CHAPTER 30

SINGLE-HANDED

“It is my fault,” said Mr Sharp, looking down at Sara Falk who was stretched on her bed with her eyes still shut, lying just as motionless as she had been ever since he had carried her up the stairs and into her bedroom.

“That’s not how she’ll see it,” said Cook.

“It was a trap,” he said, bitterness spiking his words. “The girl was a trap.”

“Well,” Cook agreed, “she was a something, that’s for sure.”

“I should have insisted she didn’t stay in the house,” he said.

“You did,” said Cook, looking down at Sara. “Unfortunately as you well know, she has never been particularly… insistable.”

Sara lay there between them, so drained that her face was as colourless as the starched linen of her bed. The sheets were pulled up to her shoulders and her arms hidden beneath the covers.

The room itself was perhaps the plainest in the house: the walls once painted a pale violet were aging back to a bleached-out white, and what furniture there was–a cupboard, a bedside table and a desk and chair in front of the window–were simple light-coloured things made of limed oak. No pictures intruded onto the blank walls, and there was no mirror. The room was plain because this was the room into which Sara retreated to sleep and be calm. The only splash of colour came from the intricate Kashgai rug; a meadow of once bright yellow, blue and green flowers on a pinkish ground, all now faded with time and wear. Mr Sharp mashed his foot into one of the green blooms and scowled.

“I should have known. I did know. The Sluagh wasn’t a coincidence—”

“Are you going to whine or do something?” said Cook, her words brutal as a slap. His head came up and he looked at her, his face as close to surprise as he ever allowed it to get.

“I mean, you can whine if you like, but I do not expect that will help Sara much,” she said. “Her ring was on that hand. And a Glint without a heart-stone, an adult Glint, will sicken and go mad.”

Mr Sharp opened his mouth to say something, and then bit down and clenched it off. The muscles round his jaw worked for a long beat, and then he spoke with a controlled, glacial voice through which tension shivered like a crack in the ice about to unleash an avalanche.

“If I could give her my hand for hers, I would cut it off instantly,” he said. “Without thought. Willingly. But I cannot…”

“And a good thing too,” said Cook. “You are becoming positively histrionic.”

“What happened?”

Sara’s voice rose from the bed like a wisp of smoke, thin as cobwebs. Her eyes were open and for an unguarded moment they darted between Cook and Mr Sharp, bright with shock.

“How much do you remember?” said Cook.

Sara’s eyes locked onto Mr Sharp’s as if trying to pull an answer from him. He said nothing, but his eyes slid off hers and down to the end of her right arm, hidden beneath the sheets.

Her eyes seemed to go away for a long moment, and then she shuddered and they came back older and less bright.

“All of it,” she said.

“So you know about your hand?” said Cook.

Sara nodded and slowly pulled her arms out from under the covers. The sight of the truncated wrist silenced them all. Mr Sharp’s throat worked but no sound emerged and they waited as she looked at the clean-sheared stump, turning her forearm this way and that, and then finally reaching across to touch the mirrored oval where the arm stopped. She winced as her fingers skated across the glass.

“I will go and wake the pharmacist on Ratcliffe Highway,” said Mr Sharp. “I will bring laudanum for the pain.”

“There is no pain,” she said flatly. “And I do not require poppies to dull my faculties at this time of all times.”

“Child,” said Cook, coming forward now the silence was broken. “Your…”

Whatever she had been about to say remained unsaid, because something large and unswallowable rose in her throat and made it impossible to speak. She rested her hand on Sara’s cheek instead. Sara looked up at the big woman.

“I have not been a child for a long time,” she said.

“No,” snuffled Cook, pulling a red and white spotted handkerchief from the inner recesses of her pinafore and blowing her nose with a thunderous series of detonations like a rolling broadside.

Sara patted her hand and sat up.

“Besides, there is no pain,” she repeated.

“Good,” said Mr Sharp.

“But there is something else,” she said, the catch in her voice betraying the strangeness of what she was feeling. “I have a great sense of… loss. And I can feel the hand.”

“As if it’s still there?” said Mr Sharp, looking at Cook.

“In a manner, yes,” she said. “Yes. I see it has quite gone, though I revolt against the thought of it, and yet… and yet… I feel…”

Her voice trailed off as she closed her eyes and concentrated on exactly what it was she seemed to be feeling.

“You feel it?” said Mr Sharp.

“Yes,” she said, eyes still shut, moving her arm a little from side to side. “Yes, that, and yet more than that I feel… I mean, it is as if I can also feel with it. As if it is still connected to me…”

She opened her eyes.

“It is not a painful sensation, but it is also not quite a pleasant one. In the circumstances.”

Cook blew another cannonade into her handkerchief.

“Had a shipmate once,” she said. “French chain-shot took his leg off just below the Tortugas, carried it clean over the side in an instant. As gone as any limb could hope to be, buried fathoms deep and lost to man. And yet, ever after, when it was cold he said his toes was freezing off, except it was the toes on the foot that were already long gone under the waves that he felt. It’s a trick the body plays on the thinking part of you. It’s just your mind not quite caught up yet.”

“It’s not that,” said Sara, her voice gaining strength. “It doesn’t feel like it’s here.”

She raised the stump again and looked at it wonderingly.

“It feels like it’s somewhere else.”

“In the mirror?” guessed Mr Sharp.

Sara shrugged and shuddered again. “Wherever it is, it’s distracting. Not painful. Just distracting. It feels like it’s in a… box.”

She moved the stump but looked at the void above it, as if she was moving an invisible hand.

“It’s your mind, girl,” said Cook. “Like I said: it’s the shock.”

Sara fixed her with eyes that had now regained their usual sharpness.

“You know it isn’t.”

Cook wiped something out of her eye.

“Don’t,” said Sara softly.

“I’m not,” said Cook, blowing her nose with a final thunderous series of detonations.

“The girl…” began Mr Sharp.

“Lucy. Lucy Harker. I told her she was safe,” said Sara.

“She’s a thief. The key from the black cage is gone,” he replied.

“The key in the cage was false bait, you know that. So no harm done,” she replied. “It has served its purpose. The Discriminator is secure still, and since the stratagem was yours in the beginning, you are to be commended for your cunning and foresight in installing the decoy all those years ago.”

The long speech clearly drained energy from her that she could ill afford. He opened his mouth to say something but she shook her head and carried on.

“We must still find her and get her back to safety.”

“Sara Falk,” he snorted. “You gave your word to a thief.”

“It doesn’t matter what she is,” she snapped back. “My word is my word. Besides. She may not have known what she was doing…”

“She knew exactly what she was doing, and so did those who sent her to us.”

“We must find her,” she said.

“I have sent for The Smith. He and Hodge will be here at dawn. You may decide with them what is to be done. I have one thing to do, and one only…”

He was already stepping to the door.

“Mr Sharp—” she said.

“Miss Falk,” he said, cutting her off. “I will find your hand or—”

“Find the girl,” she insisted.

“No,” he said. “I must find the hand. If the girl is still wherever the hand is, then I will drag her back too, but the hand is the thing.”

“You are… ungovernably obstinate,” she said, rising off the pillows. “Do as I say. It is my hand!”

“It is not just the hand,” he snapped. “It is my duty to protect not just this house, but you above all.”

She shook her head in irritation.

“This is not about some quaint chivalry, Mr Sharp, this is…”

“No,” he said. “It is not: it is about life or death.”

“I can live with one hand if need be,” she snorted. “I can li—”

“But you cannot live without your heart-stone.”

She stopped as if slapped.

“It is not just the hand that is gone, Sara Falk,” he said. “Your rings were on it too.”

She remained frozen, propped on her good arm halfway between pillow and upright.

“I will find the girl. I will return your heart-stone, or…” He stopped himself, unable to say what the alternative might be, nodded a curt farewell, and closed the door behind him.

“… or die trying,” finished Cook quietly.

“I had not thought of the heart-stone,” said Sara, wonderingly. “It was stupid of me. But the loss of my hand makes me, made me…”

She looked at Cook, her eyes suddenly wild with a new fear.

“The mirrors: he cannot—!”

“He is distressed,” said Cook, easing her back onto the pillows. “He blames himself. But don’t worry. He cannot get lost in the mirrors like—Well, he cannot get into the mirror anyway, not in through the Discriminator since one of the inner mirrors is in shards, so the direct road to the girl and the hand are gone for ever.”