. Get Papa.
What on earth can you do against an intruder, whether man or beast?
I was sorely tempted to listen to it. But if I told Papa what I had here, it would be the electrical rig all over again. Only I could defend what was mine.
For an instant I thought I really had imagined it all. Then a deafening crash of thunder was followed almost immediately by a flash of lightning that lit the room as bright as day for a fraction of an instant.
Septimus Pike was standing over my table.
He was a mess, soaked through to the skin. His hair was plastered to the sides of his face in dark blades. In his hands he held a messy sheaf of papers. My papers. He was clutching all the formulae for my dyes.
“Pike?”
He jumped at the sound of my voice. He turned to me in the gloom. His hands gave a guilty twitch, as though he might hastily drop the formulae now that the game was up.
Instead, he began to laugh.
It wasn’t the genteel, charming laugh of Pike the well-to-do merchant. It was a harsher, crueler sound. More like the old Pike.
“Well, Miss Mary Bennet,” he said. “This is a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. I have long dreamed of telling you the truth of it all.”
“The truth of what? Pike, what are you doing? How did you get in?”
He answered only the last question, gesturing toward the ceiling with his chin.
Another flash of lightning showed me a ladder, protruding from the skylight down to the floor of my laboratory.
“Quite simple really. You ought to tell your father to trim the oak next to the house, you know. Its branches make it quite easy for any intruder to gain admission over the roof.” He was stuffing my formulae into his pockets.
“Not that they would bother, I suppose. I’d warrant I am leaving tonight with the only thing of value in this whole dreary house. ”
“Pike’s green,” I said.
“Quite so,” he said. “And Pike’s scarlet, and Pike’s blue, and Pike’s gold.”
“Everything you’ve done,” I said. “These past few years—it’s all my dyes. Isn’t it?”
“Remarkable, really, that you are a clever enough woman to concoct them, but too stupid to see that I was robbing you blind the whole time. They’re most ingenious. We’re the toast of Manchester.” He gave me a sort of mocking leer. “Well. I am, at any rate.”
“I did realize it in the end.”
“Yes,” he said. “But even then you thought you were at liberty to destroy my business.” He waved the sheaf of papers again. “I should have taken these years ago.”
It was different from the night of Papa and the electrical rig. I had completely lost control then. Now I felt no urge to weep or scream. Inside there was only a dry, dead calm.
He was right. I should have seen it long ago.
“I’m going to make a fortune off you, Miss Mary Bennet,” he was saying. “And when you are some pitiful poor old maid, pinched and starved and always too far from the hearth, I shall visit you with my nobly-bred wife and my elegant children, and I shall laugh .”
His face was twisted in something halfway between a grin and a snarl.
“Why?” I asked. I found that I was not so much angry as genuinely curious.
There was a sort of fluttering along my left side though.
Perhaps something in me was angry, if not my brain.
“I was already your partner. If I had known, I could have been making more dyes all this time. Why cheat me in this way?”
“Why? Why? ” He took a step toward me. “As if you did not know. You humiliated me.”
“I did? When?”
He laughed. “Don’t pretend you have forgotten! Or maybe you have. So many females delight in cruelty. Perhaps I am not the only man you have left with his tattered heart in his hands in the middle of the dance.”
My eyes widened. “You mean—you mean all this is because I didn’t finish a dance with you?”
Again, that bitter laugh. “All? You know very well it was all anyone talked of for months. I was a laughingstock. Because of you. Rejected by Mary Bennet . The plainest girl in the parish. Surely you see what an insult that was.”
“I never heard anyone talk of it. I do not think anyone much noticed.”
He was pacing now and ignored me. Rain was blowing through the half-open skylight above, spattering the floor and table with long droplets.
“That is why I courted you,” he said. “I was going to make you fall in love with me, and then jilt you. Plain as you are, you’d be alone and pining for me for the rest of your days.
But this is so much better. Your cold heart will never be capable of love, but these …
” He waved the sheaf of papers. “You will never recover from the loss of these. Goodbye, Miss Mary Bennet.” And he started up the ladder again.
I have a few half-done diagrams for a fire safety system for my laboratory.
One idea I think has merit is a sort of flame-dampening blanket.
I would construct a heavy blanket of some flame-retardant material, you see, and if an experiment grows too lively I can throw it over everything and smother the flames.
I felt as though such a blanket had been thrown over my insides, as though what had been ignited in me was too strong even to be safely perceived.
But when I saw Septimus Pike start to climb the ladder with years of my work shoved in his pockets, the flames started to creep out from under the blanket.
“Wait! Give them back!” I grabbed at the back of his jacket and tried to haul him down.
He shrugged me off, and when I tried again, he kicked me.
It was not much of a kick, just a firm, contemptuous shove, but the shock of it sent me sprawling back.
Quick as a flash, he was up the ladder. He cast one last gloating glance over his shoulder, then he was out.
When the ladder began to vanish up after him, it broke through my shock. I threw myself after it and yanked it back down. “I said wait !”
His face appeared above. He tried again to haul the ladder up after him, which I prevented by climbing onto the first rung. I bunched up my nightgown and shimmied up after him.
Strange to be on one’s roof. It is right there above one, but one rarely, if ever, sees the house from that vantage. Icy water was pouring over the slick slate tiles. Pike had his back to me, already making his way toward the oak tree that bent toward the roof.
The rain made a sodden mess of my hair and clothes immediately.
It was hard to gain purchase on the slick, slanted surface, but I bunched up my nightclothes in one hand and used the other to keep my balance.
But young ladies, even peculiar ones like me, have little experience in that sort of physical endeavor.
Before I had crossed half the roof, he had reached the tree.
He grasped the branch that extended over the eaves, but before climbing down, he turned to me once more.
“Give them back!” I screamed. “They’re mine! Or so help me—”
The villain laughed. “Goodbye, Miss Mary Bennet,” he said. “Thank you for making my fortune. You will never see another penny from it.”
“Pike!” I screamed. “Don’t do this! I swear to heaven you’ll be sorry! Pike! ”
He only laughed again. Took one more look at me, sodden, distraught, pathetic, as though to fix the image in his mind. He grasped the bough with both hands.
Then it happened.
CRACK!
The loudest crash of thunder I had ever heard in my life was accompanied by a blinding flash. A jagged arrow of light tore the sky straight down to our oak tree.
There was a shower of sparks and a strange, chemical smell, mixed with the scent of burning wood.
Pike flew backward from where he’d been grasping the branch.
His body struck the tiles so hard I saw a dent.
Then it slid down to the edge of the eaves, trailing a long, dark stain that was washed away almost as quickly as it bled out of him.