he had chosen was a blind alley, and she almost ran straight into him as he tried to make it out ahead of her. Abruptly she was standing between him and his escape route. Only then did she finally reach the thought: What if this wasn’t a good idea?
They were both breathing heavily: she was not used to running, and he was a thin-limbed, half-starved specimen of a man. The blindfold had been pushed back up his forehead, revealing wild mad-looking eyes.
‘Get out of my way!’ he spat at her.
‘Give me my sister’s purse.’ The words had fallen into place during the chase. Now, confronting him, she was not at all sure they were wise, but they came out anyway.
He bared his teeth and, with an ugly jerking motion, he had a blade in his hand – just an old kitchen knife, marbled with rust. ‘Just leave it,’ he hissed. His voice quivered, and she thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘Just get out of the way.’
‘You’re a deserter.’ Again, not the most diplomatic remark to level at a man with a knife, but her mind was still rattling after the chase. She was very aware that this was not a part of town she had ever frequented.
‘What if I am?’ He made an abortive gesture towards her with the knife, perhaps hoping that she would leap back and give him enough space to slip by, but she seemed to be nailed to the spot.
‘My brother, he’s fighting in the war,’ she told him. ‘My brother-in-law, too. Why shouldn’t you do your part?’
She saw very clearly when something snapped inside him, and abruptly he was right in her face, her nose filled with the unwashed reek of him, his blade wavering at the edge of her vision. ‘I did my part!’ he snapped. ‘I was a year on the Couchant. I took my wound! Twice I took my wound! But they wouldn’t let me rest. They had to send me back, over and over. You can’t know. You can’t tell me what it’s like.’
She kept herself very still. He had the stolen purse in one hand, close enough that she could have just taken it off him, had she dared move. The knife was an abstraction she did not go looking for, in case breaking his gaze set it in motion. ‘Are you going to stab me, then?’
A great shuddering breath went out of him, and it took something with it, blunting the edge of his desperation. ‘I just want to go somewhere they won’t make me fight.’ His thin, wretched voice snagged and caught as it came out of his throat. ‘I’ve got nothing, just . . .’
Alice will never forgive me. She took a step back and to one side. She could not quantify what it was she felt: it was not pity exactly, and it was not fear either, for, throughout, she had not felt any of the terror this encounter should have brought with it. Almost, she thought, it was duty that gripped her: as if she was writing a page into the text of how a daughter of Grammaine should behave. Magnanimously, it seemed.
He stepped away from her, the knife still held between them, circling her as though she was the dangerous one who might attack him at any moment. If he had simply taken to his heels, then he might have escaped. He wasted too much time, though, picking his away around her.
There was a shout from along the street, and she saw the flash of a red jacket. Then the deserter tried to make his exit, springing into motion away from her, away from that pursuit. She turned to watch him put distance between them, and there was a sound like a sharp rap, nothing dramatic at all. Even as it registered in her ears he was already falling, his hands thrust forward and up, as though he was offering both purse and knife to some higher power. Then he lay stretched out on the cobbles, weapon and bounty spilled from his grip.
Only then, after it was done, did Emily realize that she had seen a man die.
Alice hugged her fiercely when she arrived. ‘How could you be so stupid?’ she shouted, and similar sentiments. The two redjackets – Mr Northway’s own doormen, she realized – examined the body, and one reloaded his musket lazily.
‘All right, miss.’ The guard not attending to his gun nodded to her. ‘Looks like we were just