Miles could not have agreed more. It was the only way to ensure that she would be safe. And that he would know where she was. “Lady Thornton, you are not evil, and I will not send you to Newgate,” he said, trying to strike a tone between imperious and polite. He was almost ready to tell her that even if she were sent to Newgate she would end up in his custody, but decided against it. “You are coming back with me to Dearbourn Hall where you will remain until another body is found. At that point, once you have been convinced of your innocence, you can decide to stay or return to your own house.”
“Absolutely not. I cannot go to Dearbourn Hall. I mean, I will not go.”
“Why?”
Clio hesitated. There were a thousand reasons she could give, none of them revealing the fact that her family reviled her. She countered with a question of her own. “My lord, do you possess anything so precious to you that you would rather suffer than lose it?”
The query caught Miles by surprise. “Yes,” he answered finally. “My cousins.”
“So do I. My home. The only thing I have. And if my grandmother finds me at Dearbourn Hall, I shall lose it forever. Compared with that loss, the loss of my freedom is nothing. Please take me to Newgate.”
Miles regarded her with an indecipherable expression for a moment, then said, “Your grandmother is not in the habit of coming to my apartments. You can stay there. There’s nowhere else for you anyway, the rest of the house is full.” Watching her mouth open he added, “And there is no use protesting—you have no choice.”
“You mean I am your prisoner?”
“No. You are simply going to be forced to enjoy my hospitality.”
“Can you explain the difference?”
“It would take some time. It is very subtle.”
“Yes. I have noticed your subtlety. Along with your wit. And charm.”
“You are very kind, but you don’t need to flatter me.”
Clio blinked at him, and was torn between the desire to laugh and the desire to hit him over the head with a blunt object. “Why are you doing this? Is it because of Beatrice?”
“I suggest you refrain from mentioning that name in my presence again.”
Clio frowned. “Then why?”
“Because it seems to me that whoever has gone to all this trouble to frame you would be overjoyed if you turned yourself in—it would save them a lot of work—and I would hate to give them that pleasure. In addition, I do not care to spend another uncomfortable night pacing the street in front of your house.”
“Neither of those is a real answer.”
“No,” Miles conceded thinly. “But they are the only ones you are going to get.”
Clio suddenly felt very tired. Although it was only nine o’clock in the morning it felt as if it had been a very long day. She was tired of fighting, tired of worrying, tired of trying to reason with the irrational Deerhound, tired of trying to keep her thoughts straight, tired of trying to remember why she was evil, or why she wasn’t, tired of trying to recall where she wanted to go, and where she did not, tired of trying to keep her eyes open, and hold her head up and ignore the regular rhythm of the coach wheels as they bounced up-down-up-down-up-dowwn-up-dowwnn-up-dowwwnn-up-dowwwnnnn…
Miles carried Toast and Clio up the back stairs of Dearbourn Hall to his apartment without waking either of them. He would deposit Toast on a chair and her on his bed and then find Corin, he decided. But as he pulled the downy linen coverlet up over Clio’s sleeping form, her fingers curled gently around his. Unable to disentangle himself despite his best efforts (liar), he kicked off his boots and lay down next to her. In less than a minute, he had fallen asleep.
The wine decanter stood on the table next to the bed, untouched for the first time in months.
The working clock in Miles’s bedchamber quietly marked the passage of an hour, and Miles and Clio slept.
Four men arrived unexpectedly at Which House to deliver a handsome new armoire to Clio’s bedroom and remove her old one, now strangely heavy. Snug was sure he had seen one of them before, and Princess Erika felt certain—whether it was a premonition or the sight of a sliver of yellow sleeve peeking out from beneath the cuff of one of their shabby work robes—that there was a mystery afoot concerning the viscount Dearbourn. This affiliation was confirmed when one of them reappeared shortly with a note saying that Clio was engaged on a very secret investigation on behalf of the viscount and would not be back for several days, accompanied by a purse containing five hundred pounds “as a retainer for her services.” In the kitchen, the Triumverate began work on a new play about enchanted servants.
The clock counted off another hour.
Three new silk gowns were delivered at a side entrance of Dearbourn Hall by a young apprentice from the studio of Octavia Apia, London’s most sought after dressmaker. A generous tip kept her from probing too hard for the name of the gowns’ recipient.
Two hours went by.
The man known as the Vampire of London sat at the writing table in his room at Dearbourn Hall, carefully studying a document. He had to force himself to concentrate, not to mention stay seated. Every time he heard a chambermaid pass in the corridor, he jammed the document into a hiding space he had created between the top of the table and its base, and moved next to the door, hoping for a snatch of gossip. At last he heard what he had been listening for, the news that another body had been found. But when he discovered that no one knew where, or by whom, his face went white.
“Looked like he might faint he did,” one of the chambermaids told the Special Commission later.
“Or like he was real angry,” the other suggested.
The hands on Miles’s clock traced a complete circle.
A shriek echoed through the west wing of Dearbourn Hall as Lady Alecia discovered that one of her favorite hairpieces—indeed, the one she had been planning to wear to the wedding—was missing. Corin held off rousing his master but promised that a full search of the house would be made, and pretended to consider Mariana’s order that the malefactor be severely flogged.
Another hour passed.
Doctor LaForge entered the library, then passed into the reading alcove at its rear. He slid a volume with dark blue binding off the shelf, inserted a piece of paper between the eleventh and twelfth pages, and returned it to its place.
Ten minutes later, Mariana’s maidservant Jocelyn entered the alcove, looked over her shoulder to make sure she was not observed, removed the same book from the shelf, and left.
Three quarters of an hour ticked by.
Responding to a summons from Mariana, Corin was relieved to hear that he was not expected to give a report on how the footmen were progressing in their search for the thief of Lady Alecia’s hairpiece. Rather, he was told that because one member of Mariana’s entourage was feeling low, the program for the night was being changed from a ball to the latest craze in entertainments, “a tablooviant.”
“Tableaux vivant,” Doctor LaForge corrected her.
“Darling Saunders suggested it,” Mariana went on to Corin, ignoring her tutor. “It is the rage in Europe and I shall have the first one of the season here. Everyone must dress up like characters from famous works of art. I shall go as the goddess Diana. She is the one with all the baby animals around her, isn’t she?”
“I believe that is Saint Francis,” Doctor LaForge put in, but was again unheeded.
Half dreading and half dreaming of Miles’s reaction to this change, Corin dispatched three-quarters of the footmen on the staff to spread word of the substitution, and the other quarter in the search of “darling baby birds” to adorn Mariana’s costume.
Throughout Dearbourn Hall, clocks chimed five.
An apologetic and somewhat breathless Corin wakened Miles then, who frowned when he heard about the tableaux vivant, frowned harder when he saw what he was supposed to wear, and frowned harder still when he learned of the missing wig. He used his special key and disappeared up the hidden staircase inside his clock. If C
orin had been surprised to find his master in bed with a woman, he did not show it.
The clock ticked on undisturbed by his passage, and undisturbed Clio slept. After a few hours, she began to dream.
She was small, a little girl, and she was walking around a fair, holding a man’s hand. He bought her a sugared citron. It was the first time she had tried one.
“Do you like it?” the man asked, and she nodded, even though she wasn’t sure. She wanted the man to be glad.
“I knew you would,” he said, happily drinking the juice out of his own. “You are just like your daddy, and daddy has a taste for them.”
Clio felt a surge of happiness then, for being with her father, being like her father. She held his hand tighter, willing him never to let her go, and he pushed her hair off her forehead affectionately. She raised her face to smile at him and tell him she loved him, too, but he was gone. Instead she saw a sign floating above the heads of the fair crowd with something written on it in large black letters, and she knew instinctively that it contained a crucial clue. She ran toward it and for an instant she could almost see the letters, almost make them out—
She awoke abruptly. In the split second between unconsciousness and consciousness, Clio caught one last glimpse of the spinning sign and the letters froze in her mind. N-E-V-E-R-D-E-S-I-R-E. Never Desire. Could that be what it said? Could that be the clue? It felt right, almost. Never desire. It made sense, sort of.
“Is there something you need, Lady Thornton?” said a voice behind her, and Clio’s eyes shot open.
She must have walked in her sleep again. She was standing in the middle of what should have been a beautiful room. Even in the pale darkness she could make out the expensive sheen of the smoky gray velvet that covered the walls, but instead of furniture there were only crates stacked in the corners. To her right was a set of windows, under which stood four trunks with clothes spilling out of them. To her left was the lofty bed from which she had presumably sleepwalked, its striped hangings supported by lightly silvered pillars in the shape of ancient columns. And at her feet lay an overturned wooden box from which had been spilled a glass figurine in the shape of a headless bear, the bear’s head, a handful of checkers, a sling shot, and what had once been a small gold table clock, which was now a not-so-small pile of gold coils and gears. Clio bent to pick it up, but the voice behind her—Corin’s voice—stopped her.
“Don’t worry about the clock,” he said amiably. “It was one of the first His Lordship made and hasn’t functioned right in years. Besides, we’ve more than enough around—” he made a wide gesture with his arm, and Clio saw that while there were no chairs in the room, there were indeed three other clocks “—and it will be good for His Lordship to have something to work on.” Noting the uncomprehending look on her face, and the fact that—despite the warnings Miles had given him about the tantrum she would throw when she awoke and the demands she would make to be taken to prison—she was not speaking, he rushed on. “I can have a bath ready in ten minutes if you like, and these gowns are for you.” Corin opened a hidden door in the wall behind which lay a built-in cupboard containing three dresses, each one ten-thousand-times lovelier than the one the woman at the fair had been wearing. “They are only temporary, of course, until Octavia can get your measurements.” When she still had not said anything, he asked, “Are you all right, Lady Thornton?”
Clio gazed at him. “I am still dreaming, aren’t I?”
But any doubts about whether she was awake or asleep were put to rest when she moved to take a step forward. The pain that shot up through her ankle brought back the events of the previous night with astonishing clarity, as did the appearance of Toast, who came dashing into the room with a clatter. If she were still dreaming, she would definitely have dreamed a better-behaved monkey.
He jumped up and down in front of her for a moment, then reached for her hand and tried to drag her through a partially open door. Clio looked at Corin. “Is there food through that door?”
“Yes. It just arrived. I did not know what he liked to eat, so I had the kitchen send up a bit of everything.”
“That is exactly what he likes to eat,” Clio told him, “as often as possible.” She addressed the monkey. “You go on, Toast. I am not hungry.”
Toast threw his chin up at her, a gesture of intense disdain, and crossed his arms.
“Really. I—” Anything further Clio would have wanted to say was drowned out by Toast chattering at her intensely. Deeming argument futile, she rolled her eyes and allowed herself to be led out of the bedroom.
Clio had been wrong. She was famished, and Toast lost no time in pointing this out to her. Corin had taken the liberty of dismantling one of the furniture towers to find a round, leather covered table and two chairs, and it was here, next to a window, that Clio and Toast dined. From this point Clio could see the rooftops of London in the growing twilight and below them, the small clusters of coachmen and grooms who had deposited their parties at Dearbourn Hall an hour earlier, and would wait outside all night until their services were needed. Over roasted capon stuffed with brown bread and parsley, Corin answered her questions about how she had arrived there (carried up by His Lordship), if the residents of Which House knew where she was (yes), whether any constables had gone there looking for her (no), what she had done all day (slept), if she had, um, been alone (Corin was afraid he did not know), and where His Lordship was at that moment (posing as a hunter in a recreation of a Titian painting in the Great Hall before a crowd of four hundred assembled guests).
“You must be joking,” Clio said. She felt remarkably better.
“No.” Corin confined himself to that one syllable because otherwise he might have been tempted to share with her the choice expressions Miles had used before departing, and he did not feel that was his place. “He asked me to extend to you his compliments and make myself available should you need anything. Is there anything you desire?”
Clio started to shake her head, then stopped. His words triggered her memory of the end of her dream, of the words Never Desire. Again she felt that they were almost, but not quite, right.
“I think I could use a library,” she answered finally. She always found being surrounded by books conducive to thinking, and perhaps looking over A Compendium of Vampires would help her sort her mind out and reveal to her the meaning hidden behind the spinning sign. It would certainly force her to stop thinking about the dresses she had glimpsed shimmering in the cupboard, especially the purple one. Because Clio Thornton of Which House did not think about clothes—about the pitifulness of her two dresses, about the fact that she had never had a new gown, about the sound that new silk would make as she walked, providing she did not trip, about what it would feel like next to her skin—ever, and definitely not during investigations in which she was the main suspect.
“A library,” Corin repeated. “It might take me some time to transfer the entire library here. Is there something in particular you were looking for?”
“Yes. Or rather, no. Sort of. If you would just show me to the library, I could find it myself.”
Corin mustered a tight smile. “No, no. Please. You must let me get it for you.”
Clio was about to protest his politeness when something about his words stopped her. “What do you mean, I must let you get it for me?”
Corin’s smile became fixed. “The viscount said you did not wish to be seen, and since the house is filled with people, it was his suggestion that you stay here.”
“Suggestion?”
Corin sighed and the smile disappeared. “Order. He said I was not to let you leave his apartment.” He watched her and was glad to see how calm she seemed. Miles had warned him that she might be upset to learn that she was, for a time anyway, a prisoner, and had especially told him to be on the look out for hiccups, but she showed no sign of them. Indeed, she did not seem to be bothered at all.
“I see,” Clio said, idly toying with one of the serving spoons as she mentally
explored ways she could sneak out of the apartment. She was so preoccupied that she let the spoon slip from her fingers and onto the floor.
Clio was startled out of her thoughts by a loud thud, followed by a groan, both of which emanated from somewhere around her knees. She looked down and saw that Corin had bashed his head on the underside of the table when he went to pick up the serving spoon and was now lying unconscious at her feet.
She hesitated for almost two seconds. Then she checked to ensure he was breathing, rose from her chair, calmly moved past his inert body, and made her way to the door.
She was unhappy about having to leave Corin alone with his injury, but it was not really her fault. If Miles had not ordered her confined to his apartments, she probably would have had the manservant bring her the Compendium and would not have been so distracted by her own plans for escape that she failed to warn him before he hit his head. But she was certainly not going to sit quietly and be held prisoner.
It was Miles’s fault, therefore, that she left Corin slumped unconscious on the floor. His fault that she was forced to sneak out of the apartment and, clinging to the shadows, go in pursuit of the Compendium. His fault that in the interests of drawing minimal attention to herself she left Toast dozing on his chair next to the window and went alone. His fault that an hour later she was gulping for air in the small reading alcove off the side of the library, her heart racing, her lips pleading, in-desperate fear for her life.
Chapter Ten
Occasional bursts of applause from the Great Hall below filtered into the library as Clio combed its shelves. She had never seen so many volumes in one place. Even the finest libraries in England comprised only a hundred or so titles, but this one had to have at least four times that. She ran her fingers over the leather spines of the books with appreciative awe and a good measure of envy. As a child, books had been Clio’s refuge from her family. Every problem, every question, every irrational occurrence could be explained by a book—it was simply a question of finding the right one. What would it be like to have such a collection, she wondered to herself. To know you could read any book you wanted, at any time. To have all of human knowledge, everything you might ever want to know, stored away on shelves in a room in your own house—
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