FIC: Gentlemen of Last Resort (Tim, Tony, Gibbs, Everyone, Victorian)
Chapter XIII
This time there was no deliberation, no introspection, no cleverness-they ran for the ballroom, ignoring the clamor their boots raised against the floorboards, ignoring the sound of people hurrying towards them out of the darkness. When the doors rose up before them, and they could hear the sounds of the party immediately behind it, they burst through-the Greeks pouring out of the horse into Troy, Timothy thought, seduced by Anthony’s old comparison of the clock to the horse that had brought down the ancient city.
They had come in with the gift, but hopefully they were the death of Thomas Travington only.
“What the devil? Who are you? What are you doing here?” That, Timothy imagined, was Duke Bennington-he certainly seemed to have control of the situation. And his daughter Lucy next to him.
She and Miss Abigail could have been twins.
She was holding the clock in her hands.
Such beautiful things you make, Timothy thought, remembering Mr. Davies standing before him cradling the clock in the same way. Like they’re spun of gold and glass and sugar. You ought to sell them as art to the quality. That had not been so long ago, but already it felt as if eons had spun out between that night and this one-he had come so far so quickly, from Mr. Davies’s carefully-kept parlor to the Duke’s magnificent ballroom. From his lonely bedroom to last night’s sofa, only an arm’s length away from Miss Abigail. From meeting Anthony outside the theatre, even, and despising him for his carelessness, to watching the blood creep up Anthony’s collar as he picked the lock to the Duke’s back door. So far, so much, so long-but so little, really, for here he was, still weary, still frustrated, and still having to deal with that damned clock.
“Put the clock down, Lady Bennington,” Timothy said. Already he could see the wisps of white trapped inside of it-the steam that was building up to shatter the glass. He could not have stood seeing Lady Bennington’s face ruined in any case, but how much worse that she looked so much like Miss Abigail? “It will break. It’s filled with steam.”
She hesitated. No one ever wanted to look a fool, not in London, where people would talk-where people talked about her already, Wallitts gleefully willing to recite the imagined names of her lovers. She looked at the father, at her mother.
“Please,” he said, more urgently now, “Lady Bennington. It’s very dangerous.”
“It’s only a clock,” she said, smiling uncertainly. “Father-”
“I think we’ve had quite enough of this,” the Duke said, stepping forward a little. He grabbed Timothy’s arm, his grip like iron. “I do not know how you arrived here, but I know how all three of you will be leaving-” But then Gibbs was there, pushing hard against the Duke until he stepped back, almost taking Timothy’s arm with him, until he let go at the last moment.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Anthony said, and he simply advanced a few steps and snatched the clock out of Lady Bennington’s hands. “What shall I do with it, McGee?”
He could see less and less of the clockwork as the seconds ticked agonizingly by. How long had it been grinding away already? The glass casing clouded. He put his hands to the sides of his head and hammered his ears shut with his palms, as if not hearing the increasingly loud argument between Gibbs and the Duke, or the equally loud silence of the other partygoers, could somehow ease his mind and let him think. There was no room, no space, nor could he have persuaded anyone to give way before him so that he could find some-not when they’d not even gotten the clock without stealing it back again-there was no way out but one. He gritted his teeth.
“Give it over to me,” he said. “Quickly.”
Anthony hesitated. “I do not want you-”
“Damn it, do not argue with me, give it over,” he said, and laid claim to it, the vicious, beautiful failure of it, “It’s my clock, in any case.”
Anthony handed it over. Already the glass was hot-hotter than it must have been when Lady Bennington had been holding it, or else she might have surrendered it to them without any reluctance. He looked about for some space, any space, but there was none. “Anthony,” he said, his very desperation somehow specific, and Anthony said, “Sir,” and then he and Gibbs were fighting back the crowd, moving them one or even two steps away from him. It was burning hot. The glass began to hiss at him, strained to the very limit. It was his clock, his accident. He put it on the floor.
Such beautiful things you make, he thought, heartbroken-Mr. Davies and Anthony and Lady Bennington and Peggy Dawes and all the rest of it-and, throwing his arm up over his eyes, brought the heel of his boot down on the glass as hard as he could.
It cracked like a gunshot and the steam roiled out and straight into him. He had left his chin uncovered, most of his mouth, and he felt the heat press into him like a hand, too hot for him to stand, and he stepped back again and again, trying to find cool air, but there was none left for him, his face was burning, even the little half-moon sliver of skin on his wrist between his sleeve and his glove was on fire. Someone caught hold of him, said, “Let me see, let me see,” and pulled his arm back from his face even though he fought against it, tried to say that no, no, they couldn’t, he needed it there to hold his skin together, to stop the burning, the dissolving pain.
Anthony’s hand around the back of his neck. “No, no, McGee, no burns, I don’t think. Nothing permanent, no more than a very bad sunburn all at once. It only hurts like the devil. Let me see your wrist.” Anthony forced the sleeve back up his arm. “There a scar, maybe.”
He was coming back into his mind slowly and it was like stepping back into Mr. Davies’s house and trying to see what was missing and what had been left there anew. “It hurts,” he said, almost petulantly, at his speaking, relief flashed across Anthony’s face.
“Of course it hurts, you might have boiled yourself alive, doing as you did.” He let go of Timothy’s wrist. “Which was very foolish.”
“But very brave,” a light voice said tremulously from behind him, and Timothy turned around to see Miss Abigail-no, no, the Lady Bennington-standing there with her hands clasped together. Her face was white. The Duke and Duchess looked, if anything, even more in shock-first these wholly uninvited guests, then this nonsense with the clock, then this quite bizarre heroism. They had no idea what to think. Certainly it was not what they had planned for their daughter’s birthday party.
Timothy tried to rein in his thoughts. He bowed. “My Lady. It was-”
And something clapped behind him, the same way the glass had cracked-loudly enough to split the room in half-and knocked into his back and sent him to the floor. The clock? But no, it could not be the clock, the clock was over and done with, he had sent it to its rest, the broken bits of it perhaps still frothy with steam and lying scattered on the floor.
Whatever had hit him had made him queasy with the force of it. He tried to stand up again, moving to his hands and knees, but fell flat at the effort, dashing his cheek, his jaw, his still-tender chin hard against the ballroom floor as he came down once more. There was screaming. Someone said, “The blood, the blood, oh Lord,” and then there were two more gunshots-and oh, he thought, that is what it was, I’ve been shot-so close together they came in a roar, like thunderclaps. Lady Bennington was sobbing. Miss Abigail? And someone-Anthony again, or Gibbs?-took him up and pressed something firmly against the pain in his back. The edges of the world went white, then black, and then the whole floor fell out from underneath him and heaving nowhere to go but the silence and the darkness, there he straightaway went.
--And gasped his way suddenly back into consciousness as the pain seemed to be trying to split him in two. He thought, I should stay awake to die, at least, and reached out, his fingers scrambling against the ballroom floor, and caught hold of something that held onto him in return. Anthony’s hand. Mad Mr. Anthony, who hated what did not make sense. And where, he thought, can I find Mr. Anthony? For he surely could not find Anthony now, the world being pitch-black as it was, all the lights having gone out around him. Did he know where to look?
“I’m sorry,” he said, “about the theatre.”
The hand around his tightened. “I don’t give a damn about the theatre.”
And the sharp pain turned into a dull drumbeat that, pounding, led him back down again into the darkness, and he gave into it as if this time, there would be no return. There was the stale-water smell of the steam in his nose, still, and he thought, It really would be quite something, if it worked at all, and the Anthony picked the lock, and Miss Abigail took his hand for the dance, and he opened the door again into Mr. Davies’s house, weary after an exceedingly long day.
Darkness.
*
When he woke again, he felt muzzy-headed, and had to blink several times for the room to stop swimming around him and settle firmly into one place. He saw dark paper on the walls; felt underneath him a bed more comfortable than any he had ever known. Time to make use of it-and so even as someone came forward rapidly and said, “He’s waking up,” he slipped sideways again into the quiet that was no longer so dark.
*
The third time he awoke after the gunshot, the world was clearer-his room, he saw. His room at Mr. Gibbs’s, the one he had only slept in for a night. The blue bedroom. He had no idea what o’clock it was, only that the sun was yellowing the curtains, but Anthony was asleep and rumpled-looking in the chair next to his bed, his chin down against his chest. Timothy looked upon him with fondness. He looked with still greater fondness at the half-drunk cup of tea on the table next to Anthony. His stomach growled. Tea was not breakfast, not even Anthony’s tea, but it would certainly be better than nothing-he reached for it.
And promptly, his fingers being clumsy with sleep, knocked it off the table and onto the floor.
Anthony bolted upright. “What the-you’re awake!” The sleep rushed off his face all at once and was replaced by a brilliant smile.
“I am awake,” Timothy said. “I knocked over your tea.”
Anthony picked the cup up from the floor. Very little of it had seeped from the cup, even though it had landed on its side, which said disturbing things about the thickness of Anthony’s tea. “Never mind the tea. You’ll need far more than that. Do you know you’ve been shot?”
“I have some vague recollection,” he said dryly. “I should not like to have it happen again.”
“No, I suppose it is the kind of thing you would only do once, given the chance.”
“Thomas Travington?”
“The late Thomas Travington,” Anthony said.
Timothy remembered the two gunshots that had come almost perfectly together as he lay bleeding, his hot cheek cooling against the ballroom floor. “You and Gibbs?”
“Though Gibbs will tell you he had the first and most fatal shot, and I suppose I must agree. Are you sitting up? Here.” He stacked the pillows behind Timothy’s back so that the uprightness itself did not exhaust him entirely. “Yes, Thomas Travington-whose man, the one the Lady killed for us, caught sight of one of your exhibitions, and, knowing his employer’s predilections very well and sharing, I suppose, a good many of them, ran and tattled, as he surely ran and tattled about recognizing me in the stables. Almost a shame to kill him, good help being hard as it is to find. I suspect it was Travington himself who visited the house that night, though-given the cane.”
Poor Mr. Davies, who had only wanted something beautiful for the mantel. Timothy was silent.
“The Benningtons, of course, are quite concerned about you. They offered you their own house for your recuperation-which has been considerable, by the way-but Gibbs was of the opinion that no one could ever recover himself in a house with marble floors, Gibbs being of certain populist sentiments the like of which I do not at all understand. So we brought you here.”
“Here is all very well,” Timothy said, as uncertain as Gibbs of his ability to sleep soundly in the lavish Bennington house. “May I have breakfast?”
“I wait and wait for you to wake up,” Anthony said, “having all these things to tell you, and all you do is steal my tea and send me off for breakfast.” He stood up, and cracked his neck to the side. “Gibbs will want to talk to you. Shall I send him in as I go out, or would you prefer breakfast first, to gird you for facing the ordeal of such a conversation?” He looked sideways as he spoke, as if attempting to peer around back of himself and ensure that Gibbs was not already there.
“He is no longer sentimental about you?”
“No, I have healed up quite nicely, and he no longer feels I deserve any coddling, which is all very well in some respects and perfectly horrid in others.”
Though this time Gibbs was behind him, having come in on cat’s feet through the open door, and he said, “Horrid how, Anthony?”
Anthony flinched-but Gibbs came along beside him without stopping, and braced himself against the footboard of the bed. There was something of a smile lurking somewhere on his face, though Timothy could not puzzle out its location or his sense of it, exactly-more the shadow of the smile than the smile itself. “Toast, ordinary tea-none of yours-for him,” Gibbs said, “and make sure you eat something yourself.”
Sentimental, still, Timothy thought, as Anthony nodded and disappeared out the door. Even if Anthony does not entirely know it.
“Did you know that you would come out of that as you did?”
“Having been shot? It was unexpected.”
“No, having not been boiled half to death.”
Timothy shrugged and sent a ripple of pain up and down his back. It was a very good thing that Thomas Travington appeared to have been a rather clumsy shot, or he could not imagine what the repercussions might have been, beyond the feeling that he’d been cruelly gouged and then sewn together all too tightly. “I hoped for that outcome, sir-the unboiled state of things, I mean. I had some reason for it, and other reasons for thinking it would not be so, but there was nothing I could have done, besides what I did.”
“There were other things,” Gibbs said. “You did not think of them.”
“I was a bit rushed,” Timothy said, hearing the sharpness in his voice and wondering where on earth that had come from-but what did Gibbs mean? What ought he to have thought of? Had he not, after all, done the very best he could, with no time to think and no room to work? “What would you have had me do, sir, that I did not do?”
“It is not what I would have had you do, McGee,” Gibbs said, “only what you did not do on your own. You might have told me, or Anthony even, to break the clock, and we would have done so.” He said this with no expression in his face or voice at all. What answer did he expect Timothy to give? Surely he did not think that Timothy should apologize for having acted on his own, outside of his hired-or, given their lack of pay, coerced-agents. Though perhaps Gibbs thought they might have managed it better-without, at least, being shot from behind while celebrating their victory.
But he was not sorry even for being shot, not if it had allowed Gibbs and Anthony to shoot Thomas Travington in return, and with all due justice.
“I did what seemed best,” Timothy said, and, because it was what he had now made some measure of peace with, “It was my clock, after all.”
Gibbs smiled. It was an unexpected event, somewhere on the level of the sea turning into blood, and thus possibly prefiguring the apocalypse. Timothy could not understand him in the least.
Anthony returned with a breakfast trap balanced on one hand and one of his stacked combinations of bread and cheese and bacon-and stewed tomatoes, was that it in between?-in the other. Somehow, with preternatural grace, he set the tray down on Timothy’s bed without ever losing a bite of his own breakfast, and looked almost revoltingly pleased with himself. At least he had brought a small pot of jam for the toast. He caught Timothy looking at it and said, “That’s from Miss Dawes, as a very kind thank you, though why you deserve it I’m sure I don’t know, since you’re the one man in this room who certainly had no part in shooting Thomas Travington. But women can be fickle with their affections, I suppose, and in general she’s a sensible girl.”
“It’s jam, Anthony,” Gibbs said, “not a proposal of marriage.”
“No, though that will no doubt follow shortly,” Anthony said. “You’ve a visitor, McGee, someone far better in a sick-bed situation than I, and you might thank heaven that we’ve so loose a hold on propriety here, or all of this would be quite the scandal.” In the direction of the door, he called, “Come in,” and someone who was all a flurry of lace and satin hurled herself into the room, ran to the side of the bed, and clasped his hand, making him drop his toast on the floor.
“I was so worried about you!”
Miss Abigail. He followed Anthony’s instructions and silently thanked heaven for the house’s general disregard of social niceties.
Anthony crammed the last morsel of his breakfast into his mouth and turned to Gibbs. “Well, sir, with the children thus occupied, shall I find myself a decent chair at last, and we’ll resume our game?”
Gibbs nodded, which may well have been enthusiastic consent, and the two left, Anthony endeavoring-as far as Timothy could hear down the hall-to convince Gibbs that he had been winning as of their last interrupted game, which even Timothy remembered had not at all been the case, and so they should resume play with him a number of points ahead.
Miss Abigail picked up the triangle of toast off the carpet. “I am very, very glad to see that you are quite well,” she said, “only-did you really need to destroy the clock?”
He laughed. Laughing pained him a little, but he considered it well worth it. “I’m afraid there was no other option. But,” he said, growing bold, “I will make you a gift of a clock, a steam-powered one, which works quite without explosions. We may build it together, as you like, just as soon as I am well enough. I suppose if you prefer the explosions, as the Lady David seems to, we might even manage that, provided you could keep it safely.”
“I should like the explosions,” she said instantly, “and in that case, there is a clock already here, your duplicate.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have other plans for that.”
“I thought you thought it broken, quite useless.”
“It’s only broken if it’s meant to be a clock.”
She divested him of his teacup and drank the last of it. “What else would it be meant to be? A weapon?”
“Art,” he said. “Just a beautiful thing, Miss Abigail, and I’ve a place it needs to go.”