CHAPTER 49

A MOSAIC OF DESPAIR

Mr Sharp stared down at hundreds of shards of broken glass. In them, as in a fractured mosaic, he saw pieces of himself looking back, haloed by the bright gas lamps of the Red Library. He looked tired. He looked worried. He looked, in fact, exactly what he felt like–fractured, damaged and not entirely himself.

Emmet’s dark head swung into view over his shoulder, multiplied in a hundred miniature reflections. Mr Sharp turned and saw that the clay man was holding another tiny sliver of glass, and was looking for somewhere to place it.

They had finished cleaning the room, collecting all the fragments of the broken mirror from inside the Murano Cabinet and had begun painstakingly to grade them by size and shape, laying them out on the newly cleared tables in the centre of the library. Mr Sharp intended to order the splinters in such a way that it would be easier to reconstitute the broken mirror piece by piece.

That was the plan.

Looking down at the assorted shards, he wondered, not for the first time since they had begun, if he was becoming as distracted as Sara. Perhaps, he thought, this was a kind of madness.

Emmet laid his jag of mirror on the table and went to fetch another piece. Mr Sharp knew Emmet never needed to sleep or rest, and somehow the thought of the golem working slowly and methodically until the job was done gave him hope.

The door creaked, and Cook looked in. Her eyes widened as she took in the nature and scale of the project they were involved in.

“What exactly,” she said with a dangerous pause in the middle of the phrase, like someone carefully cocking the hammer on a perilously hair-triggered gun, “are you doing?”

“What you see,” replied Mr Sharp shortly.

“This is no time to be playing at jigsaws,” Cook said.

Mr Sharp and Emmet carried on with their painstaking sorting of the shards.

“You cannot mend glass,” said Cook, an edge creeping into her voice.

Mr Sharp would have much rather she had not burst in on him while his project was so close to its infancy and looked so obviously unfinishable. He would have preferred it if it hadn’t been so obvious what he was planning to do. Her disapproval was not going to change his mind, but it would lend a strain to the next few days that he and the whole house could have done much better without.

“You cannot mend a broken mirror,” she insisted. “No more than you can unroast a chicken. When a chicken is roasted, it’s roasted. When a mirror is broken, it’s done for. You may as well go to the glazier and order new glass, though why you see fit to mend the cabinet when there is so much else that is more pressing and demanding of our time, I do not know.”

He pointed at the interior of the cabinet, one side silvered with the surviving mirror, the other showing the wood where the glass on the table had once been intact.

“If I put a new mirror in there, it will not hold the pathway that Lucy took out of here,” he said. “This old glass holds the resonance of that.”

Cook shook her head slowly at him.

“You cannot do what you are planning. Since the Disaster we have forbidden it, and for good cause.”

He said nothing. There was little reason to engage in an argument when his mind was fixed.

Cook’s eyes had been judging tough characters from before he had been born, and the look she scoured over him told him that and much else besides, little of it at that moment to his credit.

“Well. You are stone mad,” she said decisively. “And I won’t have it.”

“And I won’t discuss it,” he said.

They stared at each other.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll see what the others have to say about that.”

The door bounced on its hinges as she stormed out.

Emmet carried on methodically sorting the glass. Mr Sharp continued for a few minutes, until the uncharacteristic flush of colour had left his cheeks and his breathing had calmed to normal. Then he stepped away from the table.

“I will return soon,” he said. Emmet nodded slightly, so slightly that even one as keen-eyed as Mr Sharp wondered if he’d imagined it.

He found Cook in the kitchen, furiously stabbing the range with a poker, riddling the coals in the grate back to fiery life.

“If there’s another way,” he said. “Tell me and I will gladly follow it. But there isn’t.”

She continued to gore the fire with the poker. Her face was red in the glow from the blaze she had reignited, and her eyes were bright. Mr Sharp reached in and gently removed the poker from her hand.

“She’s dying,” he said quietly.

Cook shook her head violently.

“She’s strong,” she said. “She’s always been strong, even when she was little…”

“She’s strong, but she’s dying,” said Mr Sharp loudly, as if the only way he could express such a painful thought was to get it out in a burst. “You heard Wayland say it. And losing her hand has somehow accelerated it. Without her heart-stone she dies inside…”

“… a little more each day…” said a voice from behind them.

It was a quiet interruption but it silenced them both. They turned as one to see Sara Falk standing in the door behind them. Her lips, usually healthily red against the pale cream of her skin, were now bloodless and white. In contrast, her normally flawless complexion was now bruised with dark half-moons beneath her eyes. She was holding on to the door-handle with her remaining hand, just as an invalid might lean lopsidedly on a cane, one shoulder hunched higher than the other. It gave her the look of a broken marionette, or someone expecting a blow from above. Her stump was bound across her front in a scarlet shawl fastened like a sling. Her smile was so clearly an act of will that it hurt to see it.

“And then one day she’ll be hollowed out, and whoever she is won’t be her any more,” she continued. “Oh, she’ll walk and talk and may indeed cry and gibber, she may sit in the corner dribbling for decades, but she won’t be Sara Falk ever again. She’ll just be the madness that echoes round the void inside her.”

“Miss Falk,” said Mr Sharp stepping forward, feeling he had to stop her, had to say something or else himself cry out in wordless pain. She waved him back, as if all this was nothing, as if her bravado came at no cost.

Her smile was replaced by a grim seriousness as she looked at them both.

“The truth is that my heart may pump for years. But I, as I, as Sara, will be dead. And if you do not face up to that and act on it, The Oversight itself will fail. You know that.”

“Sara,” said Cook, pulling out a chair. “Sit down.”

Sara stepped away from the door and stumbled. Mr Sharp moved fast to catch her and led her by the elbow to the chair. She nodded her thanks, for a moment unable to speak. She wiped her eye and took a deep breath.

“We are the Last Hand: The Smith, Hodge, you two and I,” she said as if explaining things to a child. “If I cannot be myself the five of us become the four of you, and four is not enough for a Hand.”

“Stop,” said Mr Sharp. “Please.”

“No. Let me finish. I have to say this and if you keep fussing over me I shall not be able to,” she said. “Without a Hand, the Wildfire cannot be contained and The Oversight must be disbanded and the remains of you dispersed to the four corners of the wind to search for recruits to form a new Hand. Maybe that has to happen. It has happened before. Or maybe our time is finally come; maybe the darkness bleeds in from the edge of the world and wins. But if it does, it will not be because we were stupid, or weak, or sentimental about the truth. I am dying, dying as a useful member of the Free Company if nothing else, and I must be replaced…”

“You know that The Smith could not find any willing to join our ranks,” said Mr Sharp.

“We are tainted by the Disaster,” said Cook. “A generation later and no one forgives us for those who were lost.”

“Betrayed,” said Mr Sharp.

“Betrayed and lost,” said Cook.

“Killed,” said Sara. “Use a plain word for a plain deed. They were betrayed and killed. And no. That is not what they do not forgive us for. They do not forgive us for surviving.”

She started pushing herself to her feet, waving off the hands reaching out to help.

“I do not regret surviving,” she continued. “And I feel no guilt. We survived through luck. That is all. Fate dealt us better cards than our friends and forebears, and in their memory I will play them as well as I can.”

She stood straight and stretched, scowling at the effort it took. A tear had leaked from one eye, and she reached for it with her stump, forgetting she had no fingers there to brush it away quickly and hide it. She stopped and used the other hand. It was an uncharacteristically clumsy gesture, her body’s memory of itself fooling her conscious knowledge of her injury. Mr Sharp winced at it.

“Why the loss of a hand should make all my bones ache I do not know,” she said through a tight smile. “I am going to lie down for a while.”

“Let me help,” said Mr Sharp.

“No,” she said. “I do not need help moving around my own house. Not yet.”

They let her sway unaided to the backstairs, the ones down which she had once fallen running away from a Green Man who had stepped out of a child’s nightmare, and silently watched her hoist herself back up towards her bedroom by the banisters, her back stiff with the effort of not making it look hard.

When she had gone, Cook took the bottle from behind the spoons, placed two glasses on the deal table and poured them both a jolt of amber liquid. She drank hers in one, grimacing at the warm burn as it went down her throat. Mr Sharp drank half of his and looked at the remnant as if he expected to see an answer to his dilemma swimming in the depths.

“More?” asked Cook, pointing the bottle at him.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m still assessing the damage of that last mouthful. What was it?”

“Medicinal waters,” she said. “Waters of life.”

“Whisky,” he scowled, and finished his dram with a decisive movement. “No wonder so many Scots come south to escape it. Thank you.”

He handed back the glass.

“I have never seen her cry before,” he said.

“She is flesh and blood,” she said.

“I do know that, my dear Cook, I assure you.”

“And yet…?” she said, watching the tight stretch of his coat across his shoulders.

“And yet. I do not choose to see her… dwindle in this excess of distress,” he said. “I will not see her diminished so in her own eyes. I will not… allow it.”

“She wants you to find a replacement for her. She wants you to keep The Oversight alive.”

“We agree on the need to protect The Oversight. Where we disagree is on method.”

“We need another member, Mr Sharp. For the Hand. We need many more members for other Hands. But we must at least have the Last Hand intact,” she said.

“Not if Sara Falk is healed,” he said. “Then the Last Hand will survive and we can build on that.”

“Her hand and ring are gone,” she said.

“Then I shall find them.”

Her eyes rolled to the ceiling, where there happened to be a cutlass hanging from a hook next to a milk pan. She looked as if she wanted to grab it and start flailing around with it in frustration: instead, she stabbed a blunt finger at him.

“In this of all moments, when reality needs to be faced, you the ever careful, the ever cautious choose to be fanciful and quixotic! It is not enough that Hodge seems consumed by a death-wish, out in all weathers, hunting this breath-stealer he has become obsessed with, and so all but lost to us as a useful member of The Oversight! Sara’s poor hand is lost in the mirrors. It could be anywhere in the world where two mirrors face each other. It could be in Manchester or Munich or Macau! You’d have an easier time finding a needle in a thousand haystacks.”

“Finding a needle in a thousand haystacks is not impossible. It is merely very, very hard,” he said with a thoroughly provoking display of calmness under fire.

“And time-consuming!” she roared, slamming the palm of her hand onto the scrubbed pine with enough force to make the glasses jump in the air and fall on their sides. Mr Sharp caught one as it went over the edge.

“And while I know you think you can do very, very hard things, Mr Sharp, even you cannot make more time!”

He placed the glass he had caught carefully back on the table and straightened.

“I am sworn to protect her. I swore that before I was admitted into the Free Company. I cannot do otherwise. If I break my honour to save the Hand, then I am as useless to it as if I were an enemy. I would be creating a false Hand, with rot at its core. And that would lead to another Disaster, worse than the one that nearly destroyed us last time. I will go into the mirrors.”

She shook her head.

“You will die in the mirrors.”

He shrugged.

“You must all follow The Smith’s plan and bury the Wildfire and the treasures beneath the Thames. And I can do nothing other than what I must, old friend. If I am not true as my blade is true, I am nothing. Might as well be a Sluagh…”