Clementine could almost see her sister’s long eyelashes batting innocently, her mouth turned into a perfect pink pout of entreaty.
“Which is exactly why I am in need of a helpmeet,” Theo said.
Clementine resisted snorting but only just.
“A true meeting of the minds,” Theo went on, usingexactlythe phrase that had hooked Clementine.
“You’re right, of course. You’re right about everything,” Olive purred in that voice everyone else heard as innocent but Clementine recognized as guileful. It was the same voice she used to shake loose extra pin money from Father. “Theo, darling, I need to use the necessary. I’ll be back in a moment and we can talk some more about our initial Continental itinerary. I have a feeling the Romans might be open to some of your more interesting ideas, but of course you’ll know best.”
“Inquire after that plate of roast beef, won’t you? It’s been ages since I asked for it.”
Clementine smiled, thinking of those skinny cats.
Olive appeared at the door. Clementine hadn’t needed her weapon. She hadn’t even needed to say anything. She merely had to stand there, take her sister’s hand, and gesture for her to shut the parlor door behind her.
This novel was going to have a very anticlimactic ending indeed.
They didn’t speak—or they didn’t speak with words. Something passed between them, though, a kind of anguish and relief and, Clementine dared say, love. Whatever had happened here was Theo’s fault. Or mostly Theo’s fault.
Of course, he hadn’t run away by himself.
Half Theo’s fault?
They climbed the stairs to Clementine’s room silently, and Olive burst into tears as soon as the door shut behind them.
“Come now,” Clementine soothed, leading her sister to the bed. Olive had had the foresight to leave the parlor with her portmanteau, and she was holding it against her chest as if it were a shield. Clementine tugged it gently from her and encouraged her sister to sit on the bed. “It’s over.”
“It’s not over!” Olive’s voice was high and frightened, which unnerved Clementine. Olive’s fear was in such contrast to her previous self-possession. “He’s going to find me! He’s going to find both of us!”
“I’m not going to let him do that.” Clementine pulled out of the embrace and regarded her sister. Olive’s eyes had turned into tiny blue waterfalls.
“I’m sorry,” Olive said in a pitiful, small voice that was more alarming than the tears. That Theo had cowed her unflappable sister was, in this moment, the greatest of his many offenses.
“You are not the one at fault here,” Clementine said, though the declaration sounded less than certain. She wasn’t sure what her feelings about Olive were, truth be told. The sense of betrayal she’d been carrying around had faded somewhat now that she had her anguished sister in hand, but Clementine was still hurt. And bewildered. But Clementine of all people understood how flattering Theo could be. How he could see inside one’s very soul, it felt like, find the holes one had thought were invisible to others, and start patching them, working so fast and so intently that it was only much later, when the patches dried and started crumbling that one realized he’d used only the thinnest and cheapest of plaster.
“It doesn’t matter who’s at fault,” Olive said, her voice taking on a hard edge as she dried her tears. “There’s no way out. If I don’t go with him, he’s going to ruin us. You don’t know what you’re up against.”
Clementine laughed bitterly, pulled her pistol from her waistband, and said, “I assure you, I know exactly what I’m up against.”
The next few seconds passed as if in a dream, one of those dreams where time gets muddled and things seem to happen both more quicklyandmore slowly than they ought. First, time moved too fast. Clementine heard Olive’s name being shouted, then her own. She spared a moment to wonder how Theo knew she was here but concluded it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Theo wasnotmarrying her sister.
The door burst open. The gun was in her hands. A shot rang out. Her sister screamed.
Next, time slowed, nay, lurched to a stop, as abruptly as the coach in the yard had earlier. A man cursed. It was a familiar voice, but not that of Theodore Bull. It was a voice from her past, a voice that used to laughingly sing “Here we go round the mulberry bush” with her when they came upon such a shrub in their wanderings.
Her own voice was the next to ring out across the room. “Arch!”
“Clem.”
“I shot you.”
“You did indeed.”
4
Go Ahead and Panic
The room erupted into a frenzy of feminine alarm as the Morgan sisters, after a beat of staring at Archie as if he were their own dead mother back from beyond the grave, started shrieking. They descended on him like a pair of vultures, and the relief that had slammed into him when he’d burst into the room and found them both well was replaced by annoyance. Ignoring them, he tore off his coat and cravat and yanked his shirt down from the collar to examine his wound, which felt like it was on fire. Using the cravat, he cleaned it sufficiently to confirm his sense that it wasn’t a dire injury. It hurt like the devil, though.
