“But you know—yes, that’s the clause.” Not quite, but Oliver was strong enough that he could afford some sloppiness in his cradles. “Give it a try, see if you can scare them off. But keeping the curtain up comes first. Miss Blyth can get off a few shots as long as they can’t see her.”
Maud nodded, looking just as excited. Jack felt old and tired. Giving combat orders to young people while heavy with fatigue was like reaching for a guidekeeper: another habit he’d fallen easily back into. He didn’t like it any more than the other.
“If—” Oliver started, but was interrupted by a redoubling of Spinet House’s alarm note.
No. Now it was two notes, an uneven chord.
Jack cursed. “Signal if they break through the door,” he said, and left them to it.
He hadn’t a complete tin ear. The new, prominent note was higher than the first. He found his way to the main staircase and heard footfalls ascending at a run. Violet looked angry and out of breath.
“So,” she panted. “The kitchen’s a diversion, do you think?”
Jack nodded. Violet pointed upwards and Jack let her lead the way. His leg had begun to hurt again. The second note softened to match the first when Violet stopped outside a room on the uppermost floor before the attic level. She hesitated with her fingertips on the door, which had neither lock nor handle.
“We haven’t fully puzzled this one out yet,” she admitted. “It’s one of the queerer ones.”
Many of Spinet’s queerer rooms were those hosting secret passageways to elsewhere in the house, so this didn’t make Jack feel any better about the prospect of a breakin. He had an unpleasant vision of fog-masked attackers creeping out of the wall in the sitting room where Maud and Oliver had all their attention on the window.
Jack leaned his stick against the wall and drew his gun instead. “Stay out of sight until we know what’s happening.”
Violet didn’t argue. Unlike Maud, she didn’t need to be browbeaten into letting Jack take the lead when they were in danger. Jack didn’t know if it was her history of taking direction on the stage or simply a matter of personality.
She said, “Don’t go too far into the room if you can help it. And—move like a knight.”
Before she could explain further, there was a click as the door catch released. Jack shoved it open and stepped through, gun raised in the other hand.
The room was small. It had no wallpaper, no rugs, not even any cushions or upholstery on the chair at the writing desk. It was all wood. The floor was an unsettling chessboard of dark and light, the same pattern running up the walls all the way to the ceiling. The floor, however, was decorated with shards of broken glass from the main window, and they winked in the light of a small lantern set down near the frame.
A man stood among those shards. He had whirled around when the door opened; his clothes were dark, and a fog-mask obscured his face. There was a soft crunch and skitter as his movement shifted glass underfoot.
“Hands—” Jack started to say, but then his muscles went rigid—he couldn’t even twitch a finger against the trigger—and he almost toppled over. Damn. Easy enough for an intruder to anchor an immobility charm in front of the doorframe, wasn’t it?
“Where’s the cup and the knife? We know you have ’em both. Where are they?”
It wasn’t Morris’s voice. Jack had been half expecting his cousin’s loyal agent to be the one dirtying his hands with his work. A bland, tense city accent. Perhaps somewhere south of the river. Jack also couldn’t speak at the moment to answer the bloody question, so the masked man wasn’t as bright as Morris.
The crackle of a spell washed over Jack. A negation. Violet.
All his muscles relaxed at once. Unfortunately, this meant that he both stumbled a little and dropped the gun.
Jack cursed and bent for it. The masked man dived for the nearest thing resembling cover, which was a tall standing wardrobe. He wrenched the door open as if to use it as a shield, and Jack straightened with the gun in hand, and—
Afterwards, he struggled to remember exactly what he’d seen. Violet would say that the intruder climbed into the wardrobe. To Jack’s eyes, it looked as though something had snagged the man’s sleeve and pulled him in, like a piece of factory machinery. And what happened after that—the way the wardrobe seemed abruptly half its own height, then seemed to become a standing cabinet with elegant gaps and drawers, then back to a wardrobe again—happened so fast, in a dim room, that it could have been one of those bizarre visions the mind threw out when it was trudging up the shorelines of sleep.
The sound was distinct, at least. A bloodcurdling shout, cut off even more alarmingly by a wet noise. And then silence.
Real silence. That musical chord was gone as well.
Violet and Jack looked at each other. Dawn had begun to trickle in through the window. Violet looked bloodless in the soft grey light.
“I’m not touching it after that,” said Jack. “You’re the mistress here, not me.”
Violet swallowed hard and eased her way across the room, following an uneven pattern on the floor. Forward, across—ah. Moving like a knight.
“Maud worked this one out,” she said. She paused again in front of the wardrobe and settled her shoulders, visibly pulling on a persona, then yanked the door open.
And slammed it shut again almost as fast.
“Oh, no. No thank you. Oh fuck buggery hell.” New York shoved into Violet’s vowels when she was being unladylike. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and retched, twice. Jack began calculating a knight-path in case she outright swooned, but Violet straightened with a determined and paper-white expression.
“That can be dealt with later,” Jack said. “Let’s check on the kitchen.”
It didn’t sound as though the man—or what remained of him—was in danger of going anywhere. Nor was the glass on the floor. Jack would send some of the stronger-stomached servants to clean up later.
The kitchen was no longer under siege, and Maud and Oliver had made their way there. Oliver was worriedly clutching a tin of biscuits. Dorothy had vanished, but a kitchen maid was busy scooping coal into the largest stove. Given the hour of the day, the house’s guests were crowding out what would very shortly be a working kitchen. Jack announced that they were moving into one of the parlours, where at least arses could be parked on comfortable chairs.
“Bring the biscuits,” he added to Oliver.
“They didn’t like being shot at,” said Maud to Jack once they’d relocated. “Or having a fire set at their feet. They took off in short order.”
Jack nodded to Oliver, who turned pink at the implied praise.
“What happened upstairs?” Maud asked.
“Someone got in. The house … dealt with it.” Violet went to sit next to Maud, who responded to some invisible signal and wrapped an arm around Violet’s waist. Violet dropped a kiss on her hair.
“He must have come down from the roof, to access that window,” said Jack. “You’ll have to strengthen the wards up there, Violet.”