Red, White and Blue (Book Two of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty One: Unbreakable

When Danvers reappeared from what he would ever-afterwards think of as 'the shaving', he was white and shaky. 

He found Yelavitch downstairs in Professor Carver's laboratory and, ignoring all his questions and his meaningful looks at Danvers's blood-stained shirt, asked for a glass of brandy.

Oh, it had been horrible – standing in that artificially-darkened room, with the heavy drapes drawn across the windows, wielding a cut-throat razor so near the neck of a man he had been steadily growing to despise.

He wasn't sure whether it was just a trick of the shadows, but he had thought he could see a vein pulsing in Carver's neck, making his jowls quiver with every heart-beat.

It had been a very difficult detail to ignore. He hadn't dared shave near that place, however consistently his eyes were drawn to it. Instead, with a flick of his wrist that he had been practising all morning, he had cut Carver just in front of the ear, and watched in silent horror as the blood poured down.

Yelavitch looked again at the blood-stained cuffs, but Danvers ignored him and sipped his brandy with ragged dignity.

"Look, he's not dead," he said at last – because Yelavitch's raised eyebrows were growing intolerable. "I just made a mistake with the razor, that's all, and it bled a little more than I'd been expecting."

In actual fact, he probably wouldn't have got away with a sample of the man's blood if he hadn't made that mistake. In all the fuss, while Carver cursed and called him names, and Danvers frantically dabbed at the cut to stem the flow of blood, it had been quite easy to get a sample.

After that, he had dashed to the kitchens and come back with iodine, sticking plaster, and an endless stream of apologies. 

Because he was sorry, in a vague, swirling, cosmic way. He was sorry that Jack had forgotten the woman he loved – sorry that Madam Myrrha kept preserved genitals on her shelves – sorry that Carver had made a copy of Miss Syal and molested it so frequently that it had taken to writing the words 'kill me' on the slate that hung around its neck. He was sorry that any of these appalling things had happened – and, since the parties responsible didn't seem inclined to apologize, he was more than happy to do it for them. The fact that Carver deserved a hundred times worse than a little cut and a ruined shirt made Danvers all the sorrier.

"Did he sack you?" said Yelavitch, when he'd heard the whole story.

"I don't really know," said Danvers distantly. "He did say he'd have me castrated if he ever clapped eyes on me again..."

Yelavitch chuckled. "Reading between the lines, I'd say you're dismissed, my friend."

Danvers shook his head. He was just happy to have got out of that room without killing anybody. He had the little phial containing Carver's blood tucked away in the breast-pocket of his shirt, but every now and then, he was sure he could feel it trembling next to his skin – as though the little pulse he had observed in Carver's neck had somehow passed into the bottle, and was knocking against his chest in time with the Professor's heart.

Still, he hadn't killed anybody. That was the important thing.

He looked idly down at the Professor's workbench – littered with skulls and tomes and knives and sigils – and wondered how the man could ever have pretended he was studying chemistry.

"What's this?" he asked, holding up a yellowing piece of paper. It was covered in writing, but not in the usual, everyday sense of the word. This writing was Arabic calligraphy – all loops and sweeps and curves – and it wasn't arranged in tidy lines across the page, but packed together to form the outline of a sailing ship.