CHAPTER 56

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Since it was after dusk and the streets of the melancholy town had emptied, they were not stopped and asked why they ran as young girls might otherwise expect to be in the circumstances, but Lucy was still circumspect enough to know they must not draw attention to themselves, so whenever they saw groups of people she slowed down and they walked slowly, heads down, until they were past. Because of this they had to walk for most of the High Street as the shopmen were on the pavements packing up and shuttering their unwelcoming establishments for the night, but once they reached the road beyond the lights of the town she gripped Georgiana’s arm and sped into the darkness towards the camp.

“What?” gasped Georgiana. “What is it? I can’t run as well as you! What are we running from?”

“Something bad,” Lucy said. “And yes, you can.”

So they did. And though for the longest time the only sounds around them were the slap of their feet on the road, the distant murmur from the canal and the occasional shriek from an early owl out hunting, Lucy felt like she was running from two things–the walker in the mirror and the final scream of the burning girl.

Georgiana allowed herself to be swept along by Lucy’s urgency until they were about two-thirds of the way to the camp, and then she stopped without warning and folded, bending double in the middle of the road, her wind blown.

“I cannot,” she puffed. “I have a pain–in my side–as if I have been–pierced by a hat–by a hat-pin, I swear—”

As she bent over, something slipped from within her cloak and broke at her feet.

“No!” she gasped. It was the bottle from the apothecary shop. She instantly bent and tried to scoop it up, saving any liquid that might remain cupped in any intact section, but there was none. She stared at the dark stain on the road.

“Father,” she whispered. “Father will be–I must go back…”

“The shop will be closed,” said Lucy, looking back down the way they had just come. The moon was already up and a nail-paring off full so she could see that no one else was on the road running after them. She pointed to a stile a few yards further on.

“Sit,” she said. “Compose yourself. We’re safe, I think.”

Georgiana stumbled to the rough wooden seat and flopped down on it. Lucy sat next to her. For a while they both sat there in the moonlight as Lucy got her breath back. She thought Georgiana was still breathing hard, but then realised that she was sobbing.

“What?” she said tentatively.

Georgiana shook her head, gulping awkwardly.

Lucy knew what it was. Or at least she guessed it was one of two things–either Georgiana was ashamed at being found out as a fellow Glint or else, being a fellow Glint, she had also seen the girl being burned. That agonised scream for a mother who couldn’t come and wouldn’t rescue her from the fire, that last shout of panic and horror still rung in her own head.

She put a careful hand on the heaving shoulders next to her.

“It’s all right,” she said.

And to her surprise, Georgiana, the icy and aloof Miss Eagle, choked out a deep sob and melted into a warm tear-wracked bundle in her arms.

Lucy didn’t know what to do, so she just held her and stroked her back comfortingly, trying to calm her, as if she were a horse which had been spooked.

“I didn’t know you were one,” she said.

She felt the girl stiffen beneath her hand.

“But it’s all right,” she said. “Really. It’s all right. I’m one too.”

There was a tremor and she was sure the girl relaxed just a fraction. She could feel the other heart thrumming beneath Georgiana’s ribcage, right against her own.

Lucy remembered how strange it had been when Sara Falk–the real Sara–had shown her her own heart-stone. It seemed so long ago now, but she felt she understood exactly what was going on in the other girl’s head: thinking you were the only person who could suck the past from the stones you touched was one thing–discovering there were others like you, finding out there was a name for it, that other people had found their own heart-stone that gave them strength and glowed when danger was abroad, that was a whole other thing. That was both a great relief and a terrible shock.

She felt the dangerous rightness of this moment, this unexpected intimacy with the trembling girl in her arms and gave her a comforting squeeze.

Georgiana pushed herself gently back a few inches as she raised her head to look at her with an expression she couldn’t read.

“You’re a what?” she whispered with a catch in her voice.

In the clean moonlight that illuminated the exquisite planes of her face but allowed no colour to intrude, she looked like a perfect, marble statue.

“I’m a Glint.”

“A… Glint?”

Lucy nodded.

Georgiana pushed back another inch.

“I don’t know what a ‘Glint’ is,” she said carefully.

Lucy had not known what she was had a name either so she saw no trap here. She tightened her grip on Georgiana’s shoulders and smiled.

“It’s nothing to be scared of. It just happens. I mean it’s not pleasant, but it’s just in the mind, though it feels real at the time, so real that you saw me retch. But it passes.”

“What passes?” said Georgiana, pushing further away, and getting to her feet. Suddenly her whole demeanour had changed: where she had melted and been warm she was now freezing up, nervy again like a deer about to flee from an unwelcome noise in the forest. “Why should you want it to pass…?”

“Glinting,” said Lucy. “Wait…”

She laughed. Georgiana took another step away from her.

“Wait. It’s all right. Glinting, touching stone, seeing the past as if it’s real. Feeling it—”

Georgiana stared at her.

“What did you think I meant?” said Lucy.

“I thought you meant you… liked me. In a special way,” said Georgiana, uncharacteristically stumbling over the words.

“But did you not see the poor burning girl?” Lucy asked, trying a different tack.

“Burning girl?” said Georgiana. And then she cleared her throat and tossed her head as if shaking the instant of unguarded awkwardness away. “No. I did not see a burning girl.”

“Fine,” said Lucy. “Doesn’t matter. In fact, lucky you. But you know what I mean.”

“No,” said Georgiana. “No, I don’t. Not at all. Are you drunk?”

“Drunk?” said Lucy. “No. I’m not drunk. Why do you—?”

“Because you were sick and you’re behaving very oddly,” said Georgiana.

All at once Lucy realised that the reason Georgiana was being so strange was because she didn’t know how Lucy knew her secret: she didn’t know she’d been seen with the sea-glass.

“I saw the glass, your heart-stone–I saw you take it out of your pocket and then hide it when it flashed,” she said.

“When it flashed?” said Georgiana. “It didn’t flash. It’s just a bit of glass.” Her tone shifted. “Wait. Were you following me?”

“No,” said Lucy. “No, it doesn’t matter; I just saw you when you came out of the apothecary shop…”

“It’s medicine,” said Georgiana sharply. “It’s special tonic. Father has nerves. It isn’t what people say. It’s just a soothing draught—”

The intensity of her tone and the speed with which she leapt to the defence of Na-Barno, even if he wasn’t being attacked, was striking. Lucy swallowed and regrouped.

“I have one too,” she said, and pulled her stone from her pocket. “See? We’re safe.”

Georgiana looked at her and at the stone, and then pulled the ring with the stone from her pocket, and in that moment, seeing the pale flash of the skin at her wrists, Lucy understood in an instant that she had made a terrible mistake.

Georgiana’s hands were bare. They were always bare. She had never resorted to gloves or even rags to protect her from inadvertently touching a loaded stone and glinting the past. She had not covered her hands for the simplest of reasons: she was not a Glint after all, and when she said she had not seen the glass ignite and blaze a warning about the approaching walker in the glass, she was doing no more than telling her own truth. For had Sara Falk not said that the rest of the world saw the heart-stones as mere sea-glass, and that only a Glint could see the light it shone when peril approached?

This shocking fact that Georgiana had no idea what she was talking about hit her with almost the same stunning effect as when she had earlier seen the sea-glass in her hand and assumed that she too was a Glint. And what was worse was her stupidity: like any flat at the fair she had fallen under Georgiana’s spell and drifted into a kind of infatuation that made her not think about something so very obvious.

“Where did you get it then?” she said.

“Get what?” said Georgiana.

“The heart-st—The sea-glass,” she said, correcting herself and pointing. “That ring?”

Georgiana looked at the thing in her hand.

“This old ring?” She looked away to her left. “Charlie gave it to me.”

“Charlie?” said Lucy.

“Yes,” said Georgiana, looking back at her, eyes wide and composed again.

This information took the wind out of Lucy’s sails, and she took a breath and slowed down.

“Why did Charlie have it?” she asked, the words out of her mouth before her cleverer self could tell her that there was no reason for Georgiana to know this. “I mean, why did he give it to you?”

Georgiana’s mouth made a perfect moue, a slow-motion pout of flawless innocence so perfect it was almost pantomime.

“He gives me things because he likes me, I think. I don’t know why he gave me this…” Her eyes sharpened as she looked at the now dull piece of glass in her hand. “It’s not valuable, is it? I thought it was just some pretty coloured piece of old glass…”

“Yes,” lied Lucy.

But the sharp eyes had snagged the truth.

“What’s the trick of it?” said Georgiana. “There’s a trick to it, and I’ll wager something to do with the mirror that you smashed too.”

She giggled and twined a finger in one of the ringlets cascading down on either side of her face.

Lucy was glad she giggled at that point. Lucy hated girls who giggled, and she needed something to push her away from the unconscious magnetism of Georgiana and let her think straight.

“It was quite a thing, smashing that mirror. I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s not a constable coming after us as I speak,” said Georgiana, craning her head down the dusty road towards the town. “If you won’t tell me what the trick of the glass lumps is, tell me why you did it?”

“I just lashed out,” said Lucy, aware how weak her reply was: she felt too worn out by the glinting and seeing the girl burned, and then running the mile or so from the town to think in her normal straight line and produce a better lie.

“No,” said Georgiana, taking her arm gently. “No, you don’t want to tell me. I upset you by not understanding about this glistering thing you were talking about…”

“Glinting,” said Lucy despite herself.

“Glinting,” said Georgiana, twining an arm back around Lucy’s waist. “There, I have it right now. And so you must tell me all about it, and we shall be friends again.”

Lucy shrugged out of her grasp and began to walk towards the camp.

“Maybe later,” she lied. “I feel too ill to talk now. I must lie down. It may be that I have a fever coming.”