a few good turns with the knife she carried before taking that slash over the brow. She’d be dead but for his skill, and he’d be dead but for her help.”
He fell silent, sifting through titles.
“I would fight like that, if I cared enough for the person,” I confessed with endless devotion in my eyes.
Mr. Thornfield quirked a smile, granting me the merest glance. “You would have eaten their hearts in the marketplace afterwards. Just fetch me the magnifying glass on the desk there? Damned if I can make out this inscription.”
So it went; day after day he gave me smiles rather than scowls, and at times I tilted my head up at the perfect evening angle when he passed my chair to refill our glasses of Scotch, and still my lips went unkissed and my questions unanswered. Despite these obstacles, I was achingly fulfilled over the simple act of wanting—having passed so much time seeking necessities, a combatant in an arena where to lose is to die, possessing the leisure to lie awake yearning after caresses I did not merit felt like an extravagance in and of itself.
That is, until work upon the cellar was completed a fortnight after Sahjara’s weapons demonstration.
• • •
The pinging of distant hammers and circular progression of workmen hauling rubble out the back exit had been a torment, and I do not mean in the sense of peace disrupted; I yearned to know what was below; and when one day I came downstairs for breakfast to discover profound silence save the ticking of the standing clock, I quickly inferred that the men had, at last, finished.
“Congratulations.” I took the tea Mr. Singh offered me, containing a splash of milk and one lump of sugar, exactly as I liked it.
“Might I ask upon what account, Miss Stone?”
“The completed renovations downstairs.”
Mr. Thornfield stirred his coffee, transfixed by the newspaper; Mr. Singh nodded graciously, whilst an uncaring Sahjara yawned over her bowl of spiced porridge.
“The immediate dangers of an unsafe substructure have been seen to, yes,” Mr. Singh reported, “but it remains best to consider the place entirely unsafe, ladies. That is, supposing you value your lungs, for the place is yet a haven for mould and damp.”
Sahjara’s nose wrinkled; Mr. Thornfield made a remark about the weather.
Unsafe, my shapely white arse, I thought.
That night, I heard a tread in the corridor outside my bedroom which was neither Mr. Singh’s stately glide nor Sahjara’s heedless prance. It was Mr. Thornfield’s vigorous stride, at four o’clock in the morning.
A frontal attack seemed best, as the cellar was now kept locked during the day—and should I catch Mr. Thornfield at whatever nocturnal activity he had been indulging in, I could claim to have been frightened of intruders sent by the odious Mr. Sack. At any rate, I did not fear my nominal master’s wrath, for he now showed me every courtesy, including the caustic teasing I had come to relish. Two days I waited; then a long crate was delivered to Highgate House and quickly spirited away.
Tonight, I determined, and after pleading the excuse of a headache, I lay awake and fully dressed with my ears tinnily ringing, so hard did I listen for the faintest whisper of sound. Midnight chimed, then one o’clock; at last, a bit before two, I heard a man’s steady footfalls. As I had done when eavesdropping upon his conversation with Mr. Singh, I waited a few minutes until I knew Mr. Thornfield was fully engaged and then slipped from my bedchamber with a fitfully flickering candle.
When I reached the door to the cellar stairs, again I heard the suggestion of movement below; this was all to the good, however, and—finding it unlatched—I opened it.
Where once only rubble and the columns of the house’s foundations stood, here a polished wooden staircase plunged below the earth. Though I glimpsed wall sconces, they were unlit, and the breath seized in my chest at the thought of my taper going out, for the terrain was now an uncharted one.
Step by step I advanced, careful of the faint echoes of my healed injuries, eyes watering as I peered into the gloom. The noises grew louder—what was he doing, this unexpected love of mine, that he waited for the dead of night and hid below the earth’s surface?
I reached the bottom and stopped, suddenly fearful; a queer, sweet reek like badly mouldering apples coated my throat. Shaking minutely, I turned the door handle.