Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Three: Your Late Friend Lily

Sam stood in a doorway in Holywell Street, staring up at the bright, innocent-looking frontage of the Faculty.

He had no idea whose door he was leaning against – probably a music teacher or a concert pianist, because he could hear piano keys tinkling in the sitting-room to his left. Oxford had a musical sound, he couldn't deny it. You heard a different language around every corner, and a different instrument behind every door.

He had missed it, perhaps. He was sure you could hear the tinkling of pianos behind closed doors in London, but mostly what you heard was arguments, or crying babies, or the laughter of people who didn't have much to laugh about, which was shrill and insistent, as though to drown out common sense.

He was feeling strangely calm, in spite of the fact that nothing was going to plan – because nothing ever did with Jack. He had the mayor, the city councillors, and the police force back under his control, but mostly he had come back for the satisfaction of seeing Jack locked up in one of his cells. And a horribly injured Jack barricaded in the Faculty for Demonic Speculation wasn't quite the same thing.

He didn't particularly want to force his way in, but he didn't want Jack to slip through his fingers again, least of all by dying. That would make a martyr of the bastard. But if he waited much longer, Jack might slip through his fingers by more conventional means.

He shifted restlessly against the door, and decided to take out his frustration on a cigarette. He was just lighting the match when he noticed a black, fluttering shape in his peripheral vision, and looked up to see Manda approaching. At least, a woman in the black gown and veil of a mourner was approaching, and who else but Manda would approach him at such speed, and with so little trepidation?

When she got within six feet of him, she whipped off the black veil, making her mousy-brown curls even more disordered.

"What's going on?" she panted. "Why haven't you come to see me?"

Sam tried to be quiet and calm, if only for a sense of contrast. "You've been working for him for the past seven months. How do I know I can trust you?"

"I'm not taking sides!" she protested. "Anyway, I was the one who enlisted him to help me take care of the slave-girls. If anything, he's been working for me." She gave him a look which was more pouty, and less incandescent with rage. "And you left the city without even saying goodbye..."

"You know why!" said Sam hotly.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of! I would have run out on Alice Darwin to stop one of Lily's letters being trampled too!"

Sam, who had taken a deep breath to yell at her, let it out slowly, as if he'd been punctured. It was a crude restatement of the facts, and it should have made him even more furious. But he knew it was true. She would have done the same. And he remembered – or realized, because he'd never really thought about it before – that she had loved Lily too, and that her life had been shaped by grief just as much as his had.

He slumped back against the door and resumed his smoking, because it was the only way he had of not shouting at her. She seemed to understand that this was as good as an apology, because she took up station beside him in the doorway and stared up at the Faculty in silence.

"Do you smoke?" said Sam, after a while. "I've forgotten."

"Of course I don't smoke."

"Is it forbidden?"

"It's just unpleasant."

"Oh."

They were quiet again, leaning their backs against the wall, looking up at those lovely sash windows in the pastel-coloured stucco. There was something so fresh and clean about the buildings on Holywell Street, as if there was still a sacred spring bubbling beneath the cobbles, giving everything on that street the power to heal. But this was Oxford, he reminded himself, so every well was poisoned.