‘You’ll fall asleep.’
‘I don’t feel tired.’
He watched the firelight bounce off the burnished brass, turning it to copper, and then gold, and back again. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
There was a slight stutter in the pendulum swing. ‘Then apparently, you shall be relieved. And I’ll at least have an answer.’
‘To what?’
‘Focus on the watch, please Mr Carter.’
‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Call me Damien.’
‘Very well. Focus on the watch please,Damien. And try and believe, if only for a moment, that this might work.’
Damien’s gaze slid back. There was a roiling in his stomach that hadn’t been there before, pitching and churning in time to each swing of it, and it made a rash of sweat spring to his face.
He had spent so many years not knowing. Assuming. But what if he remembered … and it was worse? What if it was worse than he told himself, even in his darkest moments?
‘Now I am going to count down from ten,’ said Ava, her voice soft as his eyes tracked the watch back and forth, back and forth. ‘And when I get to one, you are going to fall asleep. It is not a true sleep, for your mind will still speak to you, but now it will be able to say things it can only say when you dream. It will show you things it does not show you during your waking moments.’
Damien thought that that was likely a pile of utter tosh, and yet when he opened his mouth to tell her so, he found his words came out as a gentle sigh instead.
Chapter Eighteen
In the darkness of the Penny Farthing, she used to try to put Ava Adams aside. Try and bury her beneath a cloak of confidence – pretending that the nerves, the worry, the fear all belonged to another person. A person she could choose not to be. A person she could hide.
But she couldn’t do that with Mr Carter. Not if this was going to work. And so here, now, in this room she was … Ava. Just Ava, with her thoughts knotted, and her breath high in her throat, and her palms damp.
She knew there was an art to knowing when to begin. An art to finding the precise moment when a subject had stopped thinking of all the small things that rattle through one’s brain – the next meal, errands, tasks done well, tasks done poorly – and would allow themselves to slip into that relaxed state, yet finding it now felt like searching for a speck of glass in an endless sea of sand.
She was rusty. That much she could tell from the way her own heart hammered in her throat – the desperation that seemed to tick through every vein, the constant, endless chatter of her own mind:What if you’ve forgotten how to do this?What if it’s been so long you cannot do it any longer?
Her mother had taught her to be commanding. To be compelling. And yet now as she sat there, across from Mr Carter, she wondered if she knew what either of those words even meant.
But the slowing of his breath gave her hope.
And the metronome kept clicking back and forth, steady and brave.
And so she continued: ‘Nine.’
The chair had become more comfortable somehow. As though the pillows had become softer. It felt a little like sinking into a warm bath – the white porcelain bath his mother would have the servants fill in his room upstairs, beside the fireplace. He could almost feel the water lapping rhythmically up his chest, and he counted each wave.
‘Five …’
Damien couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this warm – and comfortably so. It was not like overfeeding the fire and then spending the evening sitting closer and further away, sweating and then freezing in equal measure. Now he hovered at the perfect temperature, Ava’s voice still whispering into his ear. The water around him rippled, and for a moment he wished he could sit here, in this warmth, forever.
‘One.’
He slipped beneath the water, and looked up. There was something floating on the surface of it – a dark shadow bobbing back and forth.
The boat.
He swam up towards it – feeling the strength in his arms, the surprising ease with which he could slice through the water. He didn’t feel weak, as he had then. He felt powerful, and sure – and when he broke the surface he could see the boat, rocking gently back and forth, a little further from him than he’d thought.
‘Where are you, Damien?’
‘At the lake.’
