Freed of Edward Dance’s advanced years, I’d also hoped to shed his niggling pains, but my night in the cupboard has wrapped my bones in brambles. Every stretch, every bend and twist brings a jolt of pain and a wince, piling some new complaint atop the mound. The journey to my bedroom has proven unexpectedly taxing. Evidently, Rashton made quite an impression last night, because my passage through the house is punctuated by hearty handshakes and backslaps. Greetings lie scattered in my wake like tossed rocks, their goodwill bringing me out in bruises.
Upon reaching my bedroom, I throw off my forced smile. There’s a white envelope on the floor, something bulky sealed inside. Somebody must have slipped it under my door. Tearing it open, I look up and down the corridor for any sign of the person who left it.
You left it
begins the note inside, which is wrapped around a chess piece that’s almost identical to the one Anna carries around with her.
Take amyl nitrite pearls, sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate.
KEEP HOLD OF THEM.
GG
‘Gregory Gold,’ I sigh, reading the initials.
He must have left it before attacking the butler.
Now I know how Anna feels. The instructions are barely legible, and incomprehensible even once I’m able to untangle his terrible handwriting.
Throwing the note and chess piece on the sideboard, I lock my door and bar it with a chair. Normally, I’d go immediately to Rashton’s possessions or a mirror to inspect this new face, but I already know what’s in his drawers and how he looks. I need only stretch my thought towards a question to find its answer, which is why I know there’s a set of brass knuckles hidden in the sock drawer. He confiscated them from a brawler a few years back, and they’ve come in handy more than once. I slip them on, thinking only of the footman and how he lowered his face to mine, breathing in my last breath and sighing with pleasure as he added me to some private tally.
My hands are shaking but Rashton isn’t Bell. Fear motivates, rather than cripples. He wants to seek the footman out and put an end to him, to take back whatever dignity was lost in our previous confrontation. Looking back at our fight this morning, I’m certain it was Rashton who sent me down the stairs and into the corridor. That was his anger, his pride. He had control, and I didn’t even notice.
It can’t happen again.
Rashton’s recklessness will get us killed, and I can’t waste the host. If I’m to get myself and Anna out of this mess, I need to get ahead of the footman, rather than constantly trailing behind him, and I think I know somebody who can help, though they won’t be easy to convince.
Taking off the brass knuckles, I fill the sink and begin washing in front of the mirror.
Rashton’s a young man – though not quite as young as he pictures himself – tall, strong and remarkably handsome. Freckles are splashed across his nose, honey-coloured eyes and short blond hair suggesting a face spun out of sunlight. About the only note of imperfection is an old bullet scar on his shoulder, the ragged line long faded. The memory would give itself to me if I asked, but I’ve enough pain without inviting another man’s misery into my mind.
I’m wiping my chest, when the door handle rattles, causing me to snatch up the brass knuckles.
‘Jim, are you in there? Somebody’s locked the door.’
It’s a woman’s voice, husky and dry.
Putting on a fresh shirt, I pull away the chair and unlock the door to find a confused-looking young woman on the other side, her fist raised for another knock. Blue eyes peer at me from beneath long eyelashes, a dash of red lipstick the only colour on a glacial face. She’s in her early twenties with thick black hair tumbling over a crisp white shirt tucked into jodhpurs, her presence immediately setting Rashton’s blood racing.
‘Grace...’ My host shoves the name onto my tongue, and plenty more besides. I’m boiling in a stew of adoration, elation, arousal and inadequacy.
‘Have you heard what that damn fool brother of mine has done?’ she says, barging past me.
‘I suspect I’m about to.’
‘He borrowed one of the cars last night,’ she says, flinging herself onto the bed. ‘Woke the stablemaster at two in the morning dressed like a rainbow and took off for the village.’
She’s got it all wrong, but I have no way of salvaging her brother’s good name. It was my decision to take the car, to flee the house and make for the village. At this moment, poor Donald Davies is asleep on a dirt road where I abandoned him, and my host is trying to drag me out of the door after him.
His loyalty is almost overpowering, and searching for a reason I’m immediately beset by horrors. Rashton’s affection for Donald Davies was moulded amid the mud and blood of the trenches. They went to war as fools and came back brothers, each of them broken in places only the other could see.
I can feel his anger at my treatment of his friend.
Or perhaps I’m just angry at myself.
We’re so jumbled together, I can no longer tell.
‘It’s my fault,’ says Grace, crestfallen. ‘He was going to buy more of that poison from Bell, so I threatened to tell Daddy. I knew he was angry with me, but I didn’t think he’d run off.’ She sighs helplessly. ‘You don’t think he’s done something foolish, do you?’
‘He’s fine,’ I say reassuringly, sitting down next to her. ‘He’s got the wind up, that’s all.’
‘I wish we’d never met that damn doctor,’ she says, smoothing the creases from my shirt with the flat of her hand. ‘Donald hasn’t been the same since Bell turned up with his trunk of tricks. It’s that damnable laudanum, it’s got hold of him. I can barely talk to him any more. I wish there was something we could...’
Her words run smack bang into an idea. I can see her standing back from it wide-eyed, following it from start to finish like a horse she’s backed in the Derby.