It Happened One Midnight (PG8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

room aglow, and then settled down at the table, her chin cradled in her hands, and stared down at it.
    Postponing the moment when she would need to make a decision.
    She didn’t usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple. And if no challenge could be found, she had the dubious gift of creating one. She’d never known any other way, really. Resistance was the headwind into which she sailed.
    Thud! Thud! Thud!
    She gave a yelp. The entire building, made of kindling as it was, rocked, shuddered, and creaked. She lunged to keep her lamp from hopping off the table.
    The thudding stopped.
    She smiled. “Greetings, Rutherford!” she shouted at the ceiling.
    “Greetings, Miss Tommy!” he boomed.
    Rutherford lived in a suite of rooms above hers, and he was huge. When he moved about, the whole building trembled and squeaked and groaned as if it were a ship on the breast of a stormy sea. But he wasn’t generally home. Sometimes he found work on the docks or on a ship or as a builder, and often he was away for weeks at a time, engaged in something far more interesting and dubious.
    As he had been, for instance, when he’d last worked for her.
    Dubious occupations, in fact, seemed to be one unifying characteristic of the people who lived in her building. It was where her mother had ultimately died, young, ill, and penniless, and it was where Tommy, when she’d found her way back to it, had cobbled together a motley family of sorts, for they had loved her mother. Her rooms were small and as snug as a shoe, filled with the few fine things her mother had left behind when she died, and she was surrounded by the sounds of life, which in this building were primarily thumping: Rutherford walking from one end of the room to another, Maggie’s bed slamming against the wall as she entertained gentlemen callers, the four Beatty children thundering up and down the stairs. Things of that sort.
    All in all she had little time to feel lonely. And yet when it was dark, and she’d doused her lamp and the thumping had ceased for the night, she sometimes felt she was on a raft alone at sea, and would awake in a panic, gripping the sides of her bed. Loneliness had a sound, and it was the absence of thumping.
    Still avoiding the message, she laid out the medal gently on the table and touched her fingers to it for courage. Last night at the Duke of Greyfolk’s wasn’t really a failure of nerve yet, not really. It had been just a start, she told herself—because honestly, imagine her nerve failing! The sky would sooner fall. Jonathan Redmond had interrupted her, that was all.
    She took a deep breath and leaned over the scrap of paper, hands clasped against her forehead.
    It appeared to have been torn from an old book by someone who couldn’t easily obtain foolscap or ink. In the narrow margin, in tiny painstaking letters, scratched with a burnt stick most likely, were the words:
She’ll be waiting at the place we discussed, at the day we discussed, one of the clock.
    She recognized the careful even script of Lord Feckwith’s cook. She hadn’t, of course, signed it. Signing it could mean her death. Not to mention Tommy’s.
    She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath. Released it, fluttering her lamp flame.
    Would she do it again?
    Could she do it again?
    Because the last time had . . . well, it hadn’t gone precisely as she’d hoped.
    She absently rubbed at her arm. It didn’t hurt anymore, and there would be a little scar soon—The Doctor, who was never known by anything other than The Doctor, and therefore was clearly as dubious as everyone else—did competent work. Still, it was one more mark her body bore.
    It would be the only scar of which she’d ever be proud, however.
    The irony was they’d likely been aiming for Rutherford, who was an infinitely larger and more conspicuous target. And what kind of shooting was