He cleared his throat, the way one might at an awkward tea party, and spoke.
“Let me relieve your mind,” he said, and his voice sounded different now that he wasn’t trying to sound American.“I’ve no intention to hurt you, Miss Worms.I’ve come for the relic.I mean you no harm.But I will do what I must if you make things difficult for me.”
There was a heavy mortar and pestle on the far side of the table, within her reach if she lunged for it.Gwen had taught her self-defence years ago, but she couldn’t remember any of it.She would feel much better if she had something heavy in her hand.
“Please don’t come near,” she said.“I’m going to scream.”
Una made a dive across the table.She heard a scream which must have been hers, but wasn’t nearly as loud as she had intended, and before she could improve upon it, she was caught from behind and forced upright with a cloth pressed over her mouth, abruptly restoring the quiet of the night.
A sickly-sweet smell overwhelmed her, but nothing seemed to happen except an endless gasping against the cloth for air, which did not seem able to reach her lungs.
The pestle was in her hand, but he had that arm pinned to her side.
It crossed her mind that being chloroformed was far more distressing than it was made out to be in novels.There was such a lot of time to wonder why the person wielding the chloralneededyou to be unconscious, to feel his unwanted nearness, and to wish you had asked to be gagged instead while he went about stealing the family relic.
A flutter of wings about her head, and he hissed an unfamiliar but unmistakably nasty word and her arm was free at last—glorious!
She hit the man behind her somewhere in the vicinity of the brow with the pestle as hard as she was able, but she was shocked to find that her limbs did not feel properly hers anymore.They were soft and useless once more, just as they had been when she was six years old.
Then it was all over.
Chapter eight
Ormdale
Noonecouldhaveconsidered Pip’s return home the night before as a success.
First of all, his return was badly timed, and coincided with Friday supper.
Ever since Pip’s little half sister had been born, Janushek had begun to make a fuss over Friday supper, getting out a polished pair of candlesticks and teaching the little girl to imitate his incomprehensible foreign prayer.It didn’t seem to bother him that there was an albino dragon sitting under the table waiting for scraps.
So it was over this supper—already an awkward one for Pip—in the snug cottage on the outskirts of Ormby village, that Pip announced to his family that he was sick of London and had given up art school.
His mother was hurt by this, he could tell.Whether it was because she had dreamt of a great future for him or because she knew he was lying, he could not tell.
But his stepfather saw more than Pip had told.
“They made things hard for you, your fellow students?”his stepfather said with a flash of sympathy on his scarred face.
Pip mumbled something in response and ate his supper.Of course his stepfather was offering him sympathy—and of course the very last person in the world Pip wanted sympathy from was Brik Janushek.
For Janushek—Jewish, foreign, and defiantly proletarian—represented the opposite of everything Pip longed to become.
Pip felt peeved that his stepfather had probably guessed it all already—that the insurmountable barrier between him and his fellow students was the very thing that had driven him to ruin his future among them.To Pip, self-destruction seemed preferable to rejection.At least you did it yourself, and did not wait for it to happen to you.
Pip had gone up to the abbey on the morning after this unpleasant homecoming.He always approached the old pile with a mixture of longing and loathing.He’d spent most of his childhood overworked and underpaid, emptying chamber pots before the new plumbing was put in, mucking out stables, carrying numberless pails of water that sloshed and froze him year-round, for it was always cold inside its rambling passageways.
But for all that, the mildew-tobacco-brandy smell of aristocracy kindled a fierce longing alongside the resentment.Was this to be his doom?To be half servant and half master, even in his deepest self?
On his second evening home, Pip ventured to bring up his hopes for the year.
“I thought I might travel on the Continent this year,” he began.
His mother and stepfather exchanged a look that made him feel instantly defensive.
“Lots of people do at my age,” he said.“I was one of the only ones at school who hadn’t.I’d learn more from a museum in Italy than I would at school, anyway.”
“Where do you expect to get money for that, Pip?”his mother asked plainly.The northern directness grated on him.
