“My father would rap the back of my head with his cane when I spoke out of turn. This very cane in fact.” The lord gestured to the cane in question.“I chose a less tempestuous approach with my own son, though I’ve come to see that as an error in judgment.” His eyes finally came to rest on Theo’s. They were heavy-lidded, so as to be discreet. It was difficult to read a man who only showed you half his eyes.
This was what he wielded in lieu of a cane.
“Whereare you taking us?” Polly repeated. She looked at Theo’s father with the kind of flint Theo had never quite managed.
“I’m takingyounowhere, Scribbler,” said Terrence. “You are a flea hitched to the back of donkey. You’ll be at the mercy of the city authorities. They will sit you down in front of these texts and relay to me whatever they manage to choke from you. So heed my warning, young lady, cough it up quickly. It is the only thing that might save you from the gallows now.”
“She has been punished enough,” Theo said, stomach still roiling, the shake of the train wreaking havoc on him. “And she was forced to help us.”
“Us?” Terrence Shop said, picking out that one word and spitting it back out. He looked out the window, contempt in the flicker of his eyelids. “Miss Prescott is an agent of the House, as are all Scribblers. They are mandated to report any crime to their superiors. To theHouse, if the crime necessitates, and yet not a single note of correspondence from Miss Prescott, when she could have called upon us at any time.” He leveled Polly with a glare. “You are a traitor to your kind, Scribbler. And such a shame, after all you’d done for your country.”
Theo thought of all she’d done—moving about the continent like a game piece, making trades for safety and never quite finding it.
There was a sizzle in the air of the compartment, the wick of a dynamite stick half-spent.
Polly kicked at her teacup and it shattered against the window, hot amber liquid sluicing the countryside. Her eyes shook in their sockets, tears brimming and spilling over. “My country stripped me of everything, including my fellowship, as a reward. I owe it no loyalty!”
The compartment door slid back into its recess, and a wide-eyed soldier appeared. “Sir?” he said, looking to the splintered china.
Terrence lifted a placating hand. “Close the door,” he said. “All is well.”
The door slid shut once more, the navy blue moving away beyond the stippled glass.
“Sit down, Scribbler,” he said. “Or you’ll go to the hounds sooner.”
“Polly,” Theo urged.
“Fuck you,” Polly said, and it sounded odd coming from her. More offensive, somehow.
Terrence spoke as though he hadn’t heard it. “I’ll admit to you, Theodore, that I did not think you had this stupidity in you.” It was cold, cutting. “When I’d found you’d not only left with the miners and Miss Harrow, but you’daidedtheir escape, I was confounded. I thought of your mother, lying on her deathbed, begging for reprieve from the pain. I wondered how any child could forget such an image, much less have it wiped away by the mere sight of another woman.” He turned baleful eyes on Theo. “I will forgive you, Theo, for following that cunt out into the fray. I will forgive you your weakness, your stupidity, for the very last time.”
Theo felt heat in his hands, at the back of his neck, in the empty pockets of his belly. He felt that familiar decline into boyhood, the same crippling hand on his shoulder pulverizing him into something smaller, lowering him to his father’s feet.
This time, resistance was easy. Theo squared his shoulders. “She didn’t beg.”
A flicker of confusion crossed Terrence’s face. “What?”
“Mother. She didn’t beg before she died. She cried. She prayed. She said all kinds of nonsensical things once the fever took hold. She told me she loved me, right at the end. But she never begged. You would know that, had you been there.”
Terrence’s expression turned arctic.
“The begging came long before the influenza,” Theo continued. “When she begged you for attention, for even the slightest show of affection. When she begged me not to accept my lordship. She was terrified, she said, that I’d grow cold, as you had grown cold.”
“You disappoint me” was all his father said.
“And I must disappoint you again. I won’t return to the House,” Theo said, his voice harder now, his ears ringing. “Not unless you agree to my terms.”
Terrence’s lip curled. “Found those convictions, have you?”
Theo took his time answering, he looked at his father squarely, an older man than when he’d last seen him. Just as tall and severe, but wearier than he would ever admit. “The Lords’ Army razed Trent,” he said. “And Dorser, and likely a dozen other places.”
Terrence’s lips quirked in frustration.
“There were hundreds of bodies on the Trent riverbanks, frozen in the snow,” he said. “Hundreds wounded inside a cold factory, some of them children. It was a slaughter.”
His father showed no reaction. No outward display of any sort.
“When my mother died, it was in a warm bed with several pillows and a thick blanket. Nurses sponging the sweat from her forehead, the maid spoon-feeding her, laudanum keeping her in a trance. But these people? They were dying on a cold factory floor with their limbs blown off, Crafter women holding their mouths shut to keep their crying from waking the children.”
