One. That was the smallest, there, a hard nub scarcely the size of a pinhead. He captured it under his smallest finger. Two. Slightly larger. His heart began to slow. Three, a more imposing bulge, almost button-sized.
“No,” Christian said. “I’m sorry, Mother. No possets. I’ve work to do tomorrow, and you know they always make me muzzy-headed.”
His mother loved him; it was her only sin. He didn’t want to hurt her. She didn’t need to know everything.
Four. Five. Six. His breathing evened, his chest no longer ached.
His mother exhaled. “I heard you shouting,” she said. “The servants must have as well. Servants talk. What do you think people will say?”
Seven was a gooseberry-sized bead under his left index finger.
“They’ll say I don’t sleep well.”
She didn’t say anything.
Eight. Nine.
“They could say nothing,” she said. “And you could have a good night’s rest for once.”
Just this once. He could feel the tug of it. He could smell the laudanum, now that he’d calmed, that faint herbaceous sweetness in the dark. It whispered to him that now would pose no problem. Just a little. Just this once.
Laudanum lied.
Ten. The tenth bead was as big as an acorn. He held them all in place, ten beads, smallest to largest, one under each finger. If he could sort these, he could sort out his life.
“You can’t go on like this,” his mother was murmuring. “I worry for you. You need to sleep more.”
It wasn’t a posset he needed, and it wasn’t a lack of laudanum that woke him up shouting. It was doubt. For a moment, he remembered Judith looking at him just this past afternoon, across a table laden with over-dry, over-spiced biscuits, and telling him that he should have known. He should have known Anthony wasn’t guilty.
Christian pressed until those hard beads hurt his fingers. He’d never doubted Anthony’s guilt. There was no question in his mind that Anthony had committed treason. Transportation had been too light a sentence.
He knew, after all, why Anthony had done it.
“Just this once,” his mother said again.
It was never just once, but his mother didn’t need to know. She loved him, that was all, and he loved her. She didn’t need to know. “Not tonight, Mother,” he said instead.
He had no doubt that Anthony was a traitor. No, the reason Christian woke at night was that he wasn’t sure Anthony’s treachery was wrong.
“I’ll fix it,” he said aloud. “I’m fixing it now.” He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his mother or the long-dead friend who haunted his dreams. Christian lifted his hands and the beads rolled back to the center of the basin. “There’s another way.”
Something other than treason, something other than laudanum. He’d thought and thought. He’d made lists of lists. He was going to get Anthony’s journals. He would identify the men who had so enraged his friend with their sins that Anthony had felt he had no choice but to commit treason.
Christian was going to find them, and he was going to bring them to justice.
Then he’d finally be able to sleep without dreaming.
His mother let out a disappointed sigh. “If you insist.”
He patted her hand. “You’ve worried over me enough. Go get some sleep yourself, Mother.”
He waited until she left, taking the laudanum-infused milk with her. When she had gone, he pulled the bowl onto his lap again. One bead. Two. Three. Ordering little pieces of the universe didn’t bring him much peace, but it was some. He was going to solve this problem. He was going to solve it his way. But until he did…things were going to get worse, not better, because he was going to have to deal with Judith. He’d had little enough peace since the day that women had divided into Judith and everyone else.
Four. Five. Six.
He could still remember that day.
It had been a cold, gray, rainy day at the Worth household. He’d started it with no notion that his entire life would change over the course of an hour.
Seven. Eight. Beads didn’t dispel the memory. Judith had been fifteen, and he’d been a year from starting at university. He’d felt his importance greatly. As befitted his new status as scholar, he had taken a book of Greek poetry to the blue parlor, ensconced himself behind the curtains, and started reading. A few hours into his studies, she had come into the room. He’d looked up with narrowed eyes, but she didn’t see him in his comfortable window seat. She had looked down the hall furtively, and then, very carefully, she had shut the door.
On the one hand, being closed up in a room with a gently bred lady was not a good idea. On the other hand, this gently bred lady was Judith. He’d known her since the very first time he’d come for a visit with Anthony. He knew her from summers of play and picnics. He knew her mostly from trying to sneak away from her so he could go fishing with her brother.
Judith was technically a gently bred lady in the same way that Welsh corgis were technically herding dogs. Yes, the breed was supposedly used to handle sheep by other people—but one look at those ridiculous short legs and he could never take the dogs seriously.
He felt the same way about Judith. He’d dropped her in a lake once. After that, she simply didn’t register as someone who needed to be handled with the kidgloves of propriety.
She seemed unaware of him. Instead, she’d gone to the clock on the mantel and had taken it down. It was a shelf clock, maybe two hands’ height. She held it, turning it about, and then set it on the worktable.
He’d seen her there before, doing embroidery. She looked at the clock as if it were a French knot in need of unraveling. Then she had removed from her pocket a set of jeweler’s tools.
That had riveted his attention. He’d watched as she removed the backing from the clock, and then—very methodically, very precisely—had begun to take the instrument apart. She had laid out the gears and springs, one by one. At first, he’d itched to arrange the pieces she removed by size or by function. By tensile strength. By any damned thing, instead of the bizarre ordering she made on the table.
She dismantled the entire thing, down to the minute hand.
He had wondered what she would do at that point. Would she walk out of the room, leaving behind this table covered with springs and gears? Would she attempt to put it all back, and then feign confusion when the clock no longer worked?
She did neither of those things. Instead, she took her father’s heavy gold watch out of her pocket and set it on the table in front of her. Then, working just as methodically as she had done when she’d taken the thing apart, she’d put it back together again—piece by piece, no hesitation, reaching for each piece precisely as she had laid it down. The order he’d failed to comprehend before suddenly made sense. She’d set the parts out by order of assembly, the order in which you’d arrange these pieces if one cared not about their size or their color or their function, but about what they would become as a whole. Put together like this, they were not hunks of metal. They were a map to time itself.
Christian had spent his whole life sorting things. Watching Judith, he’d realized that the best order for things could mean something that made them more than the sum of their parts instead of reducing them to individual elements.
She snapped the back of the clock in place, consulted the pocket watch on the table, and smiled. “Fourteen minutes,” she’d announced, seemingly to the room at large. Then she’d looked at him—directly at him, as if she had known he was there the entire time.
“That’s a new record for me,” she had told him.
While he was staring at her in disbelief, she had stood calmly, gathered her tools, and walked out of the room.
The Worth family had always been odd. It was why Anthony had adopted Christian without blinking at his more peculiar habits. But until that afternoon, he hadn’t realized that Judith was that odd, and in that particular way.
After that he had tried—valiantly—to put this new, distur
bing Judith out of his mind. She was his best friend’s sister. She was supposed to be a Welsh corgi of a lady. And then he’d started noticing all the other things about her. Her smile. The fact that she’d developed breasts. He had tried not to notice her for two days before giving it up as a hopeless cause.
Wouldn’t you know? It turned out that Welsh corgis were excellent sheepdogs.
Judith was still a hopeless cause. What did he want? He wanted to disassemble time itself. To go back to the point when the most difficult problem between the two of them was a thing of clockwork and gears, a machine to be disassembled and then put back together without any indication that anything had ever gone amiss.
Of all the people in the world, she was the one who had never made him feel odd or out of place. She’d never made his head itch by disturbing his orderings. She had been perfect, up until the point when he’d taught her to hate him.