Stealing the Heart

He left them on the Albatross an hour after midnight.

It was the hardest parting of his life, and it took less than a minute. The ship was riding to a single anchor in the lee of Bankside, dark and silent, with her sails furled and her gun-ports shut. The storm had blown itself out. The sky was black and clear and bitterly cold, and the stars hung over the river like frost. From the cabin windows came a thin gold light. In the great cot swung from the beams, wrapped in a lamb's-wool blanket that Mrs. Hatch had pressed into her arms at the gangway, a child slept.

Ixara stood at the cabin door with the baby against her shoulder. She was gray with exhaustion. Her feet were bandaged. Her hair was singed to the scalp on one side, and her bare arms were crossed with burns, and she had not slept in two days. But she stood very straight, with her chin lifted, and her eyes in the lamplight were dark and clear.

"You are going," she said.

"I must."

"I know." She shifted the baby. "Go. Bring it home."

"If I can."

"You can." She said it quietly. "I saw it. In the stone, in the Hall, before any of this. A man on a roof, with a pistol, and blood on his face. I saw him standing in a vault of glass, with the Heart in his hands, and a great light." She smiled, a little. "I did not tell you. I was afraid that if I said it, it would not come true."

"And does it?"

"I think we are about to find out."

He crossed the planks in two strides. He took her face in his hands, and kissed her, long, hard, desperate, with the child's warm weight between them. She tasted of smoke and salt. When he drew back, her eyes were bright.

"Come back to us," she whispered.

"I will."

"You swore it on Odette's life."

"I swore it on yours."

He kissed the baby's head, where the dark hair lay damp and soft. Sennet opened one gray eye and one green, and looked at him, and shut them again.

He turned, and went down the side.

…

Odette was waiting at the foot of the companion.

She had been brought aboard at noon, in a hired litter, wrapped in blankets, with Mrs. Hatch and Tobias and a trunk of her books. Garrick had arranged it the night before, in the chaos of the retreat, in a hurried note to Hatch: If the thing goes wrong, I want her out of the house. He had not told his sister. He had not dared. She had simply looked up from the pillow when the old woman came in, and said, Well, I suppose it's time, and reached for her shawl.

She sat now on a coil of rope in the lee of the capstan, wrapped like a parcel in a bearskin cloak. Her face was the color of candle-wax. Her breath came in short, shallow, whistling pulls. But her eyes were steady.

"Garrick."

"You should be below."

"I wanted to see you go." She held out a hand. He took it, and found it cold as a stone. "You're going to get it."

"Yes."

"And bring it back."

"Yes."

"And I'm going to wait." She smiled, her old smile, the one with the corner turned up. "I've become quite good at waiting. It's the only thing I've ever been any good at."

"Odette—"

"Don't say it. Don't say anything. Just go." Her fingers tightened. "And Garrick."

"What?"

"Don't be brave. Be careful. It's much more useful."

He laughed. It broke in the middle.

He kissed her forehead. He went down into the boat.

…

They went by the Tyburn.

It was a long journey. Nell had come aboard at nine, in the stern of a lighter with twenty-two survivors, wrapped in a bloody blanket with a bandage round her skull and the stump of a cutlass in her belt, and had sat down on the deck at the foot of the mainmast and refused all attention until she had eaten two pounds of cold beef. "We held 'em," she had said, when Garrick came to her. "Held 'em till the Navy came, and then we ran. Lost nine. Wounded eleven. The Order's got three hundred dead and a gate that won't shut." She had grinned, a savage, bloodless grin. "Best night's work since the press-gang riots."

"Nell, I am sorry."

"Don't be. It was a good fight." She had wiped her mouth. "Where's this vault?"

Now she and her men crouched in the dark of an old brick culvert, a hundred feet under the streets of Mayfair, with Garrick and Pike and a lantern and a coil of rope. The air was warm and foul and still. The walls were slick. Overhead, faintly, through the vault of the sewer, they could hear the clatter of carriages on cobbles: the late-night traffic of the town, going about its business, heedless of the fire at Blackfriars.

"It narrows here," whispered Jory.

He stood on a ledge at the head of the party, a thin pale shape in the lamplight. The culvert, wide as a church aisle at the river mouth, had been shrinking for the last half mile, until now it was little more than a brick pipe, three feet across, running away into blackness. A trickle of water ran along the bottom. Roots hung from the roof.

"This is the old Plague drain," said Nell. "It was cut in 'sixty-five. It runs right under the foundations. You'll come up in the coal-cellar, I reckon, through the floor."

"How do we get through?"

"The lad."

Jory had already taken off his coat. He wore only a shirt and breeches. He tied a rope round his waist, and a leather roll of tools to his belt, and he looked at Garrick with wide solemn eyes.

"You're certain?" said Garrick.

"It's only a hole, sir."

"It's a very long hole."

"I've been in worse." The boy squared his thin shoulders. "My mum used to say I could squeeze through a keyhole. She said it was the only gift God gave me."

"She was wrong."

"Was she?"

"She was entirely wrong," said Garrick gently. "You have a great many."

Jory grinned. He dropped to his hands and knees, and crawled into the pipe, and was gone.

…

It took him forty minutes.

They waited in the dark, listening. The rope paid out through their hands, foot by foot, with a small dry whisper. Once it jerked. Once it hung slack for so long that Pike began to mutter. Garrick stood with his back against the brick and his hand on the hilt of his sword, and thought of nothing at all.

Then the rope went taut, and a thin voice floated back down the pipe, faint and echoing.

"Captain! I'm through! There's a grating! It's old, I can feel the rust! I need a minute—"

Nell breathed out.

A minute passed. Another. A long, soft, scraping sound, iron on stone. A clang.

"It's open!"

They went in single file.

Garrick crawled on his belly, with the sword before him and the stink of the Plague drain in his nostrils, for what felt like an hour. His shoulder screamed at every pull. The brick scraped his ribs. At last the pipe widened, and a pale glimmer showed above, and he reached up, and strong thin hands gripped his wrists and hauled him out onto a floor of cold stone.

He stood. He was in a cellar.

It was low and dim and full of crates. Jory was grinning at him with a smear of filth across his nose. Behind him, one by one, the Tidewater men were scrambling out of the pipe, dripping, cursing, drawing their pistols. A flight of steps ran up to a door.

"Where?" whispered Nell.

"The east wing," said Garrick. "The service stair. It will take us to the ground floor, and from the ground floor a spiral descends to the vault." He had counted it. Ninety steps, he thought. "Quietly."

They went up.

…

The Hall was empty.

That was what struck him first. There should have been guards. Violet-liveried footmen, grooms, the gentlemen of the Society in their black coats. Instead the long corridors lay silent and dark, the doors shut, the chandeliers shrouded in holland. The planets in the Orrery Room hung motionless on their arms. A single candle burned in a sconce at the head of the great stair.

He has sent them away, thought Garrick.

He is waiting.

They went down the spiral in a body, with their boots wrapped in sacking. The stairs wound round and round, white stone, cold and damp. At the foot, in the long vaulted passage, two lamps burned. At the end of it, the bronze and glass doors stood wide.

Light poured out of them. Blue light.

It lit the passage as the moon lights a sea. It rippled on the walls. It pulsed, slow and heavy, like something breathing.

"Stay here," said Garrick.

"Like hell," said Nell.

"I mean it. If it's a trap, you'll all die. If I go alone—"

"If you go alone, you're a bloody fool." She spat. "I've buried nine tonight. I'll not be shy of burying a tenth. Go on, then, Captain. We'll be at your back."

He drew a breath.

He walked down the passage.

…

The vault was transformed.

He stopped on the threshold and stared.

The tile walls were gone, hidden behind a thicket of copper. Wires ran everywhere, coils and loops and spirals of them, fine as hair, thick as a man's arm, crossing and recrossing the room from floor to ceiling in a vast glittering web. They converged on the center. There, where the plinth had been, rose a tall machine of brass and glass and black iron: a column twelve feet high, ringed with dials, crowned with a great copper sphere. Fire danced in its heart.

And in the heart of the fire, suspended in the air, held by invisible threads of light, hung the Aurelith.

It was naked. The lead casket lay split open on the floor like an eggshell. The dome of glass was shattered. The stone floated alone in the blaze, blue and green and violet, spinning very slowly on its axis, and its light flared and ebbed in time with a deep, strained, rhythmic hum that set his teeth aching.

It is in pain, he thought. She said so. I did not believe her.

Now I do.

"Ah," said a pleasant voice. "Wynmore."

The Duke stood on a gallery at the far side of the vault.

He was dressed, as always, in white. He wore no wig; his hair was close-cropped and silver. He leaned on the brass rail, one gloved hand resting on a lever, the other holding a glass of Madeira. There was no mask on his face tonight. It was a handsome face, long, pale, delicate, with the finely drawn mouth and the cold blue eyes, and it was alight with an expression Garrick had never seen on it before: pure, radiant, boyish joy.

"You are early," said the Duke. "I had thought you would come at dawn. But I am not displeased. I confess I had hoped for an audience."

"Draymoor."

"My dear boy, you look terrible. Have you been in the river?" He took a sip of Madeira. "I understand there has been quite an evening. A conflagration at Blackfriars. A riot at Lanternhold. A Magister laid out on the cobbles, and a witch spirited away from under the very noses of the Church." He smiled. "It was extremely well done. I do congratulate you. I did not think you had it in you."

"Release the stone."

"I think not."

"I will not ask again."

"Oh, you need not." The Duke set down his glass. "You see, Wynmore, I have been very busy since the autumn. I told you once that I was a man of vision. You thought I meant it metaphorically." He patted the brass lever. "Observe."

He pulled it.

The machine shrieked.

It was a sound like tearing metal, like a thousand cats in a sack. The copper sphere flared white. The wires shuddered. The whole vault lit up in a blinding blue-green glare, and the hum rose to a roar, and Garrick felt it in his bones: a vast, dragging, nauseating pull, as though a hand had seized his heart and tried to wrench it out of his chest.

He staggered. Beside him, Nell cried out. Pike went to his knees.

"The compass!" gasped the physician. "Garrick, look at your—"

He looked.

The little brass compass in his waistcoat pocket, the one that had been his father's, was spinning. It whirled madly on its pivot, round and round, faster and faster, until the needle blurred. It stopped with a snap. It pointed, with a steady and unwavering line, directly at the machine.

"You feel it," said the Duke.

His voice was soft with wonder.

"It is a field. A field of attraction, a tide of the invisible. The stone is its source, and I have learned to carry it. To amplify it. Every needle in the Thames estuary is pointing at this room. Every compass in every ship, from Greenwich to the Nore, is bent to my will." He laughed. "There are forty-one vessels of His Majesty's Navy at anchor between here and Gravesend. They are blind. They cannot steer. They are waiting for a word."

"What word?"

"Any word I choose." The pale eyes gleamed. "I have sent letters. To the Lords of the Admiralty. To the First Lord. To others, further afield. I have told them that the fleet of England may be commanded by a single hand, from a single room, at a single signal. I have given them a demonstration. They were impressed." The smile widened. "I am to have an audience with the King on Friday."

Garrick stared at him.

"You're mad."

"I am the sanest man in England." The Duke leaned forward. "Do you understand what this is, Wynmore? It is not a toy. It is not a medicine. It is the end of war. A power that can bind the compass of every ship will command the sea, and he who commands the sea commands the world. It is the future. It is mine."

"It's not yours."

"Whose then?"

"Hers," said Garrick. "Theirs. A people's. You have no more right to it than a thief has to a stolen purse."

"A stolen purse." The Duke laughed. "That is rich. From you."

It struck home. Garrick felt it, a knife between the ribs. But he did not flinch.

"Yes," he said. "From me. I am a thief. I know exactly what I am. I have lain awake with it for a year. It is the one thing in this room that I know better than you."

"Then you know that it cannot be undone."

"It can. And it will." He took a step forward. The compass in his hand spun. The pull in his chest was agony. "Alaric. Last chance. Shut it down."

"Or what?"

"Or I will."

"You will not reach me."

"No," said Garrick. "But I do not have to."

He turned his head.

"Jory."

…

The boy had not waited in the passage.

He had been on the floor of the vault for a full minute, flat on his belly, wriggling through the copper thicket like an eel, while the Duke held forth. Nobody had noticed him. He was small and quick and the color of the shadows. He had crept under the brass cabinets, and between the coils, and up behind the machine, and now, as Garrick spoke his name, he rose from behind the pedestal with a pair of long iron shears in his two hands.

"No!" cried the Duke.

The shears closed.

There was a flash of white light and a crack like a gunshot. A bar of fire ran up the wire and Jory flew backward, flung across the room, and struck the wall. The copper sphere blazed. The machine shrieked and shook. The hum became a scream, and the Aurelith, hanging in the blaze, convulsed, and cracked the air around it with a thunderclap of blue light that threw everyone to the floor.

Garrick was up in an instant.

He did not remember crossing the vault. He remembered only the brass, burning hot, and the blue fire licking at his face, and the stone, spinning above him in its cage of light. He reached for it. He felt the field tear at his arm like a hundred hooks. His coat sleeve smoked. His hair crackled.

Let me, he thought. Please. Please let me.

I am not here to take you.

I am here to take you home.

He closed his fist round the Aurelith.

…

It was warm.

That was the first thing. After all the fire and the screaming metal, it was warm. A soft gentle heat, like the heat of a living hand, spread through his palm and up his arm. The roaring stopped. The light died. The wires fell slack and dark. In an instant the whole vault was silent, and Garrick Wynmore stood in the wreck of a machine with the heart of a forest in his bare hand.

It lay there, quiet as a sleeping bird. It was blue and green and violet, no bigger than his fist. And as he watched, it began to pulse, slowly, softly, a beat he knew: thump, and a pause, and thump. It was the beat of a tiny heart in a cradle. It was the beat he had felt through a boat's thwart in the middle of a storm.

It was her heartbeat.

Sennet.

He bowed his head.

"Thank you," he whispered.

"You fool!"

The Duke had come down from the gallery.

He crossed the floor in long stumbling strides, white and furious, his silver hair wild, his fine mouth twisted. He had a pistol in his hand. He raised it. It shook. "You've ruined it. You've ruined it. Eight months. Eight months of work. You've no idea what you've done—"

"I have a very clear idea."

"Give it to me."

"No."

"I shall shoot you."

"I know." Garrick met his eyes. "But I do not think you will."

The Duke's finger trembled on the trigger.

"Drop it, Your Grace."

It came from the doorway. It was a voice Garrick knew: cool, clear, a little weary, with an edge of steel. He did not turn his head. He saw the Duke's eyes flick past him, and widen, and the color go out of his face.

In the door of the vault stood Lady Perpetua Strand.

She wore a dark traveling cloak, and her hair was unpowdered, and a few pearls hung round her neck. She was pale and perfectly composed. On her right stood old Sir Josiah Lyle, in his black gown, leaning on a stick, with a face as stern as judgment. On her left stood a tall fair man in a blue coat, with a staff of office in his hand, and behind them, filling the passage, a double rank of King's Messengers in scarlet.

"Alaric Draymoor," said the man in blue. "By the authority of His Majesty's Privy Council, I arrest you on suspicion of treasonable correspondence with the Court of France."

The Duke stared at him.

"This is an outrage."

"I have in my pocket," said Perpetua Strand pleasantly, "eleven letters in your hand. They were found in the false bottom of the writing-desk in your private study. I took the liberty of borrowing the key at supper a fortnight ago." She smiled. "They describe, in considerable detail, an arrangement to sell the secret of a certain island to His Most Christian Majesty. At rather a good price, I understood. I would not have thought you so thrifty."

"You—"

"I am a woman of fashion, Alaric. I tell everyone everything." The hazel eyes were bright. "It is my profession."

The pistol dropped from his hand.

It struck the marble floor with a clatter and slid away. Two of the Messengers stepped forward. They took the Duke by the arms. He did not resist. He stood very straight between them, white as paper, and as they led him out he turned his head and looked, once, at the stone in Garrick's hand.

"You do not know what you are holding," he said softly.

"I know exactly."

"No." The pale eyes burned. "You never will."

They took him away.

…

Perpetua walked across the vault.

She stopped before Garrick. She looked at him, and at his scorched coat and ruined sleeve and the blood on his shoulder; and she looked at the stone in his hand, blue in the darkness; and her face softened.

"You look dreadful," she said.

"So you've told me."

"I always mean it." She touched his cheek, lightly, with a gloved finger. "Go, Garrick. Take it. There are ships at the stairs, and the Navy is only half-blind, and I have a feeling the King's Messengers will take some time to tell Sir Josiah what he's seen."

"Perpetua. I can't—"

"Don't." She stepped back. "Don't thank me. It's unbecoming. I am a woman of fashion, and gratitude would ruin my reputation." Her mouth quirked. "Tell the girl. Tell her I'm sorry about the trial."

"I will."

"Tell her I turned my face because I could not bear to look."

"She knows."

"Yes. I rather thought she would."

She turned away. He saw her shoulders rise and fall once, in a breath. Then she was walking toward the door, with her head up and her cloak sweeping the floor, and the light of the dead machine glinted off her pearls.

…

Dawn was breaking when the boat brought him back.

It was a thin, cold, pearl-colored dawn, lit with streaks of pink and gold. The river lay flat as glass. A skin of mist smoked on the water. In the east, over the black smudge of the City, a pall of brown smoke still hung where Lanternhold had burned. The gulls were crying. And the Sable Albatross rode at her anchor, tall and dark and beautiful, her sails reddening in the first sun.

He went up the side with the stone in the breast of his coat.

Pike was waiting on the deck.

He stood by the mainmast with his arms folded, tired, rumpled, and ferocious. Behind him, on the quarterdeck, were the others: Nell on a coil of rope with her head bandaged; Mrs. Hatch, upright as a post, with her key in her fist; Tobias with his hands folded, tears running openly down his long mournful face. And at the break of the poop, wrapped in the bearskin, huddled on a chair that someone had carried out of the cabin, sat Odette.

She was awake. She was looking at him.

He crossed the deck. His legs would barely carry him. He knelt before her and took the stone from his coat, wrapped in a handkerchief, and laid it in her lap.

"Garrick," she said. "What—"

"Ixara said she'd allow it." He swallowed. "She said it's not a theft, if it's given. Only for a moment. Only until we're home. She said the Mother would not mind. She said—"

His voice broke.

Odette looked down.

She looked at the handkerchief. She looked at the faint blue glow that leaked through the linen, and the way it fell in a circle on the rug. Then, slowly, with a hand that shook, she folded back the cloth.

The Aurelith lay in her lap, quiet, warm, and bright.

She put out her fingers.

She touched it.

For a moment nothing happened. The sun rose. A gull cried. The river lapped against the hull. And then, from the stone, a ripple of soft green light ran up her wrist, and over her hand, and along her arm, and into her chest. It spread through her like dawn spreading through a field. It filled the hollows of her cheeks. It colored the lips. It rose in her pale, translucent face like a lamp being turned up behind alabaster.

She drew a breath.

It was a deep one. A long, slow, shuddering, glorious breath, drawn in to the very bottom of her lungs, and held, and released. It made no sound at all. There was no wheeze. No catch. No rattle. She sat motionless on the chair with her mouth open and her eyes enormous, and he saw her chest rise and fall, again, again, a perfect, even, easy rhythm.

"Oh," said Odette.

She laughed. It rang across the deck, clear and silvery. It was the laugh of a girl of seventeen on the first day of spring.

"Oh, Garrick. Oh. I can breathe."

He could not speak. He put his head on her knees.

Pike had come forward.

He went down on one knee beside the chair. He took her wrist, and counted. He laid his ear against her back and listened for a long time, with his eyes shut and his face turned toward the sun. The silence on the deck was absolute. Even the gulls seemed to have stopped. Hatch had her hand over her mouth. Tobias was weeping into his sleeve.

When Pike straightened, there were tears on his face.

"The left lobe," he said hoarsely. "There was a cavity. I heard it myself, a month ago. A hollow note, like a bell. It isn't there." He swallowed. His hands were shaking. "I can't find it. I can't find any of it. It's gone."

"Hollis?" said Garrick.

The physician looked at him.

He was a dry, careful man, a man of caution and measure, who had never in twenty years said a thing that he could not prove. His face, in the red dawn, was transfigured. He opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it again, and said, in a voice that cracked on the words like a boy's:

"Alive. She's alive."