Page 77 of Baron Bolt

For a long moment there was only the rain, gone gentle on the glass, and his heart against her palms, and the mantel clock ticking its ridiculous tick.

Then the corner of his mouth moved. It climbed, with tremendous effort, into the ghost of that sudden grin that had jarred her every single time, because she was never ready for it. Bloodless. Crooked. Alive.

“Duly noted,” her husband breathed, “my lady.”

CHAPTER 19

The storm had worn itself out somewhere before dawn. Ophelia could not have said when. She only looked up and found the windows pinkish-gray instead of black. The rain had stopped flinging itself at the glass. Hartleigh had gone so quiet she could hear the lamp burn.

That, and the servant, Luc.

Dr. Rochat was still raving somewhere beneath them. The cellars. Luc Morel had dragged him down to the gloom below, which struck her as no more than justice. The sound came up through the floors, thinned to almost nothing, a muffled, furious drone, like a wasp shut in a drawer. It could be ignored. She had discovered that a few minutes ago and had been practicing ever since.

“Hold there, madame,” Luc said. “Just so. Do not let it open.”

She held there.

Damian lay flat on the floor where they had put him, on the rug before the cold hearth. There had been no moving six feet and four inches of wounded man any farther than flat. His blood had gone into the carpet in a stain the size of a dinner plate. She was kneeling in the edge of it. Lamp in her left hand. The first two fingers of her right pressing the edges of the wound together a half-inch ahead of the needle.

The blood was warm against her knees. Then it was not. It had begun to cool in the wool, and the cold of it climbed.

Damian had spoken once since they dragged him there.

Her name, she thought. Or part of it.

She had bent so close her hair had brushed his cheek, but whatever he had meant to say had gone out of him before the words could form. Since then there had been nothing. Not even when Luc put the needle through.

That frightened her more than the blood.

She had not rung for anyone. She was not going to ring for anyone because they were all at the lodge, dry and safe. Some things could not be seen. By breakfast she would need a story, and she was good at a story.

That was tomorrow’s hand.

This was tonight’s.

The needle was curved, like something a sailmaker might carry. It had come out of an inner pocket of Luc’s coat, along with a hank of waxed thread. He had named each thing as he laid it on a clean towel. The needle. The thread. The way the stitch would go. Slow, accented English, as if the names themselves might keep her hands from failing.

They had, rather. She had taken hold of them the way she took hold of her father’s cards.

“You have done this before,” she had said.

He had threaded the needle by lamplight without squinting. “A man does not haul bodies for an anatomist, milady, without learning what holds flesh together.” A pause, while he drew the thread through and doubled it. “Or how it comes apart.”

Now he worked, and she held. The thread made a dragging sound each time it passed through. She would hear that sound for the rest of her life, she suspected, and at inconvenient moments. The room smelled of blood and brandy and wet wool and lamp oil. Heat from the lamp licked the side of her face. Her hands were red to the wrist. Blood had settled in the fine creases of her knuckles and dried there. When she flexed her fingers the skin pulled. The needle needed her still.

She kept her young lady face as she had kept it at Edward’s deathbed. She had sat by him for the worst of it and held his poor hot hand. Afterward Lady Archer had wept on her shoulder and told her, between sobs, how beautifully she had borne it. What a comfort she had been. Everyone had praised her for not breaking. It had been easy not to break. She had been sorry. Truly sorry. She had liked Edward. Sorrow was a thing a well-bred girl could carry in both hands without spilling.

This was not sorrow.

This was a scream clawing at her face, and her lungs had shrunk to the size of walnuts sometime around midnight and had not come right since. Every breath she took was shallow and painful. If she once breathed deeply she would come apart. Her hands would shake. Luc’s needle needed her hands.

So she knelt in her husband’s blood with her spine straight and thought, with each pass of the thread: Do not. Do not. I have just found you. Do not.

“Bring the light nearer,” Luc said.

She brought it nearer. The flame trembled once and then held. Her wrist ached from keeping it high.

He wiped along the seam with a folded cloth, frowned, and wiped again. The cloth came away barely marked.