Page 73 of Baron Bolt

He walked in anyway.

CHAPTER 18

There were eleven steps between Ophelia and the door. A madman between her and the eleven steps. One pistol between them all.

She had counted the steps twice. She had counted the candles in the branch on the pianoforte. Five. Two of them guttering. The fire irons on the hearth. Three. The poker nearest. The paces from her chair to the poker. Four. Three too many against a cocked pistol. She had been counting for the better part of two hours. Counting was what her father had taught her when the stakes climbed past bearing and her face wanted to give her hand away.

“Never show the table your fear, Ophelia. Count the cards. There is always something left to count.”

Her cards were still on the table.

The madman was still muttering now. Half of it was not English. Some of it was not French either. She caught ja, ja under his breath, and once a run of Latin. He did not speak to her. He had asked her nothing since the beginning, when he had wanted only one thing. “Where is it? Where has it gone? When does it return?” Disgust turned in her stomach. It meant Damian.

Thunder bellowed over the house. Under it the mantel clock ticked, small and domestic and absurd.

Then, suddenly, the candle flames all bowed at once.

The door from the hall stood open and Damian was in it.

Rain dripped off him. That was her first thought, stupid and complete. He was wet. He had come hatless through the weather. His hair was plastered black-brown to his skull. The shirt hung off those enormous shoulders like sealskin and dripped onto the floorboards.

Lightning whitened the park beyond the windows. For an instant she saw him lit from two sides, candle-gold and storm-white, filling the doorway the way he filled every doorway. The relief went through her so hard it felt like a card falling face-up out of her sleeve. She was on her feet before she knew she had risen.

“Sit,” said the foreign lunatic.

The pistol swung to her.

Damian’s eyes came across the room. Both blues. The true one, and the one that had never quite agreed with it. He made a motion with one gloved hand.

Down.

She sat. Her heart did not.

“Monsieur.” Water tapped from his drenched shirt to the floor. “Let her go.”

“It came,” the thin man breathed. He stopped walking as a starved man stops before a laid table, afraid the food might startle. “It came back. You see, Luc? You see? It always comes home. The work always comes home.”

“I am here,” Damian said. “That is what you wanted. So let her go and lock the door behind her, and your work will stand in the light and look at its maker as long as it is required.”

Your work.

He said it evenly, of himself, confirming what the stranger had ranted about. The floor went out from under her. She was watching a wager she did not understand, made in a currency she had never been shown, and her husband had just pushed himself across the table like a stack of coin.

“No,” she said. It came out small. “Damian!”

“Ophelia.” He did not look at her. “Be still.”

The stranger laughed. A terrible sound. Breathless. Delighted. It went on a beat too long. He came forward with the pistol drifting half-forgotten in his hand. She watched the muzzle the way she would watch a dealer’s fingers. Then he began, horribly, to circle.

“Off with it,” he said. “The shirt. The shirt, the shirt.” His free hand made pulling motions in the air, as if he were the one wearing it. He rounded Damian’s shoulder, rose on his toes to peer at the line of his jaw, dropped back. “Stand in the light. There.”

Damian took off the shirt.

He did it quickly, his face shut. He laid it over the arm of the sofa and stood in his buckskins with the candlelight on him, and let the madman look.

And the madman took Damian in like drink. Circled again, muttering “ja, ja, gut, es hält.” She thought it meant it holds, and then he put out two fingers toward the left side of Damian’s face. Toward the pale scars climbing there.

His whole body went to stone when he did. Hands at his sides, curled. He was letting it happen and it made her heart quiver in sympathy.