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‘Um… Mr Ambrose?’ My voice sounded slurred, even to my own ears.
‘Yes, Mr Linton?’
‘I have a question, Sir.’
‘Indeed.’
I waited, but he didn’t say anything. Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually asked the question yet. By Jove, I was a tiny bit confused tonight, wasn’t I?
I cleared my throat.
‘Are you… are you sure that nothing else happened? Up there in your office? Nothing else but me passing out?’
He hesitated. I saw his hand tighten around the walking stick that concealed his sword. His lips parted.
‘I…’
‘Here, Mr Ambrose, Sir!’ Like a fat little ball of lightning, the porter shot around the corner, and I mentally cursed the man and all his descendants to the seventh generation. Or maybe the eighth. ‘Here is the gentleman’s tailcoat! Dried and cleaned as requested!’
Although it was my tailcoat he carried, he handed it to Mr Ambrose, an action that didn’t endear him to me any more than his sudden appearance had. I added a few curses for the ninth and tenth generations. They probably more than deserved it. And I was sure my good friend Napoleon would see to it that they were adequately tortured if I asked him.
Mr Ambrose nodded to the man.
‘You’re dismissed. Take up your post again.’
‘Yes, Sir! Immediately, Sir!’
Emitting relief like a beacon did light, the man hurried off, and Mr Ambrose held out my tailcoat to me.
‘Here.’
‘About what I said,’ I tried to return to the earlier subject. ‘About what happened up there in your office… I’m pretty sure I can remember something about you and me-’
I didn’t get any further than that. Suddenly, I was cut off by a violent hiss. Mr Ambrose’s fingers had clenched into the material of the tailcoat, around a lengthy tear in the black cloth. He stared at the damaged garment with eyes like icicles.
‘Look at this,’ he told me, his voice matching the coldness of his eyes. ‘Look at this, Mr Linton. Now!’
Uncomprehendingly, I stared at the tear in the coat.
‘Yes? I see it. And? I must have ripped it somewhere. Maybe on a nail or something like th-’
‘That’s no tear,’ he interrupted me with deadly calm. ‘Do you not see that the whole is round? Do you not see the blackened edges of the cloth where it is ripped open? Those are gunpowder stains!’
My fuzzy brain tried to grasp the meaning of his words. It needn’t have bothered. Stepping so close to me that our faces were almost touching and I could see the darkness of his eyes, Mr Ambrose told me:
‘A bullet grazed you and ripped your coat open! Another inch and it would have buried itself in your flesh!’
The way he said your flesh sent shivers down my back. Shivers of fear, anger and… something else I couldn’t quite grasp.
He wasn’t shivering, though. He was colder and harder than I had ever seen him.
‘You could have died.’ He seemed to be speaking to nobody in particular. His icy eyes were staring right through me. ‘You really could have died.’ They were looking so far into the distance, those eyes of his - as if he was seeing some other world, another reality altogether. Suddenly, they refocused on me again, and he thrust the tailcoat into my arms.
‘Here. Let it be a reminder, Mr Linton.’
I staggered back, clutching the coat in my arms.
‘A reminder of what?’
