Page 33 of Infamous

Firstboat? Eddie wanted to interrogate this, but resisted the urge to draw him back out from under his hat to ask more questions. Liza hadn’t reacted to anything that had been said; she had been perfectly polite to Eddie for the first hour of their journey, asking her the usual sorts of questions that could maintain a tentative back-and-forth between two people who were not yet at ease with each other, but once they had lapsed into silence neither of them had attempted to break it again.

They were staying for the night at a small inn, at the centre of a town that was really only a handful of buildings that had sprung up on either side of the road; everybody was so exhausted from the strangely wearing task of sitting still for eight hours that they drifted away from one another without making plans for dinner. Rose and Eddie were to share a room, and once they had made it up to the narrow, comfortable attic lodgings, each sat down on a bed and considered the other.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Eddie said, her throat dry. ‘I sort of .?.?. didn’t think you would.’

Rose sighed. ‘Neither did I. But then my mother said it might be a good chance to get to know Albert away from London before we marry – she thinks we’re heavily chaperoned, of course, she has no notion that these people are as likely to keep a proprietary eye on us as they are to renounce their vices and turn back to God – and .?.?. if you must know, I kept thinking about you squirrelled away in some mysterious house with Nash Nicholson, and I thought that if I didn’t come to keep an eye on you, you might end up drowned in the lake or sacrificed upon an altar after too many drinks.’

‘And now that you’re here,’ said Eddie, ‘at least you might reap the benefits of the sacrifice. Buy favour with the gods.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rose. She looked just as tired as Eddie felt. ‘I suppose you were having some riotous party in your carriage, while we were making polite conversation and reading?’

‘Something like that.’

A silence stretched between them, populated by all manner of unsaid things, but Rose broke it by asking if they ought to go and see about some supper, and Eddie agreed that they ought indeed. Eddie sat at one end of the table opposite Nash, Rose sat at the other opposite Albert, and everybody in between ate and talked sleepily, unaware that they were being employed as social buffers.

The next day Nash was clearly in better spirits; instead of collapsing into a corner to sleep the day away, he opened a bottle of wine at ten o’clock in the morning and engaged Mr Akerele in a lively discourse about parliamentary reform, rubbing Juno the dog behind the ears as she smacked her tail enthusiastically against the inside of the carriage. This time it was Eddie who pretended to be unconscious, to prevent herself from being dragged into a conversation about politics which was sure to reveal her as a nincompoop of the highest order.

Pretending to be asleep quickly gave way toactuallybeing asleep, and she was only awoken when somebody tapped her on the arm; opening her eyes, she saw that it was Liza, and that she was now pointing out of the window.

‘You can just about see the house from here,’ she said.

Eddie sat up and peered out of the window, at first confused about what she was looking at; after a moment it started to make sense, and she realised that the vast, glittering sheet of grey that had been confounding her was in fact the lake.

It wasenormous, more like a sea than a lake – if she squinted, Eddie could just make out the far shore, bordered by a thicket of evergreens. Hills swelled on either side, also crowded with trees and topped with pale crags that were almost the same colour as the silvery sky, looking wilder than anything Eddie had ever seen in her life. She half-expected a dragon or a very large eagle to come swooping across the vista to make it complete.

The one thing shecouldn’tsee was a house.

Nash noticed her looking.

‘God. Dreadful weather for it. When it’s sunny you can almost imagine that it looks inviting.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Liza.

Clearly therewasa house, and Eddie simply wasn’t trying hard enough to see it; she practically pressed her nose against the glass, and after a moment she realised what she had missed.

The house wasn’t hiding among the pines at the shore; it wasn’t on the shore at all. There was a small, lopsided island rising out of the lake to the east, almost completely camouflaged due to the thick covering of trees that made it near-identical to the woods on the mainland.

‘The isle is St Bede’s,’ said Nash, ‘and the house is named for it, too – apparently the poor fellow was never canonised, but he’s saintly enough for us.’

Eddie was only able to eventually spot the house because it had been built in light grey stone, so that it loomed palely out of the greenery, the roof and top two storeys visible for a moment before the road turned and it slipped from view. From their vantage point as they followed the curve of the lake, Eddie could see that one side of the island ended abruptly in sheer cliffs, the land falling away dramatically. A few white birds were circling, buffeted by the wind.

‘And therein lies our doom,’ said Nash dramatically, causing Mr Akerele to sigh in a pained sort of fashion.

‘How many times a week does the boat come from the mainland?’ he said, his voice grim with apprehension.

‘Oh, once or twice,’ said Nash, sounding all too pleased to deliver this bad news. ‘Although I rigged a system to signal them, should we all be driven mad by faces in the mirror and figures in the wallpaper and need to flee.’

‘Do you not have your own boat?’ said Eddie, eyeing the unfriendly-looking lake and shivering at the thought of being adrift on it, tiny and insignificant in the face of all that menacing water.

Liza made a disapproving noise. ‘Wedid.’

Nash reached down and groped about until he found the mostly empty bottle of wine, and then took a fortifying pull from it.

‘Apparently there is no limit to the amount of times a man can apologise for a boating accident—’

‘Shipwreck,’ said Liza. ‘A maritime disaster, precipitated by gross negligence and obscene quantities of alcohol—’

‘Maritime meansocean, Liza,’ Nash said acidly. ‘Were we atsea?’ Eddie glanced at Dayo out of the corner of her eye, and saw him press his lips together in grim solidarity. ‘We are unfortunately between boats. I meant to .?.?. Well, I haven’t been here for quite a while. Five years? Six?’