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She lay in the coffin with her hands crossed on her chest and her eyes closed and the cloth pouch beneath her right palm and the fowling piece along her left side and her heart slamming against her ribs hard enough to shake the lining. She breathed through her nose. Shallow. Even. The way a dead woman breathes, which is to say not at all, except that dead women do not sweat and she was drenched.

The drawing room door creaked. One set of footsteps entered. Heavy. The floorboards groaned under the weight. She heard him cross the room. Heard the first step creak — the rigged step, the one Kit had left loose.

The second set of footsteps stopped. At the threshold. The second man had not entered the room.

The platform shifted beneath her. The warrior was climbing. She could feel each step through the timber, the structure swaying as his weight found the treads. One. Two. The second step cracked and he paused and she heard his breathing — close now, below her, his face tilting up toward the open lid.

She opened her eyes. Sat up. And threw.

The quicklime hit him full in the face. She saw his mouth open and his eyes go wide in the instant before the powder found them, and then he screamed. The sound filled the drawing room and bounced off the boarded windows and she felt it in her teeth. He staggered backward. The rigged step cracked under his weight and gave way and he fell sideways, fifteen stone of thrashing man, and the platform lurched as his flailing arm caught the trestle leg and cracked it.

The coffin slid. She grabbed the sides. The structure held — barely — one leg cracked, the whole thing listing, the coffin scraping toward the edge. She pressed herself flat and gripped and the sliding stopped.

The warrior was on the floor, curled on his side, his hands clawing at his face, the screams turning to something worse — a wet, choking sound, the quicklime in his mouth, his nose. She did not look away. She could not afford to.

At the threshold, the boy had not moved.

He stood in the doorway with his pistol raised. His hands were shaking. The muzzle pointed at her chest, then drifted left, then came back. He was perhaps sixteen. His face was white and the pistol was too large for his grip and the hammer was cocked and his finger was on the trigger.

She looked at him. He looked at her.

"What is your name?" she said.

He blinked. The pistol wavered.

"I asked your name."

His mouth opened. Closed. "Jem," he said. Barely a sound.

"Jem." She kept her voice level. "This house needs a stable hand. The work is hard but the pay is fair and you will be fed three meals a day. You will sleep in a warm bed. No one here will brand you or sell you or call you a coward."

His eyes were wet. The pistol was still up. His arms were trembling with the weight of it.

"I am Lady Audrey Kendal. I am the mistress of this house. And I am offering you a position in my household." She held his gaze. "Put it down, Jem."

The pistol lowered. An inch. Two.

Chapter twenty

Stay Down

Kit

He stopped in the doorway and took in the room in a single sweep. The warrior on the floor, writhing, face swollen shut. The platform tilted, one leg cracked, the coffin on it at an angle. Audrey sitting upright in the coffin, white dust on her hands, her face pale and set. The boy at the base of the platform with a pistol half-lowered, aimed somewhere between the floor and her chest.

Kit raised his pistol and aimed at the boy.

The boy heard him. Swung the pistol toward Kit. Then back to Audrey. Then Kit again. His face was a ruin of terror.

"Don't shoot, Kit."

Audrey's voice cut through the room. Clear. Certain.

He kept the pistol up. The boy's muzzle was drifting between them, the finger white on the trigger.

"He's a child," she said.

"He's armed."