Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (23 page)

“Get out,” said Mrs. Latham. “Both of you. Get
out
!”

“Mrs. Latham, please,” Harriet said desperately, “I’m sorry for what I—”

“Are you deaf, Harriet? I said, get out, and take your damned mountebank with you. What was the plan? Terrify us all into locking ourselves into our bedrooms and then make off with the silver? If you don’t get out this instant, I will have you
put
out. And don’t think I can’t.”

She could. Harriet knew all too well that Mrs. Latham’s word was law in Chisholm End. She said stiffly and coldly, “Am I to understand that you are dismissing me from my position?”

“I’m certainly not going to keep you around.”

“And you will not listen to our warning?”

“
OUT
!” shrieked Mrs. Latham, yanking furiously at the bell-pull. Harriet turned and bolted, Far at her heels.

She found herself saying ridiculously as they clattered down the stairs, “They’ll never give me a character now. Never in a million years. Never never never.” The front hall was deserted; the servants were doubtless, as Mrs. Latham had said, indulging themselves in hysterics in the servants’ hall.

“Wait!” Harriet said, catching Far’s sleeve. “Your bowl.”

“You know where it is?”

“I think so. This way.”

And sure enough, in the breakfront in the formal dining room, there was Far Faithwell’s simple blue bowl, incongruous among the Sèvres vases and Dresden figurines.

Far tried the door. “It’s locked.”

“But I know where the key is,” Harriet said, still with maniacal giggles welling up under her breastbone. “The housekeeper’s supposed to keep it on her ring, but she never does. It’s too fiddly, and she says she’s afraid she’ll lose it. Here.”

It was hidden carefully in another present from Cousin Emmeline in Bath: a hideous crenellated silver salt-cellar which leered at the room from the top of the breakfront. Harriet unlocked the door, stood aside to let Far lift out the bowl himself—and she noted with what care he did so, using both hands, as if it were the Grail—then locked the door again and put the key back in the salt-cellar. There was no need to get Mrs. Brennigan in trouble.

Far was standing in the middle of the room, his head bent over the bowl.

“Mr. Faithwell? Are you . . . ”

“Better,” he said, and gave her a smile that was like a dim reflection of Francis.

They returned to the front hall; there were still no signs of life. Wilson, Harriet reckoned, would have gone pelting up the backstairs as soon as the servants noticed the bell ringing, but by then there was a sporting chance Mrs. Latham would have rendered herself incoherent. But still, she and Far didn’t have long, and she was grateful for the evening’s alarums, which had so thoroughly disrupted the household that the butler hadn’t yet locked up for the night. Harriet and Far wrestled the door open and half-fell out into the cool night air.

Far cradled his bowl carefully in his right arm and offered Harriet his left.

She accepted it, her giggles deserting her. “Is Francis . . . are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

They started together up the long drive. Far said, with an effort at lightness, “This is the first time I’ve ever actually been thrown out of a house before.”

“It is not an edifying experience.”

“No, but one must strive to keep from stagnating.” He glanced over his shoulder and said in a completely different tone, “Are those your
footmen
?”

Harriet looked back. Peter and Jasper were just emerging through the front door, a matched set of giants. “She’s probably told them you stole the silver. Can they see us?”

Her question was answered by a shout from Jasper. Together, they ran, Far clutching his bowl to his chest, Harriet bundling up her skirts in both hands. The footmen were unwilling to follow them far in the dark, doubtless imagining a whole team of burglars, and Harriet and Far emerged on the main road breathless but in good order.

The moon was near full; by its light Far looked at Harriet quizzically. “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.” The enormity of it crashed in on her all at once. “She
fired
me. No character, no warning. My things . . . Oh dear God—”

“Don’t get hysterical now, I implore you.”

“I beg your pardon?” Harriet said as icily as she could, and then couldn’t help returning Far’s grin.

“Look. Your situation is my fault—” He held up a hand, forestalling Harriet’s protest. “Please. I’ll buy you a train ticket to wherever you want. If you’ll accompany me to the train station, of course.”

“You have money?”

“I do. No one was crass enough to empty my pockets while I was unconscious.”

“Perhaps there’s something to be said for breeding, after all,” Harriet said, and they laughed together, shakily. “The train station’s this way. Though I’m afraid it’s a good five miles.”

“I have nothing better to do, and I cannot imagine a more charming companion.”

They walked in silence for half a mile. Far was still shivering; Harriet herself felt on the verge of tears. She said, “Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“When you said her vengeance would be real before dawn.”

“Yes. Harriet, you aren’t still—” He broke off, his eyes widening. “Miss Winterbourn, I beg your pardon.”

“I’ve just been thrown out of a house with you. I think we can, without loss of decorum, establish ourselves on a first-name basis.”

He smiled back at her. “Harriet, then. You aren’t still—”

“Of course I am. I always will. But I know that you’re right. She would not listen, and I don’t suppose, even if she would have let me, that staying in her room all night would have helped.”

“No,” Far said. “Believe me. I know of
nothing
you can do. She broke the circle, you see.”

The simplicity with which he said it chilled Harriet to the bone. “I understand. And I won’t be sorry that she’s dead. But . . . ”

There was another long silence. Harriet’s feet began to hurt.

“If anyone I’ve ever met deserves what that woman has coming to her,” Far said, “she’s it.”

“Yes,” Harriet said desolately. Far away and dim, from the house they were leaving behind them, she could almost hear Enid laughing.

They reached the train station in the coldest, bleakest hour of the night. There were no passengers waiting; the booking clerk was asleep in his coffin-sized office. Far said, “Let’s not wake him yet,” and drew her over to sit on one of the benches.

He looked at her sidelong, an odd half-grimace of a look, and said, “Where will you go?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The train ticket. Where will you go?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I haven’t any family. I don’t—”

“I . . . ” He cleared his throat nervously. “I have a suggestion.”

“A suggestion?” She could not help her eyebrows lifting, and he blushed fiery red.

But he stuck to his guns. “You could come with me.”

“Come with you where?”

“Well, I have an engagement in York on Tuesday.”

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“But what . . . ”

“I have no designs on your virtue. I promise. But I have wanted to hire an assistant for some time.”

“An assistant?”

“Yes.”

“If this is because I’ve been dismissed—”

“No! Well, I mean, yes, but not like that. Do you know how few people there are who genuinely believe me?”

“Oh, but surely . . . ”

“They half-believe. Some three-quarters. But people who genuinely believe that I hear the voice of my dead twin brother in my head? Who genuinely believe that the dead speak to them through me? Not one in a thousand. So. Will you?”

He was watching her anxiously, an ugly, tired little man, ashen-faced and shivering a little.

She said, “Francis said you liked me.”

He almost flinched, but he met her eyes. He said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

She was throwing away her respectability—but, then, she had already thrown it away, left it behind with her limp leather-bound Testament in Chisholm End. And, she thought, her heart suddenly seeming to expand in her chest, she had left behind Mr. Benfelton, as well.

“Yes,” said Harriet Winterbourn, and she and Far Faithwell smiled at each other, like children waking from nightmares to wish upon a star.

He wakes up tasting dirt.

A voice, hissing, “Jesus, Cluny, are you okay?” and hands grabbing his shoulders, dragging him away from . . . away from . . . 

Away from what?

And who the fuck is Cluny?

He jerks free of the hands, wipes sweat and blood off his face with the sleeve of his uniform jacket—except no way is that his uniform and that can’t be his arm, and he presses hands that don’t belong to him against a face that isn’t his either and comes closer to screaming than he has since he was eleven and stepped in a yellow-jackets’ nest. Back on Earth.

“Cluny!
Cluny
!”

He looks up, because he knows a sergeant’s voice when he hears one, and a hand grabs his jaw, tilts his head. It’s a woman’s hand, and the yellow-brown eyes staring at him are a woman’s eyes.
Oh Jesus who is this bitch?
He doesn’t know her, and she’s wearing the wrong uniform, just like he is.

She lets him go and says, “Jesus, girl, your head must be solid rock. That poor bastard of a Yoggo gets his skull smashed to smithereens and you aren’t even bruised.”

He stares at her.
That poor bastard of a Yoggo . .
 . He jerks around, hard enough and fast enough to hurt his neck, and looks back, into the tunnel she just dragged him out of, and sees the rockfall and a bright splash of blood and then there’s the body and oh fuck oh Christ there’s the
right
uniform and he knows those boots with the duct-tape holding together the left heel and he knows that outflung arm with the darn on the elbow of the jacket and the scar across the back of the hand and oh sweet Jesus that’s
him
, he’s lying out there dead, dead and fucked to Kingdom Come.

Except that he’s
here
and the woman with the yellow eyes is shaking him and saying, “Come on, Cluny, we got to move.”

And he follows her back to where the rest of the squad is crouching, because she’s a sergeant, and he can’t think around the voice in his head screaming,
Koth, I’m a Koth, fuck me Jesus, how can I be a KOTH?
Because he hates them and fears them, and he doesn’t know what the fuck happened that he’s stuck in the body of a Koth-bitch private, but he just keeps putting one foot in front of the other because he’s a grunt and that’s what you do.

He keeps with the squad, keeps his head down. Being a grunt is being a grunt, and he’s even kind of comforted by that, when he can forget for two minutes together that he’s on the wrong fucking side. He squints sideways at names, matches them to faces and the sergeant’s harsh voice. The sergeant’s name is Livingstone. She’s a big dark woman, grip like a trash compactor—he can feel where she left bruises dragging him out of the rockfall. The other grunts don’t give him any shit, and that’s good. Makes it easier to keep himself together. He watches and listens. Really, he keeps expecting to fall down dead.

But he’s still alive four hours later, when they make it back to the Koth camp, and Livingstone says, “Cluny, come on. The rest of you, dismissed.” He follows her, because she’s his sergeant, and at least in this fucking mess, he knows who his sergeant is—
and you fucking pussy, does that actually make you feel BETTER?

Yeah, actually. It does. And then it occurs to him that “pussy” is maybe not something he wants to be calling himself anymore, and he doesn’t feel better at all.

Livingstone leads him straight to the med-tent and shoves in shouting, “Doc! Doc!”

“Sergeant Livingstone, I presume.” A tall, skinny, snarky man, older than any of the camp-docs he’s seen in a year or more. Koth must take better care of them. “What can I do for you, sergeant?”

“Take a look at Cluny here,” Livingstone says. “Piece of tunnel came down on top of her.

Oh shit.
“I’m fine,” he says, and dear Jesus is that his
voice
? The last word trails up into a squeak like a dog-whistle, and he starts coughing.

“Yes,” says the doc, “I can see how fine you are. Come on, Cluny, you know the drill.”

He doesn’t, but he gambles on it not being different from what he’s used to, and it seems like it must not be. He takes off his boots and his uniform jacket, and Christ he hadn’t imagined they
made
uniforms this small, and steps over where the doc is waiting and smirking at him like a dried-up vulture. He’s not trembling, he tells himself, and it’s not like he has anything to be afraid of now. The doc shines a light in his eyes the way they always do, and listens to his heart, and prods at his stomach and kidneys and all the vulnerable bits between the ribs and the hips. Which he hates, and it’s even worse in this body because he can’t let go of knowing how close the doc’s long cold fingers are to his tits. Well, not
his
tits, but this body’s tits. Which aren’t very big, but still. He doesn’t want the doc touching them. Doesn’t want the doc touching
him
, and he can feel his hands balling into fists, feel that cold sweat starting on the back of his neck and in his armpits, and it’s just fucking great that it feels the same in this skinny little body as it does in his.

He tells himself not to flip out, not to be a sissy, but he knows it’s not doing any good, and then a movement, just a little one, drags his attention back to the tent-flap, and he realizes Livingstone’s still standing there, arms folded and one hip canted. She doesn’t trust the doc, either, and she isn’t going to leave. And he thinks he shouldn’t be as relieved by that as he is—
you fucking sissyboy
—but he can’t do anything about it.

And finally the doc straightens up and steps away and says, bored, “Nothing wrong here.” He gets his jacket and boots back on, and feels better for it.

“Good,” Livingstone says. She jerks her head at him and he follows her back out into the camp. He tries to identify things as they pass: the showers, the quartermaster’s tent, and oh Christ somewhere in this mess is
her
tent, Cluny’s tent, and what the hell is he going to do about
that
?