saw it too.
‘I wish you the very best of journeys,’ he said. Then, just as she turned to go: ‘Miss Marshwic?’
She looked back, and saw he had held out one hand. Briefly, a light flared up in the palm: a dancing, flickering ball of ghostly flame that lit up his face for her. He smiled uncertainly. ‘The gifts of the King are for more than just war.’ With his other hand he took her wrist, gently pulled it towards him, then decanted some of the pale fire onto her own palm.
She gasped in shock, but there was only the faintest heat from it, and the flame skittered between her fingers, and danced there for long moments before it died. ‘Beautiful,’ she said in awe, and his shy smile grew. ‘We shall see you at Grammaine some day, Mr Scavian.’
‘It shall not be my fault if you do not.’ He helped her back into her seat and gave a courteous nod to Alice.
Looking through the back window of the buggy, she saw that he remained standing there before Deerlings House, looking after them until she could not see him, and perhaps longer.
8
From that moment in time, events fell into place without me asking them to. As though I have been moved like a piece on a chessboard, from square to square until the moving led me here. Looking back, it seems like the pulling of a trigger on a musket: that terrible pause while the arc-lock spins, which stretches for an eternity in the mind, and yet one knows that the powder must catch and the gun will fire. The inevitable can barely be stayed, and never stopped.
She would liked to have seen Northway’s face when it was announced, ‘A Miss Marshwic to see you.’ That would have helped what was about to come.
As she entered his office, the first thing she saw was that damnable smile, cold and sardonic. His head was cocked a little on one side and his hands clasped before him on his desktop, amongst the ledgers and stacks of parchments.
‘Why, Miss Marshwic, what a pleasant surprise – not to mention unexpected. Have I or the King done something to displease you? Nothing else seems able to lure you to my chambers lately.’
‘Mr Northway,’ she acknowledged, but all the words she had prepared while waiting had remained outside the room as she stepped in. She fought to recapture them in the sudden silence that followed.
‘Please sit, if you will, Miss Marshwic. I have pains in my neck and back enough, from sitting at this desk all day, without straining myself looking up at you.’
Grateful for this time to think, she took a seat across the desk from him, like an applicant for some menial position.
‘I was surprised to see you at Deerlings, Mr Northway,’ she said.
‘As the governor of Chalcaster, it would have been an unpardonable affront for them not to invite me,’ he said. ‘I daresay it was hoped that some pressing business would keep me away. Indeed, I regretted the venture as soon as I set out for the place. A man can take a dislike to being snubbed by so many all at once.’
‘You regret attending, then?’
He looked at her for longer than she was comfortable with, before he said, ‘As it happens, there were consolations.’
She broke eye contact and looked down at the wooden surface of the desk. Here it comes. Deep breath now. ‘Mr Northway, I fear I have been quite churlish towards you of late.’
‘If so, you are in good company,’ he replied wryly.
‘You did save my life, and that of my sister, and it is unfair of me to lose that fact amidst the . . . real reason that you were there.’
She did not look up, but there was an encouraging silence from him, and no further snide remarks.
‘And,’ she added, ‘you were the first man to offer to dance with me at Deerlings, before the King took my hand, after which I had to . . . to beat men away with a stick, is how my sister decorously put it. So perhaps our experiences at that house were not so different, all told.’
‘I don’t know. The King didn’t dance with me,’ he remarked, and she looked up sharply. His smile was still there, but perhaps it was less cold and impersonal than before.
‘You do not make this easy for me,’ she chided him.
‘I am not in the business of making things easy,’ he told her without apology.