Page 82 of Infamous

‘Who?’

‘Well .?.?. I can only assume that it left the island with Miss Li.’

Eddie sat with this, unease brewing. Her instinct was instant denial; she could not countenance Rose doing such a thing, even in an almighty snit. But then .?.?. shehadseemed deeply hurt, and it had all happened so fast.

If not to punish her – and Eddie could not believe she would stoop so low – she might have taken it to use as bait, to attempt to lure Eddie out of the wilderness and back to domesticity in London. She could picture it now – Rose going upstairs one last time to fetch something she had forgotten, hovering in the room indecisively with their argument still ringing in her ears, and then snatching the manuscript up at the last second and carrying it carefully back to London, the pages stashed somewhere about her person.

‘God damn it,’ Eddie breathed. ‘Sheknewhow much it meant to me. She wanted me to come back to town, but I .?.?.’ She cast about as if the room would provide an answer to this problem, and came up empty. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do now?’

Nash clapped her bracingly on the arm.

‘You stay here and see the damned thing through. You have me on your team – together we will be unstoppable. I am sure she will feel terribly guilty about it and send it back to you shortly, with her tail between her legs. You can still finish it, can’t you?’

Eddie clenched and unclenched her fists, feeling as if her heart were miles away in a rickety carriage.Howcould Rose do this to her? And how could she ever expect to be forgiven? It was far easier to just be righteously, deliriously angry than to try to examine the more complicated emotions of their separation, so anger it was.

‘Damn it,’ Eddie growled. ‘And damn her. Iwillfinish it. I will not go running after her, just as she wants. I will stay here, I will get it done, and when it is finished, it will bedespiteher.’

‘Splendid!’ said Nash. ‘I have always found spite to be delightfully motivating.’

His hand slipped off Eddie’s shoulder as she got to her feet and brushed down her skirts, now feeling equal parts dismayed and determined.

‘I shall start right away.’

‘Very good,’ said Nash, who had been left behind on the floor and was now scrambling to his feet. ‘In fact .?.?. I’ll come with you.’

To her great surprise, he did. He sat down opposite her in Dayo’s old seat in the library, flicking through a book he had pulled from the shelves, occasionally noting something down on the parchment next to him, and barely interrupted her at all. Once she had written a few pages, he crooked his finger at her until she slid them over to his side of the desk, and then sat reading them as she started on the next.

‘Did you mean to write that the constable looked “ponderous as an orb” here?’ he said, making a small note on the manuscript in his spidery script.

‘Ah. No,’ said Eddie. ‘That should say “owl”.’

They continued in this fashion for hours, Juno at their feet. Eddie’s feelings were still smarting, her jaw clenched tightly as she tried to keep her emotions at bay and focus on the work, but it helped beyond measure to have Nash at her side. He was a staunch companion for the rest of the day, his attention unwavering, focused in a way Eddie had never witnessed before; she felt a rush of fondness towards him as he frowned seriously down at her latest page, a tiny dot of ink decorating his chin.

When it came down to it, she thought, Nash reallydidunderstand her. He knew how important this opportunity was to her; he was clearly fighting all of his natural inclinations towards distraction and folly in service of her work, and she was extraordinarily grateful. Here she was, finally on the verge of completing her first novel, publication on the horizon, and Rose had abandoned ship – but Nash was there.

*

Eddie only realised that it was time for dinner when Valentine stalked into the library, took a book from the shelf at random and then threw it at her; luckily it bounced off the table leg rather than the back of her skull, and she only suffered a moderate to extreme shock.

‘You could have invited us politely, like an adult!’ she called after Valentine, who just cackled in reply.

The entirety of dinner was taken up by a good-natured argument that Kitty and Nash were having about Coleridge (Kitty in favour, Nash against). Eddie barely paid attention, scarfing down her chicken, her mind still in the library, her heroine Mrs Fortescue tumbling rapidly downhill and now lingering on the cusp of her darkest night. She escaped as soon as she could, ignoring Nash’s protests that she deserved a break after the day’s work, obtained a few more blankets and then returned to the library, where she wrote all the way through to the end of her candle. When it gave one last flicker and extinguished, she sat in near-darkness for a moment, loath to break her train of thought – but then sighed and gathered up her small stack of papers, heading for bed.

Her new room was far warmer and drier than her quarters on the second floor had been; any misgivings she had felt about staying on the island as the house fell apart around them were temporarily banished by the sleepy crackle of the fire, the blankets that smelled clean and dry, the fact that she could undress for bed without having to then attempt an athletic record in panicked leaping so as not to lose her limbs to frostbite.

She had just climbed sleepily under the bedclothes, wondering if she was smearing ink all over them and then deciding she was too exhausted to care, when she heard a soft knock at the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Napoleon Bonaparte. Out on leave. Time off for good behaviour.’

Eddie sat up, pulling her blankets up to her neck.

‘A likely story.’

‘C’est vrai, you charlatan. Let me in before the British catch sight of my enormous hat and ship me back to die.’

The door creaked open. Nash was still dressed, if a little dishevelled, a bottle of wine in his hand.