Page 69 of Baron Bolt

“You have seen the eye.” It was not a question. His voice had dropped to a doctor’s murmur. A lover’s. “The left. You live with it. You sit across your dishes from it. Madame. You have looked into it a hundred times.” He leaned nearer. The candle guttered between them and the heat touched her cheek. “Tell me. Do they match?”

She did not answer. Her silence answered. He saw it. His whole starved face broke open with joy.

“Ah,” he breathed. “Ah. You have seen. Yes. You have seen it. Oculus meus. My finest work. The finest, I say it without vanity. The guns took the first and I would not raise it half blind. That would be shoddy. That would be cruel. And it took, madame. It took.” He straightened, hugging the pistol to his breast with both arms now like a relic, rocking slightly. “I must see it again. I have crossed a sea. I must see the eye again.”

And every entry in her hidden tally arrived at once and Ophelia believed she understood. She understood what Damian had meant when he had said unclean.

She waited for the horror to arrive and attach itself to her husband. It arrived, punctually, in full. It attached itself, all of it, to the man in front of her. To the stained cuffs. To the pistol clasped like a rosary. To the streaming, exulting eyes. And to no one but the madman in front of her.

“Madame is silent,” that madman observed.

“Madame is listening,” Ophelia said. “You came a long way to talk. I would not dream of interrupting.”

He studied her a moment, head tilted, as if she were a dog that had done a trick. Then he stood back from the table. His voice changed. Formal. As if he had stepped up into a pulpit only he could see.

“It will come to me,” he said.

The rain filled the pause like a congregation.

“It will come to me,” he said again, the identical words in the identical order. He has said this to himself a thousand times crossing the Channel. That was clear. “Or the lady learns what I am capable of to make it so.”

He let the words crack through the room like the thunder overhead. The servant by the window shifted his weight, one boot to the other, and grimaced at the floor.

Ophelia drew a fortifying breath and kept her face calm.

“Where is it? Where is … your husband?”

Ophelia wanted to rebel but she suspected that it was best to summon Damian back rather than argue.

“He walks in the storm.” She gestured to the park, and the stranger followed her hand to gaze out into the night.

“You keep a bell,” the madman said. It was not a question either. “Ring it.”

She rose slowly, letting her hands be seen, another of her father’s commandments. She crossed to the chimney-piece and pulled the bell. Then she came back to her chair and sat, and she dealt the interrupted hand out to its end. Three cards. Four. The pistol pointed at her and the storm leaned on the windows.

Her fingers did not shake. She was rather proud of them. Good servants. They had not disgraced her.

It took an age. It took four minutes. Then a candle came wavering along the hall and Marcus appeared in the doorway. The drawing-room door showed him everyone at once. She had never valued that before. Marcus with his nightshirt stuffed anyhow into his breeches, his hair standing like thatch, his shoes unbuckled, his young face already halfway through beg pardon my lady I thought the bell must have … And then he saw the room, the stranger, and … the pistol. He stopped as if he had walked into glass. His candle tilted. Wax ran down over his knuckles unnoticed.

“Come in,” said the madman pleasantly. “You will carry a message.”

Marcus’s eyes went to her. Then, briefly, to the fire-irons standing in their stand not four feet from him. Ophelia called, “Marcus,” in exactly the voice her mother used for spilled tea, no more. His eyes came back to her and stayed there. The poker remained in its stand, and she exhaled in relief that they all went on living.

“You will find your master,” the madman commanded. He spoke slowly, with spaces between the words. “He is out of doors. He is walking in the storm. It does that. It is drawn to … No matter. You will find him and you will say the doctor has come for his property. Say it.”

“Milord.” Marcus swallowed. “The doctor’s come for his property.”

“You will say remember the cellar. Say it.”

“Remember the cellar.”

“You will tell him that he will come to me before dawn, and come alone, or her ladyship will join him.” A pause. The candle-flame hissed under a falling drop of rainwater from his sleeve. “Say it all.”

Marcus said it all, white as his shirt, mangling it only once. His eyes pleaded with her over the words the way a dog pleads over a whip. When he had finished he whispered, “M’lady?” Just that. Asking her whether the world was still the world.

“Do exactly as the gentleman says,” Ophelia said. “Take the lantern from the gun room. Try the park toward the beeches. Go now, and speak to no one else in the house. No one, Marcus.”

He went. The servant by the window let him out through the broken door and stood in it, listening, until somewhere far off the storm grew briefly louder and then shut away again. The great house settled. There was nothing left in the world but the rain, the dead fire, the candle, and the two dripping men in her drawing room.