A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Five: The House Always Wins

When the coach was an hour away from Northaven, Robin took the driver aside, pulled him into the shadows of the inn's stable-yard, and spent a full five minutes pouring whispers into the poor man's ears. Ellini guessed they were threats, not because he had grabbed the man by the lapels – Robin had a tendency to do that anyway – but because he was smiling. His perfect, white, even teeth glinted in the light of the gas-lamps. She wondered how a man who had lived a life like Robin's had managed to keep all his teeth. 

Ellini sat at a table by the window, with a blanket round her shoulders and a cup of hot cocoa cradled in her hands. She had changed her clothes and dried her hair since Warwick, but she hadn't been able to shake off the cold. Perhaps it was because she had finally admitted to herself that she would be going back to Oxford. The idea of facing the music – that much music! – chilled her to the bone. 

Good god, what would she say? Yes, Manda – yes, Sergei – yes, Mr Danvers – yes, Matthi – I let you think I was dead. Oh no, it was nothing you'd done, I just... I needed to get away. Yes, like a holiday. Yes, I suppose you could say I broke your hearts in order to go on holiday. Where did I go, after all that? Oh, a slop-house in the East End of London. And then I started living with the man who killed my family.

But that wouldn't be the worst bit. Those were not the worst people. Even seeing Alice Darwin, whose chilly composure always left Ellini bereft of words, would be a picnic compared to seeing him.

She was afraid she would be angry, and she was afraid she wouldn't be angry. She was afraid she would fall into his arms, and she was afraid she would jab a fork in his eye.

Ellini unpinned her hair and ran her fingers through it, which was like trailing her hands in a warm bath. That part of her, at least, seldom got cold. It brought back memories of the fires her temper had kindled in the hawthorns outside Warwick, but it still revived her.

She looked back at Robin, who seemed to have finished haranguing the coachman. He was now patting him a little too hard on the back, a gesture which demonstrated that they were good chums, but nevertheless Robin was the stronger chum.

For this stretch of the journey, the coach was crowded. There was still no train to Northaven, although Gladstone made a speech in the House of Commons every month asking for one. All the railway companies had resisted the idea, perhaps because they thought there would be something irreversible about linking Northaven with the rest of England. The rail network stitched the country together, and nobody wanted to be stitched to Northaven.

Everyone in the crowded carriage seemed to be a new-breed, and some of them had obviously been in the prison colonies. The tan was curiously tenacious, as was the look of malnutrition, even when the new-breeds in question had put on weight. Bones jutted out through newly plumped-up flesh, as though they couldn't lie back and rest.

Curiously for Robin, he didn't seem inclined to talk. But Ellini would have done anything rather than listen to her inner monologue, so she struck up a conversation with the man seated opposite, a journeyman tailor with a hooked nose, who was bunched up in the corner with his luggage on his knees so as not to encroach on Robin's personal space.

She started with a very English complaint about the weather, which got a derisive smile.

"This is Northaven, madam – where you love the rain because it's not a monsoon, and you love the midges because they're not mosquitos. Fortunately for the new-breed race, there's no place like home."

That last sentence struck through Ellini's breast like an icicle. It was from one of Joel's speeches, given to the hungry crowds outside Lucknow, or Agra, or Hyderabad. He had met her eyes when he'd said it, all those years ago.