Page 71 of Baron Bolt

“Is she hurt?” His own voice came out strange. A parade-ground voice. The footman snapped to it like a recruit.

“No, my lord. No. Not when we … I … No.”

“How many men?”

“Two. One of them had a pistol out, and he turned us all out into the yard, my lord. The whole household, out onto the gravel in the rain.”

“The dowager?”

“Safe, my lord. Gone down to the lodge with the rest. He put everyone out. Everyone but …” The man swallowed. “He kept her ladyship. In the drawing room.”

“How was she?”

It mattered. He could not have said, in that first white moment, why it mattered so much. Only that it did.

“She were not … She was not weeping, my lord. She told us to go. Stood there with that pistol not three feet off her and told us to do as the gentleman asked and go, calm as anything.”

Calm as anything. Calm as a woman looking down at very bad cards and letting nothing whatever reach her face. His gamester. His card-sharp. Sitting down this minute to the worst hand of her life, alone, against a madman. And the one man who ought to have been standing at her shoulder had decided to walk out into the rain and desert his post.

“He gave me a message,” the footman said. “Said we was to find the baron. Said he’d wait.” His eyes rolled white at the memory of it. “Said his lordship would know what he’s come for … to remember the cellar.”

Damian knew. There was only one madman in England with business at his door, and the business was Damian himself. The anatomist had come up out of a French cellar and all the way up an English drive to find him, and he had gone out, of all nights, tonight. Removed himself from the house like a fool and left behind the one piece on the board worth taking. So the anatomist had taken her. Surety for the return of his property.

“Take the horse, my lord.” The footman was already dragging at the bridle. The horse was already telling them both what it thought of that.

Damian looked at it for the length of one breath. It was blown, mud to the hocks, trembling in every quarter. The lane at the bottom of the hill was no longer a lane. It was a running stream. A fresh horse could not have held any pace worth the name through that. This one would founder inside a quarter mile.

“Get him off this hill,” Damian said. “Lightning likes high ground. Then get yourself to the lodge.”

“My lord, what shall I⁠—”

Damian had already turned. Then he was running.

For weeks he had walked like a man carrying a brimful glass. Measured. Careful. Lifting nothing heavier than he ought. Stairs at a gentleman’s pace. Reining the whole dreadful engine of this body down to a crawl so that no groom, no footman, no wife would ever see what it could do and ask the question underneath. Now he opened his stride and let it out of harness at once, and the hill poured away under him.

The slope tried to kill him in the first ten yards. Grass gone to grease. Ground giving sideways. The body caught him. It always caught him. That had been the horror of it, once. Tonight it was the use of it. He came down the pasture in long, eating strides, took the field gate at the bottom with one palm flat on the top bar. Wet iron. Up and over without a check. Landed running in the flooded lane. Water burst away from his feet in sheets, and the pain of running on stones affected him not at all, for he was no longer a man.

Thin behind him, under the thunder, the footman called something reverent and entirely unrepeatable.

Let him see. Let the whole county see, for Ophelia needs me.

The sky split. The lane sprang out of the dark, white to the last rut, every drowned wheel-track, the hedgerows leaning their black shoulders in from either side. He ran that picture through the blind dark that followed. The sky split again and corrected him. Flash and correction. Flash and correction. The road opened ahead in lengths of white fire, as if the storm had appointed itself his linkboy. Each flash hung a heartbeat longer in his left eye than his right. A green ghost at the edge of things. He had long suspected the anatomist of some improvement there and had never once wanted to know. Tonight he used it and ran on.

People said thunder sounded like guns. It did not. Guns were flatter. Meaner. Guns arrived with their killing already done. The sky tonight was giving a fair imitation of a full battery, peal overlapping peal until the ground itself seemed to give under it. He ran beneath the cannonade the way he had stood beneath the real one. Chin down. Mind narrowed to the next necessary yard. The count between flash and report kept shrinking. The storm was moving down the valley toward Hartleigh, gathering itself over the house.

Over her.

His lungs began to burn honestly somewhere past the second gate. He waited, with a soldier’s fatalism, for the body to fail.

It declined.

The sutures pulled taut across his chest with every breath. The long seams over the left shoulder drew like harness straps. And held.

He could say this much of the monster running down the hill … it was built to last.

The shirt bound his shoulders like a prison, but he ran on.

Somewhere in the black stretch between one lightning and the next, hammered into him by his own footfalls, the truth arrived.