The Bet on Others

POV: Hollis

They built Whitcomb Hall out of chalk.

It took the best part of a day. The warehouse on Dunmore Quay had been a tea-merchant's godown once and still smelled of it, a ghost of smoke and bergamot under the damp. Its floor was packed earth and old planking, forty yards by sixty, with a roof of rusted iron and a hundred sparrows nesting in the rafters. Hollis Quade stood in the middle of it with a bucket of whitewash and a length of string, and tried to remember where the third-floor corridor met the back stair.

"Left," said Josiah, from the other side of the hall. "Two paces left. You've put the greenhouse in the pantry."

"The pantry's a nice place for a greenhouse."

"The pantry is where the cook keeps the sugar."

"I think the cook'd be happier with a pineapple."

Josiah did not smile. He crossed the floor in a straight line, took the string from Hollis's hand, and moved the corner post two paces to the left. Then he stood back, regarded the result, and said gravely, "That is more efficient."

"Efficient," said Hollis. "He says efficient. We're drawing a rich man's house on a floor, with a bucket. Nothing about it is efficient."

"That is why it must be correct."

Hollis opened his mouth. And then, across the hall, Felix lost his grip on the chalk-line he was holding and sat down hard in the middle of the dining room. The line snapped back and drew a long white stripe across his trousers, and Felix looked down at it with such blank dismay that Hollis began to laugh.

Josiah's mouth twitched.

It was only a twitch. It was gone at once, the way a rabbit's nose is gone from the grass. But Hollis saw it, and filed it carefully, as a man files a card he means to play later.

…

By afternoon they had a floor plan.

It lay in white lines across the earth, rooms and corridors and stairs, with the rooftops marked in red brick-dust. Dray's list was tacked to a beam. A ladder, borrowed from a chandler, stood in for the garden wall. A line of crates did for the greenhouse. A packing-case on its side was the door to the cellar.

"Again," said Josiah.

They went in again.

The plan was this. On the night of the Auction, at half past eight, Whitcomb's carriage would leave his gate. He would be gone three hours. In that time the Hall would be at half strength, four sentries on the grounds, two on the stairs, a handful of servants, and a man of Dray's on the third-floor landing. They would come by the roofs. Hollis would take the shot at the greenhouse lock, a long, clean, silent shot; Josiah would bring the rope. Felix would stay on the Hill with the lens and watch the gate. Once the three of them stood on the glass, they would go down through the plant-house, up the servants' stair, and along the third-floor corridor to a door with no window.

It was a good plan. It was thin as a cheese-cloth, and every stitch had to hold.

Hollis lay on the packing crates in his shirt-sleeves, with a cheroot in his mouth he'd not dared to light, and watched Josiah drill a man who didn't exist.

"Step. Turn. Strike. Step."

It was not an exercise, exactly. It was what Josiah did when he thought no one was looking: the old forms, the cadet forms, the pressure points of the hand and throat. He moved with a flat, graceful economy, as if he were folding a sheet. Where the chalk lines ran, his boots found them. Where the walls would stand, his shoulders brushed them.

"You've a way with a corridor," said Hollis.

"I have spent a great many hours in corridors."

"Ever think of taking up the violin?"

"No."

"I'm told I'm very bad. It'd be a comfort to have company."

Josiah stopped. He turned.

"Mr. Quade," he said. "May I ask you something?"

"You may ask."

"When you bent the bullets. On the pier. You said it takes something from you."

Hollis took the cheroot out of his mouth.

…

He had not planned to tell it. He had been told once, by a doctor in Cheyenne, that it was a mistake to look too hard at a thing like his hands. But the warehouse was big and dim and smelled of tea, and the man who stood in front of him had been, until two weeks ago, a thing Hollis had spent eight years running from, and the thing was somehow easier to say to him.

"There's a thing that happens," he said slowly. "When I take hold of metal. It isn't pain. It's like when your foot goes to sleep, you know? That fizz. It starts in the fingertips. The more I ask of it, the farther it goes. A knife, I lose a finger or two for an hour. A lock, a hand, for a day." He turned his right hand over. The scarred palm. "Bending a volley's the worst. That was both arms to the elbow."

"And the memories."

"And the memories." He tried a smile. "It's funny. I used to think it was just the numbness I'd mind. Then it started taking things. A horse's name. My father's whistle. A woman's face from a boarding house in Laramie, who gave me soup when I was sick." He flexed his fingers. "Some days I think I'm only half there. I read what I've lost off a list in my coat pocket, like a grocer."

"I did not know."

"Why would you?"

"I did not ask." Josiah's voice was level. "I hunted a man like you, once. In the summer of eighty-nine. A tinker named Obadiah Rudd, in Fell Street. He could shape iron with his hands. A Gift. He had a wife and a daughter and a stall." He paused. "I brought him in. They took him to the Dome. I was commended."

Hollis went still.

"I am telling you," said Josiah, "because I think you ought to know the sort of man you are standing beside. I have done this. I have hunted men like you." He lifted his chin. "I was wrong."

It was said as simply as a man might say the time is nine.

The sparrows rustled in the rafters. Somewhere outside a cart rumbled along the quay.

"I know," said Hollis.

"You knew."

"Since the Palisade. You're a terrible liar, Pruitt. You hold your breath." He put the cheroot back in his mouth. "I figured you'd say it when you were ready. It took longer than I'd have liked."

Josiah looked at him for a long moment.

Then he nodded, once, and returned to his corridor.

Neither said another word. It was, Hollis reflected, a better conversation than most he had had with men who talked a great deal.

…

Felix came to find him at dusk.

He came across the floor with his hands behind his back and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. He had the look he wore when he'd made something and was afraid it was foolish. He stopped in front of the packing crates and stood there, rocking slightly on his heels.

"I've something for you."

"If it's a mouse in a box, I've had it."

"It isn't a mouse." He brought his hands round.

It was a pair of gloves.

Hollis looked at them. They were gray kidskin, soft as butter, cut close to the hand. At first glance they were nothing more. But when Felix laid one on his palm the weight surprised him: they were lined, the whole palm and the length of every finger, with thin plates of something supple and quilted, felted wool over layers of beaten lead-foil, stitched finger by finger. A narrow strip of copper wire ran along the back of each hand and down into a small flat disc at the wrist.

"I read your hands," said Felix, in a rush. "I mean, I thought about them. The numbness. I think it's a kind of cold. A drain, as the Gift pulls heat out of the nerve. So the lining holds warmth. And the copper takes some of the tension off, I think, the way a lightning rod does. It may not work. I've never tried it. I've only the one pair. But if it only takes the edge off, if it spares you one finger on the pier—"

"Felix."

"—or if it's useless, I've just wasted a morning, which is—"

"Felix."

The boy stopped.

Hollis sat up on the crates. He pulled the glove on. It fitted to the knuckle, close and snug and warm. He flexed his fingers inside it, and the soft lining shifted and held, and he felt a strange slow pressure in his throat.

He did not say anything for a while.

It was a singular thing. He had been given a good many things in his life. A saddle, once. A job. A bullet, a knife, a fistful of cash. Nobody had ever sat up late with a pair of scissors and thought about the inside of his hands.

"They're good gloves," he said at last, in a voice that came out lower than he meant.

"They're all right."

"They're good." He looked up. Behind the spectacles Felix's brown eyes were enormous. "Come here."

Felix came. Hollis caught him by the back of the neck, in the manner of a man taking a colt by the halter, and pulled him down, and rested their foreheads together for a moment, brief and rough. It was not a kiss. It was something older.

"Thank you," said Hollis.

"It's only gloves."

"No," said Hollis. "It isn't."

…

The plan was fixed that night, over bread and cold ham, on an upturned crate in the lamplight.

Ninth hour of the twenty-seventh. Whitcomb to the Customs House for the Auction, which would run from half past eight to half past eleven. The Hall at half strength. Dray's man on the landing. Viv in the black room. In and out in one hour, with no one hurt.

"Three hours," said Josiah. "We will have an hour to spare."

"We'll have none to spare," said Hollis. "That's how you know it's a plan."

Felix laughed, a thin surprised sound, and put his hand over his mouth.

It was late when the others went to sleep. They lay in a row on the packing floor, wrapped in coats, with the chalk Hall faintly white around them in the lamp's last light. Josiah slept like a soldier, on his back, with his hands folded. Felix slept on his side, with his spectacles on his chest. Hollis lay awake and listened to the sparrows.

He thought about betting.

He had spent his whole life in the business. At fifteen, a wager on a horse. At nineteen, on a gun. At twenty-two, on the hand he held in a Cheyenne back room, with his own life on the table. He had never bet on anyone but himself. And he'd always bet when he thought he would lose, because a man who expected to lose could never be disappointed.

I bet myself because I thought I'd lose, he thought.

What do I bet now?

He lifted his gloved hand in the dark and looked at it. It was a thin pale shape against the rafters. He could not feel the lining. It was only a warmth.

He had, in his coat, a revolver with six chambers. Two spare cylinders, loaded. That made eighteen shots. A man who valued the bullets he spent might make them last.

He counted them over. Then he counted the people he was going to spend them for.

Eight bullets in the cylinder he'd marked for the Hall. And five people in the world he would have walked into a fire for, with a sixth waiting in a black room at the top of a house.

Eight bullets, he thought. Six friends.

For the first time in his life the arithmetic did not make him want to gamble.

He lay and looked at it, and it was the oddest feeling: a quiet in the place where the wanting used to be. And then, quite suddenly, he slept.