has conceived his idea of a Big Push.’ He stopped, glancing from face to face. ‘Is nobody going to stop me, under the rules of the club? ‘Am I not too serious for you?’
‘I think we’re all listening to you, Scavvers,’ Brocky admitted.
Scavian put on his small, sad smile for them. ‘He will throw us all into the mix, gentlemen – saving yourself, Brocky. He will take up all his forces in two hands and cast us in the direction of the enemy. I hear Captain Goss is returning to retake command of your company, Salander, and that will be the trigger of this plan pulled.’
They sat in silence after that. Emily looked from face to face: Mallen tattooed and unreadable; Brocky’s scowl, and Tubal’s philosophic half-smile. Scavian met her gaze and then lowered his eyes, relighting his pipe with just a touch of his finger.
Late on, when Tubal declared the meeting of the Survivors’ Club over, it was Scavian who approached her to say, ‘Miss Marshwic, I wonder if I may escort you to your . . . to your tent.’ She read his dissatisfaction with the word and smiled at him.
‘Why, Mr Scavian, I would be delighted.’
It was quite dark without, the camp’s lanterns and candles looking like nothing so much as the marsh-wick she had witnessed with Mallen. She found the ground unaccountably treacherous with all the guy-ropes, as she and Scavian made a tentative progress towards where she was barracked.
So here we are at last. ‘Do you remember Deerlings House?’ she asked him.
‘It has never been far from my mind,’ he said. And then, with understated gallantry, ‘A man going to war could wish for a worse send-off than an evening of your company, Emily.’
A shiver went through her, from the cold, the company, the words. What a place is this! Out here on the edge of civilization, death and his harvest every other day, and I feel as though I have left a host of fetters behind me. Surely Miss Emily Marshwic of Grammaine would not have been seen thus, dressed as a soldier and leaning on a young gentleman, with three glasses of brandy inside her. How Alice would talk!
‘I have a great deal to thank you for, Emily,’ Scavian continued. She leant a little further into him, and his arm found its way around her shoulders to steady her. ‘It is because of you that I sought out Tubal when first I arrived here. Without you, I would not have found my club, my friends. I would have had no company but Lascari. I think you must have saved my life ten times over by now, just for pointing me in that direction.’
She could see, out at the edge of the camp, the dancing dots of fireflies, the swamp’s own torch-bearers. She stopped, seeing now for a second what Mallen could find to love in such a place.
‘God knows, this can be a lonely place,’ Scavian remarked in hushed tones. Around them the camp made subdued noises, everyone asleep now bar them and the sentries. ‘A man needs good company here.’
He felt warm against her in the dark, even through her jacket. She thought of the King’s mark on his chest, and what it would feel like to put her hand on that imprint. It seemed utterly incredible that she was here beside a King’s Warlock, with his arm about her. She was only Emily Marshwic, after all. How daring this should be. And yet how natural.
‘I’m glad I found you, Giles. I had thought . . .’ But she could not say what she had thought, for the words choked in her throat. A moment later she had her arms tight around him, her head on his shoulder, and he held her just as close. His arms were not iron hard and lean, as she might imagine Mallen’s to be, but they had a power in them, like the King’s own power. He was warm as a fire, hot as the swamp air. She felt his lips touch gently on her cut-short hair. What a spectacle we must make. Thank God for the darkness.
The brandy, the place, the strangeness; what else could she blame? This was a new world, here, with new rules. She knew, though it would have shocked and horrified that previous Emily Marshwic of Grammaine, that she could ask him to lie with her now. She need not even ask: such things could be communicated without a word being