She supposed that was fair, although she still couldn’t see the benefit of giving a false name.
‘Best just write the room number on the envelope, though,’ Damien said. ‘Lest you confuse the poor creature. It’s room 13.’
‘Unlucky,’ Ava mused, putting the key in the door. And so she didn’t see the way he looked at her when he said:
‘Perhaps not as unlucky as I thought.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Damien awoke two days later feeling as though he’d not only been beaten, but thrown beneath a carriage and kicked between its wheels. His cheek was red and raised, and when he peeled the greying white shirt from his chest he could see a patchwork of bruising beneath it – yellows, purples, and angry reds spreading in patterns down his chest and arms from the blows he’d not managed to avoid before the fray had tumbled out of the doorway, and onto the street.
‘If only Pa could see me now,’ he muttered – crossing to the washbasin in the corner. The water was old – he hadn’t changed it yesterday, and nor did he have the energy to traipse down to the small pump in the courtyard today. He picked the lint from the water before splashing it over his face, under his arms, wincing as it sank into the collection of cuts he was amassing before running another handful of water through his hair – oily now, and dark with it.
Perhaps his father would’ve given him some speech – about how this was his fault. About how he’d brought it all upon himself.
But even that was generous.
The last time Damien had seen his father, he hadn’t uttered a single word to him – not in the two-hour carriage ride it’d taken them to reach that abominable school. Not even ashe’d stood in its cavernous doorway, a collection of trunks and cases at Damien’s feet. He’d just looked at him with those sharp, dark eyes – and then he’d turned, and walked back to the carriage, shutting the door so hard Damien could hear the glass rattling in the windowpanes.
He pushed the thought away – for he didn’t want to think about that school. About the Christmases he’d had to spend there, and the letters he’d waited for – soul stretched thin with hope that there’d be one from his father. But the only people who ever wrote to Damien were the butler – his messages short, encouraging, but damnably brief – and the cook, who always sent a wax-paper package with hers. A treacle cake, or pots of jam.
A taste of home, she’d always write.
As thoughhomewasn’t something he’d lost.
Damien gripped the edge of the washbasin, watching his fingernails turn white with the effort. And then he straightened, throwing on a new shirt, a new neck-tie, and turning for the stairs.
‘Any letters?’ he asked the sour-faced man now.
‘Mmm.’
He lifted the page of the penny dreadful he was reading, and shunted a small square of paper towards Damien. Damien tore into it, pulling the thin scrap of paper out quickly.
Lillian wants her update, it read, in shaky black lettering.And don’t forget – she knows where you live.
Damien hadn’t noticed how many sets of stairs Bertie had led him up before: from the foyer, to the auditorium, to the gallery level, and then up even further, until now. Now every step ached, every bruise on his body singing until he stood once more in that long corridor at the top of the theatre, the circular windows casting a dozen, pale moons of sunlight upon the carpet.
And he thought of her.
Ava.
The woman he’d met that first night had been a woman defeated. A woman bowing under the weight of something unseen. But that was not the same woman he’d seen outside the inn. That Ava had been fierce, and bright – and brilliant – and he wondered if that was what she’d been like on the stage, too. The moment she’d stepped in front of him something had changed – in her voice, her presence. He’d felt it in the way his pulse had stumbled in his chest, in the way it’d sent something hot and unfamiliar spearing through his veins.
Normally when someone did this, when they stepped over the invisible line he had long ago drawn in the dirt, he would leave. Or he would lean more heavily upon his rules: the tenets for life that had thus far kept him safely separated from the rest of the world.
And yet with her, he’d already broken most of them.
‘You can wait in the office,’ said Bertie, appearing at his shoulder. ‘Miss Lillian will be up in just a moment. She’s dealing with a costuming crisis.’
‘Sounds serious,’ said Damien, following her into the room. The curtains were still drawn, the fire banked but not relit, and the glow from the embers bathing the room in a warm, reddish tinge. This time, the birds were quiet, with only a gentle, rhythmiccoocoming from one of the pigeon cages. Damien’s gaze flitted to where the magpie had been, but the door was open, and it was gone.
‘Don’t touchanything,’ said Bertie.
‘Of course,’ said Damien, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he sat down, and counted Bertie’s retreating steps down the hallway.
Eight, nine…
She would be nearing the staircase now. And as soon as he heard the creak of the stairwell door …
