Page 70 of Baron Bolt

After that, for a long time, nobody spoke. Ophelia sat at her own card table, hostage in her own house, and thought.

The servant moved once. Went out and came back with bread and the heel of a pie from God knew where. The larder. The man had found her larder. He set it on the sofa table and said, low, urgent, in French, something that had eat in it.

“Monsieur. Il faut manger.” You must.

The madman looked through him and did not eat. He did not sit either, though there were chairs on every side. He stood, or he paced his slow orbit of the room, the pistol swinging, the mutter rising and falling. Latin. German. The cellar. The letters. The appointments of heaven. And he did not blink. She fixed on that and thought about Damian and what she should do.

The thunder cracked fit to split the roofbeam. The candle ducked. She flinched despite everything. The man’s streaming eyes stayed wide open, fixed on the dark beyond the windows where his creature was, and did not blink.

Her father had never taught her courage. He had taught her better. He had taught her what to do with a bad hand.

You do not weep on the cards, girl. You watch the other man’s hands. You count what has been played. And you wait, all night if the game asks it, for the one trick that is yours.

So she waited and held her faith that an opportunity would present itself.

And she watched his hands. The left never stopped. It touched, trailed, conducted the mutter. The right stayed locked white-knuckled around the pistol. One card lay face down. She could not turn it yet. Would any powder in England be dry enough tonight to fire? Alas, she was not familiar with firearms.

The doctor has come for his property, she thought. The candle burned lower. The storm kept its appointments. Ophelia squared her shoulders, watching the madman and waiting for her moment.

CHAPTER 17

Lightning took a tree on the far ridge. An oak, from the size of the light it made while tilting over. Damian did not flinch.

He was on the highest ground in the parish, in the worst storm the county had thrown in ten years, and his mind was silent in the wrong way. Empty, not calm.

Any sensible man would have been off this hill an hour ago. Any sensible man would have known what happened to a body planted upright on a bare summit in weather like this.

It was an invitation, and the sky was in a mood to take one. Lightning had already had its chance at him. It had declined to finish him now.

The rain had won every engagement of the evening. It had found the gap between his collar and his neck in the first minute, run a supply line down his spine by the fifth, and now held the whole of him without contest. An inch of water pooled around each foot. The shirt hung off his shoulders with the weight of a drowned sheep. He had stopped shivering some while ago.

A mile down the valley, Hartleigh showed in the flashes of light. Small, dark, and smeared to nothing whenever the wind threw water sideways, then coming back between gusts.

He had dreamed of that house across hundreds of miles of France, an undead man walking home on stolen coin. Soft rain on green meadows. That had been the whole of the dream. Soft rain. He had followed it home like a lodestar. The sky over Hartleigh tonight was not that rain. Tonight the nightmare weather had found his home and was bearing down on his dream like a bad omen.

Thunder rolled down the valley and broke against the far hills. Under it, through it, he heard hooves.

He turned. No one rode tonight who had a choice. There it was again in the gap after the thunder. A horse being pushed uphill through mud, blowing hard. A man’s voice, raw from shouting into weather, crying out something the wind tore apart and flung past him in pieces.

“Lord, my lord.”

The sky went white. Damian saw them. One of the Hartleigh footmen, drowned so far out of his livery’s color that he was only a black shape on a black horse. Hatless. The lantern long since beaten out on its hook. The horse had had enough and said so, wheeling under him at the next crack of thunder. The man half fell rather than dismounting, floundered the last yards of slope on foot, and fetched up in front of Damian gasping like a landed fish.

“My lord. Thank God. Thank God.” Marcus had to stop and bend and haul air. “Been riding the lanes the best part of an hour … Could not find … Then the sky went white and I saw you from the mile road. Whole hill lit up and there you stood, plain as an engraving. My lord, you must come. You must come now.”

“What has happened?”

“There is a man in the house.” The footman’s voice cracked. He drove it on anyway. “A foreigner. He is mad, my lord. Raving. Walking mad. He has a pistol. He has her ladyship.”

The storm went on exactly as before. The rain kept falling. Every part of Damian awoke at once.

He had been asleep for weeks. Ever since waking in the cellar he had been asleep. Walking, giving orders, answering to his brother’s title, buttoning collars, standing at windows, but nevertheless asleep the entire time. This was true waking. Instant. Total. Cold as rainwater dousing his head.

She is taken.

And beneath it, already finished before he could turn from it, the second half of the sentence.

Because you left.