“I’ll try,” said Stephen.
Twenty-nine
“What are you doing?”
Colin’s voice came suddenly and without prelude from the previously empty room. Up on a stepladder, her arms full of books, Mina twitched but didn’t jump or scream. “Cataloguing the library,” she said, rather than any of the sarcastic replies that came to mind.
She plucked a final volume from the shelves. It was bound in green leather and newer than some of the others, but the dust was equally thick. Mina held back a sneeze and climbed carefully down the ladder.
“Give over a few of those, will you?” Colin held out his hands, and Mina was glad enough to fill them. When he felt the dust, she didn’t even try not to giggle at the expression on his face. “Good Lord. How long have wehadthese? And what have we been doing with them?”
“A long time and not much, from what I can tell,” Mina said. She deposited the rest of her stack onto the desk with a solidthump.
“And Stephen still has you messing about with them? Hehasgrown into a tyrant.”
“He’s done no such thing,” said Mina, sharply enough to make Colin widen his eyes and hold up his hands in mock defense. “And he didn’t give me the job. He hasn’t had me doanywork, really.”
Colin eyed her as if she were some newly discovered form of life. “You mean to say you volunteered? Why on earth?”
“Because it needs doing, and I needed something to do.”
“Ah.” The new species was a little more comprehensible, it seemed, alien as it might be. Colin looked from Mina to the desk. “And you’ve been doing this all day?”
“More or less.”
Lesswas more accurate, despite Mina’s best intentions on the subject. Half her records had had blots, misspellings, or other features that had meant she’d had to cross them out and write them again. She’d written down one book twice and completely forgotten about another until she’d found it by the windowsill. Every trip up and down the ladder had taken about twice as long as normal, too.
Mina could have laid some of the blame at Colin’s feet. Their earlier conversation had left her thinking about mortality and humanity, rules and consequences, and coming to no useful conclusion regarding any of it. She wasn’t cut out for philosophy, she’d told herself, but her efforts to direct her thoughts elsewhere had only sent them toward that entry in not-Saint George’s journal, the one about rites and children, at which point she’d inadvertently knocked a set of Johnson’s works to the floor.
Work usually distracted her from troubling thoughts, not the other way around. What waswrongwith her?
“Then I’m right in thinking it’s not a very urgent matter,” Colin said. “And that means you can come out with me.”
Coming back from her thoughts, Mina blinked at him. “Out? Where? Why?”
“Out.” He leaned against a bookshelf, counting off the points on his fingers. “Anywhere you want, within reasonable limits. Because London is quite a bit more entertaining than the inside of this library or even, if I may dare to say it, the inside of this house.”
“Yes, but why me?”
“Because you’re—” He looked at Mina’s face, saw the skeptical expression she’d used on dozens of other young men, and grinned ruefully before switching to honesty. “You’re here, and you’re pleasant enough company. And I don’t know many people in the city these days, or at least not many people who’d be glad to see me turn up, looking as I do.”
If he felt any sorrow about the matter, he concealed it easily enough—much easier than Stephen would have, Mina thought. Still, she felt a little sympathy for him, and more so because he’d had sense enough not to try and charm her. “I can’t,” she said.
“Of course you can. You don’t turn to dust in the sunlight. My brother would have mentioned.”
“I agreed,” she said, “not to go out of the house without Stephen, not until this matter with Ward is settled.”
“Oh, that’s the letter of the agreement, true enough.” Colin waved a hand. “But the spirit of it is that you shouldn’t tell anything to Ward or his men, whether you mean to or no. Stephen’s presence was meant to secure as much, and so mine should do just as well. I’d hardly risk his safety or let that jumped-up fellow Ward get his hands on anything important.”
“Well—”
“I’ll give you my word on it.”
“And what if they try something when we’re not here?”
“In broad daylight? This is a respectable neighborhood, or so I hear. Besides, Stephen told me that both of you have been out of the house before this, and no harm came of it.” Colin smiled at her. “So, you see, he trusts me, which means you should too.”
“Does it really?” Mina asked.
