Livia’s temper rises in her like a dark cloud. All those years of Discipline, sent packing by a scattering of words.

“He’s out of his mind. What — we sneaked into Mother’s laboratory and now she’s going to kill us? Do you think she put on her riding skirts and a gun and staked us out? Or perhaps she sent Thorpe, the old man.”

“Or Julius.” It is Charlie who says it, beside her, quiet, his face open like a book.

“He wouldn’t shoot his own valet. The man is like a father to him!”

Her mouth is bitter with Smoke. Charlie does not respond. On the table, Thomas has slumped back into oblivion, one arm thrust into his open shirt, cradling his own chest. In the silence opened up by his faint, Livia feels herself drawn into Thomas’s doubts by her own lack of an explanation. To her side, the farmer stands, folding laundry. She has listened pretending not to listen. When Livia studies her face it is carefully neutral, the intelligence of her eyes locked away behind her half-drawn lids. It strikes Livia that this is a role at which the woman has had practice: acting dull when she’s expected to be. By her betters. The thought is new to Livia. She has lived around servants all her life but has never been in their quarters. Never in a farmhouse, never in a factory. It has not occurred to her that her whole life she has been watched by hooded eyes. Evaluated.

“Let’s go outside,” she says to Charlie.

ф

They argue quietly, five steps from the door. Her clothes remain wet and Livia shivers with cold.

“It makes no sense,” she says again.

“It might do. What if we saw something? In the laboratory. Something so important that it changes things. Something no one must know. No matter the price.” Charlie is calm, analytical, willing to forgive even his own murder. “Let’s think it through. The attack, I mean. Six shots, I make it. One after the other, but pretty quick. Shot at great distance. One gun or several? A marksman, in any case. If it were bandits, they’d want the horses alive. They are worth a great deal I should think.” He bites his lip. “If Thomas is right — if someone’s after us for what we know. . then it’s best if nobody knows that we are here. No one at all.”

Livia tries to dismiss his words, along with her own doubts. “Do you really think my mother would endanger her own daughter?”

“No. But you weren’t supposed to be there. You climbed on in secret. Outside the gates.” His eyes find hers, hold them, gently and with wonder. “Why did you?”

She wants to put him off with a non-answer, grow angry even, or prickly at least. But his face makes it difficult. It is open, like a book.