A-Splendid-Ruin(90)

“He’s on his way,” he said when he reached me. “He’s just down the block.”

The bag full of books beat against my hip as I raced with Dante around the corner of the building. There, we stopped.

“Did you get them?” he asked.

“Yes. What’s he doing here? Shin was supposed to keep him—”

“She tried. She sent a boy to warn me, but he was only steps ahead of Farge. At least you got out of there in time. Come on.” Dante started off.

I didn’t move.

“Come on. Do you want him to see us?”

“He can’t see through a building.” My heart was racing again, excitement and apprehension both. “I want to see what he does.”

“This is exactly how murderers and thieves get caught,” Dante protested.

I peeked around the corner. No Ellis yet. “By standing behind buildings?”

“By watching the scene of the crime. It happens often enough that it’s almost a cliché.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him. “I’m not a murderer.”

“No, but you’re being an idiot and it’s going to be how he finds us.”

“Don’t tell me that you don’t want to see Ellis’s reaction when he finds the books gone.”

Dante hesitated.

“Come, now. You know you do. But if you truly don’t, then go ahead and leave.” I shrugged the bag from my shoulder and handed it to him. “Take these with you. I’ll meet you at the house later.”

He took the bag and slung it over his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

“They destroyed me, Dante.” The soft danger of my fury was impossible to harness, and I made no attempt to do so. I said it again, more quietly, “They destroyed me. Ellis stole my . . . he stole me. I have to see him. I have to know.”

“Know what?”

“If this will destroy him too.”

Dante’s expression was both tender and pained. “The things you say sometimes . . . It breaks my heart.”

The words and his gaze caught me and held; suddenly and unexpectedly, I wanted to step into his arms. So disconcerting . . . I lost what I’d been about to say; I lost my focus. Just then, Ellis came into view. I backed up quickly from the corner, cracking my head into Dante’s chin. “Ouch! Sorry.”

He swore quietly. “What if he stays in there for hours?”

“He won’t.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I wouldn’t.”

And in fact, we waited only another few minutes—long enough for Ellis to reach his office, to discover his treasure trove gone, to question Robinson, the assistant—before Ellis came rushing again from the building. He stood helplessly at the entrance, looking wildly about. I smelled the stink of his desperation from where I stood, and I understood it; I knew exactly how he must feel. But Ellis had made a choice, and he had not cared that it crushed me when he made it, and so when he sank back against the building and buried his face in his hands, I turned to Dante, who watched over my shoulder.

“Seen enough?” he asked.

“It will never be enough,” I told him.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “His hell has only just begun.”

When we arrived back at the house, having stopped at one of the relief lines for our portion of eggs and canned meat, bread and coffee and canned peas, Dante emptied the bag of my sketchbooks. “Do you mind if I look at them?”

The urge to deny him came first, that lingering fear that the drawings were juvenilia, or worse, that I was talentless and deluded. But my library had been built, and Dante had already told me he knew I had talent, and so I nodded, and went to the stove set among the rocks outside to cook a meal.

When I came back, bearing eggs scrambled with potted meat, he was still looking through them. He didn’t look up until I set a plate before him.

“No wonder Farge used these. They’re beautiful.”

I let myself bask in the pleasure of his praise. Again, I felt the urge that had overtaken me at the Monkey Block. I ignored it. It was only the tension and excitement of stealing the sketchbooks. “That one was inspired by hollyhocks in our back alley. They grew along the fence. The narrow windows are the slats, and the curtains and the stucco—”

“Yes, I can see it.”

“My mother showed me that when you turned the flowers upside down they looked like ladies in ball gowns. We used to dance them along the railing. She said it would be my life one day.” I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. “You’ll be like these ladies, but it won’t be pretend. You’ll be wearing a ball gown, and you’ll dance all night, and have such fun . . .”

It had been like that, hadn’t it? I had danced all night. I had worn ball gowns, and yet—“But when it was mine, I didn’t like it.”

“Hmmm.” He motioned to a chair. “Here, sit down. Let me get to those stitches.”

I did as he asked. He pulled out a pocketknife and lit a match, blackening the edge to sterilize it while I watched unseeingly, thinking instead of suppers distinguished by endless talk of nothing, teas and receptions and parties shimmering with illusion, so much emptiness. “I’d been raised to be a lady in society, but when I actually became that lady, it was boring. It was all so—”