Page 110 of A Devilish Element
Finally, he was able to straddle the support beam and clasp her to his body. “I have you now. It’s going to be all right.”
He felt every tremble that shook her body as he loosened the makeshift rope and bound it fast around her waist instead.
“I think I may have broken my arm,” she said, tears spilling.
“We can get Bell to splint it.”
That made her splutter something approaching laughter. “Oh, Jem, I’m such a fool. You were right. I shouldn’t have charged out there. I could have killed us all.”
“You weren’t to know it was unsound. None of us did.”
“It’s my fault Mrs Honeyfield…” She turned her head away from the shattered body, pushing her wet face into the crook of his shoulder. “I’m always so sure I’m right, I forget to listen.”
“Eliza, it was not your fault.” She peeped up at him with watery eyes. Jem pressed his hands to either side of her head and drank down the vision of her while his heart rioted inside his chest. They were in no position to be exchanging any sort of tendresses, but he pressed his lips to her brow, nonetheless. “I’m going to get you down from here. I think I’ve enough length to lower you to the parapet below. It was a mere ten feet or so, rather than the thirty he estimated the ground to be.
“Promise me your knots will hold.”
“They’ll hold,” he promised, and pressed another desperate kiss to her brow.
She nodded her assent, and he gingerly began to lower her. It was almost worse dangling her at the end of a line than making his arduous crawl down the tower wall. Ten feet had never felt so interminably far. When she finally landed, he gasped deep lungfuls of air. His heart was ready to burst right out of his chest.
Eliza freed herself of the rope, then still holding fast to the end, waved for him to follow.
“Perhaps I missed my calling as a sailor,” he said when he was finally on a level with her again.
“Well, I’m glad that you didn’t take to the sea, else we might never have met.”
“It’s good to have met you, too.” He smiled, as did she, right before both their brows knit and their expressions crumbled into frowns.
“What now?” she asked, turning away.
Jem winced, feeling the rejection as keenly as the wound on his side.
Her head jerked towards him again. “You’re injured.”
“Some,” he concurred. Neither of them had got away unscathed. He finally looked down at the damage. His shirt was stuck to his side, and the flesh there was red and bloody. “My coat caught alight. Jane’s hands,” he muttered recalling she’d fallen against him.
“How?” Eliza asked.
“I don’t…” The little amber rock he’d picked up had been in his pocket. “I…I think I found one of the missing pills. It wasn’t as I expected…I didn’t recognise it as… I mean it didn’t look like something you’d swallow, more like a speck of amber you might pick up off the beach. In the scuffle, it must have—”
“It’s unstable in the air. It’s why the pills are coated with silver, and generally stored in water.”
“And you say that you’re not a chemist!”
She winced as she snort-laughed. “I’m not. I’ve only read Lavoisier.”
Jem shook his head, wearily bemused. “I should introduce you to my cousin Pip, he’d talk your ears off about the subject. He used to correspond with Lavoisier before… Well, before the revolution took its toll.”
“I should like that.” She blessed him with a smile. “I should like very much to do something as ordinary as drink tea and converse with your learned cousin, but first we should find a way down from here, and then you must get Doctor Bell to dress your wound.”
“Shan’t you do it?” he asked. He’d much rather her hands on him than Bell’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t have faith in the former, only his bedside manner wasn’t half so endearing. Plus, he was loath to part company with her so swiftly after so great a shock. His mind was still catching up with the fact she wasn’t dead. He thought the image of her falling away from him would stay in his head forever.
“My arm,” she reminded him. “And if it weren’t so sore, my hands are not so steady at the moment.”
She was shaking from head to foot, but he wasn’t faring much better.
“Jem, someone needs to fetch the magistrate. Also, where is Jane? Is she all right? I didn’t see her fall. She didn’t, did she?”
