George. George Bastoke. A new memory, this one full of pain, punched its way between Alan’s eyes and into his head. He found himself cradling one of his hands to his chest, curling his body around it.
“My head hurts like someone’s been at it with a bloody hammer,” he said into the pillow.
“Can you sit up?”
That deserved a glare, and Alan delivered it. Hawthorn produced a stoppered glass vial, removed the cork, and held it out.
“See if you can take a few sips.”
Alan continued glaring.
Hawthorn’s mouth twitched. He took a sip from the vial himself. “It’s not magical. Just a tonic. It’ll send you back to sleep, most likely, but it’ll help the head too.”
What was the worst it would do—kill him? Then his head wouldn’t hurt. Alan took the vial and drank a mouthful. It tasted surprisingly pleasant, like watered-down honey and herbs. And he was indeed asleep again before he could bring himself to mutter a thank-you.
The second time Alan woke, his headache had retreated. It was occupying only a small attic rather than the whole bloody mansion.
The light had changed; the room was lit by an elegant gas lamp as well as a deep golden soup of sunset. Jack was still in the chair, still in his stained clothes. A full glass of wine and an empty plate lay on a side table, and he was reading a book bound in red leather.
Alan explored his memories of the past few months like someone gingerly handling an ancient scroll. Pieces slipped and crumbled. He remembered … Edwin handing him a loop of paper with one side, and the idea of channels carved within him by the rosary. Alan held that image and breathed with it, as he’d done when Bastoke was pouring that yellow spell around his head. It had felt like the perturbation was working. And then he’d felt nothing.
“I have most of it back now, I think.” His voice was a dry ache.
Jack put the book down at once. “Name and year and Prime Minister.”
“Asquith. Nineteen-nine. And my name’s Julius Caesar.”
Jack lifted a hand, hiding the shape of his mouth. “And mine?”
Alan automatically delivered one of the worst profanities he knew. “My lord,” he added.
Jack stood from the chair. He tugged a bell rope to summon a maid, and ordered tea. They were in Jack’s own townhouse, then. The style of this room fit with the parts Alan had already seen.
A slow, awful dread was winding Alan’s guts around its hands. He did remember it all. He remembered the hatred in Violet’s voice and the anger in Robin’s, when his traitorous role in Bastoke’s scheme had been made clear. He didn’t have any memory of how Jack had looked. He hadn’t had the courage to glance in Jack’s direction at all.
And now Alan was … here. How? What had happened between Alan falling unconscious in the Lockroom and now?
Alan’s tongue thickened and his heart thudded rapidly. However it had happened, he was alone in the heart of Jack’s territory. Jack had ordered tea, as if settling in for a leisurely session of—what? Interrogation? A slow, masterful flaying with the edge of Jack’s insulting tongue? Alan would prefer a hard beating with sticks to the way his betrayal squatted invisibly in the room between them, fouling the air and leaving him tense and miserable with nerves.
The tea arrived. Jack brought a cup and saucer to the bed and gestured Alan to sit up and take it. Perhaps this was where the poison was. Alan was too thirsty to care. Black tea, very sweet. It was the best thing his parched throat had ever experienced.
“So,” said Jack calmly. “Did you fuck me as part of playing the spy?”
Arsehole that he was, he’d waited until Alan had a mouthful of hot tea. Some of it went down the wrong way. Alan choked, spilled tea onto his shirt, and contemplated tossing the rest of the cup in Jack’s face.
God, he was so tempted to say yes. To drive a knife into this and let it die. But he hesitated too long.
Jack answered his own question. “No. I didn’t think so.”
Alan had learned a new method of lying from Maud Blyth: Don’t say anything untrue. Keep your secrets in the gaps between your words. But he’d lied in action, he’d betrayed them all to the elegant monster that was George Bastoke, and now the weight of that sat leaden on his shoulders.
“I didn’t need to,” he said. “Maud and Violet—even Edwin—they all let me into the fold without thinking twice. I was trying bloody hard not to fuck you, as a matter of fact. Given that it seemed like the worst decision I could make.”
“What happened to that plan?” said Jack, down in those dangerous registers of his voice.
“My willpower failed and I did it anyway. Christ, you’re a smug prick.” Nothing to lose. He might as well interrogate in return. “What happened?”
“To my willpower? I wasn’t exerting any.”
“To me. To everyone. What happened in the Lockroom?”
Jack told him. It took some time, and the growing horror of it got under Alan’s skin until he couldn’t sit motionless in the bed any longer. He got up and paced, and had more tea, and listened with gritted teeth to the disaster that was his own fault.
Jack hadn’t stuck around to find out how much of the Barrel was still intact, but he’d sent a servant to that corner of London later, and the answer was: not much. The same servant then went to Spinet House, where nobody answered the door to knocking, but an hour later a note from Violet was delivered. The others were all safe.
Alan’s legs weakened with relief to hear that, and he leaned against the bedpost. Something shaped like a prayer haunted the roof of his mouth. His back and one of his knees ached as if—well, as if he’d been dumped unconscious on a hard floor and left there, and then—
And then what?
We got out just in time, Jack had said. No specifics.
Alan might be small for a man, but neither Violet nor Adelaide would have the strength to carry him bodily out of a collapsing building. And from the sounds of things, Robin had had his hands full with Edwin.
A dangerous emotion broke in waves against the wall of Alan’s will.
“You saved my life.”
Jack didn’t deny it. His mouth curved a little. “Next time I’ll leave you to die, if your pride insists.”
There was that cut on his head. And he’d sat here in those ruined clothes as Alan slept, and made Alan’s tea perfectly, and Alan deserved none of it. Alan wanted to toss it in his lordship’s face like a handful of hated diamonds.
The waves broke through, and they were scalding hot. Before Alan’s common sense could raise even a feeble protest he was standing between Jack’s legs, leaning down to grab hold of Jack’s shoulder and shake. It was like trying to shake a lamppost.
“What the devil—”
“Stop pretending you’re not angry,” Alan snarled. “It’s—it’s fucking patronising, is what it is, and I can’t stand it.”
Jack’s free hand went to Alan’s wrist, as if to remove it, and Alan lost his head entirely. He planted himself in Jack’s lap; the chair was large enough that he could wedge his knees on either side of Jack’s hips and rest his full weight on Jack’s thighs. Jack went still. His pupils darkened and his mouth tightened. The air between them had the heady closeness of the hour before the heavens opened and flung down a storm.