Godspeed

Chapter 25

"I must go out," Quinn advised me, storming into the room with unusual speed applied to his already unusually long strides. "You will accompany me."

I blinked several times in disbelief.

I had not set foot outside the building’s many rooms since I first was carried inside them; my tenancy here was still something very much, I had been told, to be hidden.

Ironic, I thought, considering I was the very least of the secrets he was hiding in this house…

“Surely you would rather that I stay with Mister Algernon,” I stammered at last.

"Mister Algernon has told you to call him Schuyler more times than I can count, and the man is otherwise engaged at the moment. He cannot keep an eye on you, and I am…" He paused, shifting uncomfortably as he took his overcoat from the rack in the corner of the room and laid it over my shoulders. "I am loath, still, to leave you on your own."

I worried in that moment that for all the strength I'd regained, and all the time that had gone by now, he still had serious concerns about the ability of my heart to sustain my life. It never occurred to me that he might simply need my company.

I was so surprised by this turn of events that it took me a moment to even process that he had given me his own overcoat to wear, not something of Schuyler's. I remembered wearing his waistcoat one night on the balcony that seemed a lifetime ago, and never forgot the way it felt. Wearing anything of his seemed the closest thing to heaven I had ever known.

What pleased me the most, to be truthful, is that it was something that he did without thought — an automatic gesture to keep me warm and safe, two feelings that always strengthened in me the moment he entered any room.

He noticed me tugging at the heavy wool garment with both hands, trying to settle it down onto much smaller shoulders than it was intended for so I could begin to button it.

Then he said something that took the sparkle out of the moment for me — and I was sure that fact must have been evident to him.

"We will have to see about procuring you a more varied wardrobe now that the weather's turned. You should have a coat of your own."

I nodded slightly as I saw him reach out and at first, attempt to button the coat for me.

He looked down at me and then quickly back up into my face for a moment. Gentleman that he was, and being that this was not a medical intervention, he withdrew his hands before they made contact with the coat or anything close to my body. "Button up quickly,” he said, as he turned away. “We can't keep the Magistrate waiting."

"We're going to see Jib's father?"

"Yes, and I do not know how long the meeting will last. If you begin to feel tired, all you will have to do is mention the fact, and their staff will show you to a place to lie down. If you begin to feel anything more than tired…" He glanced up at me from the stack of papers he was placing into a leather messenger bag, and locked his eyes on mine to reinforce his directive. "Then I want you to have them come and fetch me immediately."

#

The carriage ride was shorter than I imagined it would be. Still, by the time we arrived, I was already feeling fatigued. I saw the concern in Quinn’s eyes as he measured, it seemed, the meter of my breaths, and clutched his medical bag tighter in his left hand. The messenger bag was slung over his right shoulder, and with his right hand he reached out quickly to steady me as I faltered a step and nearly lost my footing on the curb.

“Are you all right?”

I nodded.

We were left at the corner of what appeared to be two beautiful, residential streets. There were only two houses in view, one on either street, back and away from where they met at that corner, and both with gates so tall that all you could make out of the houses from this distance were the shingles of the roofs.