Page 127 of Pandora

Dora lifts her head. “No, Lottie, you can’t.”

Lottie looks away. “You needn’t concern yourself with me, missum.”

Dora looks at Edward. He squeezes her hand, understands what she does not ask.

“You’ll come to Mr. Ashmole’s, with us. At least for tonight,” he adds before she can object, and Lottie breathes out, long and slow.

“I’ll get my things, then. If you’re sure.”

“Is it really safe to go in?” Dora asks.

The men who brought Hezekiah out were the ones who had stopped the fire before it could get any further. Though it burnt the basement stairs black the fire did not destroy them, somehow did not make it past the basement doors.

“It’s safe,” Edward says.

Dora and Lottie stare at each other, then the housekeeper nods, ambles across the street, disappears into the shop, and Dora looks after her, a troubled expression creasing her forehead.

“What is it?” Edward asks.

She does not answer at first.

“A miracle, don’t you think, that the fire did not take the shop.”

“You know I don’t believe that.”

“No,” she says, and Dora rests her head against his shoulder again.

Just then a carriage clatters past, the cobbles making its wheels rattle loudly on their springs. Edward glances up. Stares.

“Dora, did you see?”

But the carriage is already away, and Dora is yawning into her free hand.

“See what, Edward?”

“An old man. Through the window.”

Dora watches Edward stare after the carriage, touches his arm to bring him back.

“Edward, what is it?”

He hesitates. “Do you ever remember knowing, or your parents knowing, an old man with a long white beard and blue eyes? Strikingly blue?”

Dora frowns. Something on her face tells him that this man sounds familiar to her, but then she sighs and shakes her head.

“I have never known anyone like that. Not personally, at any rate. Perhaps my parents did, but...” She looks at him carefully. “You told me, when we first met, that you had spoken with a gentleman who said he knew me.”

“Yes.”

“Is that man who you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I thought as much.”

He puts his arms around her, holds her close. They sit that way for some time. Edward breathes in the scent of smoke on her hair.

“I want to know what he was trying to find,” she says quietly against his chest.

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