Shattered

11

Marigold objected to my wanting no audience to the making of the rearing horse and the crystal ball. Kenneth Trubshaw understood, he said.

“Darling Trubby,” substantial, gray-haired and very much a businessman, mentioned to me the one quiet word, “Fees?”

“Worthington and I,” I said, “will fix a price with Marigold, then you can haggle if you like.”

He shook my hand wryly. “The Leicester Steward whose wife owns several of your things is also a Steward of Cheltenham, and he told our committee this morning that five years ago we could have bought this trophy for peanuts.”

“Five years ago,” I agreed. “Yes, you could.”

“And he said,” Trubshaw added, “five years from now works by Gerard Logan will at least cost double again.”

Uncle Ron would have loved it. Well... so did I. It was surviving the next five days that caught my attention.

By mid-afternoon everyone had collected and split apart again. Bon-Bon and Marigold left the boys in my care while they browsed the antique shops, and Worthington and Kenneth Trubshaw developed a strong mutual regard in a stroll.

In the workshop, Victor, utterly impressed, watched Hickory show off with two gathers of red-hot glass that he rolled competently in white powder and then colored powder and tweaked into a small wavy-edged one-flower vase. Pamela Jane expertly assisted in snapping the vase off the punty iron and Hickory with false modesty lifted it into an annealing oven as if it were the Holy Grail.

Daniel, for whom the workshop was a familiar stamping ground, mooned around looking at the shelves of bright little animals, pointing out to me the scarlet giraffe his father had promised him the day before he died. That story was most unlikely, I thought, remembering Martin’s absentmindedness towards all his children, but I gave Daniel the giraffe anyway, a gift that would have displeased his grandmother.

Giving to Daniel, though, always reaped a worthwhile crop. This time he wanted me to go outside with him, and, seeing the stretched size of his eyes, I went casually, but at once.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s a shoe shop down the road,” he said.

“Yes, I know.”

“Come and look.”

He set off, and I followed.

“Victor and I came down here with Irish, looking for hamburgers,” he said, “but we came to the shoe shop first.”

The shoe shop duly appeared on our left, a small affair mostly stocked with walking shoes for tourists. Daniel came to an abrupt halt by its uninspiring window.

“I should think it might be worth two gold coins,” he said.

“For two gold coins it had better be good.”

“See those sneakers?” he said. “Those up there at the back with green-and-white-striped laces? The man with that gas, those are his laces.”

I stared disbelievingly at the shoes. They were large with thick rubber-like soles, triangular white flashed canvas sections and, threaded in precision through two rows of eyeholes, the fat bunched laces of Daniel’s certainty.

He said again, “The man who gassed us wore those shoes.”

“Come into the shop, then,” I said, “and we’ll ask who bought some like them.”

He agreed, “OK,” and then added, “It might cost two more gold coins, to go into the shop.”

“You’re an extortionist.”

“What’s that?”

“Greedy. And I’ve no more coins.”

Daniel grinned and shrugged, accepting fate.

The shop had a doorbell that jingled when we went in, and contained a grandfatherly salesman who proved useless from our point of view, as he was standing in for his daughter whose baby was sick. She might be back some day next week, he vaguely thought, and he knew nothing about previous sales.

When we went back into the street, Bon-Bon, away up the hill, was beckoning Daniel to her car, to go home. Only the fact that she had already loaded Victor, having offered him another night’s computer hacking, persuaded her son to join her, and presently, when Marigold and “Darling Trubby” had gone their separate ways, only Catherine and my little team were left, and those three, as it was Saturday afternoon, were setting things straight as if for a normal winter Sunday of no action. They departed with my blessing at four-thirty, leaving only myself and Catherine to lock up; and I gave her too a bunch of keys for the future.

I also told police officer Dodd about the laces, which sent her on a brief reconnaissance only, as first of all she said she needed another officer with her if she were to question the shop owner, and second, the grandfather salesman had shut up shop and left it dark.

Catherine, like Martin before her, grew minute by minute more interested in the technical details and the chemical complexities of bright modern glass. Old glass could look gray or yellow, fine to my eyes but dingy on racecourses.

Catherine asked which I would make first, the horse or the ball, and I told her the horse. I asked her whether, even though they would not be on duty the next day, she could persuade her Pernickety Paul hobo partner to come and walk up and down Broadway with her a couple of times? She naturally asked why.

“To mind my back,” I joked, and she said she thought he might come if she asked him.

“He might be busy,” I said.

“I doubt it,” she replied. “He seems rather lonely since his wife left him.”

We rode her motorbike to a hotel deep in the country and ate there and slept there, and I avoided Blackmask Four and explained to my increasingly loved police officer, before I kissed her, that she and the hobo might find handcuffs a good idea on the morrow. “He always carries them,” Catherine said.

In the morning she said, “All this walking up and down Broadway... is it the tapes?”

“Sort of.” I nodded. I didn’t mention life or death. One couldn’t somehow.

All the same, I woke Tom Pigeon, who woke his dogs, who all growled (Tom included) that Sunday was a day of rest.

I phoned Jim. At my service all day, he said. His wife was going to church.

Worthington was already awake, he said, and had I noticed that Sundays weren’t always healthy for Gerard Logan?

“Mm. What’s Marigold doing today?”

“I’ve got the day free, if that’s what you’re asking. Where do you want me to turn up when? And most of all, why?”

I hesitated over the last answer but replied in order: “Wychwood Dragon lobby, soon as possible, on account of fear.”

“Whose fear?”

“Mine.”

“Oh yeah?” His laugh traveled with bass reverberation. “You’ll be alone in that workshop of yours, is that it? In that case, I’ll be with you soon.”

“I won’t exactly be alone. Catherine and her partner officer will probably be in the town, and in the workshop there will be Pamela Jane, who’s going to assist.”

“The girl? Why not that bright young man, what’s his name... Hickory?”

“Pamela Jane doesn’t argue.”

Worthington’s deep voice arrived as a chuckle. “I’m on my way.”

I made one more phone call, this time to the home of George Lawson-Young, apologizing for the eight-thirty wake-up.

“The hour doesn’t matter” — he yawned — “if you bring good news.”

“It depends,” I said, and told him what he might expect.

He said, “Well done.”

“More to do.”

“I wouldn’t miss it.” His smile came across the air. “I’ll see you later.”

Catherine and her motorcycle took me to Logan Glass, where local inhabitants could have seen a display of affection to wag tongues for a week. I unlocked the doors, being there intentionally before Pamela Jane, and again read the notes I’d made (and filed in the locked bookcase) last time I’d tried my hand at a rearing horse.

This one would take me about an hour to complete, if I made the whole trophy, including plinth and ball. At a little less than half a meter high, it would weigh roughly twenty kilos, heavy because solid glass itself weighed a good deal, let alone the added gold. Marigold had with wide-sweeping arms insisted on magnificence. It was to be Martin’s memorial, she proclaimed, and she had been exceedingly fond of her son-in-law. Both Bon-Bon and Worthington thought this much-to-be-publicized admiration a little retrospective, but “Darling Trubby” might think the trophy handsome in the sun.

I had filled the tank with clear crystal and put ready at hand the punty irons I’d need, also the small tools for shaping muscles, legs and head. Tweezers too, essential always. I set the furnace temperature to the necessary 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.

By then I “saw” the sculpture complete. A pity they hadn’t wanted Martin himself on the rearing horse’s back. I saw him there clearly now, at last. Perhaps I would repeat the horse with Martin riding. Perhaps one night... for Bon-Bon, and for the friend I’d lost and still trusted.

While I waited for Pamela Jane to arrive, I thought about the wandering videotape that had raised so many savage feelings, and like curtains parting, the deductive faculty Professor Lawson-Young had put his faith in continued to open vistas in my mind. I had at last added in his factor X, and the mask had dropped from Blackmask Four.

Out of doors it started raining.

I stood looking at the furnace and listening to its heart of flame. Looking at the raisable trapdoor that kept 1800 degrees Fahrenheit at bay. Irish, Hickory, Pamela Jane and myself were so accustomed to the danger of the extreme heat roaring within the firebricks that taking care was automatic, was second nature.

I knew at last the sequence of the roads in the cul-de-sacs. I listened in my mind to Catherine’s list of punishable crimes and their penalties, and reckoned that Rose and Adam Force should, if they had any sense at all, just leave the videotapes where they rested and save themselves the grief of prosecution.

Thieves never had any sense.

I’d surrounded myself with as many bodyguards as I could muster that Sunday simply because neither Rose nor Adam Force had shown any sense or restraint so far, and because the making of the trophy horse left me wide open to any mayhem they might invent. I could have filled the workroom with a crowd of onlookers and been safe... safe for how long?

I knew now where the danger lay. I couldn’t forever look over my shoulder fearfully, and, however rash it might seem, I saw a confrontation as the quickest path to resolution.

If I were disastrously wrong, Professor Lawson-Young could say good-bye to his millions. The breakthrough that would save the world in the cure for cancer would be published under someone else’s name.

When my enemies came, it wasn’t just time, I found, that I had given them, as much as an opportunity to out-think me.

I was still listening to the furnace when sounds behind me announced the arrival of Pamela Jane. She had entered through the side door, though usually she came in through the front.

“Mr. Logan...” Her voice quavered high with fright, and besides, she normally called me Gerard.

I turned at once to see how bad things were, and found that in many unforeseen ways they were extremely bad indeed.

Pamela Jane, dressed for work in her usual white overalls cinched around the waist, was coming to a standstill in the center of the workshop, trembling from a situation far beyond her capabilities. Her raincoat lay dropped in a bundle on the floor and her wrists were fastened together in front of her by sticky brown packing tape. Simpler and cheaper than handcuffs, the tape was equally immobilizing, and more effective still in Pamela Jane’s case as the charming Adam Force held a full syringe in one hand and, with the other, had dragged down a clutch of female overalls to reveal a patch of bare skin below the needle. Thin and frightened, she began to cry.

A step or two behind Pamela Jane came Rose, every muscle triumphant, her whole face a sneer. She too came quietly, in soft shoes, and fast

Rose, strong, determined and full of spite aimed powerfully my way, held in a pincer grip the upper arm of Hickory. My bright assistant stood helplessly swaying, his eyes and his mouth stuck out of action by strips of brown packing tape. The same tape had been used to bind his hands behind his back and also to form a makeshift hobble between his ankles.

Roughly steadying Hickory’s balance loomed the bookmaker Norman Osprey, more bully beef than beauty, but arithmetically as fast as a computer chip. Just inside the side door, keeping guard and shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, was, of all people, Eddie Payne. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He took instructions steadfastly from Rose.

The actions of all four intruders had been whirlwind fast, and I had arranged little in any way of retaliation. All the bodyguards were simply to roam the street outside. Catherine and her hobo were to patrol their normal disjointed beat. Rose and her cohorts had somehow slid past them in the rain.

I was wearing, as usual, a white singlet which left my arms, neck and much of my shoulder area bare. The heat from the furnace roared almost unbearably beyond the trapdoor, if one weren’t used to it. I put my foot and my weight sideways on the treadle, which duly opened the trap and let a huge gust of Sahara heat blow out over Norman Osprey’s wool suit and reddening face. Furious, he made a snatch towards hurling me onto the trapdoor itself, but I sidestepped and tripped him, and unbalanced him onto his knees.

Rose yelled to Norman, “Stop it, you stupid asshole, we don’t want him damaged this time; you know bloody well we’ll get nowhere if he can’t talk.”

I watched as Rose tugged my blindfolded assistant across a good length of floor, with Norman Osprey holding him upright in a fierce grip. Hickory stumbled and felt tentatively forwards step by step until he reached the chair I’d bought for Catherine. At that point Rose revolved Hickory roughly until he fell into the chair on his side and had to struggle to turn and sit upright.

Behind me now I could hear the distressed breathing of Pamela Jane, and also the unmistakable heavy wheeze of Adam Force’s asthma. He said nothing at all about his near miss with insulin at Bristol. He definitely needed an inhaler but had no free hands.

Rose said to Hickory with malignant satisfaction, “Now you sit there, buddy boy, and it will teach you not to put your nose in where it isn’t wanted.” She redirected the pleased venom back my way while Hickory tried hard to talk but produced only a throttled tenor protest.

“Now you,” she told me, “will hand over everything I want. Or your friend here will get holes burned in him.”

Pamela Jane cried out, “Oh no, you can’t!”

“You shut up, you silly little bitch,” Rose acidly told her, “or I’ll spoil your soppy looks instead.”

Whether or not he was aware of Rose’s speed in standing on the treadle part of the floor that raised the flap of the furnace, Hickory was unable to protest more vigorously than to shrink ever deeper into the chair. He did understand, though, the diabolical choice she was thrusting under my nose.

As if she could read his mind, she said in the same sharp tone, “You, what’s your name, Hickory? You’d better pray that this boss of yours won’t let you burn. Because I’m not fooling, this time he’s going to give me what I want.”

She picked up one of the long punty irons and pushed it into the tank of molten glass. Her movement was ungraceful rather than smooth with constant practice, but somewhere, sometime, she had watched a glassblower collect a gather from a tank. She withdrew the iron with a small blob of red-hot glass on the end of it, and revolved the rod so that the glass stayed adhered to it and didn’t fall off.

Pamela Jane moaned at the sight and all but fell onto the doctor’s needle.

“Gerard Logan,” Rose said to me with emphasis. “This time you will do what I tell you, now, at once.”

Extraordinarily she sounded less sure of herself than screaming “Break his wrists” into the Broadway night, and I remembered Worthington’s judgment that as I would beat her at the tennis match of life, so she would never again face me on the actual court. Yet here she was, visibly pulling together the sinews and nerves of resolution.

I’d seen Martin summon his mental vigor when going out to race on a difficult horse, and I’d seen actors breathe deeply in the wings when the play ahead dug deep into the psyche. I understood a good deal about courage in others and about the deficiencies in myself, but on that Sunday in January it was Rose’s own mushrooming determination that pumped up in me the inner resources I needed.

I watched her as she in turn watched me, and it wasn’t what she said that mattered at all, it was which of us would win the desperate battle for pride.

She plunged the cooling small ball of glass into the tank again and drew it out again, larger. She swung the iron around until the molten red-hot lump advanced to a too close spot under Hickory’s chin. He could feel the heat. He shrank frantically away and tried to scream behind the adhering tape.

“Look out, for God’s sake,” I shouted automatically, and as if surprised, Rose swung the iron away from Hickory’s face until he wasn’t for the minute threatened.

“You see!” Rose sounded all of a sudden victorious. “If you don’t like him burned you’ll tell me where you’ve hidden the videotape I want.”

I said urgently, “You’ll disfigure Hickory if you’re not careful. Glass burns are terrible. You can get a hand burned so badly that it needs amputating. An arm; a foot... You can smell flesh burning... you can lose your mouth, your nose.”

“Shut up,” Rose yelled, and again, at the top of her voice, “Shut up!”

“You can burn out an eye,” I said. “You can sear and cauterize your guts.”

Pamela Jane, who lived with the danger, was affected least of all in spite of her fluttery manner, and it was big Norman Osprey of the great muscular shoulders who sweated and looked ready to vomit.

Rose looked at her red-hot iron. She looked at Hickory and she glanced at me. I could more or less read her rapid mind. She had come to threaten me through my regard for Hickory and now here I was, a target again myself.

Beside Rose’s powerful identity her companions’ egos were pale. Even Adam Force’s good looks and persuasive smile faded to second rate in her presence, and I began to realize fully that her reputation in inspiring real abject terror, in men particularly, was in no way a myth. I felt the fringes myself, try though I might to counteract it. Her effect on her father sent him to the confessional at the best of times, and this being Sunday again I could barely imagine the turmoil churning in his good Catholic conscience.

To Norman Osprey no doubt one day was as good or bad as the next. His days were judged by the amount of muscle needed to achieve his own way, coupled with the fizzing ability to add, divide or multiply as if by instinct.

Adam Force’s finger seemed to itch on the plunger set to activate the syringe’s undisclosed contents. I wished to heaven that poor Pamela Jane would sniff back the tears and swallow the sobs, both of which seemed increasingly to irritate Doctor White-Beard; and as for Hickory, stuck with wide brown bands into silence and sightlessness, and deep in the soft armchair, I thought he would be staying exactly where Rose had put him until someone pulled him out.

Impressions flashed and passed. Rose stared at me with calculation, enjoying her certainty that she would defeat me pretty soon. I couldn’t swear she wouldn’t. This time there were no black masks or baseball bats. But to be faced bare-armed with molten glass was worse.

Suddenly and unexpectedly Rose said, “You came here this morning to make a trophy horse of glass and gold. I want the gold.”

Wow! I thought. No one had brought gold into the equation before. Gold for the trophy hadn’t been mentioned in Rose’s hearing as far as I knew. I had ordered enough for the trophy, and a little over for stock, but a quantity worth holding up the stagecoach for, it was not.

Someone had misled Rose, or she had misunderstood, and her acquisitive imagination had done the rest.

Rose was still sure that, one way or another, I could make her rich.

Adam Force was admiring her with a smile and applauding her with his eyes.

If I could use this, well... golden... opportunity... I could but try... I did need time now, and if I made the trophy horse I could slow things nicely.

I said, “The gold isn’t here yet. I’m fed up with the delay.” The carefree but complaining tone I used non plussed Rose into lowering the tip of the punty iron for the moment.

“If I don’t get the trophy glass horse ready on time,” I said, “the one that’s ordered, that is, well...” I stopped abruptly, as if I’d teetered on the brink of a monster mistake. “Never mind,” I said as if nervously, and Rose demanded I finish the sentence.

“Well...” I said.

“Get on with it.”

“Gold...” I said. “I have to use it on the horse.” Pamela Jane, to her eternal credit, dried her tears in mid-sniffle and in horrified disgust told me frankly across the workroom that I should be thinking of freeing Hickory, not making a trophy for Cheltenham races.

“How can you?” she exclaimed. “It’s despicable.”

“A car from the jewelers is bringing the gold for the hooves, mane and tail,” I said.

Rose wavered, and then demanded, “When?”

I said I wouldn’t tell her.

“Yes, you will,” she said, and advanced the hot iron in menace.

“Eleven o’clock,” I said hastily. A good lie. “Let me make the horse,” I suggested, and made it sound on the verge of pleading. “Then, when I’ve made the horse, I’ll tell you where to look where I think the tape might be, and then you must promise to set Hickory free as soon as you have the gold.”

Pamela Jane said helplessly, “I don’t believe this.”

She couldn’t understand how easily I had crumbled. She couldn’t see that her scorn was the measure of my success.

Rose looked at her watch, discovered she would have to wait an hour for the gold to arrive and did the unwise calculation that she could afford to wait for it.

“Get on and make the trophy,” she instructed. “When the gold comes, you’ll sign for it in the normal way, or your Hickory’s for the slow burn, understand?”

I nodded.

“Get on with it, then.” She looked around the workshop, assessing the state of things, and told Pamela Jane to sit deep in the other soft chair. There, while Adam Force held his threatening needle at her neck, Norman Osprey taped her ankles together.

Pamela Jane glared at me and said she wouldn’t be assisting me with the horse, or ever again.

Rose consolidated this decision by telling her I’d always been a coward. I looked expressionlessly at Pamela Jane and saw the shade of doubt creep in, even while she listened to Rose pour on the disdain.

I hadn’t meant to shape the trophy horse under the threat of Rose’s hand on the punty irons. I had in fact mobilized the bodyguards to prevent it, and they hadn’t. On the other hand a confrontation with Rose some day had been inevitable, and if it were to be now then I’d need to think a bit faster. I stood flat-footed, without drive.

Rose taunted, “I thought you were supposed to be good at glass.”

“Too many people,” I complained.

She peremptorily ordered Norman Osprey and Eddie Payne to go around the half-wall into the showroom, and with more politeness shifted Adam Force around after them. All three leaned on the half-wall, watching. Having pulled out one of the punty irons that I’d put to heat beside the active part of the furnace, Rose thrust it into the crucible — the tank — holding now white-hot glass, and drew it out, a reasonably sized gather, revolving it just speedily enough for it not to fall off onto the floor.

“Go on,” she said. She shoved her lump of burning devastation towards my right arm and I retreated far enough for it not to char my skin.

It was no way to make a trophy of any sort. I needed to start the horse’s body with several gathers of clear crystal and Rose, with irons loaded with plum-sized tips that would destroy whatever they touched, hovered over Hickory’s and Pamela Jane’s heads and threatened to melt off their ears, to make their roasting flesh smell like meat cooking if I gave her the slightest cause. I was to tell her all the time what I proposed to do next. There were to be no sudden unforeseen moves on my part. Hickory and Pamela Jane would suffer. Did I understand? Rose demanded.

I did.

I understood. So did Pamela Jane, and so did Hickory, who could hear.

I told Rose I would need to take four or five gathers

from the tank, and while she had her own lump of destruction close to Pamela Jane’s ear I harvested enough glass to make a horse standing on his hind legs a third of a meter high.

Pamela Jane closed her eyes.

I told Rose in advance that it was almost, if not totally, impossible to make a horse of that size without an assistant, which was partly because the body of the horse had to be kept at working heat, after one had sculpted the muscles of the neck and the upper legs while one added two pieces of glass for each lower leg and foot, and others for the tail.

“Get on with it and don’t whinge,” she said. She was smiling to herself.

People in circuses could keep a dozen plates spinning in the air by twiddling sticks under them. Making that rearing horse in Broadway felt much the same: keep the body and legs hot while you sculpted the head. The resulting head wouldn’t have won in a preschool contest.

Rose was enjoying herself. The less I blocked and opposed her the more certain she grew that I was on the way to capitulation. She liked it. She smiled again, a secretive dirty-little-girl underhand twist of the lips.

I looked at that smile and abruptly I personally understood what Worthington had described. Victory for Rose was never complete without the physical humiliation of a male adversary.

Victory over Gerard Logan, which Rose now saw as gloriously her own, wouldn’t be sufficient for her in that place unless it included her inflicting some depth of burn.

I might shudder at such a prospect but Rose wouldn’t. I might use plain muscle power in an all-out attempt to defeat her, but I wouldn’t try to wreak havoc of molten glass on Rose. Nor on anybody. I lacked the brutality.

Neither, though, could I desert my team and run.

With tweezers I pulled the horse’s front legs up and its rear legs down and held the whole body on an iron within the furnace to keep it hot enough to mold.

There were still things I could do, I thought.

Honorable exits.

Exits that were more or less honorable, anyway.

I managed to juggle body and leg pieces into a headless racer.

Exits, hell, I thought. Exit wasn’t enough. Defeatism never got anyone anywhere.

I held two punty irons with difficulty and transferred enough glass from one to the other to attach and shape a mane, but it hadn’t the elegance necessary for Cheltenham.

Worthington opened the gallery door and began to come in from the street. His eyes widened as fast as his comprehension as he spun a fast 180-degree turn and was on his way down the road before Rose could decide which had priority, chasing Worthington or keeping me penned.

When Worthington was out of anything but whistling distance she told Force and her father to lock the gallery door immediately and was furious because neither of them could find a key. I hoped to hell and back that Pamela Jane wouldn’t report obligingly that she herself had a key to everywhere.

She gave me another uncertain stare and shut her mouth.

Rose stopped smiling, loaded her punty iron with a white-hot golf-ball-sized end of glass and held it close to Hickory.

I did my best to make and fix a tail to my increasingly non-thoroughbred creation. The tail and two hind feet formed a triangle to support the rearing horse. When I wanted a great result, this stage often went wrong. That day it all balanced like perfection.

Hickory wriggled desperately to get away from Rose’s white-hot threat.

Pamela Jane saw me doing nothing to help Hickory while constructing only a toy, and went back to despising me.

I stuck the head on the neck and tweaked the ears forward. Finished, the object had four legs, head, mane and tail, and no grace whatever. I stood it upright on the marver table, where rearing, it was ready to start leaping into the future from a crystal ball.

In spite of the faults, Rose seemed impressed. Not impressed enough, however, to lower her guard, or her punty iron beside Hickory’s head.

I glanced at the workshop clock.

A minute — tick tock, tick tock — was a very long time.

I said, “The gold will cover the hooves and the mane and the tail.”

Tick tock, tick tock.

Rose thrust her cooling punty iron back into the furnace and brought out a new white-hot gather, which she again held near Hickory’s head.

“How long,” she demanded, “until that gold gets here?”

Hickory wriggled violently, trying desperately to free himself from the sticky strips on his mouth and his eyes.

Pamela Jane, eyes closed, seemed to be praying.

Two minutes. Tick tock.

“The gold,” I said, “will come in small bars. It has to be melted, then it has to cover the hooves and the mane and the tail...”

Hickory threw himself forward, trying to get out of his embracing chair. Rose didn’t move her punty iron far enough away fast enough to avoid him, and one of his ears did touch her waving white-hot blob of glass.

Under the parcel tape, he couldn’t scream. His body arched. Rose jumped back, but Hickory’s ear sizzled and now smelled of fried meat, and would never be perfect again.

Three minutes. Eternity. Tick tock.

Hickory’s horror, plain and agonizing, had everyone staring. Rose should have jettisoned her iron and gone to his help, but she didn’t.

Three minutes, ten seconds since I stood the rearing horse on the marver table.

Dangerous to wait any longer.

I picked up the big tweezers I’d used to form the horse’s mane, and with them tore the parcel tape securing Pamela Jane’s ankles. I pulled her up by her still-tied wrists, and Rose turned towards me from Hickory and yelled at me to leave her alone.

Pamela Jane had no idea what she should do, and dither could be fatal. I said to her urgently, “Run,” and she didn’t, but hesitated, looking back to Hickory.

No time left. I lifted her up bodily and carried her.

Pamela Jane objected. Rose ordered me to put her down. I didn’t, but aimed a bit unsteadily for the way into the showroom and shouted at the trio there leaning on the wall to get down behind it.

Rose came fast across the workshop after me, and drove at me, holding her hot glass — laden punty iron like a sword.

Half seeing her, half sensing the searing future, I twisted both myself and Pamela Jane roughly to let the iron miss us, like a bullfighter, but Rose in fury dragged and stabbed and burned a long black slit through my white singlet.

No more time.

I lugged Pamela Jane around the half-wall to the showroom and threw her, screaming protests, to the ground, and I fell on top of her to pin her down.

The rearing horse had stood unannealed at maximum heat on the marver table for three minutes forty seconds when it exploded.