She didn’t have time to guess where Estelle had been hidden. She needed to know. Her power wouldn’t help her, even if she could manage to force a reconnection to it. There weren’t any answers there. It couldn’t tell her what was happening now, only what was coming.
How could she know?
The files.
She thought back to the ones she’d rifled in Hartwell’s study—all detailed, painstakingly organized.
There had been a file cabinet in the office he’d commandeered here in the manor. It was far too new to be some relic of the old estate. Hartwell had brought it there before he’d moved so much as a stick of other furniture or supplies.
Somewhere in that cabinet was a file on Estelle. It wouldn’t list her true name, of course. But the rest of it would be perfectly accurate—including the number of the room where she was being held.
Urgent footsteps echoed down through the ceiling as Lily made her way back to the ballroom. She slipped past the painter’s cloth, returning to the glaring white hall of Hartwell’s asylum.
She paused to pluck a crowbar from the toolbox on the floor.
The weight of it felt good in her hands, familiar like an old friend.
She crept up to the office door.
It was empty.
The electric lamp on the desk still lit the space, though outside the windows night had fully descended. The light felt harsh, exposing her to anyone who walked by.
Her pulse pounding, she strode to the big steel file cabinet, wedging the crowbar into the edge of the first drawer and throwing all her weight against it.
The drawer cracked open with a squeal of twisting metal.
It was empty.
She slammed it shut, knowing speed was what counted now, and jammed the crowbar into the next drawer.
It popped open, then caught. Lily stomped on the crowbar and the drawer wrenched free. A handful of files rested inside.
She grabbed them and tossed them onto the desk, quickly flipping through the contents.
First was a 75-year-old female from Islington, diagnosed with dementia. Next was a 20-year-old with melancholia. There were no room numbers on either file, making these most likely patients that Hartwell had already arranged to take up residence in this sterile hell once it was ready to open.
She tossed them aside, knowing it could not possibly be long before she was discovered.
She opened the file of a female, age unknown but described as “middling”, approximately 5’ 10” in height. Diagnosed with chronic delusions. Sapphic, Hartwell had neatly penned on one of the lines.
Sapphist. The slur he had used to refer to Estelle.
On the opening line of the chart was a room number.
204.
“There!”
The shout came from the hall. Lily looked up to see Hartwell and Northcote striding toward her.
She snatched up the crowbar.
Could she fight them both?
The narrow door in the wall caught her eye. She ran to it and wrenched it open. A narrow stair lay behind, leading up.
As Hartwell entered the room, she bolted through that dark opening.
Shouts echoed up at her as she climbed. The stairwell was tight, twisting and turning dizzily. Cobwebs brushed her face as she ran, her feet slipping in the dust. She didn’t allow herself to wonder what could possibly be at the end of it. She simply ran until a solid wall stopped her.
She felt at it frantically in the darkness. Cold air seeped through cracks in the wood. Her hand brushed a knob. She rattled it but it refused to turn.
Footsteps from below shook the boards under her feet.
The wall behind her was rough, not wood but brick. She braced herself against it, then kicked—once, twice. The third time, something shattered and the door swung open.
Lily ran through it out onto a narrow path that stretched across the apex of the roof.
The sky overhead exploded with stars, dizzying in their abundance. The cold air slapped her, fogging her breath.
She could see the road and beyond it, the broad expanse of the heath, the familiar landscape made strange by a shroud of winter. Around her, the peaks and gables of the house were a treacherous mountain range blanketed with snow. She could see the two great wings of the building, but there was no sign of another door like the one behind her or any promise of a way down that didn’t involve tumbling to her death.
Voices sounded from the stairwell behind her. Out of alternatives, she ran out along the narrow, frosted path. It ended at the solid brick wall of another chimney. She turned, letting the crowbar hang at her side.
Hartwell stepped out onto the roof.
“If you will wait a moment, Mr. Northcote,” he spoke into the darkness behind him. Then he turned to Lily.
“Miss Albright.”
“Doctor Hartwell.”
His face looked cadaverous in the pale light of the stars, the hollows of his cheeks cast into sunken shadows. His tone was casual, as though he had simply happened across her here on the peak of the roof.
“You have noted, I am sure, that there is no other means of egress from here.”
Lily didn’t answer, adjusting her grip on the crowbar. Her fingers were cold, the metal sucking the warmth from her hand.
“Mr. Northcote is fairly cross with you. I gather Mr. Gibbs is as well. But I have made both of them promise not to exact any retribution for the trouble you caused them this evening if you agree to return quietly to your room. I’m sure you must see this is the only sensible course of action.”
There was nothing sensible about it. To return to the room was to put herself back under Hartwell’s control. He would take what he wanted from her—quickly or slowly—and then he would kill her.
The snow-covered roof offered nothing, no scaffolding she could scale back to the ground, no convenient tree she could climb. There was only a steep, slippery pitch to either side of her and beyond that, a long drop to the dirt.
The silence where her answer should have been stretched, grew undeniable.
“I see,” Hartwell replied shortly. “That is unfortunate.” He called back to the darkened door. “Mr. Northcote? I am afraid Miss Albright will need to be retrieved.”
Hartwell moved a step to the side and Northcote slipped past him onto the path.
“Can you handle it?” she heard Hartwell ask, voice low.
“She’s just a girl,” Northcote retorted.
He approached, moving cautiously down the narrow walk.
As he came, Lily heard a thick fluttering overhead. She looked up to see a wave of black wings pass across the sky, dark bodies obscuring the thick veil of stars.
The ravens circled, a few breaking away from the others and coming to rest on the cracked pots crowning the chimney behind her. They stared down at her and Northcote, black eyes indifferent.
The driver continued to stalk toward her. He was a large man. She had no illusions about her chances of resisting him if he managed to get his hands on her. At the moment, she had only one advantage.
She took a step out from the bricks, the crowbar hanging in the shadow of her leg.
As Northcote reached the place where she waited for him, the silence of the night broke, interrupted by the distant rumble of an engine.
Beyond Northcote’s shoulder, a pair of headlights pierced the darkness of the heath, moving far faster than they ought to be up the snow-covered road.
He turned toward the sound, surprised.
Lily seized her chance and swung.
She aimed the crowbar for the driver’s back, his broadest target. The impact sent him lurching forward, but he turned as he fell and clutched at the sleeve of Lily’s jacket.
Northcote’s weight pulled her off balance. Her feet slid on the snow-covered path and she tumbled after him, sliding down the icy slates of the roof.
She swung the crowbar up over her head, wildly. The hook of it slammed into the path and held, wedged in place. She dangled from the end, fe
et hanging halfway down the roof, as Northcote slid past her.
He stopped at the copper gutter, clinging to it. The metal creaked.
“Doctor!” he shouted.
The rumble of the approaching engine grew louder. The headlights were drawing closer to the drive, their glow illuminating the shadowy forms of another handful of ravens settling on the hedge that lined the road.
“Miss Albright?”
Lily looked up to see Hartwell standing over her. He knelt down in the snow, extending his arm.
“Take my hand, please.”
Behind her, a louder wrench signaled another shift in the gutter. Northcote screamed.
Lily glanced down at him. He had managed to wrap one of his legs around the metal, but the copper pulled away from the roof, revealing a few inches of open air.
“We can fetch a rope for Mr. Northcote once you’re somewhere safe.”
Hartwell’s voice was calm, placidly reassuring. His pale hand remained suspended in the darkness above her as the cold iron of the crowbar grew slick under her sweating palms.
She was under no illusion as to why he offered her his help. He wanted her body. He wanted to rip it open and find the source of its power. He would tear it out of her and make it his, acting out some dark dream of possession cloaked in altruistic glitter.
Below her, metal screamed and twisted as the gutter tore away from the roof. Northcote’s voice rose to join it, a howl of animal fear as he slid down the remaining length of it and then tumbled from view.
The howl ended abruptly with a dull crunch in the snow of the yard.
Hartwell’s hand hovered in the darkness above.
She felt the tension between two terrible options—to fall, or to let Hartwell save her and be placed fully under his power for whatever remained of her life.
Her hands slid against the cold iron of the crowbar and her mind flashed back to a hallway of infinite doors, to the cold weight of a key in her hand. The connection to that space became present, firing through her. With perfect clarity, she knew exactly what it was.
The future spilled forward from the moment in which she hung. She felt it splinter, multiplying like a kaleidoscope in which every facet revealed something subtly different. Possibilities unfurled behind countless doors. Lily knew them all, saw the myriad ways they could unfold, based on the pivot of this moment.
In many—nearly all—Hartwell continued his work. More women died in the name of his research, research with the potential of proving that desirable talents could be harvested with the blood of those who bore them, then granted to others deemed more worthy.
It was a discovery that would justify unspeakable horrors.
And yet there were other doors—slimmer, less tangible—which lead to a very different outcome.
She was suffused with the knowledge that, at this precise minute, she held the key to one such future in her hand . . . a third option that lay between letting go and giving in.
One where she took Hartwell down with her.
She could become a murderer herself and in doing so, prevent a thousand untold murders from ever being thought.
It was a choice that chilled her with horror.
Lily pulled against the crowbar. She walked her feet up the icy slope of the roof, bracing them against the slates. She pulled her right hand from the iron and lifted it. Felt Hartwell’s cold palm clasp her own, his grip sure, and prepared to use that leverage to push both herself and the man who thought he was going to save her off into the open air.
At the top of the drive, the headlights swung towards the great ruined house. Tires skidded across the snow, caught, and spun a gleaming silver Rolls Royce into the yard.
The light from below washed over Hartwell, chasing the shadows from his face, leaving him exposed and thoroughly surprised.
On the chimney pot, a raven ruffled its wings and croaked.
Impossible.
It was impossible . . . but impossible things had been happening all night.
They’d been happening all her life.
Hartwell turned his gaze from the car in the drive to Lily’s face, surprise shifting to suspicion, run through with veins of something else—a reluctant respect.
His hand in hers, her legs still braced against the roof, Lily met his eyes. She felt the perfect balance of the moment. The decision was hers to make, but only for another breath.
Down the drive, car doors slammed, the engine rumbling to a stop.
She let out her breath and then, shifting the angle of her feet against the roof, allowed Hartwell to haul her back to the path.
Voices called out below, sharp and urgent. Lily singled out a familiar Ulster brogue as Dr. Gardner’s tones floated up to where she stood on the peak of the roof.
“There’s a man on the ground over here!”
Hartwell still held her arm, keeping her as close as a lover as he looked down at the activity below. Figures moved across the headlights of the Rolls, their forms thrown into silhouette. Lily could see Gardner’s broad shoulders as he pulled a case from the car, then jogged over to where something lay beyond her line of sight.
Sam grabbed a lantern and ran to the end of the drive, where he waved it at three more sets of approaching headlights making their way across the heath at a more measured pace.
Someone else remained in front of the vehicle, his gaze directed up at the roof. Though he was cast into shadow by the headlamps, Lily knew him. She knew his shape—the set of his shoulders, the unfashionable fall of his hair.
Strangford.
Alive. Here.
The relief shattered over her, bursting into a thousand pieces, releasing her from a grief so deep she hadn’t allowed herself to feel it.
She felt his eyes on her and knew he had made her out on the peak of the roof—along with the silhouette of the man who gripped her.
He ran, sprinting toward the house.
“How did you do it?” Hartwell demanded. “How did you tell them where to find you?”
“I had help,” Lily replied.
The other cars had reached the drive. They turned, carefully negotiating the snow-covered corner to enter the estate. Lily could see the decals of the Metropolitan Police painted onto the sides. They stopped and uniformed men spilled out, heading for the house or to the place where Northcote had fallen.
Beside her, Hartwell watched them come.
“I think . . . this can be salvaged,” he said thoughtfully, slowly.
There was a thin current of fear in his tone, a flicker of uncertainty. It shocked Lily. He had always seemed sure, certain of himself and the rightness of his actions.
She felt her pulse quicken, her senses sharpening.
“The Sapphist has been drugged. She won’t recall anything of substance. There is nothing in the building that should not be here given its intended purpose. Gibbs will validate any case I make. There is only Northcote who must be accounted for.”
“I think you’re forgetting something,” Lily snapped.
“No. I am merely envisioning the picture that will be made if the most troublesome piece of the puzzle is eliminated.”
Her heart pounded. She did not need any power to understand what was coming next.
It would be a neat enough story. The good doctor would simply be trying to do what was right for the lunatic who had been witnessed breaking into his house—a lunatic who was now on the roof from which his loyal servant had fallen.
Even if Strangford and the others tried to speak the truth, it would look groundless without the key witness in all of this.
Without Lily.
On the chimney, the raven called again, another harsh, demanding croak, a restless flap of dark wings.
She felt the pressure on her arm shift.
There was no time to think, no time to weigh outcomes. Lily acted on instinct, countering him with the only resource she had available.
She grabbed his arms in return and when she felt him push, threw the weight of her
body toward the yard.
They toppled together from the path.
She hit the snow-covered slates, sliding. She pushed Hartwell away and reached out wildly.
Her fingers clasped cold iron.
She grabbed, the metal scraping against her palm. Her momentum jerked to a stop, her shoulder screaming in protest.
Beside her, Hartwell glided across the icy slates. He reached the bottom of the roof where the gutter had torn away and without so much as a gasp, tipped over the edge and vanished.
Lily dangled from the far end of the crowbar, her hand burning, and watched him go.
There was no scream, only silence, then the thick crunch of impact.
The raven rose from the chimney, flapping lazy black wings. It circled over her, then swooped down to the place where Hartwell had fallen.
Cold metal slipped under her palm.
“Lily.”
She looked up.
Strangford knelt on the path. There were cobwebs in his dark hair, his pale cheek marred by the scar of his struggle with Waddington. He tugged at the black gloves on his hands, shoved them into his pocket. He reached across the roof to her.
“Hold on to me.”
She felt her precarious grasp on the crowbar slip. She kicked her feet against the snow covering the slates, searching for purchase, and found it—hardly anything, just the toe of her motorcycle boot catching against a chip in the stone—but she used it, wedged in as far as she could, and pushed.
She swung her hand up, met Strangford’s bare fingers, and clutched.
He brought his other hand down to catch her, his grip warm and sure. He pulled. Lily scrambled and a few slippery, precarious steps later, he hauled her back onto the path.
His arms came around her, solid and real. She let herself fall into his embrace, all the tension and fear crumbling, leaving her raw, vulnerable to the horror of how close she had come to losing herself.
“Strangford,” she said, her voice as hoarse as the raven.
“I know,” he whispered, his breath warm against her hair, his bare hands cradling her. “I know.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The Fire in the Glass Page 47