Over the Rooftops of Crown Hill

POV: Hollis

Eight-thirty came with a clean cold wind off the sea, and a rumble of wheels on the gravel drive below.

Hollis Quade lay on his belly on the slates of the Prescott carriage house, eighty yards from the iron gates of Whitcomb Hall, with his cheek against the stock of a rifle and a pair of Felix's gloves on his hands. The slates were slick with dew. The sky was low and clear, with a thin yellow moon going down in the west. Across the lane, behind a wall hung with ivy, the lights of the great house showed in a hundred windows, warm as a lit stage.

Beside him Josiah lay motionless, with a coil of rope over one shoulder and his face turned toward the Hall. He had not spoken in twenty minutes. He had the stillness of a man who has done this before, many times, to other men.

"There," said Josiah.

The gates were opening.

They swung inward on silent hinges. A pair of footmen in silver livery stood at attention. And down the long gravel drive, in the light of eight carriage lamps, rolled a black coach drawn by two matched grays, with a gloved hand resting on the window-ledge and a head of silver hair framed in the glass. It passed through the gate. It turned east, toward the Customs House and the docks. The hooves clopped away down the lane, fading, until there was only the wind.

Hollis let out a breath he had been holding since sundown.

"That's him," he said.

"That is him."

"Ten minutes."

"Ten minutes."

They lay and counted it out. It was the longest ten minutes of his life, and he'd once waited out a dust storm in a ditch with a dead horse for company. He could hear his own heart. He could hear the faint tick of the rifle's cooling barrel. Somewhere out on the Docks a train whistle sounded, long and low, the signal that the Auction had begun.

Two hundred and forty, he thought, two hundred and forty-one.

The lights burned. The wind pulled at his collar. And, at the edge of his sight, something flickered.

…

It was in his scope.

He had not been looking through it. He had had the rifle propped on its folded coat, the barrel pointing at a bare patch of Hall roof, the lens catching the starlight. But the flicker came again, a tiny pulse of white at the edge of the glass, and he put his eye to it without thinking.

It showed him a slope of slate. A line of chimney pots. A lit window, bright and small, on the far side of the garden. And in the middle of the circle, floating just above the glass as if painted there, a face.

He nearly dropped the rifle.

It was a girl's face. Thin and pale and sharp-chinned, with a mass of dark curls piled badly and pinned with what looked like splinters. Her eyes were huge. She was framed in the lens like a portrait in a locket, and she was looking straight at him.

"Josiah," said Hollis, hoarsely.

"What?"

"Look at this."

Josiah put his eye to the sight. He drew a sharp breath. For a moment neither of them said anything.

The girl in the lens smiled.

It was a crooked, tired, brilliant smile, lopsided, with her chin up. She raised her hand and waved, three small flutters of the fingers. Then her mouth began to move. She spoke slowly and clearly, shaping each word, the way you do for a child on the far side of a window.

"She is speaking," whispered Josiah.

"I can see that. What's she saying?"

Josiah watched. His lips moved with hers.

"Third floor," he said slowly. "Rear. No windows. The east stair, not the west. Four minutes after the bell." A pause. "Don't be late."

"She's—" Hollis stopped. "How's she doing it?"

"A mirror," said Josiah. "Any surface will serve. She has found a small one." He lowered the glass. His face was very still. "She is in the house. She knows the plan. She is sending us orders."

"She's telling us not to be late."

"Yes."

Hollis put his forehead down against the cold wet slate, and began, helplessly, to laugh.

…

The face faded. The lens went dark, and clear, and ordinary. But by then they were already moving.

"The east stair," said Josiah, in a low voice. "Not the west. Dray's list had the west stair. She says it is watched."

"She'd know. She's been inside it for a week."

"Then we change the route."

They did it without fuss. It was the thing Hollis admired most in Josiah, that in an emergency he did not get louder. He got quieter, and crisper, and slightly more formal. He turned on the slates and pointed. "The greenhouse is here. The east stair rises from the pantry passage, beyond the kitchens. We enter by the plant-house and cross to the servants' wing by the glass corridor. It adds forty feet and one door."

"Fine by me."

"Then go."

Hollis went.

He took the gap between the carriage house and the stable in two strides, felt the slate bite through his gloves, and dropped. The next roof was ten feet down and four feet across. He landed with a roll, came up on one knee, and ran. Behind him he could hear Josiah on the tiles, light and steady as a metronome. They went along the ridge of the coach-house, across the drainpipe, over the long low slope of the orangery, with the Hall's great black bulk rising ahead of them like a cliff.

The wind sang past his ears. He could smell wet slate, and chimney smoke, and the faint sweet rot of fallen leaves in the garden below. It was a clear cold night, and the whole sleeping Hill lay spread out under them, lamp after lamp. He had never in his life felt so alive.

Eight bullets, he thought. Six friends.

He kept running.

…

The greenhouse was a long glass shed, built against the east wing, with a peaked roof and a brass frame. Through its panes, in the starlight, he could see the dark leaves of potted palms, the pale blooms of some hothouse orchid, and a glimmer of wet stone.

He lay down on the roof beside the lock.

It was a good lock, Charter-made, set into the iron stile of the roof-light with a bolt as thick as his thumb. Hollis had been told by Felix that a lock was nothing but a conversation. He had never believed it. Now he took off his right glove, laid his bare palm on the cold brass, and felt for the pins.

He was not going to need the rifle after all. He had known that for a week. But he'd brought it, because a man who comes to a house with a locked door and no gun is a man who has stopped believing in doors.

The metal answered at once.

It hummed under his palm, a low bright thread of sound, like a finger on the rim of a glass. He felt every pin. He felt the spring and the bolt and the long cold bar of the stile, and he asked them, quietly, to move.

They moved.

There was a soft click. The bolt slid back. The frame shifted under his hand, and the roof-light lifted an inch on its hinge.

Pins and needles ran up his wrist. He flexed his fingers. The numbness stopped at the knuckle.

Well, he thought. There's something.

He pulled the glove back on. The lining held. In the dark, in the cold, he felt a small, absurd rush of gratitude for a boy with a pair of scissors.

"Thank you," he whispered, to no one.

"Hush," said Josiah, behind him. "Down."

…

They went in over the orchids.

The air inside the plant-house was warm, wet, and thick with the smell of earth. A silver bowl of water lay in the middle of the floor, and the glass above them swam with the reflections of lamps. They moved through the rows of palms like men wading. Hollis kept his hand on the butt of his revolver and his eyes on the door at the far end, a narrow green door with a brass handle.

It opened as they reached it.

A man in the gray-and-silver livery of the Hall stood on the threshold, with a tray of clean glasses in one hand. He was a broad man, thick-necked, with a pink shaven face. He saw them. His mouth opened. His hand went to the whistle at his belt.

Josiah moved.

It was so quick that Hollis barely saw it. A step, a pivot, a flick of two stiff fingers to the hollow below the ear. The man's eyes rolled up. The tray tilted. Josiah caught it with one hand and the man with the other, lowered him to the flagstones, and laid the glasses beside him without a chink.

"He will wake in an hour," he murmured. "With a headache."

"You've done that before."

"I have done it to better men."

A second guard came running at the sound, a young one, with a gun he hadn't time to raise. Josiah took him in the same way, with a hand under the jaw, and they dragged both men behind a bank of ferns and left them side by side like drunks at a christening.

"Rule three," said Josiah.

"Rule three," said Hollis. "No one dies."

"Unless he is the one with the gun."

"This one had a gun."

"This one was frightened," said Josiah. "That is not the same."

…

The corridors of Whitcomb Hall were long, and carpeted, and bright.

They went up a back stair. They crossed a landing with a stained-glass window of a ship. They passed doors, and doors, and doors, behind which came the muffled sounds of a household half-asleep: a clock, a cough, the rattle of a poker. Twice they flattened themselves in an alcove while a pair of footmen went by. Once a housemaid passed within six feet of them with a basket of linen and never looked round.

At the head of the east stair, they met the patrol.

They were three, in blue coats with brass lamps on the collars. The Lamp Order. They came out of the shadows at the turn of the corridor, in step, with their carbines slung. And the man at the front was a squat, wide, hard-faced Captain with eyes like wet slate.

Hollis's hand closed on his revolver.

Dray.

They stopped. All of them. For one long, silent second the six men stood in the lamplight and looked at each other, and nothing in the world moved. Hollis could see the pulse in Josiah's throat. He could see the sweat at the Captain's hairline.

Dray looked at Josiah. He looked at Hollis. He looked for a very long time at the revolver, and the gloves, and the coil of rope.

"Lamp Order patrol," he said, in a clear carrying voice. "The east stair is clear. There's nothing on this floor." He turned his head to the nearest man. "Did you see anything, Corporal?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Private?"

"No, sir."

"Nor I," said Dray. His voice was perfectly level. "I don't see a thing."

He nodded, once, brisk, to the air. Then he turned, and walked on down the corridor, with his men at his heels, and the sound of their boots went away down the hall until it was swallowed by the dark.

Josiah let out a slow breath.

"He is a good man," he said, very low.

"He's a liar."

"Yes," said Josiah. "That too."

…

The last corridor had no windows.

It ran, long and narrow, along the back of the third floor, paneled in dark wood, lit by a single sconce at the far end. The carpet was thick. The air was still. There was a smell of beeswax and cold stone, and underneath it a deeper, flatter smell that Hollis could not place, like a room that has not been opened in a long time.

At the end stood a door.

It was a black door, plain, without a panel. It had no brass, no knocker, no keyhole that he could see. Only a single heavy bolt, and a small square grille at head height, covered with a sliding plate.

He stopped ten paces off. A sound had reached him.

It was a small sound. A soft, thin, clear whistle, pitched very low, like a kettle a long way off. It rose and fell. It had a pulse to it, a lilt, a graceful three-count lean, one-two-three, one-two-three.

He knew it. He had heard it only once, in the wing of an Odd Fellows hall, on a rainy night in the second week of October. A boy had been counting under his breath. A girl had been laughing. A cane had been propped against the wall.

A waltz.

It was coming from behind the black door. Someone in a locked room with no windows, in the dark, with nothing to look at and nothing to reflect her, was whistling a waltz very softly to herself and keeping time.

Hollis stood in the corridor with his hand on his gun and his heart in his throat.

She's still dancing, he thought.

He had not believed in much of anything for a very long time. But he believed in that.