Matthew saw her face contort. Saw her teeth clench. Saw the other pistol coming up.

He pulled the musket’s trigger, though he had no memory of aiming it. His thought was that if Greta had not yet reloaded the weapon, the hammer was falling on his grave.

Greta’s powder was dry.

The musket was loaded.

In the burst of blue smoke that followed, Lioness Sauvage simply fell away out the door and was gone as if she had never been there at all. When Matthew pulled his reluctant legs after himself and peered out, he couldn’t see her anywhere but there were dark streaks on the snow. He closed the door softly, as if not wishing to disturb the dead, and he lamented the fact that there was no latch on this door, as the country thereabouts was a trustful land.

He found himself standing over Elizabeth. He looked into Greta’s blood-blanched face. He handed her back the musket. “Thank you,” he said. And then: “I’d like a cup of tea,” but why he said this he had no idea because he didn’t really want any tea, he wanted to find a place on earth where human beings did not murder each other for profit or for entertainment, and as Greta backed away from him obviously realizing he was on the brink of madness he sank down beside Elizabeth with a weary sigh and put a brotherly hand on his sister’s arm.

She had been cut badly in other places and those wounds might have healed, but she would not recover from the throat wound. Matthew saw it was a matter of time, and time was short. He just sat with her, in the mess of the hallway, and he put his arm around her shoulders as she leaned her head against him and bled out.

She angled her face up toward his ear and whispered something. A garbled sound. He couldn’t make it out.

She tried again, and this time he caught the first word.

“Save,” she said.

He nodded dumbly. Yes. Save.

“Save her,” she said.

He knew what she meant.

She was speaking about Berry. The woman I love and plan to marry, if I can bring her back, he’d said to Elizabeth in the room near the pit. I am here to retrieve the book and to take Firebaugh with it.

Perhaps at the last Elizabeth respected that effort, more than she respected Lash’s auction of the book; perhaps even RakeHell Lizzie thought it was a noble thing, because what man had ever held her in such high esteem? What man, indeed, would have died to save her?

Lash’s figurehead, deciding which way to steer her own ship.

And perhaps also, Matthew thought as Elizabeth took her final breaths, she was weary—so very weary—of being two people, and being burdened by all she’d told him in the coach.