Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: Hands

I came up the Duchess's back stair at dusk with tar on my boots.

The sitting-room fire was lit.

Tristram sat on the hearth rug in his shirtsleeves, building a tower out of the Duke's ivory chessmen.

Tuppence knocked it down every time he got past the bishops.

"Your shop door," he said, without looking up. "Did it hold?"

"The chandler did good work."

"Good."

Tuppence crawled across the rug and pulled herself up by my skirt.

She buried her face in the hem and sniffed hard.

Then she sat down on her bottom and looked up at me.

Cici smells like the green man, she said in my head. Clove. Wine. Bad table.

Tristram's hand stopped above the rug with a white knight in it.

He set the knight down very carefully.

"The green man," he said.

"Tristram."

"Clove and wine." He got up off the rug. "Ralph has drunk clove wine since we were boys."

I opened my mouth to say boards and nails and the chandler.

Nothing came out, because he was looking at me, and I found I couldn't do it to his face.

I took the Sun Diamond out of my bodice and set it down on the rug among his chessmen.

"He's buying it," I said. "Whole."

He didn't shout. That was worse.

He walked to the window and stood with his back to me and his hands flat on the sill.

"When?"

"The masque. Midnight. The long gallery."

"The hour they hang me."

"He chose it. He thought I'd enjoy the view."

He turned round.

He looked at my sleeves, then my hands, then my throat.

"I thought I'd find blood on you," he said. "I keep looking for it."

"There isn't any. Not a scratch."

"Don't." His voice cracked. "Don't make it sound small."

Tuppence looked from him to me with her mouth open.

"If you'd come, he'd have smelled you from the stairs," I said. "He'd have had you knifed on the quay and called it a brawl."

"So you went to let him knife you instead."

"He didn't."

"He could have! That room is full of men he owes, and any one of them would do it for a marker!"

"And you hang in nineteen days anyway!"

We were both shouting now.

Down in the yard, a groom looked up at the window.

"You don't get to decide that alone," Tristram said. "Not about you."

"You decided it in the rain. You wanted to walk the stone into the palace and hang for it."

"That was different."

"How?"

"Because it was me!"

It rang off the Duchess's painted ceiling.

He heard it land. So did I.

Tuppence started to cry.

Not loud. A thin, wobbling sound, the one she made when the cat hissed at her.

Loud, she said, in both our heads at once. Papa loud. Cici loud.

Then, smaller: Papa is scared gold. Cici is scared gold. Same.

Tristram sat down on the arm of the Duchess's chair.

I knelt on the rug and picked her up.

She put her wet face in my neck and hiccuped.

"She's right," he said after a while. "I'm not angry. I'm frightened out of my wits."

"I know."

"You don't. I sat on this rug all afternoon building towers and thinking you were nailing boards."

He held out his hand.

"Give me your hands."

"I'm holding the baby."

"Then give me one."

I gave him my left, the one with his mother's ring.

It was shaking. It had been shaking since the quay.

I'd kept it in my sleeve the whole way up the hill so he wouldn't see.

He saw now.

He turned it over and looked at the burn scars on my two fingertips.

"These covered the Queen's diamond on his green table," he said. "And didn't shake."

"They're shaking now."

"Good. I'd hate to have married a madwoman."

He kissed my palm, then each fingertip, the burned ones last.

"Next time," he said into my hand. "Take me."

"Next time I'll take you."

"Swear it on something."

"On my porridge," I said. "It's my best thing."

He laughed against my wrist. It shook out of him.

I picked the Sun Diamond up off the rug, out from between a bishop and a rook, and put it back in my bodice.

Someone tapped at the inner door, politely.

The Duke stood there in his robe. He'd heard the shouting halfway down the house.

He held out his arms for Tuppence and didn't say a word.

She went to him at once and grabbed his beard to steady herself.

Goat, she told us, very satisfied.

"She sleeps in my rooms tonight," the old man said. "I'm told newlyweds quarrel. I'm told it passes."

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