Chapter Thirty-Seven - The Modest Rose Puts Forth a Thorn

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Chapter 37. Author's note - there will be two chapters after this one and then an epilogue. The story's coming to a close, everyone. Thanks for the (dwindling) support, though, and I hope you will all check out my new story when I release it after Inamorata. Please excuse the shameless self-promotion.

"Nightingale!" Robin's voice was pleading. "Nightingale, wait!"

For anyone else she would not have turned. For anyone else, even for Rose, whose freedom was now her focus, she would not have stopped in her warpath towards anyone, anything that could get her closer to her sister.

But Robin was different. The tone of his imploring voice struck a chord with her, something deep down and visceral, and so she turned.

"What, Robin?" she asked.

By this time, he'd caught up to her. He'd been trailing behind for she'd been walking very fast, so fast, in fact, that he would have had to have run to keep pace with her.

"What's going on?" he huffed. He seemed a little out of breath.

The sympathetic, wide-eyed look of confused pity and astounded concern now making Robin's face positively endearing with worry barely took the edge off Nightingale's fury. She shook as she raised her eyes to Robin's and said:

"Rose shot Bobby. Now she's been arrested. I'm going to get her back," she said.

Robin was quiet for a moment and Nightingale could practically see the cogs in his mind turning as he considered her words.

"'The modest Rose puts forth a thorn'," he muttered, and Nightingale remembered the quotation as being from one of many Blake poems she'd read. He shook his head like a dog with water in its ears and continued:

"And how are you going to do that, Miss Nightingale?" he asked softly, as if saying the words in a gentler tone would minimize their impact.

"I don't know," she replied, his query not deterring in the slightest her ambition to liberate Rose. "I'll think of something. It's my duty to her! My duty to do something! She's just a child and she thought of me as her mother, I swear, so I-"

Nightingale's words cut off with a gagging sound and she realized she'd litterally been choked into silence by the ardour of her fury.

Out, out, brief candle! she recited to herself, closing her eyes and shutting out everything, focusing only on the flow of the verse. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player-

"Nightingale?" asked Robin. She felt him touch her arm. He'd never seen her recite, and so was probably confused by the fact that she was standing in utter silence, her eyes closed, when moments before she'd been jabbering, her only movement the heaving of her chest and the quivering of her frame.

This time, she ignored him.

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told- 

"Nightingale, what the bloody hell is going on?" she heard Robin say, his tenor voice shooting up in pitch as worry made his words grate urgently against Nightingale's ears.

By and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Feeling her fury not abate, but at least settle, like some wild animal that has been whipped to mutinous silence, she opened her eyes.

"I need to talk to David," she told Robin.

He raised his eyebrows. "About Rose?"

"Exactly. It's was a member of his team who arrested her - Caroline, I'm told," she said, her lips curling back over her teeth as she spoke. "He's the leader of that team. I need to talk to him."

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