A Spark Unseen (2 page)

A few minutes and the fire was gone, the air around us a poisonous fog. Mary’s face was blackened, her watering eyes laying a white stripe on each cheek. She thrust a wet cloth into my face to breathe through as I staggered toward the naked window. I tried to turn the latch — an act that had likely not been attempted in more than two hundred years — and when it would not yield I picked up a metallic arm and smashed the windowpanes, sending sprays of glass down into the gardens below. The cool autumn night sucked at the smoke.

I took a breath of the purer air, the burn of it like fire itself, and turned away from the broken window, stumbling through the wreckage of machinery, past the twisted shape on the floor, a dark stain spreading halo-like from around his head. The soles of his shoes were smoldering. And then I broke into a run across the workshop, scattering a bucket of screws and tearing my gown on a jagged piece of iron before I burst through the door in a cloud.

“Uncle Tully!” I yelled. “Uncle!”

I searched the bare and tidy room with streaming eyes. But my uncle was not there.

M
rs. Cooper put a cup of boiling tea in front of me on the kitchen table. I was sitting in what I thought of as “my chair,” the one I had claimed more than two years ago, the first day I’d stepped inside Stranwyne Keep. I felt much the same now as I had then: frightened, uncertain, and steaming with an anger that set the heat of my tea to shame — my inevitable reaction to anything beyond my control. But I was a different girl from the one who had sat here brazenly baiting Mrs. Cooper — Mrs. Jeffries, then — with a bravado that only partially covered my fear. I counted that day I’d come to Stranwyne as the first of my life, my real life; the person I’d been before it was hardly worth remembering. I held my anger in check.

Mrs. Cooper put another cup of tea in front of Mary, nattering on and on as she did it, calling her “duck” and “poppet” and a “right good girl,” the rags tied in her hair fluttering like feathers above a white cotton nightgown. I was wearing her dressing gown, the faded blue she kept in the kitchen for baking, pulled close over my wet and sooty nightdress. I reached for the little jug in front of me.

“Cream, Mary?” I asked, steadying my hand.

She didn’t answer, just stared stone-faced while I poured it, her unnatural silence hurting me so much more than the small, throbbing cut at the base of my throat. She should not go back upstairs tonight. Maybe she should go home with Mrs. Cooper, or to her mother’s in the village. I smiled gamely at the still-blathering Mrs. Cooper, an expression I knew would give her comfort, and then my gaze lifted past them both, into the far corner of the room and another source of chatter. And like the cream pouring into my over-hot tea, my anger cooled, sweetened by an exquisite sense of relief.

My uncle sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, his attention directed like a beam of light on a broken pocket watch, a trinket I had tucked away for just this purpose, to bring about distraction when needed. I had found him in his nightshirt, wandering in the ticks of his clock room, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the upper reaches of Stranwyne. The bright eyes were innocent still, intent as he hunched over the watch, alternately listening and then peering at its innards.

“Would you like some tea, Uncle?”

“One, two, three, click,” he muttered. “Spin, spin, four, five, click …”

“Or some milk?”

“Yes, yes. That is just so. Just so …”

I did not think he was speaking of milk. “Or …”

“I am not sleepy, Simon’s baby!” The light of his attention had focused suddenly on me. “I am not sleepy. The clocks were ticking, but you came before they could tell me when.” He cocked his head, accusations now over. “You know about the clocks, don’t you, little niece? You like the ticks. You know how to listen to the when?”

“Yes, Uncle.” I understood it perfectly. I smiled as his face relaxed in relief. How I wished I could go to him, give him one fierce hug to assure me of his safety. But only crisis or exhaustion had ever induced Uncle Tully to accept affection, and right now he was conscious of neither. He was sighing happily.

“My little niece knows. Lane knows what is right, and my little niece knows the when, and what we should do. This one does not tell me when. Right now, it cannot say. …”

His white beard moved with soft but incessant words, the intense gaze back on the watch, observing the machinations of tiny gears. He would solve the problem in his hand very soon, if he had not solved it already. It was for this that those men had come, for the strange and wonderful contents of my uncle’s mind. And they could not have it. They would not have it.

Knuckles rapped at the door, and Mary started violently, knocking the contents of her cup into a brown, seeping streak across the table. Mrs. Cooper fell mercifully silent.

“Tea doesn’t belong on tables,” Uncle Tully stated. “No, no. Tea belongs in cups, pots, cupboards, cabinets, people, mugs, tins. …”

“Who’s there?” I called.

The response from the corridor was muffled. “Only Matthew, Miss.”

I breathed again, shaking my head at my foolishness as Mrs. Cooper moved to unlock the door. I doubted the man that had nearly shot Mary and run flaming from the workshop was likely to announce his presence with a polite knock. His companion would never knock again.

Matthew shambled into the room, a shy, retiring ox of a man whose unlikely occupation was filling in the tiny details of flowers and vines on the figurines produced by Stranwyne’s pottery kilns. How his enormous fists did such fiddly work was a conundrum to me. I set down my cup.

“You found nothing of him?” I asked him.

“No, Miss.”

“Then the man is likely several miles onto the moors by now. I will come upstairs and see what can be seen.” I stood, glad of something to do. “Mrs. Cooper, lock the door behind me, just in case, and see that Mary has a place to lie down, or that she gets to her mother’s, would you?” I saw Mary cross her arms at this, frowning at the table.

“Don’t go for long, little niece,” my uncle called, eyes on the watch. “Not for long! We are not sleepy, but it is the wrong time for kitchens. The wrong time. I can wait in the wrong time without my niece for twenty, and then we must be back in the right place for the right time. I can only wait for twenty.”

“Of course, Uncle.” I leaned close to Mrs. Cooper. “If the watch is repaired before I return, there is a broken clock on the top shelf of the sideboard.”

Mrs. Cooper nodded unhappily, her round face like a worried dumpling. Water came unexpectedly to my eyes. “Don’t worry, Aunt Bit,” I said. “I’ll be gone fifteen minutes, no more.”

I kissed her wrinkled cheek before I went out the door.

Matthew waited for me in the kitchen corridor, hat in hands, brow troubled, his great weight shifting from foot to foot, making the floorboards squeak. He would not meet my eyes. “Miss,” he said slowly, “I’m thinking there’s no need of you going up. There’s really …”

“Did Mr. Cooper allow Dr. Pruitt to finish his examination?” Dr. Pruitt was brought to Stranwyne’s village nearly six months ago, a decent, highly trained, rather progressive physician, who had unfortunately lost his reputation the same day a prominent patient lost his life. Mr. Cooper had been in high dudgeon ever since.

“Yes, Miss. Dr. Pruitt says he was gone before he hit the floor, most likely. And Mr. Cooper agrees with him, for what that’s worth. But I do think there’s no need for you to be …”

My stony look must have quelled this last observation, which would no doubt have expressed reservations about a young lady going voluntarily into the presence of death. Even if she had been present when it happened. Matthew’s mouth formed a straight line, his gaze fixed on a place somewhere about ten feet behind my left ear. Or, I thought suddenly, perhaps it was the nightgown. I pulled the blue dressing gown tighter as we started down the corridor.

“And have you found where John George has gotten to?” I had some particular words planned for the man I had assigned to stand guard in my corridor.

When Matthew remained silent, I looked up. His face informed me of the truth before his voice could. Shock stilled my feet, and then an abrupt conflagration of fury had me setting a brisk pace down the hall.

“How?” I asked him.

Matthew jogged to catch up. “His throat was cut, Miss.”

I climbed the stone stairs that led to my wing of the house, to what had always been my inner sanctum. “Where was he?”

“In the chapel, Miss.”

I reached the top of the stairs, the smell of burnt carpet wafting down the corridor, horror, indignation, fury, and sadness all at war inside me. I had liked John George. Had trusted him. What had he been doing in the chapel? Had he followed Uncle Tully? The clock room was adjoining, only one door away. I thought of how close I had been to my lifeless friend when finding my uncle. I thought of how close those two masked devils had been to my uncle when they poured that friend’s life onto the chapel floor. How dare they? I threw open the door to the smoldering workshop, letting it bang hard against the wall.

The room flickered with candle glow. Dr. Pruitt and Mr. Cooper were crouched over the inert body, their two heads coming up to frown at my entrance, the shadowy, metallic body parts of my uncle’s inventions glinting randomly in the light. I marched up to the thing lying on the carpet. Now that the candles were lit, I could see the man’s mask was no more than a sack of dyed linen, crude holes cut for the eyes. I reached down and tugged at the cloth, jerking the lifeless head in a way that made Mr. Cooper wince. And when the mask came away, I saw gray-brown hair, skin paling beneath unshaven stubble, open eyes of a nondescript color. A complete stranger to me. The knife he had held at my throat lay on the carpet a few feet away. The blade was bloodstained, more blood than could have possibly been my own.

I ransacked the man’s pockets, ignoring the
tut
of Mr. Cooper, and found one surprisingly clean and unmarked handkerchief, a shilling, two francs, and one pence, and a crumpled sheet of paper. I stood and smoothed the paper, holding it to the light, studying the penned squares and lines that took me several moments to recognize as a rough plan of Stranwyne Keep. The position of my corridor was marked with an
X
.

I turned away without a word, the crude map in my hand, and walked out the door to the hallway. I leaned against the corridor wall, well away from the workshop’s light spill, and allowed the guilt to settle down on me, like snowflakes of iron, falling one by one, each adding their weight to my shoulders. The north wind came up, the ripping breeze that was as much a part of Stranwyne Keep as my Uncle Tully, and an unnatural, resonant wail began, the trogwynd, rising around the walls of the house, drowning out the low talk of the men in the workshop. I used its noise to move silently along the corridor, down the stairs, and out of my wing of the house.

Light showed from beneath the kitchen door, where my uncle was chattering, but I moved quickly past it, slipping instead into another door a little farther down the hall. There was no gaslight here, and I felt for the candle and matches I kept on the table. The matches were an extravagance, but I didn’t want to bring a light in here with me; I didn’t want anyone to know I came. The match struck, sizzling, and the plainest room in Stranwyne leapt into visibility. It was little more than a closet, a bed neat and unslept-in, the hooks for the clothes empty, a set of carving tools abandoned on a worktable. But Lane had wanted his room this way, small and with no fuss.

I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes, blocking out the candlelight, breathing against the weight that sat on me. Lane’s smell was here, though only just. It was one of the reasons I knew Mr. Wickersham’s letter six weeks ago could not have been true, why I had thrown the paper on the coals and watched the ink burn. How could Lane be gone from the world — like the dead man upstairs and John George — and his scent still be in this room? The deepest part of me, a place that had nothing to do with logic, screamed that it could not be, that it was not possible, that therefore Lane must be somewhere.

I had nearly three minutes before I was late for my uncle, and therefore two minutes to let my tears flow, and to wonder if I could ever be the little niece that knew what we should do and when. Lane Moreau would have let me come in here to cry if I needed to, I knew that. I just didn’t know why he had not come back to me.

M
r. Babcock leaned back in his chair as I finished my recitation, the buttons of his waistcoat straining. It was the second dawn since the Frenchman had died in my uncle’s workshop, and the sun had only just crested the moors. But I had been prepared for one of Mr. Babcock’s infamous early arrivals, the natural result of putting himself on a train as soon as my express could have arrived in his London offices. The story I told him had been clear and succinct, my manner calm, expression collected. In other words, I was an utter sham. I held my hands in my lap, watching the shrewd eyes of the Tulman family solicitor hood themselves into a familiar expression of deep contemplation. My gaze moved from Mr. Babcock to the settee, where I found Mr. Wickersham coolly regarding me.