‘What is it?’ Aubrey cried, trying to see into the room.
Dr Gottfried let his hands drop. He lurched into the room. ‘I do not believe it,’ he whispered.
From a doorway that was suddenly full of people, Aubrey stared.
The young woman in the bed glared at them. ‘What are you looking at?’
The voice was hoarse, but she was unmistakeably Sylvia Tremaine. She was identical to the presence they’d encountered inside the pearl – apart from the liveliness in her face.
She waved a hand. It was limp, and the effort was clearly a strain, but it did have a modicum of grace. ‘Close your mouths. You look foolish.’
Aubrey had been prepared for almost anything, but he hadn’t taken this into account. The reintegration had clearly been achieved. The soul fragments had found their way home. They had joined their pale, incomplete presences to recreate something that was definitely greater than the sum of the parts. While Sylvia didn’t appear in the absolute peak of health, she was alert and coherent. She was pale and thin, her eyes were red-rimmed, but she looked like someone with a bad cold rather than someone who had just emerged from a coma that had baffled doctors for years. And she seemed to have a spark that was absent from the presences in the pearl.
It reminded Aubrey of her brother.
‘Remarkable,’ Dr Gottfried kept saying as he fussed around his patient. ‘Remarkable.’
‘Don’t keep repeating yourself, doctor,’ Sylvia said hoarsely. ‘It’s becoming irritating.’
Doctor Gottfried took her wrist, for the lack of anything better to do. ‘Do you know where you are?’
She frowned. ‘I’m in the hospital, of course. I’ve been here a long time.’
‘Ah. Yes. Yes you have.’
She looked around the room solely by moving her eyes, as if her head were too heavy to lift. ‘Where’s Mordecai?’
‘Your brother? He’s not here.’
‘I can see that. Send a message to him, straight away. I need him.’
Doctor Gottfried opened and closed his mouth. He looked at Aubrey, Caroline, George and Hugo. ‘I...’ Then he pushed past them and hurried out of the room.
‘Foolish man,’ Sylvia said.
Aubrey stepped to the bedside. ‘Hello, Sylvia. My name is Aubrey Fitzwilliam.’
She studied him with fever-bright eyes, but her countenance was pale, not flushed. ‘I know you.’ She flicked her gaze around the room. ‘All of you.’ She swallowed and a hint of pain touched her face. ‘It wasn’t a dream,’ she added, almost to herself.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Aubrey said. ‘Your soul was in pieces.’
‘And you helped free them.’
‘I did?’
‘At my family home.’ She frowned. ‘And another place I didn’t recognise. Grey.’
Caroline came close. ‘You were aware of what was happening?’
She took some time to answer and for a moment Aubrey thought she had fallen asleep. ‘I knew. In this room, at my home, in the grey place, wherever my pieces were. It was blurred, but I was aware of them all.’
‘Even in the pearl?’ von Stralick asked.
‘In the pearl?’ She rubbed her forehead and sighed before letting her hand fall once again to the bedclothes. ‘What pearl?’
Aubrey reached into his vest, and was glad that George had prevailed on the embassy’s housekeeping staff to mend it overnight. ‘This one.’
Sylvia gasped. With some effort, she propped herself up on one elbow.
‘I gave it to him.’ She stared at it with hungry eyes. ‘A long time ago.’ She closed her hand around the pearl and dropped back onto the bed. ‘I’m thirsty.’
George appeared at the bedside with a glass of water. ‘Here.’
Caroline cradled her while she drank – only a few sips, but it seemed to refresh her. She lay back on the pillows with a little more colour in her cheeks, but that simply emphasised the paleness of the rest of her face. ‘The grey place. Part of my soul was in the pearl?’
‘Quite a few fragments,’ Aubrey said. ‘The rest was lingering at your home, it appears.’
‘I was scattered.’ She shivered. ‘But it was only because Mordecai tried so hard to make me better.’
‘You were unwell?’ Aubrey asked.
‘Dying.’ She said the single word with the practised ease of someone who had come to terms with death a long time ago. ‘A wasting disease. I had made my peace, but Mordecai couldn’t bear it. He wrought great magic and stopped it.’
‘But shattered your soul in the process,’ Aubrey said. He couldn’t imagine what that would do to a person. And Tremaine? The man accustomed to having nature itself bend to his bidding? To fail so spectacularly? ‘He did his best,’ he found himself saying. He patted Sylvia’s hand.
A voice came from the doorway, low and full of amusement. ‘I’m glad to have your approval, Fitzwilliam.’
Dr Tremaine leaned in the doorway. He was wearing a full-length fur coat and a rakish, wide-brimmed black hat. He had a walking-stick in one gloved hand and a generous cravat around his high-buttoned collar.
Von Stralick was the first to move. He was standing to one side of the door, his back to the wall, and he lunged, swinging a roundhouse blow at Tremaine.
It was hard to follow what happened. A flurry of movement ended in Dr Tremaine still standing in the doorway, not even breathing heavily, while von Stralick lay unconscious at his feet. ‘He almost surprised me,’ Dr Tremaine said and he nudged von Stralick with his foot. ‘I don’t think his jaw is broken.’
George was standing next to Aubrey at the foot of the bed. He steeled himself but Aubrey put a hand on his shoulder to restrain him.
Sylvia struggled to sit up. ‘Mordecai!’
Dr Tremaine closed his eyes. He trembled, then opened his eyes. ‘Oh, Sylvia. I didn’t dare believe.’
In an instant he’d crossed the room, ignoring Caroline, who sat on the edge of the bed, next to the pillow. Aubrey and George may as well have been tree stumps for all the notice he took of them.
Dr Tremaine sat on the bed and, with eyes only for his sister, he reached out and took away the pistol that had appeared in Caroline’s hand. It vanished into the folds of his coat.
He held Sylvia’s hands and Aubrey noticed that he didn’t remove his gloves first. ‘How do you feel?’
Carefully, Aubrey turned toward the door. This wasn’t the time and place of their choosing. ‘We’ll just leave you two alone.’
George took the hint. He edged away. ‘Family reunions should be private.’
Caroline didn’t move. She was only a few feet away from the rogue sorcerer. Hands clenched in her lap, she was breathing heavily, her nostrils flaring. Her eyes were hammered steel. ‘My father died because of you.’
Tremaine flicked a glance her way. ‘Oh, it’s the Hepworth girl. Still on about that, are we?’
‘You must pay for what you’ve done.’
Dr Tremaine kissed his sister’s hand. For an instant, it looked as if he might cry. ‘I have no doubt about that. But you’re not the one who’s going to make me pay. And don’t look at Fitzwilliam like that. He’s not going to do anything either.’
‘You’re a dangerous man, Tremaine,’ Aubrey said, then he winced, for he knew he’d left himself wide open.
‘Ah, you’ve mastered a cliché!’ Dr Tremaine said. ‘Well done, boy. Keep it up and they’ll let you write speeches for your father soon.’
I deserved that, Aubrey thought. He gestured at Caroline with a minute twitch of his finger, but she ignored him. With rising nervousness, he knew she’d attack Dr Tremaine in an instant if he didn’t do something.
He patted his appurtenances vest. Multiple use paraphernalia, nothing suitable for major magic – and major magic was what would be required to take on Dr Tremaine. He’d learned a number of things since their first encounter.