The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Sixty Eight: The Proposal

Oxford, 1881:

Two hours after Danvers left the Faculty—taking all his belongings with him, and studiously refraining from criticizing Alice Darwin—Jack got impatient with Ellini's sulking and burst into her room. At first glance, it seemed empty, but he knew her too well to trust his first glance.

On the dressing table was a tray, with a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter. The cook must have brought it up for her when she failed to appear at breakfast. It hadn't been touched.

Beside the tray was the little velvet pouch, containing all the pieces of broken clay doll that he and Sergei had been able to find. They had sorted through the dust heaps until their fingers were black—well, Sergei had, at first. To begin with, Jack had sat back, lit up a cigarette and mocked him. But then he'd got frustrated with Sergei's technique, and joined in.

They were both acutely aware of the stupidity of it—sorting through dust heaps for broken pieces of clay, when they could have just stood up to Alice, and prevented the clay from being broken in the first place. They both felt as though this demeaning activity was what they deserved—although Jack was able to be cheerful about it, because he had never comforted himself with the idea that he was a good man, the way Sergei and Danvers did.

Still, he didn't want Ellini to die on the fourth of July. Even while he'd been trying to sort the pieces of clay from the lumps of coal and slivers of broken crockery, he had been formulating a plan—or, anyway, trying to think of an alternative to the starkly obvious plan of giving up Alice Darwin.

In the end, he had been more successful with the clay.

They couldn't be sure that they'd found every piece. Sergei suspected that some of them had fallen down between the cracks in the floorboards of the Faculty lounge. But they had gathered everything they could find into a little pouch, and given it to the cook, who had agreed to be Ellini's maid in Sarah's absence.

By the looks of it, Ellini hadn't touched the pouch any more than she'd touched the tea, but Jack wasn't daunted.

He slung the pouch onto the tray, then picked it up and brought it over to the little patch of carpet between the window and the bed where he knew Ellini would be, lying just outside her squares of sunlight.

She was curled up on her side with her eyes determinedly open, staring into the bright squares as though she was trying to blind herself. He could have predicted this too, and it made him happy and annoyed at the same time.

He put the tray down on the floor beside her and closed the curtains, plunging the room into sudden gloom. Ellini blinked a little but didn't move.

She was still wearing the Charlotte Grey dress, with her braids pinned up on her head tightly, so they wouldn't present a trailing target for the gargoyles in pursuit. Bruises from the night before were starting to blossom on her arms and shoulders.

Jack had a strange reaction to those bruises. On the one hand, he wanted to cover them with the lightest, tenderest kisses—and, on the other hand, he wanted to prod them really hard.

"You're not being practical," he said, as though they were resuming an old conversation. "How are you supposed to escape those gargoyles if you go blind? Sight is the one advantage you have over them."

On the floor, Ellini made a stiff, shrugging motion, but didn't speak.

"And you're not eating anything," he went on. "You know, however masochistically determined you are, food helps. You run faster when you've got fuel to burn."

"I only have to do it for one more day," she said, in the quiet, distant voice he had grown to recognize from her dark moods

Jack sighed and sat down, cross-legged, on the carpet beside her. "And can you imagine how you'd feel if you'd been doing so well for so long and then you failed the night before you were due to finish? Doesn't your dastardly scheme mean everything to you? Can you afford any slip-ups at this point?"