By the time Lucy had grabbed her belongings and dashed back out to the stables, the enormous horse and small covered carriage were ready. Martha stood by the contraptions, and when Lucy approached, she fired off directions and admonitions regarding its usage.
“Yer control panel is here, just in front, and unless you do somethin’ stupid, he’ll obey you nice.”
Lucy glanced at the darkening clouds overhead. The wind had a bite to it that penetrated her heavy cloak, and she looked forward to the warm interior of the carriage. “And the horse will perform well in adverse weather?”
“O’ course. He’s been coated with anti-rust, and the outer casing protects the inner workings. Mr. Clancy programmed the directions to the lodge, for yer ease, and set the speed at three-quarters of maximum. Should reach the lodge in about three hours.” Martha handed Lucy a tin punch card and gave her a curt nod.
“Thank you. I shall take great care of the equipment.”
Martha placed Lucy’s overnight bag in the small boot at the back of the carriage. Locking it securely, she patted it once and then handed Lucy the key. “Godspeed, then.”
Lucy climbed into the carriage, closing the door behind her. Taking the tin Mr. Clancy had programmed, she placed it into the program slot and waited thirty seconds while it processed. Then, with a slight lurch, the mechanical horse moved forward and took her away from the stables, down the front drive, and out onto the main road.
The horse traveled at a quick pace, unencumbered by the rain that was falling in steady sheets. The carriage interior was warm, but chill seeped in through the windows and doors. She had mentally dubbed the wooded patch of land between the manor and town “the tunnel,” and while she was in it, the darkness closed in significantly. She switched on two outer lamps—one on the big horse’s forehead and one on the front of the conveyance, although that one did little more than illuminate the horse’s huge metal backside.
At her side, she’d attached a small purse which contained the very objects that necessitated visiting Blackwell in person and risk facing his wrath. Her nerves were strung tight, and she told herself repeatedly to keep her emotions in check. She leaned against the plush seat and tried to relax, secure in the knowledge that the programmed punch card would take her safely to her destination. All that was required of her was patience.
Now that she had a moment to sit and do nothing but think, she realized how tired she was. Leaning her head against the side cushion, she allowed herself the luxury of closing her eyes, telling herself she would sleep for just a little while.
She awoke to darkness. The world beyond the beam of light cast by the carriage’s headlamp was black. Perhaps even more alarming, however, was the snow that fell hard and fast, the gusting wind temporarily blowing the flakes violently sideways. Squinting out the front window, she saw the back end of the horse, which was stationary, with copious amounts of steam escaping its right flank.
With a muttered curse, she drew her cloak’s hood into place and opened the door, pushing against the wind and making her way outside to examine the horse. “You’re supposed to be in tip-top condition,” she muttered to the animal as she walked around to where steam poured out in a steady blast.
Not an accomplished mechanic in the least, she went to the front of the animal and opened the panel on its chest. The cold made her fingers clumsy, and the metal sheet slipped closed. She struggled to open it, though once she found herself looking at the buttons and wires within the control panel, she had to admit she had no idea what to do with any of it.
She closed the panel, securing it back into place, and climbed back into the carriage. Her options were few. She could remain in the carriage and hope someone would find her once they’d realized she’d gone missing—but who would do that? Mr. Clancy and Martha knew where she was going, but nobody else did. Why would they think to go out looking for her? Or telescribe the lodge to see if she’d arrived? It wasn’t as though Lucy was their daughter.
Or she could take the tin programming card, slip it into her own telescriber, and go the rest of the way on foot. In a storm that was looking to turn itself into a raging blizzard. And because she’d slept for part of the journey, she had no idea how far she was from the lodge. Checking her pocket watch, she calculated the time she’d left the manor against the time she was to have arrived at the hunting lodge. It was an hour shy of midnight.
How long would the power charge of the carriage hold out? If it hadn’t been hooked to a Tesla Connector to charge for long, she could well find herself sitting in the cold and dark soon.
With a frown and not a little bit of unnerving fear, she pulled the tin programming card from the control panel inside the carriage and slipped it into her telescriber, which she’d had the foresight to charge completely, thankfully. It didn’t pinpoint her location—it couldn’t unless she were connected to an actual Tesla Connector, and the odds of finding a Tesla Booth in this forest were laughable—but she ought to be able to at least determine how much ground the horse had covered before breaking down by checking the carriage’s wheel-rotation calculation.
She looked closely at the control panel until she saw the switch. Flipping it, she waited until a small piece of paper was ejected. She read it carefully; she was two miles away from the lodge. As if helping her to make the decision—to stay or to go—the carriage lights began to flicker and the heating mechanism shut down. The resulting silence in the absence of the steady hum of the machinery was so complete that it roared.
Taking a deep breath, she exited the carriage, unlocked the boot, and pulled out her overnight bag. Popping her umbrella open and angling it against the driving snow, she consulted her telescriber. Mr. Clancy’s directions were clear, a map appearing alongside written coordinates.
The road stretched before her, but she was unable to see more than ten feet beyond herself. The map showed a fork in the road, which she had to assume the horse had already taken while she was asleep.
What am I doing?
Less than a month ago, she’d been living her well-ordered life. Now she found herself risking life and limb for her cousin and an irascible earl. Putting one foot in front of the other, she began her journey into an abyss of darkness and snow.
The first mile was slow going in the face of the storm. The only sound was the wind whistling eerily through the trees and brushing up against her parasol, which was proving to be largely ineffectual. A distance that would normally have taken thirty minutes at an easy pace stretched into a good forty-five.
Her cloak grew heavier under the onslaught of snow that melted into the fabric and left her drenched. She had abandoned her hat to the carriage, which was just as well. Even with the parasol, her hair whipped clear of the pins that had held it in an elegant coiffure hours before. Trying to keep her hood in place required more energy than it was worth when a sudden gust of wind flipped her parasol inside out and sent it flying up into the trees.
She tugged at the hood of her cloak, trying to hold it in place with both hands. She was beyond the point of trying to protect her hair. All she wanted was to be able to see where she was walking without getting an eyeful of wind and snow.
Lucy periodically consulted her telescriber, constantly reminding herself that after the fork in the road, there was only one path leading to the hunting lodge, which was situated along the coastline. If she remained on the main path, narrow though it was, she would reach the hunting lodge within the hour. She hoped.
Her fingers and toes were so cold that they hurt, and she found herself wishing they would go numb.
I could sit for just a moment, she thought. Rest.
But just as her knees tried to buckle beneath her, she spied a flash of red on the path in the distance.
“Wait!” she called out, unconcerned that whomever or whatever the thing was might not wish her well. “Please help me.” Her voice was little more than a croak, sna
tched away by the wind as soon as it left her lips.
She struggled forward, her feet burning in pain, and feeling a deep, throbbing headache taking root behind her eyes. Keeping the figure in red in her sight, she followed it, even hurried to try to see what it was. The minutes seemed like hours, and still the red beacon stayed before her, like a lighthouse in a storm.
“Marie?” Lucy whispered as she drew closer to the person who seemed to have stopped and waited for her.
It was indeed Marie. She looked familiar in her red gown, her hair blowing slightly in the wicked breeze but otherwise unaffected by the raging elements. When Lucy came within fifty feet of the specter, Marie again moved forward. Lucy supposed that the angry ghost might well lead her right off the edge of a cliff, but at that point she hurt too much to care one way or the other.
“No,” she moaned when Marie disappeared. Moving as quickly as her sore feet would allow, she made her way to the last place she’d seen Marie.
Coming out of a clearing, she spied an expanse of flat ground—likely a lawn—that sprawled before a building that was darker than even Blackwell Manor had been on the first night of her arrival. Trees lined the path leading to the front door, and while not nearly as large as the manor itself, the hunting lodge was impressive in its own right. There was no light coming from inside. She had to assume that if the earl was in residence, he was probably asleep.
She stumbled down the length of the path, moving as automatically as if someone had placed a punch card into her brain. Her only thought was to get inside and sit by a fire for the next two years. She forced her feet to climb the stairs. She dropped her bag next to the front door and lifted the metal knocker with fingers that could hardly function. The loud sound of metal on door broke the silence. It was the only sound, however. Nothing moved inside the lodge, despite repeated assaults on the door with the knocker.
She tried the door but it was, of course, locked. Even if Blackwell wasn’t here, she had to get inside the building or risk freezing to death. Leaving her bag on the porch, she descended the front steps and made her way around the side of the house, hoping to find a servant’s entrance. Trees planted alongside the building snagged at her hair—clearly there wasn’t an entrance to be found there. She fought the urge to crumble at the base of one of the trees and fall asleep.
A low growl split the night, and she whirled around, looking behind her. A chill ran down her spine, and she felt her heart beat so rapidly she wondered if it would expire from exhaustion. The growl came again, closer, and she spun forward, terrified. Running the length of the building, heedless of the brambles, thorns, and branches that ripped at her hair and clothes, she reached the back and spied a door.
The world slowed as she lunged for the entrance, moving as though stuck in a mud that refused to give an inch. By the time she reached the back door and pulled on the handle for all she was worth, the growl was nearly at her heels. She looked over her shoulder, terrified, as an enormous wolf stalked her, watching her every movement.
It was a huge animal, entirely black but shot through with strands of silver. The eyes were ice-blue and seemed to glow in the dark.
Her calm having long since fled, she banged on the back door with her fist. “Blackwell!” she screamed. She drew in another shuddering breath as the wolf moved inexorably closer, its intense regard never wavering. “Miles!”
Lucy stumbled back from the door, moving slowly, keeping the wolf in sight. There were trees to her back, and a quick glance in that direction showed undergrowth and foliage. The creature would likely navigate it better than she could, but her only other option was to stand and be mauled. She’d rather take her chances with one desperate attempt at escape.
She turned and dashed through the trees, stumbling and crashing, falling and staggering to her feet and all the while hearing growls that turned to snarls. A quick look over her shoulder proved a waste of energy as the wolf blended with the darkness of the thicket. The eyes, though. She saw them clearly enough.
She continued her maniacal flight, stumbling again, but this time when she shoved herself up from the ground, she took a step and met nothing but air. Her last conscious thought was that her family would be so horribly sad at her death.
Lucy awoke in a darkened room, the only light coming from a small lamp on a bedside table. As she squinted and tried to rise on one elbow, she heard a clucking sound, rather like a mother soothing a small child.
“Rest, yet,” the woman’s voice said. “Ye’ve had a nasty fall.” The accent was pronounced, but Lucy couldn’t place it.
The woman moved closer to the bedside and laid a hand on Lucy’s brow. “And ye’re warm again.”
Lucy heard the sound of water hitting a basin as though being wrung from fabric. She felt a cloth placed on her forehead, and the woman gently pushed her shoulders back into the mattress.
“Where am I?” she tried to ask, but it came out as little more than a whisper.
“Ye’re safe. Just rest.”
She fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of wolves, of curses, of having to bury Kate in a grave next to Clara and Marie.
When she awoke again, her relief that she’d been dreaming was quickly replaced by the realization that her nightmares only mirrored her current reality.
She shifted into a sitting position and gasped with pain that was so profound she saw stars. She clasped her right arm to her ribs and found bandages wrapped around her torso. Looking down at herself with a wince, she realized she was wearing her nightgown and that her suitcase had been placed at the foot of the bed on a bench.
The light in the room was still dim, but the curtains on three large windows were open enough to allow a glimpse of daylight to shine through. The sky beyond the windows was white, and the snow outside continued to swirl and fall in what resembled a large collection of eiderdown feathers.
The bed she currently occupied was a large affair, not so very different from the earl’s quarters back at the manor. A seating area near the hearth and an impressively huge rack of antlers hanging on the wall above the fireplace completed the décor of what was clearly a very masculine room.
Taking further stock of her injuries, she realized that besides the wrapping on her ribs she also wore splints on both her left wrist and her right ankle. She clenched her teeth against the pain that throbbed from the injuries as she tried to get comfortable. Fluffing the pillow up behind her back, she gingerly reclined and rested her head against the headboard.
She reached her right hand to her head and felt an enormous goose egg beneath her hair. She remembered flashes of sensations: tumbling down the side of a steep ravine behind the hunting lodge and smashing into rocks and trees that slowed her descent by degrees while doing a fair amount of damage.
Lifting her hair to one side and leaning more comfortably against the pillows, she felt a soreness around the skin on her neck and touched it with her fingertips. Perhaps her cloak had snagged on something and rubbed her skin raw.
She took as deep a breath as the tight bandages would allow and frowned. If her ribs were broken, the bandage wasn’t going to be of much use. One of her friends at school in Switzerland had suffered a fall, and the attending nurse had insisted that tightly wrapping the wound served no purpose other than to deny the patient the ability to breathe.
Lucy released the top few buttons on her nightgown using only her right hand, as any movement with the fingers on her left had her gasping in pain. It was slow going, but she eventually had given herself enough of an opening to reach inside and unwrap the tight binding around her torso. While she couldn’t draw a deep breath even without the dressing, she did feel a modicum of relief.
She had nearly all of the buttons of her nightgown done up again when there was a quiet knock on the door. “Come in,” she croaked out and looked at the nightstand for the teacup of water she remembered from before. Someone had helped her take a
few sips. A woman with an accent . . .
The door opened to reveal Lord Blackwell looking at her with a carefully blank expression.
He closed the door quietly behind him.
Lucy looked a mess, she was certain, although she hadn’t yet spied herself in a mirror. Her hair hung down in tangled masses, and she pushed some of it away from her face, wincing, and wondered if there was a spot anywhere on her body that wasn’t bruised or broken.
Perhaps even more alarming, however, was the expression on Blackwell’s face. He didn’t give away even the slightest clue as to what he was thinking, which was more than a little unnerving.
Blackwell pulled a chair to the bedside and sat back in it, crossing his long legs at the ankles and linking his fingers over his midsection. He watched her with unblinking eyes, and Lucy wondered if he were measuring his words carefully. It would be a first, that much was certain. He was dressed casually in shirtsleeves and black trousers, his ever-present black riding boots the only spot of polish. She was beginning to think that the only person she’d seen so consistently without his vest, coat, and hat was her brother.
“You wanted to see me?” Blackwell finally asked.
Lucy closed her eyes. Mercy, she hurt. Feeling ridiculously young and dramatic, she nodded and opened her eyes. She tried to speak but could only croak. Tears burned and threaten to fall. She reached for the teacup on the table, realizing belatedly that the fingers on her left hand likely wouldn’t be able to grasp it.
Seeing her intention, Blackwell leaned forward and picked up the cup. Placing it carefully in her right hand, he sat back in his chair while she took a few cautious sips of water.
“I did want to see you, my lord,” she said, her voice sounding marginally better. “It is a matter of some importance, or I would never have imposed on your privacy. I know you guard it well.”
“It didn’t occur to you to have someone accompany you?”
Beauty and the Clockwork Beast Page 20
