Page 53

Behind the empty bar, there was a bottle of rum no one had touched in years.

It was distilled by John Colson, drunk sparingly and only on dire nights. On its label were the words: For the recess of head and heart.

Lord, but Patrick longed for a recess.

The bottle was drawn from its shadows and placed on the bar top, where Patrick stared at it for long moments, head awash.

But he didn’t drink from it. He wouldn’t until his father was the one to pour it. If John Colson were here, he’d set two glasses down, fill them to the brim and tell Patrick that there is little more dire than a woman.

Patrick sat himself on a stool—one that faced the door to the stairwell—and drew a coin from the inside of his sleeve. “You’re a fuckin’ fool, Pat,” he said to no one. He flipped the coin in the air and let it fall as it may. Tails.

So he’d stay here, then. He would not go back up to her.

A strange combination of relief and anguish followed.

He returned the bottle of rum to its dark corner and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve, trying not to imagine it all again.

At this moment she was likely hanging her shawl, unpinning her hair, unbuttoning that torturous dress.

She was closing her eyes and trying to rid herself of the night’s events, enough to fall asleep.

She would fail. He would fail. They would wake with burning impressions all over their bodies from where the other had pressed.

“Fuck,” he growled, and stalked toward a door behind the bar.

Through the kitchen and out to the courtyard, past the chickens and a sleeping Isaiah, who awoke and greeted him immediately. Patrick stopped to stroke his downy head, then whistled for the dog to follow him to the cottage door.

The windows glowed orange—a bad sign. He’d hoped Tess and his brothers had remained at the marketplace.

The kitchen was already warmed when he stepped into it, the round table occupied by Gunner and Donny. Isaiah went to Donny’s feet and puddled gracelessly. He panted up at them all, oblivious to the tension arriving the moment Patrick closed the door behind him.

He waited for either of his brothers to speak, and when they didn’t, he took off his coat, hung it, and said reluctantly, “Let’s have it, then.”

Gunner was tight-jawed. He looked at Patrick squarely when he said, “We had an agreement. No fuckin’ the swanks.”

Donny offered nothing. He seemed to sink into his chair, readying for a long argument.

Patrick merely tilted his head to the side, scrutinized his brother through his furrow. “A rule we came up with for Donny and the other boys.”

“So, it’s different rules for Patty, then?” Gunner grasped a mug on the tabletop like he might break it. “Very convenient, eh?” From the corner of his mouth, a speck of inky black slipped free.

Patrick stared at it, laughed darkly, then stepped forward until he was close enough to bend his face to Gunner’s. Patrick lifted a thumb and smeared the bluff from his brother’s lip, then held it up for closer inspection.

Gunner shrunk. His eyes averted.

“Yeah, brother,” Patrick muttered, inches from Gunner’s face. “It’s different rules for me.” He was close enough for Gunner to throw his head, to take a swing. When he did neither, Patrick shook his head and paced in a circle, scrubbing his face.

“Pat?” Donny asked, not without apprehension. “What’s it like to fuck a Charmer?”

“Watch your mouth.” Patrick felt the last tethers of his patience snapping. “And no one’s fuckin’ anyone.”

“I just wondered if there was anythin’ special about it, is all.”

“Shut up, Don,” said their mother, appearing in the doorframe behind the table. “Go to bed.”

“No,” Patrick said. “Donny, take Gunner home. Make sure he doesn’t fall into a fuckin’ canal along the way. His wife’s waiting for him.”

Gunner raised his head. “Pat—”

“I’d wring your neck, Gun. But it seems you do a fine enough job of that all on your own. Get the fuck out of here.”

For a moment, his brother seethed, fists balled, and Patrick almost wished he would throw a punch.

But he didn’t. Gunner only sniffed pitifully.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” he muttered, overbalancing as he stood.

He was a head taller than Patrick, broader in the shoulders, yet somehow half his size.

“But you just remember what we said, eh, brother? Them Artisans you’re collectin’, we can’t trust ’em. You told us to keep our distance.”

“And so long as I’m running the tunnels, the trades, the meetings, the rallies, and the fuckin’ coppers, I’ll keep telling you whatever I like, Gunner. Unless you want the job?”

Silence fell. Each one of them knew it couldn’t come to pass. The bluff had hold of Gunner, and so Gunner had hold of nothing.

“What about you, Don,” Patrick said then. “You got eyes on a promotion?”

“Was that a dig?” Donny frowned. He turned to their mother. “That one was surely a dig—”

“Go,” Tess answered, her lips thinly pressed. “Now. Take your brother.”

“Am I s’posed to lead him, or he me?”

“Just keep to the left, and if you hear the trolley, jump out of the fuckin’ way.”

Donny muttered under his breath as he collected his coat and Gunner’s.

“I don’t need a bloody keeper. I’m fine,” Gunner said, but when he met Patrick’s expression, it brooked no further argument. The two of them disappeared through the door, and Patrick tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

Tess waited, her hip against the frame, arms crossed over her chest. “Well?” she said eventually, when it seemed her son would say nothing at all.

Patrick breathed once, twice, cooling his temper. “The foray into Dorser failed,” he said, sitting at the kitchen table with a metastatic groan. “The shipping containers were already empty. A decoy, probably. They knew we were comin’.”

Tess nodded. “Scottie told me. That’s three of the last four missions thwarted.” She peered at Patrick, gritted her teeth to keep back what she so wished to say. “You can’t tell ’em, Pat.” She said, and she meant anyone, everyone. “They can’t know.”

Patrick didn’t argue the point. Panic spread quickly in Kenton Hill. They were all tinder in a waiting box, at any moment set alight. There could be no friction. “The crew’ve been told to keep it quiet.”

“Otto has a big mouth when it comes to that Scribbler. I think he’s in love with her.”

“He’ll keep it quiet.”

“Ten to one, son. Ten to one says it’s one of the swanks gettin’ word out.”

Silence again. Above them, a boiler sourced the air temperature and clanged to life. Gas funneled through copper pipes. A fire would light beneath the cistern. Winter was approaching.

Patrick shook his head. “They’re watched, day and night,” he said. “They only know what we tell ’em. It ain’t the swanks.”

“Then find whoever it is,” Tess said simply. “And throw ’em down a shaft.”

Patrick nodded. He lit a cigarette, watched the first euphoric exhales spin eddies into the ceiling. “Out with it, Ma,” he said eventually, closing his eyes, bracing.

But a moment ticked by, then another. Enough moments to warrant the opening of his eyes. He found his mother looking away, oddly distant. “Been a long time since I saw you like that, Pat. A long, long time.”

His mother and he were well practiced in speaking this way, in half sentences. No mincing. She meant the dancing at the rally. The foolishness of it.

But he’d been a kid once, hadn’t he? A kid in the lane, playing coppers and thieves.

“You used to do that a lot.”

He frowned. “Dance?”

“Laugh,” she said. “Have fun. You were sunshine once.”

But no longer, because someone had to step up. Someone had to gather the storms.

Tess tsked. “She’ll leave this place, son. You know that she’ll leave.”

“Or she’ll stay,” he said, but it was feeble. “If she can be convinced to our side.”

Tess sighed, and it was world-weary. Formed by years of trial. “You should prepare for the eventuality that she won’t, son. Pick another. There’re plenty of other girls for you in Kenton Hill.”

Were there? To him, their faces were indistinguishable, their outlines hazy.

He felt they might pass straight through him.

He had begun to think that he’d been waiting all these years to see her again.

Even more worrisome, that he’d brought her here because of it.

“I just need some time,” he said. “She’s one of us , Ma. I know she is.”

Patrick didn’t look to see the pity in his mother’s eyes, the sink of her shoulders. But he heard it when she said, carefully, quietly, “You shouldn’t waste time hopin’ people will change, son. They never do.”

Patrick stood. He didn’t want to reenact the many rows that had split the seams of this kitchen when his father had been here and Tess still believed he could be persuaded from his course.

Patrick and his brothers had heard them from that one bedroom upstairs, one ear pressed to the mattress and the other blocked by a pillow as the roar downstairs seemed to grow and grow.

“Four weeks,” Tess murmured. “It ain’t enough time to change a person’s mind. Lord knows a decade weren’t enough to change your father’s, and now he’s—”

“Captured,” Patrick cut in.

“Dead,” Tess said forcefully, white knuckles clutching the back of a chair. “There ain’t a hope you’ll find him still alive, Pat. You need to stop pretendin’—”

“You’re able to abandon him so easily.” Patrick’s fists shook with the urge to be buried in a wall. But he spoke evenly. “Not me.”

No, not Patrick. He felt his father knocking at the insides of his skull.

Other people had a tendency to forget what Patrick couldn’t when it came to John Colson: the cast-off parts turned into toy trains, the easy jokes, and a hand wide enough to span two of his.

In the mornings, his father would submerge his head in a bucket of water to rinse dust from his eyes, and they’d come away bloodshot.

He’d sit at the table, draw a sketch of some strange imagining: a lantern, a filter, a kettle, a trolley.

Tess would shake her head in wonder and ask him how he came to such ideas, and John would pull Donny onto his knee and tell her that he was going to fix up the whole world.

A place crafted by hand, out of spit and steam, all before the whistle for second shift blew.

No son of mine , he’d said. No son of mine in a pit.

And he’d found a way. It would only take a war.

He was too stubborn to die, Patrick knew.

Tess shook her head again, and from one breath to the next, Patrick thought she grew older.

“This idea you have in your head of victory? It’s a delusion.

We already have all the victory we’re gonna get.

A safe home, fair gain, less men belowground.

” Her eyes welled. “Everyone gets what they need, Pat. God bites the hand of those who try ’n’ take more.

” Suddenly, she coughed into her hand, bending almost double, and Patrick rounded the table to her side, held her shoulders until the spluttering slowed.

He sighed. “Your God turned his head from this place a long time ago, Ma. We’re the only gods here.”

She sat at the table with Patrick’s guidance, leaning her head on her steepled hands, eyes closing.

“You sound so much like him, Pat. That’s what’s hardest.” She said it so softly he could barely hear it.

“You’re some of him and some of me, and we don’t get to pick which parts we give to our children.

You’re a mess of the two of us—his head and my heart. Both’ll get you killed.”

“I have to finish it, Ma. I promised him.”

“Aye,” she said. “And there’s not a day I don’t hate him for it.”

Patrick left. No time to sleep, no time to lament. Just a knocking in his brain, a tingling on his mouth, a looming clock in the periphery winding down the seconds.

“Don’t wait on her, Patrick,” his mother called after him as he walked out into the night.