Page 75

“And then,” the stranger continued, “I raised it.”

Lightning obliged him. The park leapt white beyond the glass. Every raindrop on the panes was a bead of fire. The thunder came in on top of it and the whole house shuddered. The madman lifted his face into the noise as if it had been applause for him.

“The rod on the farmhouse took the strike. I felt it through the stones. Through my teeth. Heaven’s own fire, madame, into my cellar, into my work, and I did not even know. That is the jest God made of me. I went up to my supper a failure and my finest work lay in the dark below, finishing.” His voice cracked. “It woke without me. It took its uniform and a dead man’s valuables and it walked out into the night. No. No.”

He mastered himself. Breathed. The fever in his eyes banked down into something worse. Certainty.

“It does not matter. It is found.”

“Monsieur,” Damian said again, low. “You have had your look. Now let my wife⁠—”

“Wife!”

The word came out of the madman like something spat.

And here it came. Ophelia had watched enough tables to know the moment a man stopped playing and started preaching. Here came the sermon. The pistol came up with it. The drawing room lost its manners. Nothing in it felt soft anymore.

“Listen to me, madame, since it will not tell you.” Each word laid down like coin for a wager. Thunder farther off underscored him. He waited for it. He timed himself to it, as if the storm answered to him. “That is not a man.”

Tick, went the mantel clock.

“It is property.”

The pistol had come up. A slow cold ran down through her. It was not pointed at Damian. It was pointed at her. His hands had no right to hold so still.

“It is the property of science. Of the work. It stood up from my table and it walked away wearing what belongs to me. My work. My sutures. My eye. Electricity jolting from the skies that came to my cellar. And it has been playing at man ever since. At baron. At husband.” The mouth twisted. “No, no, enough! It is coming home with me, madame. Tonight it comes home, or I will make the argument in the only language it⁠—”

Damian moved.

Not fast. That was what undid her.

He crossed the drawing room the way he crossed it to take his coffee, water still darkening the floor behind him. He walked into the line of the pistol as if it were a doorway, and stopped, and stood, and was between the muzzle and her chair.

So close to his maker that the barrel nearly touched his breast. So close to her that she could smell rain and flesh. His shoulders shut out half the candlelight and all of the madman’s face.

“No,” he said.

The word landed in the room like a dropped stone.

“You will point that at me,” Damian commanded, “because I am the one you want, and because if you turn it on her again I will kill you where you stand and we may all find out together whether I stay down twice.” His voice never lifted. It was the voice that had ordered squares to hold, she thought wildly. A voice for commanding juniors to stand still while Napoleon’s armies fired. “Now hear me, because I will say this once. You sewed me. You grafted me. You put a dead man’s eye in my head⁠—”

Only there, only on the eye did his voice catch, one tiny tearing catch, and then he went on.

“… and it may be that your lightning called me back, or it may be that God is stranger than either of us. It changes nothing. I am not your work walking. I am a man. I am her husband. I am alive.”

Lightning took the windows again, closer, and lit him white from crown to heel. The soaked hair. The bared ruined shoulder. The seams of him shining. Lit by the very energy that had made him. He stood in it and did not flinch.

“When I stood up off that slab,” he said, “I stood up on my own legs, and I walked out of that cellar on my own feet, and I have been paying debts ever since to everyone but myself. I do not belong to science. I do not belong to you. I was going home the moment I opened my eyes.” His breath heaved his thick shoulders. “I belong to nothing on this earth, Rochat, except what I have given myself to. And I have given myself⁠—”

He turned his head.

Over his shoulder he found her. Both blues, his and the borrowed one, and no barrier between either of them for the first time since she had known him. His lips moved without sound, carefully, so that she could not mistake it.

I am sorry, Ophelia.

The thunderclap and the pistol were one noise.

The world went white and stinking. Powder smoke rolled between the candles. The report slammed off the ceiling and buried itself in the thunder’s tail.