Page 74

Let her go, and the work will stand in the light.

He was subjecting himself for her.

“The face healed beyond my hopes,” the madman said, to the scars, not to the man. “Shallow, the face, shallow damage, but the body. Oh.” His breath had gone ragged with pleasure. “The chest. The shoulder. Show me the shoulder.”

“No,” said Damian.

The madman’s hand shot out and wrenched the shoulder forward.

It was so quick, and so intimate, and so violent all at once that Ophelia’s own hand flew to her throat. Damian was pulled into the light of the candles.

There, in gold candlelight, in her drawing room, among the tea tables and the pianoforte and Lady Archer’s abandoned workbasket, her husband’s throat was bared.

The base of it, where the collarbone ran, was crossed and recrossed with a raised white lattice of scars and black threads.

“There,” the stranger whispered. “There is my hand. Clavicle to the eighth rib. Forty inches of suture if it is one. Look how it holds. Look how it holds.”

His fingers hovered a breath from the scars, trembling, reverent. He was talking to them now. Crooning to the stitching itself.

“They said it could not be done. A ruin, they would have said. A thing for the pit. And I raised it. Every graft took. Every one. The skin at the shoulder is another man’s skin, do you know that, does it know that—” the bright eyes flicked up.

Ophelia sat with her folded hands and her schooled face and felt her marriage turned over card by card.

I cannot.

His voice so wretched she had ended by pitying him through her own rejection.

She understood far too much, but not enough, and it made her ache for her husband.

“Artillery,” the foreigner was saying, circling again, hungry, naming each piece as he found it.

Thunder rolled the word around the room.

“Luc brought me the harvest in carts. Carts of them, from that field. And this one. This one⁠—”

“Damian,” Ophelia said. Her voice did not sound like her own. “What exactly is he saying?”

Damian’s jaw moved. He did not answer her. He had not answered her for the length of a marriage.

The stranger answered her. He seemed only now to remember she could hear. He turned to her as if he had waited years for someone to sit still and listen, the pistol swinging loose and dreadful with the gesture.

“Madame does not know.” Wonder in it. “It kept even this. Even from her.” He laughed again, high. “It died, madame. On the eighteenth of June, in the mud below Mont-Saint-Jean, this died. It was brought to me in a cart with the others and it was cold, madame. I have handled enough of the dead to swear to it as to scripture. No breath. No beat. Cold.”

He was walking toward her now, confiding, almost glad. Behind him Damian had gone the color of the candle wax, his head dropping in shame.

“I laid it on my slab in the cellar with the rest. I sewed it because the ruin of it offended me. I gave it …” his voice dropped, tender. “I gave it an eye.”

“The eye,” Ophelia repeated.

“The left.” He said it like a lover. “Ruined in the socket, quite ruined. And nearby, a whole one, blue, near enough a match. Near enough. And I thought, why not, why not, what is science if it does not dare …” His hands were shaking. “Another man’s eye, madame. And it sees.”

She looked past the madman at her husband. At the two blues that had never quite agreed.

She saw Damian’s face as the words landed. The left lid fluttered.

He had not known. He must have suspected. She could read the whole grim arithmetic of it in the way he stood. He had lived above that suspicion the way one lives above a cellar. And this shrieking creature had just thrown the door open, in front of his wife, and shown him what was kept down there.

Oh, she thought, uselessly, her heart breaking in some entirely new direction. Oh, Damian.