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Nightingale paced through the ground floor of the Folly for the fourth time that night. Pools of sodium-yellow light spilled on the neurotically clean carpet in the smoking room. He had opened the curtains earlier, looking out at the square, but had not turned the electric light on, and only the streetlights illuminated the rooms. Nothing was ever silent in London, but the Folly felt silent in a way that it hadn't for over a year now. Varvara was upstairs, not locked in her room but keeping out of his way. She had avoided him like a feral cat, fastidiously pretending that she had something urgent to do elsewhere whenever he came near and not that she was terrified of him. Molly was in the kitchens, her silence more subdued than usual. And Peter had hidden in the coach-house all day, then gone out for the evening with a group of his old Charing Cross colleagues.
At least Peter wasn't alone, Nightingale tried to console himself. Everyone had to be told that Lesley had turned, and Stephanopolous and Seawoll had been uncharacteristically silent and grim when he'd broken the news. And now that the Department of Professional Standards had finished chewing them all up and had spat them out again, the other recent probationers had taken it upon themselves to keep an eye on Peter.
It wasn't as if he was unused to spending nights--and days--alone here, but the silence of being the only person in the Folly was very different from the silence when his apprentices were gone. His apprentice. Lesley had been so promising, come on so fast, studied so hard, and now he was wondering if her progress had been because she'd had two masters to Peter's one. He hadn't caught any hint of another practitioner's signare in her work, but it was Peter who could recognise the Faceless Man's signare well, not him, and Peter wouldn't have the sensitivity to spot it in Lesley.
He walked back through the mundane library and paused at Lesley's desk. He'd cleared away all her papers and gone through them himself, looking for clues, but the pack of wet wipes she used with her mask had been knocked to the floor underneath and Molly had elected to leave it there. Nightingale cleared everything away into the wastepaper basket and then quickly walked away.
It was almost one in the morning when he finally heard voices on the doorstep and felt the wards part to admit Peter, then a clatter of police boots in the atrium. Nightingale leaned back in his chair and did his best to look like he just happened to be sitting in the smoking room--in the dark--and not as if he'd been waiting up for his remaining apprentice like a worried father whose son had taken the car out on his own for the first time. He resisted the temptation to use a small spell to check on Peter from a distance. Besides, Peter was getting a lot more sensitive lately and he'd certainly feel it.
But when after a few minutes he hadn't heard Peter leave the atrium and head up the stairs, Nightingale got up.
Peter was leaning against Isaac Newton, gazing fixedly at the inscription as if it were written in Latin and he couldn't find the verb. He barely glanced up at Nightingale. More than half-cut, Nightingale diagnosed, pissed as they said nowadays.
"Did you have a good evening out?" Nightingale asked, politely meaningless, and Peter mumbled an equally meaningless, "Yeah, thanks," in reply. After meeting Peter's mother, Nightingale had no doubt of where he had learned his reflexive good manners.
"You should get some sleep," Nightingale tried again when Peter didn't move. "Target practice at nine." It would be good for them both to keep life as normal as possible.
"Mm." Peter looked around the atrium, up at Isaac, and finally settled on Nightingale, and Nightingale saw the moment when Peter's bewildered shock at Lesley's betrayal turned to anger.
"Couldn't you have fixed it yourself?" he began, at first quietly, then with anger rising in his tone. "If he can, then you must be able to. Why didn't you do it yourself?"
Eighty years ago, Nightingale reflected, he might have felt that same anger. Now he just felt tired. But he wasn't altogether sorry to see Peter's shock finally leave him, even if his anger was misdirected.
"I couldn't," was all he said in reply, calm and uninflected.
"Did you even try?"
"I went through the literature on the subject, yes. But there's nothing I can do with old wounds like that."
Even drunk, Peter saw the implications of his words. He leaned forward. "But you could have done right after it happened, when it was all, all, fresh? Why didn't you fix it then--oh."
"I did try," Nightingale said, and this time he didn't quite keep his own voice calm. "I forced Walid to take me to her when he told me what had happened. He didn't want to, but I--well. The surgeons were working on her by then, it was clear she was going to live. I tried. But I couldn't do the whole job."
Peter's anger was cooling now, his curiosity engaged. "What did you do, then?" he persisted. He was a good copper, as good as Lesley had been.
"I restored her sight," Nightingale said reluctantly. But there was no reason not to tell Peter the truth. "I was able to repair that much of the damage. Then... well, then the next thing I knew it was two days later and I was on the ventilator again. Walid was incandescent."
"You never said anything about any of this." There was still anger simmering in Peter's voice.
"I saw no reason to. I couldn't finish the job. And I wondered allowing her to see what--what the rest of the damage looked like--was really such a kindness. And I didn't want her gratitude. Perhaps if I had told her..."
"Don't say that!" Peter said, even more sharply. This anger was, Nightingale recognised in surprise, protective. Of him. He nearly smiled, despite it all. The young could be so beautiful in their generosity sometimes. "Don't say that. You didn't make this happen."
"You don't think it was because she wanted to avoid my Latin homework, then," Nightingale bit back, surprising himself. "It's all right, Peter. What's done is done."
"Do you think he really can fix her face?" Peter asked after a minute. "I mean, Lesley's not stupid. She wouldn't have... not unless she was really sure he could do it."
"He is skilled at deception. But as for whether he can do it, I have no idea. He clearly has some unusual facility with manipulating life. I never had any particular training in that area, just enough for first-aid in the field, as it were. But even if I did, you must remember when I was studying these things. Medical science is almost unrecognisable now, compared to when I was learning. In that, technology really is magical, and if you could have transported Lesley to the Folly's best doctors in the old days, I don't think they could have done as good as job as her own doctors did."
"Plastic surgery only really started during World War II," Peter volunteered, unsurprisingly. Nightingale had never known such a curious collector of random information. "And it wasn't really very good then. We did it at school. The history of medicine, I mean. It was Archibald McIndoe, I think, and burned RAF pilots." He paused. "Besides, Lesley wouldn't have survived without antibiotics anyway."
"Indeed." He'd seen that, more than once. From the way Peter's gaze crossed his face, the boy was realising again that what were old school history classes to him were memories to Nightingale.
Then Peter leaned forward and deliberately struck his head against Newton's pedestal, twice. Nightingale reached out to him reflexively, but drew back before touching the boy. Peter looked up at at him.
"Stupid," he muttered, "I was so stupid. Faceless, sir. We need to check all our potential suspects for facial injuries. Because that's what Lesley would believe. If he was wearing a mask for the same reason she was, then she'd believe he was serious about being able to heal it, or trying to."
Nightingale had treated Peter and Lesley's tendency to give everything dramatic or silly names--Pocket Quidditch, the bat-phone, the Faceless Man--as a modern trend. But perhaps this nickname had held more meaning than he'd realised. "We can check that," he said slowly. "And look at it the other way, too, any other people with similar injuries in Lesley's contacts."
"She had a support group at the hospital," Peter said. "For people with facial injuries. I think some of them were even worse than hers. God, he could have been sitting right there all along, luring her in."
"We'll look into it all," Nightingale said. "We're investigating it all ourselves." He'd had to go toe-to-toe with the Department of Professional Standards on that, because they wanted to run their own investigation, but letting the DPS chase a black magician and now his renegade apprentice was guaranteed to end badly. The fact that he was the only person qualified to face this Faceless Man was a headache for everyone. "But in the morning, Peter," he added as his apprentice yawned and leaned against Isaac again. "Go to bed before Molly has to carry you up there."
That prospect propelled Peter forwards, and Nightingale hid a smile and walked beside him, a hand on his elbow on the stairs.
"I trusted her so much, sir," Peter finally said when they got to the second floor and his room. Nightingale's student room, once. "With my life."
"I trusted her as well," Nightingale replied. Not as much as Peter had, not as much as he trusted Peter, but he had been betrayed like this before. He rather thought Peter never had.
For a moment he thought Peter was going to embrace him, and he tensed, but the boy gave him a lopsided smile instead and opened the door to his room. "It'll be all right," he said. It sounded like he had meant it to be a statement, an attempt at demonstrating his stiff upper lip, but it came out sounding more like an anxious question.
"Yes," Nightingale told him with as much authority as he could bring to his voice, "it will. Good night, Peter."
After the door closed behind Peter, Nightingale took up his patrol of the Folly again, knowing he would get no more sleep that night than he had the previous two. Peter was too distracted by grief and the destruction of the tower, but Nightingale was an old campaigner and he knew one thing for certain. Their adversary had tipped his hand now in using Lesley, and that meant he would have to make his next move soon. And Nightingale had no intention of losing a second apprentice to him.