Rook(59)

She rolled another tube. Tom had left everything written down so they were able to work quickly and almost in silence, Orla waxing and gumming the tubes together, Benoit trimming and greasing the fuses, while René measured the powders and salts carefully per Tom’s instructions. A good job for him, Sophia thought, considering how careful and precise he was being with her. Making sure they were not long in the same room, walking just a little back as they made their wary trip down the road. And he’d chosen the opposite end of the tall worktable now, sleeves rolled up and brows drawn down. It wasn’t very different from the way she’d behaved their first days in the farmhouse, and somehow this seemed to make her paper tubes more uncooperative.

“Tom,” Sophia commented, scowling at her unrolling paper, “is much better at this.”

“These kegs are nearly empty, child,” said Orla. “Go and fill them.” She shoved two small kegs toward Sophia and went back to waxing the tube ends. Sophia knew exactly what this meant. It was, “We’ll go faster without you, so go do something useful instead of something that isn’t.”

She took the kegs and went to the dim end of the room where KINGS CROSS ST. PANCRAS glistened in white and red, the bigger barrels of saltpeter and charcoal lined up beneath it. She ducked behind one of the concrete columns near the wall, taking advantage of a small sliver of privacy from the people across the room, and leaned back her head. Making Bellamy fire was the last thing she’d done with Tom before the Red Rook crossed the sea to rescue the Bonnards. It made her plans, the acknowledged and unacknowledged, seem very tangible.

Then she realized there were booted footsteps coming across the broken tiles. Too heavy for Orla, and Benoit she wouldn’t have heard in the first place. She straightened as René came around the corner of concrete, ceramic bowl in his hand, though not in time to look as if she had some purpose for standing still in the near dark behind a column. He paused, looking her up and down.

“You are not in pain?”

She shook her head, failing to think of a single thing to say. His gaze moved away to the ground at her feet.

“If we are to make more I will need the sulfur as well.” He waited. “Do you know which …”

“Oh, yes. Over here.” She led him to the small cask of sulfur, sitting on top of the saltpeter, and pried open the lid.

“How did your brother learn this?” he asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell.

“Tom? He didn’t. My father did.” She glanced up as she poured a spoonful of yellow powder into the bowl. “Hard to imagine, I know. He must have been like Tom, I think.”

There was silence before René said, “In what way?” She heard the caution in his tone. Interested, when he knew it would be better if he wasn’t. She knew the feeling.

“They were both curious about the Time Before,” she replied. “But for Father, it was the stories of guns that interested him, and the noises they were supposed to have made. He thought they must have needed an explosion of some kind to work. He didn’t believe they were just stories.”

“Sometimes legends can be true, I have found.”

This made her smile. But she was afraid to look up, in case it might scare him away. She talked quick and spooned slow.

“Father studied about it in the Scholars Hall in the city every summer, and he experimented. Down here, I would think …” She hadn’t really considered that before, her father in Tom’s place in the sanctuary, actually striving for something. “And finally … he did it. He made a powder that would explode. He said it was what made a gun work, and that enough of it could blow Bellamy House right off the cliff. That’s what he told Tom, anyway. When we were young.”

René looked back over his shoulder at the worktable.

“That’s why the lamps are covered,” she said. “But it was Tom who learned how to make the explosions smaller, to mix the salts in for sparks and color.”

“But, Mademoiselle.” René had set down the bowl of sulfur and picked up one of her casks, moving to the open barrel of saltpeter as he talked. She followed him. “Would the Commonwealth not pay your father well for such a discovery? A weapon that is not a machine?”


“I think any country still honoring the Anti-Technology Pact would. But Father thought about what could be done, what had been done with such things and … he didn’t want to tell anyone what he’d found. It’s part of what torments him, I think. That if he had gone against his conscience, that maybe … that we wouldn’t be in the predicament we are.”

“I see.” For a moment there was no sound but the dry, grainy swish of the black powder pouring into the wooden cask. René said, “But Tom could sell what his father did not wish to, is that not so?”

“Tom agrees with Father. He thinks the world is better off without it. And I agree, too, actually.”

“But, Mademoiselle …,” René said again. She could see his curiosity. It was in the intensity of his gaze and the way he held his body, in the way he angled toward her, forgetting to fill the barrel. “Tell me this. What if the powder is the true thing, but it is the weapons that are the legend? What if a gun is a … a story my grand-mère would have told?”

“You mean the one who was a liar?”