Page 15 of Let Me Be Your Hero
But she found herself clinging to the hope that it had been a random act of street crime, a group of cutpurses who had noticed their fancy carriage and assumed they would have something worth stealing. That she had not been atargetin the literal sense.
That it was unlikely to happen again.
“It’s difficult to say,” Lucy said in answer to their mother’s question. “Everything happened so fast.”
Her mother’s eyes were sympathetic. “Izzie, there’s no reason these men would have for attacking you. Is there, darling?”
Izzie choked on her biscuit. Suddenly, the words she had overheard in the dark walks echoed through her head.
How soon can you deliver the guns?
The army won’t even miss such a trifling amount.
I know who those guns are intended for.
You’re in too deep.
If those men had spotted her, there was a very good reason someone might now want to kill her.
But if she were to tell her mother that, she would have to tell her the truth. That she hadn’t lost her way last night. That she hadn’t been delayed due to her hair being snarled in a tree.
That, like Pandora, she had been unable to tamp down her curiosity, and now she desperately wished she could force those secrets she had never wanted to hear back inside the box.
And after all, Lucy had a point. Everything had happened very quickly.
Maybe it really had been a gang of cutpurses.
“Nothing comes to mind,” she lied, setting her cup down upon its saucer. “I am feeling shaken, though. If it’s all right, I’d like to lie down.”
“Of course, darling,” her mother said.
Izzie went upstairs. Her maid helped her loosen her gown, and she lay down on the bed.
But sleep did not come.
CHAPTER 8
Afew blocks to the north, Archibald arrived at his family’s townhouse, a hulking Gothic monstrosity designed to look like a haunted castle, complete with bars over the windows, crenelated walls, and turrets on each corner. It was his mother’s notion of fashionable architecture, and it was apropos in that it blended in with the sedate Georgian townhouses that surrounded it about as well as Archibald himself blended in at a ball.
He handed his coat and hat to the butler, Giddings. “How is he?”
Giddings understood precisely to whom he referred. “He’s been resting for most of the afternoon. Shall I send up some tea?”
Archibald flexed his hands, sore from working all day at the forge. “Please. In case he wakes up.”
Giddings bowed. “At once, sir.”
Archibald made his way up two flights of stairs to a room in one of the circular corner towers. He rapped lightly on the door. There was no answer, but he pushed it open, anyway.
Inside he found his grandfather, John Nettlethorpe, lying on the bed. The doctors had found a tumor in his chest two monthsago. They had cut it out, but the surgery had not slowed his grandfather’s decline.
Today, like most days these past two weeks, his grandfather’s eyes were closed. On days when he was awake, he would ask Archibald how things were at Nettlethorpe Iron, the business he had founded some fifty years ago. His grandfather gave him better advice than anyone. Archibald understood everything about running Nettlethorpe Iron from an engineering perspective. But he was still getting used to the business side of things, which his grandfather had always overseen, and which was just as complex as any high-pressure steam engine. They would talk for a half-hour or so until his grandfather grew tired.
He placed his hand upon his grandfather’s forehead, gently, so as not to wake him. He wasn’t feverish. He seemed to be resting peacefully.
Archibald pulled a shield-backed chair beside the bed, intending to stay a while in case his grandfather awakened. He glanced around the room that would be his grandfather’s final home. It was grand but spartan, with curved stone walls, a high ceiling, and brilliant stained-glass windows. His grandfather had requested this room over one of the bedrooms, all of which had been overenthusiastically decorated by his parents in the Gothic style, because he was a simple man, and the sparseness of the plain stone walls suited him. But Archibald insisted on moving a particular pendulum clock into the room, positioning it facing the foot of the bed where his grandfather might see it.
It happened to betheclock, the one that had started it all. Even as a five-year-old, Archibald had liked to know how things worked. That was how it came to pass that one spring morning, his parents had walked into the front parlor and discovered their son sitting in the middle of the Axminster carpet with a screwdriver in his hand and the pieces of their brand-new clock scattered around him.
