Fitzpatrick shrugged. “Mr. Grenville said the house was safe.”
“Mr. Grenville didn’t mean you should start summoning demons here. The house is warded, and all homes have some protection, but neither protection nor wards count when you open a door in the middle of the house. With the forest right outside, we’re lucky you got one demon instead of the legions of hell. Now,” Olivia said, “you will both clean this up. Thoroughly. Ask one of the housemaids for soap and hot water. Add the salt, and sage if they have any in the kitchen. I will stay here and watch you, as it’s obvious I can’t trust you alone together. One of us will also search your room before you go to bed tonight, and you will stay in your room, for the next week, when you’re not in class or otherwise supervised.”
Fitzpatrick didn’t say anything, but he gave her a thoroughly mutinous look, in response to which Olivia glared right back. To her surprise, Waite simply nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am?”
“Yes, Mr. Waite?”
“What would have happened?” Fitzpatrick turned his scowl on Waite, who ignored the younger boy and went on. “If you hadn’t come in, I mean?”
“I can’t say for certain,” Olivia said. “If you’d drawn the circle well enough to hold Balam, and if nothing else had gotten through, he’d have given you what you wanted, in some fashion. Generally a troublesome one, he might have made you invisible with no way to turn back, for instance. In the process, he would have tried to get one of you to break the circle. If you had, or if the circle hadn’t held in the first place…” She shrugged. “We would have been fortunate if only the two of you had died.”
“Oh. I see.” Waite scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, looking faintly green. “Right, then.”
Olivia nodded. “Go get what you need, both of you. Be quick about it.”
She waited until they were gone, then dropped into one of the chairs against the wall. The headache had, indeed, started to make itself known, and that reminded her of Gareth, who was still standing near the door when she looked up. “Feeling better?” she asked.
“Hmm?” Gareth then seemed to realize what she was asking. “I…suppose. Something still feels off, but I’d imagine that will pass.”
“I’d wager you’ve never been around an attempt at demon-summoning before,” Olivia said dryly.
“I can’t say I have.”
“It’s a new experience for both of us, then. Or all five, probably. We’ll all be feeling the aftermath for a while. Which reminds me that one of us should see to Violet.”
“I’ll do it,” Gareth said, crossing the room as he talked. “I’m not certain my training covers this, but it’s close, and you have to stay and supervise, don’t you?”
“It seems the least I can do.” Olivia grimaced. Not all of her anger, she was realizing now, had been for Waite and Fitzpatrick. “I thought I’d taught them better. I really did.”
Out in the hall, the clock began to strike seven. Olivia listened to the chimes, letting the rhythm soothe her mind a little.
Then Gareth was in front of her, smoothing the loose strands of hair back from her forehead. “You did,” he said and shook his head a little, helplessly. “Young men are idiots. They’re idiots no matter what you tell them. Getting them to their majority alive is a small miracle.”
Olivia looked up at him and laughed briefly. “I shouldn’t find that reassuring, should I?”
“I wouldn’t have said it otherwise,” said Gareth.
Their eyes met again. Even exhausted as she was, Olivia felt a brief resurgence of her earlier desire. More than that, there was a quiet comfort in his face and the touch of his hand. She could almost feel her nerves resettling themselves.
“You should go talk to Violet,” she said. “Thank you, though, and for getting me here faster.”
“Thank you,” he said, “for keeping us all alive.”
He fell silent and bowed. Before he turned toward the door, Olivia saw the startled look on his face, as if he was surprised to say the words or to mean them.
Chapter 27
“Any injury can be more serious than it looks,” Gareth said. “Any injury can be less so. I’ve seen a man die from taking a punch to the stomach, and I’ve seen a man recover after being shot in the head.” Young Lewis had possessed a singularly thick skull in more ways than one, and Gareth had entertained a few suspicions about the quality of his enemy’s powder. “You have to consider not just the visible injury,” he went on, “but also the possibility of hidden damage, not to mention infection, shock, and the patient’s general condition. Miss Donnell?”
“Sir,” the girl said, lowering her hand slowly, “you said last week we often wouldn’t have time to think very much.”
“Yes,” Gareth said. “I did. And it’s true. Decisions about treatment and triage usually require significant thought. You…you five, especially, of all people, will almost certainly need to make them in moments, perhaps seconds.” He felt a wry smile cross his lips. “Mr. Grenville and Mrs. Brightmore ask you only to learn the unlikely, Miss Donnell. We’re attempting the impossible in this class.”
Uneasy laughter followed. Miss Woodwell exchanged a glance with Fitzpatrick, who was sitting next to her on the couch. Waite and Fairley just looked a bit blank. Elizabeth curled the end of a braid around one finger. Gareth remembered how young she was and had the urge to say something comforting.
There was no comfort to give. None that would be doing Elizabeth or her fellows any service
Gareth sighed. They were all so young, really. None of the faces turned toward him bore any wounds, any marks of great grief or fear. He didn’t doubt there’d been pain in their lives, but it had been the pain of any half-normal childhood. And he and Olivia and the Grenvilles, were sending them into…he couldn’t even say what.
It was no wonder, in some ways, Waite and Fitzpatrick had come up with their particular form of idiocy. No excuse, but they’d likely get over being young and stupid. From the exasperated look Miss Woodwell had given both of them when they’d come to class, the story had gotten around the student body, and embarrassment might help as much as punishment.
Waite was more attentive than usual today, and Fitzpatrick, though sulky, gave his answers fairly readily. They were raising their hands at practically the same times, Gareth noticed, and glancing at each other whenever one got an answer right, one in triumph, one in annoyance.
Whatever the private aftermath of their summoning had been, it had not resulted in closer friendship.
Gareth, who had dreamed uneasily all the night before and had spent the day with a strangely diminished appetite, couldn’t find much sympathy for them.
“Few lives go by without hasty decisions,” Gareth said now, looking down at the seated students. “I doubt any of them will be yours. Luckily, knowledge helps whether or not you have time to think. There’s a point where theory and practice becomes reflex, just as it does in riding or shooting.”
“But it’s never certain, sir?” Fitzpatrick asked.
“We’re in the wrong world for certainty, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Gareth said. “The best huntsman takes a toss every so often, the best shot can miss when the wind or the light is wrong, and the human body is far more complicated than either.”
He stopped and looked around the room again. All of the students were watching him now, nervous and earnest and waiting. He had planned to give them certain facts, basic and practical and perhaps somewhat dry. The rest, Gareth had thought, they could get from Olivia or the Grenvilles…or from life.
But neither Olivia nor the Grenvilles had likely been in certain situations, and life might break the unprepared.
Gareth cleared his throat. “You will be wrong. Each of you. All of you. If you deal with injury and disease, and, I suspect, with everything else you’re training for here, there will be times when you get bad information, when you lack the proper supplies, when you’ve had little sleep and less food and you make the wrong decision. There will be times w
hen you know that. There will be times when you don’t. There will be times when there’s no right decision.”
The room was silent.
“Sometimes,” said Gareth, making himself simply speak and not remember, “there isn’t anything you can do. Nothing that will make a difference. And sometimes you don’t know if there might have been.”
“What then, sir?” It was Fairley who asked, the only one young and blunt enough to voice what was probably on the others’ minds. “I mean, how do you—?”
“Cope with it?” Gareth asked when the boy was obviously lost for words. “Different men have different methods.”
Prayer, strong drink, or bad women, one of Gareth’s teachers had said, but they’d both been men, and Gareth had been of age.
“Religion is an aid for some,” he said now, and the words were stiff and awkward in his mouth. His father would have put it better, but also wouldn’t have said some, and Gareth had seen too much to say all. “Sometimes music is a comfort, or art or the company of friends. And some,” he added, honesty forcing the words, “turn to other distractions. I’d recommend the less dangerous sort. Particularly if you think you’ll need your wits about you the next day.”
Ordinarily, even such a veiled reference would have gotten a knowing smirk from Waite and Fitzpatrick. That they still looked serious reassured Gareth. He was making something of an impression.
Gareth just hoped none of them asked about his experience with self-destructive forms of comfort. He’d been lucky enough not to end up craving drink, and he’d never touched opium, but he couldn’t pretend to have been completely temperate either.
“That,” he said, “is what you can do afterward. Beforehand, you prepare as well as you can, and you do the best job possible. That’s as much as anyone can manage.”
He didn’t speak for a minute, simply watched them. Elizabeth’s lips were pressed tightly together, and her face was pale. Waite was frowning, but abstractly so, as if considering a problem. Fitzpatrick was studying his hands. Miss Woodwell just looked determined and businesslike, and Fairley chewed on his lower lip.
“In that spirit,” Gareth said and reached for one of his rolled-up charts, “let’s consider the human leg.”
He’d told them as much as he could. The rest would be up to life.
***
“Dr. St. John?”
Gareth hadn’t expected the voice. He’d turned away as soon as he’d dismissed the class, and started to straighten up the place. In truth, there wasn’t much to do. He’d brought a chair up and some charts in, and the servants really would have done it all, but old habits died hard.
Old reflexes too. He’d turned before the voice, male, young but broken—therefore Fitzpatrick or Waite or a footman—had gotten more than halfway through his name.
Waite stood in the middle of the empty room, hands in his trouser pockets. At Gareth’s sudden turn, he blinked but didn’t step back. “I hope I’m not bothering you,” he added. “I was wondering if I could ask a question.”
“Any number of them,” said Gareth, tucking one of the rolled-up charts under his arm. “I might even answer a few.”
“Ah.” Waite smiled a little uneasily, remembering some of Gareth’s earlier lectures, perhaps, or that Gareth had no reason to be particularly patient with him just then. “More in the line of a favor, really.”
“A favor,” Gareth repeated flatly.
“That’s right. Not my day for it, I know. Only…” Waite extracted one long-fingered hand in order to run it through his hair. “Say a student wanted some more-advanced lessons than the rest of us do.”
Gareth lifted his eyebrows. Waite had done decently well in his classes, but he’d never excelled, nor had he seemed to find the subject matter particularly enthralling. Still, he wasn’t inclined to discourage anyone who sought after knowledge. “Say one does,” he said and kept his voice neutral.
“Would that be the sort of thing you’d do? Assuming you had time, I mean.”
“That depends,” Gareth said, “on how the student was doing elsewhere, for one. I’m not the only instructor here, after all.”
He expected to see Waite flinch at that reminder of Olivia, but the boy just shrugged almost impatiently. “Quite well, from everything I know, though it’s not like you give us marks here, sir.”
“No,” said Gareth, “there’s a reason for that.”
He glanced around, making sure he’d gotten everything. Now the room could have been a model or the background in a painting: pale yellow walls, darker furniture, thick carpets, wide windows. There was no sign left of five students, whether lounging and listening or applying bandages to one another, and nothing of the charts they’d studied or the notes they’d taken. Only Gareth and Waite.
The boy was still there, standing straight and looking earnest. And he did need something to keep him out of trouble.
“Was there any particular aspect of medicine that caught your attention?” Gareth asked.
“Oh. It’s not me, you see.” Waite gave him a rather sheepish grin. “It’s Lizzie. Miss Donnell. Wants to learn surgery and all that…” Don’t ask me why was all through Waite’s voice, but he had the good sense not to speak it. “I said I’d have a word with you.”
Elizabeth made more sense than Waite, but…“Why didn’t she ask me herself?”
Waite coughed and looked down for a second, for the first time in the conversation. “A bit scared of you, sir,” he said apologetically and added, “You know how girls are sometimes.”
“Not really, no,” Gareth said. His life since leaving home had sometimes involved women, rarely involved ladies, and hardly ever involved girls. Not until the last few months. “I’m hardly frightening.”
“No, sir,” said Waite politely.
Gareth chose not to pursue that particular line of questioning any further. “I’d be glad to teach Miss Donnell,” he said, “but I can’t imagine the classes will go very well if she’s too intimidated to talk to me.”
“Oh, shouldn’t be a problem, sir. Not when she’s not asking you a favor.” Waite waved a hand. “Besides, Miss Woodwell said she’d go along, at least until Lizzie gets used to the whole thing.”
“How kind of Miss Woodwell.”
“Oh, rather,” said Waite. “She’s a jolly sort of a girl. Doesn’t seem to mind getting a batch of younger siblings ready-made.”
“Neither do you, by the evidence,” said Gareth.
Waite shrugged. “I’ve two little sisters back home, you know. You’ll probably have them on your hands in a few years, and God help you all then.”
“We’ll try to be equal to your family,” Gareth said. He started across the carpet toward the door, and Waite followed. “But your parents may want to keep your sisters at home. It’s not by chance we have only two young ladies here.” On impulse, he glanced sideways at Waite and added, “Most people think no more of female students than they do of female teachers.”
“Right, sir,” said Waite, looking satisfactorily uncomfortable. “Easy enough mistake, when you don’t know better.”
“Most mistakes are,” said Gareth.
They walked toward the door together, in silence that wavered between embarrassed and companionable, until Waite spoke again. “Must have taken some getting used to on your part too, sir. Working with a woman and all. Not to mention the magic thing.”
“Teaching took some adjustment,” Gareth said. He’d meant to protest that he and Olivia didn’t work that closely together, but then there’d been the day before, and the trip to the forest, and the feeling he’d gotten when Simon and his wife had left. If he put a hand out, he knew she’d catch him.
And she’d spent years falsely offering a hand to others.
Suddenly impatient, Gareth looked over at Waite. “You have somewhere to be, don’t you?”
Chapter 28
There was no omen of disaster. In fact, the day had gone fairly well. Both of the older boys, after the first bit of sulki
ng, seemed to be taking their punishment with relative good grace, and certainly nobody had tried to summon anything else. Charlotte had kept Michael busy making a box for the hedgehog, which they’d named Star, after a book on Babylonian mythology had connected her species with the goddess Astarte, and Elizabeth was lost in a book.
She’d slept well for the past few nights too, or, if she hadn’t, she’d managed to get herself down without waking Charlotte and thus Olivia. Olivia had followed her youngest student’s example and, curling up in one of the library chairs, had immersed herself in The Moonstone. Reading anything fictional these days was a rare enough pleasure to occupy all her attention. If the household had experienced any alarm, she didn’t hear it…
Not until the door opened and Mrs. Edgar stood on the threshold, face white beneath her cap. “You’re wanted upstairs,” she said. “Now, ma’am.”
“Who is it?” Olivia asked irritably, yanked abruptly from Indian diamonds and drowned maidservants. If Fitzpatrick and Waite had tried summoning again, she would personally feed them to whatever they’d called up. Feet first. “One of the boys?”
“No, ma’am,” said Mrs. Edgar, voice low and quiet.
Annoyance gave way to fear. “Elizabeth? Or—?”
“It’s the master, ma’am,” said Mrs. Edgar. She swallowed and shook her head. “He’s home. They’re home. And something’s wrong.”
***
Wrong didn’t begin to describe it.
Gareth stood by the bed in Simon’s room, looking down at his friend’s still body. Simon still breathed regularly, and he’d had the strength to reach his room with Gareth and Mrs. Grenville supporting him, but he hadn’t moved since he’d fallen onto the bed. His eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything either. He didn’t speak, and his skin had gone a shade of grayish green Gareth had never seen before and could only assume was a very bad sign indeed.
Not, however, as bad as his right arm.
Snaking up from Simon’s wrist, the lines of his arteries stood out as if his arm had been a picture on one of Gareth’s charts. Unlike in the picture, though, Simon’s arteries from his elbow down were glowing a sick purplish black that looked like it shifted every time Gareth blinked. Like it squirmed.
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