She waited until the house had gone quiet before she checked.
When she reached it she confirmed, without needing to touch anything, what she already knew: the hook was empty. The bolts, which by long habit were always thrown top and bottom, top toward the corridor, bottom toward the frame, had been drawn back — not fully open, but eased, the bottom bolt resting a bare half-inch clear of its housing, exactly the amount required to be forced the rest of the way in silence by a man who knew precisely where to push.
She stood a moment in the dark corridor and did the arithmetic she'd learned to trust more than instinct. The tide charts pinned in the boot room, which she had studied on her second week at Ravenholm purely from habit and had never once expected to need, told her the equinoctial tide would crest just before three in the morning — the highest water of the month, deep enough to bring a boat directly beneath the cliff path without grounding, and dark enough, this close to the new moon, to hide it from anyone who wasn't already looking. A ship at anchor a mile offshore. A door left conveniently unlatched. A tide that would not come so high again for another month.
They were coming tonight.
She did not waste time being afraid of the conclusion. She had trained herself out of that particular indulgence months ago. Instead she went to the third stone in the low wall by the east gate — cold under her fingers, damp with the day's rain — and marked it with the chalk stub she kept for exactly this purpose: three strokes, close together, the signal reserved for 'immediate danger, do not wait for the usual exchange.' She drew a small set of two waves beneath it. It would not bring help by morning. It might not bring help at all before whatever was going to happen, happened. But it was the only voice she had beyond her own two hands, and she used it, then went to prepare the rest.
The dispensary yielded what she needed without difficulty; four months of quiet cataloguing had left her with a working knowledge of every locked cabinet in the building and most of their keys besides. She measured out a modest dose of chloral hydrate, enough to keep an unwilling man calm without endangering him, and wrapped it in paper for her pocket. She checked the fire alarm bell in the main corridor, confirmed its rope hung clear and its clapper unobstructed, and noted the distance from Pavilion Seven to that bell as a number she might, before the night was through, need very badly.
Beneath the loose floorboard in her own room, alongside the wrapped chemistry journals, sat a small stoppered phial she had made herself over three careful weeks — a compound of her own devising, more noxious than dangerous, capable of producing a cloud of tears and coughing and blind panic in an enclosed space without doing any man permanent harm. She had made it for no reason she could have named at the time, in the manner of a woman keeping a coat by the door against weather that has not yet arrived. She took it now and understood, at last, precisely what she had been preparing for.
The kitchen knife she took last, sharpened that afternoon on the whetstone by the scullery under the pretext of helping Mrs. Garrick with the vegetables, and it went into her boot, flat against her ankle, cold through the wool of her stocking.
The evening attendant, a heavy, kindly, unimaginative woman named Mrs. Peale, took almost no persuading at all. "You're a good girl to offer," she said, already reaching for her shawl, plainly delighted to be spared the walk across the wet grass in the dark. "Mind he doesn't take a chill. And lock up proper, mind — Director's very particular about the pavilion being locked of a night."
"I always do," Bee said, and meant it more thoroughly than Mrs. Peale could have guessed.
She locked Pavilion Seven from within as soon as the woman's footsteps faded across the grass — both bolts, top and bottom, thrown hard — and banked the fire low, and sat in the one chair with the phial in her apron pocket and the knife against her ankle and the chloral hydrate folded in paper by her hand, and waited.
Rath slept badly. He murmured, at intervals, fragments that meant nothing and everything: 'the coast at Cherbourg — no, further, further out — tell them the number is not the number they think — France, tell them France was never the—' His hands moved even in sleep, fingers building invisible fortifications on the blanket, precise and hopeless.
Bee sat very still and listened to the wind change direction outside, and to the tide, somewhere beyond the dark glass, beginning its long climb toward the cliffs, and to her own heartbeat, which she had trained over four long months to keep slow and even no matter what came.
Somewhere out on the black water, she knew without needing to see it, the Erebus rode at her anchor, patient as a held breath, waiting for the tide and the dark and the unlatched door to align.
They were coming. She did not know exactly when, in the hours between now and dawn, but she knew it would be that night.
She closed her hand once around the knife handle at her ankle, just to be sure of it, and then she folded her hands in her lap, composed her face into the dull patience of Bridget Wynn, and sat listening to the dark.