Roffe’s booted foot struck her midsection with a dull thud, and she cried out in pain.
“Little fool!” Roffe yelled, face mottled in rage. “Do you think I need your meddling? Do you think the way of making that thing work wasn’t already in my head, merely waiting for the time to make it so?” He kicked her again, and Cat curled up into a ball to protect herself. “Do you think I need your help, you bloody, scheming, gutter cat?”
Roffe left her and grasped the little cleaner, lifting it off the floor. Its wheels and brushes spun wildly, and steam gushed from its bottom in a hissing plume.
“I’d have had it!” he screamed, heaving the device across the room.
A screech of metal from inside sounded as the device struck a workbench and then the floor. It wound up on its back, side dented in near the springbox. Cat could hear the scraping sound of the spring against that dent as it continued to unwind. Steam continued to hiss — slower and slower until it gave out with a last, sputtering gasp.
“I’d have had it in time,” Roffe said again, panting from his exertion.
He glared down at her, jaw clenched, and Cat covered her head with her arms as he drew is foot back again. The thought to attack him entered her mind, but where would that leave her? She’d be out on the street sure, then — perhaps would be now, angry as Roffe was.
His kick landed low on her back this time, beneath her ribs, and she was thankful for the sturdiness of her stays there even as she felt the pain.
Footsteps sounded, but she kept her head covered, not trusting that it was over and not understanding why it had begun.
“These are mine! Mine!” Roffe yelled as he descended the stairs. “I am the artificer, damn you!”
Roffe’s footsteps descended the stairs and there was the sound of more shouting from below.
Cat stayed where she was for a time, afraid to move, then just as she thought she might try to stand, there came the sound of more footsteps.
She curled into a tighter ball, then, torn between anger and the desire to stand and slip a knife under Roffe’s ribs, and the urge to stay down, take what punishment he deemed necessary, as the lesser members of her childhood gang would do when Brandt was on a tear.
Cover your head, take it, and hope there’s a place for you in the morning — hope you’re not to be turned out to fend for yourself.
Memories of being alone on the streets, hungry and cold, kept her in place.
A hand touched her shoulder and she flinched.
“Easy,” Clanton said.
His hands ran over her back, probing, and she winced as he pressed where Roffe had kicked her. Clanton’s blows in training were hard, they bruised and battered her, but Cat realized he must be pulling them — they hurt, but did no real damage. Roffe’s were different — unrestrained and aimed to harm.
“Where else he get you?” Clanton asked. “Any to the head?”
“No,” Cat whispered. It came out ragged, sounding on the verge of tears and she vowed that wouldn’t happen. She’d not give Roffe the satisfaction. “Gut.”
“Roll here,” Clanton ordered, easing her to the side. His hands probed at her midsection as well, eliciting another gasp.
“I’ll want these off,” he said, tugging at her clothes. “Need to see the bruising. Roffe knows how to kill a man, much less you, and he was off his head.”
Cat didn’t have the energy to argue, nor the strength to help. Her cheek stung and her thoughts felt addled. Had she told Clanton she’d not been struck in the head? But she had, hadn’t she? That first blow — yes.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, but instead cried out as he tugged at her clothing and it moved something deep inside her in quite the worst way.
“Nothing for it,” he muttered.
The sound of steel on leather came to her and a moment later another tug, this time as Clanton slid a sharp blade into her clothing and cut it away, stays, chemise, and all.
Mistress Hinds would find that quite improper, Cat thought, but it didn’t bother her. Clanton’s touch had nothing of impropriety in it, as though she were merely a piece of meat he was examining — or some sort of animal.
“Not so bad. Try to sit up,” he said, and assisted her in leaning back against a workbench. He examined her face. “Thought you said he’d not struck your head.”
Fingers probed her midsection again and she was saved from answering by the need to cry out.
“Tell me if you piss blood,” Clanton said. “But I think you’ll not die of it.”
“That is not encouraging, Mister Clanton,” Cat managed.
Clanton ignored her and sat back on his heels. He looked around the room.
“Messing with Roffe’s devices, eh?”
Cat tugged the halves of her clothes closer about her now that the man’s examination appeared to be over. She glanced over at the cleaning device, upside down on the floor, case dented, a bit of a ticking coming from it occasionally. She thought that might be the last of its spring slowly unwinding.
“Why did he do this?” she asked.
“Worked on that near a year,” Clanton said, nodding to the device, then to another on a bench at the back of the room. “That one two, I think.”
“I don’t understand it,” Cat said. “Why are all these drawings in different hands? Why couldn’t Roffe just ask the drawers if he had trouble making them work?”
“Man who drew those is dead,” Clanton said. “Man who drew those is dead.” He looked back at Cat. “Wager on the others, will you?”
Chapter 15
Cat followed Clanton downstairs slowly, wincing every few steps.
As they passed Roffe’s rooms, Cat glanced guiltily at the door. She’d entered those more than once, in addition to the Mechanicals Room above, and shuddered at the thought of how Roffe might react to catching her there again.
The painting there drew her, though, in an odd way — she found it both disturbing and, somehow, comforting. She’d determined in her own mind that the woman was clearly afraid of the man, but loved the babe — and she became more convinced with every viewing that the man was a younger Roffe, and no brother. Not unless they were twins, as the resemblance was too close — and hadn’t Emma said that Roffe’s wife and child were dead, not some brother’s? Why would Roffe claim a brother instead of saying the portrait was of his own family, as Cat now suspected it must be?
Clanton seated her at the table and laid out a simple supper.
“Nothing to do for you but wait to heal,” he said. “No bones broke, at least.”
Cat took a bite of the coarse brown bread and chewed. Proper meals were another advantage of the manor house and she found herself longing to return.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” she asked. Clanton must have known she was going up to that room.
“Not my place,” he muttered around a mouthful of cheese, then took a large gulp of beer. “My place is teach you to fight and those other things.” He drained the rest of the beer, then looked at her critically. “Best you didn’t fight back today, but did you even block a blow at all?”
“I wasn’t expecting him to strike me.”
Clanton laughed. “Weren’t expecting it? You suppose a fellow sends bloody invitations?”
Cat flushed. “I suppose I felt safe here — at least when you aren’t training me.”
Clanton stared at her for a moment. “Have to fix that,” he said, which Cat felt bode ill for her future stays in the townhouse.
“Why was Mister Roffe so angry, though?” Cat still couldn’t understand it — even if Roffe had been working at the thing for a year, as Clanton said, shouldn’t he be happy that she’d got it working?
“Not my place to say,” Clanton said, starting in on a sausage. “But if you suspect a thing is his, best not to touch it without his leave. He’s particular about what’s his, our Mister Roffe.”
Cat pushed her plate of sausage across the table to him and concentrated on her bread and cheese. She’d seen
enough sausages of the sort Clanton chose on the streets to last a lifetime, and would rather wait for something of more certain provenance.
“You said the men who made those drawings were dead — all of them?”
Clanton nodded.
“Is that what Mister Roffe does? Buy the … what, estates? Of other artificers? Try to get working what they hadn’t time to in their lives?”
Clanton stabbed her sausage with his blade and moved it to his plate.
“Not my place to say.”
“But the original drawings were all wrong,” Cat pressed. “The thing would never work like that, so why write it down in the first place?”
Clanton sighed. “A man writes something down, any can read it.”
Cat frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“Any can read it; any can build it,” Clanton said. He rose and refilled his mug from a barrel on the counter, drained half, then filled it again before returning to the table. “Where’s the profit in that?”
Cat frowned further, puzzling it out.
“Do you mean an artificer might make his design … wrong? In putting it to paper, I mean. But wrong in a way he knows it’s wrong, but others don’t?”
Clanton laid a forefinger alongside his nose and tapped it there.
“So, Mister Roffe knows the designs will be wrong, unworkable, yet buys them from the estates in any case — then tries to figure out what the original designer’s done to bollox things up? That makes no sense. Who would buy a design they know won’t work? Who would buy such a thing without the key to fixing it?”
“Mister Roffe’s business is Mister Roffe’s business,” Clanton said, “and it’s —”
“Not your place to say. Yes, I gathered that.”
Clanton grunted.
Cat pondered all this while they ate.
Was Roffe even an artificer? What did it mean that Cat had seen how to make the cleaning device work when he hadn’t for, what was it Clanton had said, a year?
And the man’s anger — Roffe was normally so calm and controlled, yet he’d come suddenly unhinged merely that she’d touched something of his?
She thought of leaving — if Roffe was so mad as to beat her for so slight a crime, then what might he do for some real transgression?
In the end, though, she couldn’t leave. There was nowhere to go — she might be able to make her way as a thief with what she’d learned so far, but she’d never be able to achieve the sort of success Roffe had. Both the manor house and the townhouse were too comfortable, the food too plentiful, for her to leave now — not when there was more to learn, and all that for the taking and nothing asked of her yet.
Chapter 16
As though her latest sojourn to the townhouse had been some sort of turning point, perhaps triggered by Roffe’s anger at her working with his mechanicals, her return to the country manor was marked with changes as well. Where before her days had been much her own, save for the rather light schedule of classes with Mistress Hinds, they were now so full that Cat had barely a moment’s breath from one thing to the next.
Mistress Hinds increased her own workload, demanding more and more of Cat, and presenting everything from mathematics to literature to the ways of proper society at a speed Cat found dizzying.
More, she was expected to find time each day to spend with Mistress Singley in the kitchen. Not cooking or learning to cook, but decocting odd notions in the manor’s stillroom. Notions that were decidedly unsavory, for, it turned out, Mistress Singley was an able maker of all things less nourishing than bread or pies.
“Now, this one,” Singley muttered, “you’ll want to be careful with.”
She carefully poured the liquid from one container to another, her hands encased in thick leather gloves.
“Be sure of your stopper,” she said. “Cork’s no good, lessen you seal the outside with lead or wax — lead’s better, but wax’ll do if you must. I’ll show you the wax now, so you can see, but remember lead’s best.”
She grasped the newly filled and corked vial with a pair of tongs and poured red sealing wax all around its top until the vial was covered halfway down its length. Then she dipped the vial, tongs and all, deep into a half-filled barrel of water, even though, as Cat had seen, not a bit of the clear liquid had gotten on its outside.
Singley set the vial on a rack to dry, then moved all of the items used to make the substance into the barrel as well, including the thick leather mat that lined the work surface. She ended by dumping in the tongs, then her leather gloves, and seating the barrel’s top firmly in place.
“Skiff will dispose of that,” she said. “He knows how.”
“And that will kill a man?” Cat asked, nodding at the innocent looking vial.
“In minutes,” Singley said. “One or two, if you can get it in his mouth — less than ten, still, if by touch.”
“Touch?”
“A few drops on the skin, don’t take much.”
“Why … why would you teach me this?” Cat asked, not wanting to ask the other question of how the pleasant cook would even know it in the first place.
“Master Roffe’s instructions.”
Master Roffe’s instructions applied to Skiff, as well, who began taking Cat on runs about the manor grounds and then out into the surrounding woods.
Those were hours spent in some odd, draped gown Skiff had her wear, with ragged strips of cloth attached, all the time trying to keep him from spotting her.
She was to move from one place to another amongst the trees, and every time she made a mistake, Skiff would toss a pebble at her — which was annoying, but far less so than the heavy clout she got when Clanton caught her in an error, so Cat didn’t complain.
To this Skiff added more mundane tasks, such as harnessing the horses and driving the cart or carriage, even riding, which Cat found she quite enjoyed. These, at least, seemed useful skills to her — as any cart, carriage, or horse could now become her transport clear of a heist gone wrong.
The woodcraft, though, seemed out of place. She thought most of her thieving would certainly be done in a city, not the country — still, she could see its use if she were to need to make her way to some lord’s country home and out again with the goods.
It would be handy to be able to hide from any he sent after her and handier to flee.
Singley’s concoctions, though, still confused her. Those that put a man to sleep or took his memory of the last few hours’ time, those would be useful, but the poisons? Perhaps Roffe hadn’t been specific about what the cook was to teach her, yet she still wondered at how Singley knew these things — and how Skiff came to be such an expert at moving about forests.
It seemed like everyone in Roffe’s employ had some secret.
It was not so very long before the new schedule began to wear on Cat.
She’d spend a week with Clanton, being battered about the townhouse’s courtyard in the mornings, set to picking locks, now sometimes paired with the cleverest of traps, in the afternoon, then sent onto the city’s rooftops for half the night, before starting it all up again the next dawn — after which, she’d get to doze in the carriage from townhouse to manor where the schedule was almost as grueling.
Lessons with Hinds, distilling with Singley, traipsing through the trees with Skiff — or set to first harnessing the horses, then to driving carriages and riding, as he began adding more for her to master — more lessons with Hinds, who seemed to take great pleasure in loading Cat down with further things for her to study before the next day’s lessons and the cycle began over again.
The only person not demanding more and more of Cat’s time and effort was Emma, who Cat saw less and less of every day.
Her fatigue and anger at the never-ending demands grew until one morning she simply laid down in bed and crossed her arms when Emma held out her dress.
“No,” she said.
“What?” Emma asked.
“I shan’t get up today.” Cat cro
ssed her arms and sank back into the pillows.
“Are you sick?” Emma set the dress aside and came to feel Cat’s head.
“I’m exhausted,” Cat said. “I’ve just got back from the townhouse, where Clanton had me up half the night, and now Hinds has loaded me down with texts I’m to read — but not during the day, as she requires I attend her in the drawing room to learn the proper steps of some dance and Mistress Singley must teach me to create some vile concoction and Skiff has yet another sort of harness he must, without delay, make me familiar with … I cannot think, I cannot learn — there is not a bit of space left in my head for one more thing — and I must sleep!”
With that, and feeling near tears, Cat rolled over and burrowed into her pillows.
Chapter 17
Cat spent three glorious days refusing to do anything at all.
She slept late, then made her way to the solarium to simply sit.
Some might have found it boring, but for Cat it was a welcome respite. The peace and view of the gardens helped her to think, and she was still thinking of what to do about Roffe. The man frightened her, but she wanted what he offered, too. The thoughts, the dilemma, clouded the days and made her a bit melancholy.
In all, she would agree she was not good company these last few days, but Emma, bless her, stayed by. Even now, she guarded the solarium door from the fearsome Mistress Hinds who sought to drag Cat off to some horrid lesson in greater maths.
“She’s not well,” Emma said.
“I heard you the first time,” Hinds snapped. “Mind your place, girl!”
“Mistress Hinds,” Cat said, not wanting the woman to have any more excuse to harangue Emma than she already did. Though all of the servants found themselves on the bad side of the tutor’s tongue, the woman had an especial dislike for Emma.
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