Castle of Shadows (11 page)

Tobias was late. Charlie pressed her lips together and examined her candle. Fifteen minutes left at best. She curled into a chair, blew out the flame and waited for her eyes to adjust. The moon was bright tonight. The leaded windows sliced the floor into diamonds. She would have to wait.

Her eyes snapped open. She must have dozed off. She heard it again: a muffled footstep. The door hinges creaked. She was too stiff with cold to move. Her eyes strained, big as gobstoppers. Someone was in the room. She could hear them panting.

‘Hey! You there?’ It was Tobias. He stepped into the moonlight, and the diamonds cut him into a dozen pieces.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Come on! We gotta get out of here. Watch is after me! He’s got a gun!’

She must have misheard. Sleep, cold and shock had frozen her. Tobias lurched forward and grabbed her arm. ‘Come
on
!’ He pulled her from the chair. The candle fell onto the floor, and she tried to pick it up, but Tobias’s hand was like an iron band around her wrist. He pulled her to the door and out. Charlie’s legs began to work. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw light
swaying towards them down the corridor. She ran faster.

After five minutes, Charlie realised that Tobias was lost. Her breath tore through her in great sobs. There wasn’t enough left over for talking. She grabbed his arm with her free hand and pulled. It was like trying to stop a runaway horse. She pulled again and braced her feet. She toppled over and pulled him down with her. His foot kicked her in the side, and she curled up, gasping for air.

‘Dolt!’ Tobias scrambled up. His voice was thick with fear. ‘He’s right behind us!’ Charlie looked. The end of the corridor lurched, lightened.

‘Follow me!’ she hissed. ‘I know where to hide.’

Tobias yanked her to her feet, and they ran on, Charlie leading this time. Her ankle and ribs hurt, but she gritted her teeth and ran, remembering the look on Tobias’s face as he stood in the moonlight.

They had nearly reached the east wing. Charlie flew round the corner and into the grand vestibule. Their feet clattered on cold marble. The noise bounced off the thick stone walls and chased after them. And now she heard other footsteps behind them. Watch was gaining.

Here! It was here. Charlie raced past the lesser dining room at breakneck speed and burst into the serving room. She pulled Tobias in after her, closed the door, and ran across to the dumbwaiter.

It was a dumbwaiter of generous proportions, designed to help feed parties of one hundred or more, but the two of them barely managed to squash inside. She could not
reach to work the cables even if she had dared. She crouched, squeezed on three sides by the dumbwaiter’s walls, and on the other by a gasping, shuddering Tobias. The air inside was thick and sweaty. She felt panic rising and forced herself to breathe slowly. She closed her eyes so that she would not have to see the dark.

She felt Tobias stiffen. Her eyes popped open. Light showed around the edges of the dumbwaiter’s door. Watch was here.

Four hands grabbed hold of the metal bar that worked the latch and pulled backwards with all the strength four arms, four shoulders and two backs could muster. Charlie braced herself. Footsteps shuffled towards them. The light grew brighter. Charlie pulled backwards so hard she could feel her ears popping.

The tug, when it came, was piffling. One brief, exploratory yank. On the other side of the door, Watch grunted. Charlie thought her heart would explode as the light lessened and went out altogether. A door slammed shut.

‘Thank you, God,’ Tobias groaned, ‘for inventing good-for-nothing slackers with brains the size of rotten walnuts.’

‘Shut up,’ Charlie found enough breath to say, ‘and open the door.’

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘I saw it. Plain as I’m seeing you now. He’s got a gun!
A ruddy great pistol. One of them fancy new revolving types that’ll shoot six bullets without reloading. He was waving it about, shouting: “Come out, or I’ll shoot!” I never run so fast in me life! I’m not likely to be mistaken about it.’

‘But why? Who would give Watch a gun? It’s crazy! He’s not safe as it is, drunk half the time.’

‘Watch belongs to O’Dair. You know that.’

‘But that means…’ Charlie stared at Tobias. They were sitting in the schoolroom, the door locked from the inside. She shook her head in disbelief. ‘The Prime Minister wouldn’t let her.’

‘I don’t expect she’s told him, do you? You can have the joy of doing that.’

‘Oh yes? And shall I tell him how I found out? Creeping round the Castle at night? I might as well tell him straight out that I’m spying on him!’

‘You’d rather Watch shot you? ’Cause that’s what O’Dair’s after. She’s out to kill you, girl! And she won’t shed no tears if I get plugged as well.’

‘She doesn’t know you’re helping me.’

Tobias sighed. ‘Don’t be daft. Watch saw us, the other night. Enough to judge size, anyway. Ain’t no other kids in the Castle, is there? She knows, all right.’

‘But…surely Watch wouldn’t shoot you? You’re friends. He couldn’t have known it was you!’

Tobias stared at the floor. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t much feel like staying to find out.’ He looked up at her. ‘So,’ he
said, after a moment. ‘What’re we gonna do about it?’

‘I’m not giving up,’ Charlie said.

For the first time that night, he grinned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t reckon you would.’ The grin faded. ‘Look, Charlie, this ain’t a lark no more.’ His eyes fastened on hers. ‘You could get killed. I ain’t gonna help you do that. You’re out of this from now on.’

‘You can’t tell me what to do!’

He shook his head. ‘You’re only a kid, Charlie! A snarky little eleven-year-old girl! I can’t just let you…’ He trailed off. Sighed. ‘You’re not listening to a flipping word I’m saying, are you?’

‘And what about you?’ Charlie snapped. ‘Are you going to give up?’

His mouth fell open. His eyes dropped to the floor. ‘That’s different,’ he muttered.

‘Why?’ A smile spread across her face. She didn’t often win arguments with Tobias. It felt good.

He scowled at her. ‘It just is! I’m older.’

‘One year! What you mean is: you’re a boy.’

‘Well of course. Girls isn’t supposed to…’ He stopped, sighed. ‘Oh, sweet Betty! All right! You win.’

‘Good. Because we’re going to the secretary’s office right now. It’s the last thing Watch will be expecting.’

The moon hung low in the sky, illuminating the ministerial wing of the Castle. A shaft of light fell through the window and across the floor of the secretary’s office.
It looked solid, as though she ought to be able to touch it – feel it trickling between her fingers like fine sand, cool and silver. Everything since they left the schoolroom – the trip to the ministerial wing, the ease with which they had avoided the guard standing on watch just a few yards away, and the way the door of the secretary’s office had opened as though it wasn’t even locked – had all felt charmed, like the moonlight. Watch was vanquished. Nothing could go wrong.

Tobias squatted on the floor in the wash of light. She heard the scratch of a match; the smell of sulphur pricked her nose, and there was a sudden flare of light from the strange one-eyed lantern he had collected from the corridor where he’d dropped it. ‘What is that thing?’ she whispered.

‘Dark lantern,’ he said. He looked up at her with a sardonic smile. ‘We’re thieves now, Charlie. Might as well use the proper gear. This don’t leave no telltale drops of wax behind, and we want our little visit kept secret.’

‘What about the window?’ She had noticed at once that it had neither curtains nor shutters. Anyone outside in the grounds would be able to see their light.

Tobias glanced at it, shook his head. ‘We’ll have to risk it. I’ll keep watch at the window, look for any sign of the patrol. See that sliding door on the lantern, next to the bull’s-eye? If I say, you pull that across; it’ll shut off the light.’

Charlie balanced the lantern on a chair and directed its
beam towards the filing cabinet. She had never met the Prime Minister’s secretary, but he seemed highly organised. She supposed Windlass would not tolerate anything less.

Correspondence was filed alphabetically by sender, and Charlie soon realised there was far more here than she could hope to search through tonight. She scribbled down names, subject matter and dates. After about forty minutes, her fingers began to ache. She decided to try the appointments diary. Tobias grunted as she stood up, but said nothing. She adjusted the lantern so that it shone onto the desk.

The diary was in the top right-hand drawer. She noted down visitors to the Castle over the last month and Windlass’s movements both in and outside the City. Then she flicked over the page and saw the list of Windlass’s meetings for the next week. Several were in the City, the location, date and time clearly noted.

Her heart lurched. All she had to do was give this information to Peter, and Windlass would have an appointment with death.
She
wouldn’t have killed him – that would be the Resistance leader’s responsibility; his crime…if it was a crime. But how could it be a crime to kill someone in order to prevent them doing evil? And Nell was right: she had to protect her father. Windlass deserved to die for what he had done to her parents.

Charlie glanced behind her. Tobias stood motionless beside the window, staring out into the night. She flipped
to the back of her notebook and scribbled down the appointments, then, heart thumping, rose from the chair on wobbly legs. ‘I’m done,’ she whispered. ‘We can go now.’

‘Did you find anything useful?’ Tobias’s face was striped black and grey by the moonlight seeping through the slatted door. Charlie was too busy shivering to reply. They were inside the enormous airing cupboard in the east wing, drawn to its warmth like moths to candlelight. The cloudless night had grown bitterly cold.

She pushed her back against the giant cylinder of hot water and gave a violent shudder as its warmth penetrated her clothes and eased into her bones. The cupboard had been designed to keep hundreds of sheets, towels and pillowcases free of damp, and the cylinder had supplied hot water for the baths of the guests and dignitaries who no longer visited the Castle. The hundreds of sheets were now merely dozens, and there was plenty of room for two freezing children.

‘I don’t know. Names mostly. Peter can figure out what to do with it. They wanted a list of contacts. I’ll give it to Nell tomorrow.’

‘No,’ said Tobias. ‘Nell can’t get out the Castle any easier than you. O’Dair gave her the one day off already; she won’t do more – she ain’t the charitable sort.’

‘Are you going to take it to Peter then?’

‘Nope. He don’t want that.’ Tobias grinned a stripy
grin. ‘Don’t think he trusts me overmuch. He does have a point: Windlass has got more spies in the City than fleas on a beggar. You never know who’s watching. No, Nell’s got a better idea.’

‘What?’

‘The messenger tubes.’

‘But they only work inside the Castle.’

‘Not all of them. A few are direct lines into the City. The one in Windlass’s office, for example. And the one in your mum’s laboratory.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Nell’s been doing her own bit of spying. Well, she asked Mr Moleglass. But she thought to, and we didn’t. Apparently, your mum used the pneumatic messenger in her laboratory to chat with other scientists in the City. It’s a direct line to the Exchange. Peter’s had someone working in the Exchange for years. His bloke will divert any message coming from your mother’s laboratory from now on, and take it straight to the Resistance. So all we have to do is get back in the lab.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Come on, Charlie. I gotta get some sleep. Tomorrow after lunch, like we done before.’

He had opened the airing cupboard door and was climbing through when she remembered. ‘Wait! That bottle I gave you. Did you give it to Maria?’

‘Oh,’ he said, turning round and fishing in his pocket. ‘I nearly forgot. Yeah, I gave it to her. Here it is if you
want it back.’ He dropped it into her hand.

‘Well? Come on. What did she say? What is it?’

Tobias sighed, deep and slow. ‘Where’d you get this stuff from, anyway?’

‘Never mind that! What’s in it?’

‘Do you want to know what Maria said or don’t you?’ Exhaustion underlined every word, but so did stubbornness. She gave up.

‘All right. It’s my father’s medicine. The stuff O’Dair makes him take.’ In the slatted moonlight, she saw him wince. ‘What is it?’ she cried.

‘It’s not good,’ he said slowly. ‘That stuff – it does things to your brain. Makes you dreamy. So you don’t care about nothing. She’s drugging him, Charlie. I’m sorry.’

‘Charlie?’ The voice came again, from a long way away. Charlie stared ahead of her. Not looking. Not listening. She felt like she was carved from a block of wood. Only her heart pounding in her ears told her she was not. She would destroy Alistair Windlass for this. And she had the means to do it right here in her notebook.

‘Charlie?’

‘Go away.’

‘I’m not going till you’re all right.’

‘Go away!’ The numbness was fading, and she was beginning to hurt. She didn’t want him here. She didn’t want anyone.

‘Charlie?’ His voice was gentle. He reached out and
touched her shoulder. She hit him. She punched out with her left fist and hit him somewhere in the face. It hurt her hand, and she heard him cry out. Felt him jerk back.

‘Dammit, girl! You…’ He paused.

‘Go away.’ Her voice was a stone in the silence.

He went.

She sat and waited for tears to come. She wanted to cry because she had hit Tobias when he was trying to be kind. She wanted to cry for herself. Most of all, she wanted to cry for her father. But the pain was too fierce for tears. It burnt them to ash.

After a while, she crawled out of the airing cupboard and began the journey up the long winding staircase to her bedroom.

Charlie woke early. She felt numb, inside and out. She looked at herself in the mirror as she brushed her hair. Her face looked strangely stiff. She needed to see Mr Moleglass. Now. Before lessons.

It was still dark as she descended the endless stairs. The Castle clock chimed seven as she climbed inside the dumbwaiter. She hardly noticed the journey into deeper darkness. The butler would be awake: he still woke at five every morning, even though he had no work waiting for him. But he would not be expecting her. She knocked on his door, and it opened at once. This was so unusual that Charlie’s numbness was pierced with a brief jolt of surprise.

Mr Moleglass stood aside for her to enter. The first thing she saw was Tobias. His right eye was bruised purple and red and swollen half-shut. She winced at the sight and turned back towards the door, the dust, the journey up through darkness. But before she could leave, Mr Moleglass’s arms folded round her.

He held her gently, as though she were a child of three who had fallen and hurt herself. The numbness shattered, and she began to cry. She cried for a long time, and when she had finished, he pulled the pristine white handkerchief
from his breast pocket and handed it to her.

‘I am so sorry, Charlie,’ he said. She looked up and saw that his seal’s eyes were sadder than they had ever been. His face looked thinner, older. ‘Tobias has told me about the drug which is given to your father. I can only beg your forgiveness.’

She stared at him. She must have misunderstood. She looked at Tobias, but he was frowning at the floor. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, looking back at Moleglass. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

A look of pain crossed his face. ‘But I am responsible. Oh no,’ he said, as she gasped in disbelief, ‘not for the drug in the medicine. No. I am responsible for Mrs O’Dair.’

Charlie gazed at him, speechless. What could he mean?

‘Forgive me, Charlie. It’s my fault she is here. Perhaps it is even my fault that she has grown so dark inside. I ask myself that question every day. She was different when I first knew her.’ He looked at Charlie and shook his head at her incomprehension. He groaned. ‘She is my wife, Charlie. She married me because I was the butler here. She married me and persuaded me to give her the job as housekeeper.’

‘B-but…her name isn’t Moleglass,’ Charlie said, as though this fact would wash away what she had just heard.

He smiled at her sadly. ‘It is the custom, in the case of servants marrying each other, for the woman to keep her maiden name. Particularly if she holds a position of
authority. She is indeed my wife, Charlie, although we have not lived as man and wife since I first became aware of her scheming.

‘But even so, I was not strong enough to cast her off completely, to repudiate her and leave the Castle for a dangerous and hungry world. I’m far too fond of my own comfort for that! And I added to my store of comfort by telling myself that I could not abandon you. That I might prove to be of some small use. But I deluded myself. I have never been able to influence her treatment of you in the slightest, although I have pleaded and argued with her countless times over the years. All I was ever able to do was feed you occasionally, and teach you chess. It is pitiful!’ He groaned again, staring in front of him, his face pale and set. ‘But this…this I will not tolerate!’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. The numbness had come back, and her head was singing, but it seemed important to find out.

‘Tobias has told me about the pistol,’ Mr Moleglass said. ‘You should have come to me at once instead of waiting till morning! And now I discover that she has been drugging the King! I will visit her. Force her to listen to reason!’

‘How can you stop her? She won’t pay you any mind.’ Charlie heard the contempt in her voice and watched Moleglass wince.

‘I will threaten to leave,’ said Mr Moleglass, looking at his hands and smoothing his gloves with the tip of a
finger. His hands shook. ‘Surprisingly, perhaps, she does not want that. She has always hoped our estrangement would be temporary. She is…fond of me, as some women are of their lap dogs.’ He shuddered.

As soon as Mr Moleglass’s door closed behind them, Tobias caught hold of her arm. ‘There’s no point in blaming him, Charlie.’

They stood in the dust of the cellars, in a puddle of early morning light that had struggled through one of the grimy windows at the top of the wall. ‘I don’t,’ she said.

‘Tell that to your mirror. Your face is a study.’

She yanked her arm away. ‘And how long have you known…about him and O’Dair?’

‘Don’t you go blaming me, neither. What’s between Mr M and me is none of your business. He’s a good man, Charlie. He cares for us both, and he’s done the best he can by us. You can’t ask no more.’ He paused. ‘It’s more than some get from their own fathers.’

Charlie gasped. She stared at him in disbelief. She couldn’t believe he had said it. And she couldn’t believe how much it hurt. ‘How dare you!’ she whispered. ‘How dare you say such a rotten, horrible…when you know it’s not even his fault! I’m glad I gave you a black eye! I’d like to give you another. I hate you, Tobias Petch!’ She whirled around to leave, slipped in the dust and fell onto her hands and knees.

‘
You self-centred little idiot!
’

Charlie stared up at him in surprise. Tobias was shaking. His eyes blazed in his white face. She realised she had finally achieved one of her life’s ambitions. She had made Toby Petch lose his temper.

‘You think everything is about you, don’t you?’ he shouted, his face twisted with fury. ‘I wasn’t talking about
your
father. What sort of person do you think I am? I was talking about
mine
!’

Too shocked to make a sound, she watched him turn his back and stalk away into the dust.

The spade coughed as it bit through the frozen sod.
Hack! Hack! Hack!
The noise echoed through the garden. She followed the sound and found him standing in a hole up to his knees, double digging the trench for next year’s runner beans.

‘What are you doing out here?’ Tobias growled up at her. It was only a few hours since she had seen him, but it might have been years. His voice was cold. His black eye glowed in the sunlight. ‘Foss is disinfecting the greenhouse, but he’ll be checking up on me soon enough.’

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you.’ He turned back to his trench, stabbed at a lump of rusty earth. ‘Go on. Get out of here before you get caught. We’ve got enough trouble already.’

‘But I want to say I’m sorry! For hitting you and…for what I said. I’m sorry your stepfather was rotten to you.’

He stopped shovelling but didn’t look at her. ‘He’s dead. It don’t matter.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Someone stuck a knife in him and tipped him in the canals.’

Charlie gasped. ‘Why?’

Tobias shrugged. This time he did turn to face her. ‘He was a thief. Fell out with someone he did a job with. Trusted the wrong person. That makes him a fool. A dead fool.’ His voice was as bitter as the frost. ‘Now get out of here. Don’t worry; I’ll be along later just like we planned.’

He turned his back, stabbed the earth again. Charlie watched him for a moment. Had he accepted her apology? She was surprised how much it meant to her that he should.

A creaky voice shouted for Tobias. Fossy was coming. Charlie turned and ran.

Her mother’s laboratory still bore traces of their previous visit: footprints scuffed the dusty floor, tracked around the room. Charlie ignored them, going straight to the pneumatic messenger. She had written two messages to Peter this morning. One contained the list of Windlass’s appointments. She would send it if she could, but she didn’t dare let Tobias see it. He might stop her, and she couldn’t take that chance.

He hadn’t spoken to her the whole journey from the scullery to the north attics. The idea of Tobias hating her
made her oddly miserable. She clattered open a message capsule, stuffed a folded paper inside.

‘Here. Let me have a look at that.’ He plucked the tube from her hands, pulled out the paper and read it. His black eye was turning purple and yellow, the colour of rotten bananas. Charlie winced. ‘All right.’ He slid the paper back inside the tube and handed it to her. ‘Send it.’

There wasn’t going to be a chance to send Windlass’s appointments to Peter. Not unless she could get rid of Tobias. She slotted the brass capsule into the messenger tube, and he reached up and pulled the lever. There was a hiss, a whoosh, a faint clatter, and the capsule was sucked along twisty rubber tubes towards the City and the Exchange.

‘Right. I’ll be off now then.’ Tobias turned to go.

‘Go ahead. I want to stay for a while,’ Charlie said. ‘Study some of the research papers that are still here. I didn’t have a chance to more than glance at them last time. There might be clues to what my mother was working on.’

‘Windlass’ll have snaffled anything useful and taken it away years ago. If your mum was daft enough to leave anything behind, which I doubt.’

‘I know. But at least I can find out more about her science generally. She was studying synthesis. I don’t even know what that means.’

He sighed in exasperation. ‘Then I gotta stay too! You can’t relock the door.’

‘Just go! The door doesn’t matter!’

‘Don’t be an idiot!’

‘Well, I’m staying here! Do what you want.’ She turned her back and marched to the filing cabinet. Tobias would just have to have one more reason to hate her. With any luck, he’d soon get fed up and leave.

She settled down on the floor to read, ignoring the angry scuffing noises he made as he stalked around the laboratory. When she looked up, a long while later, he was sitting with his back against the electricity generator, doodling in the dust of the floor with his finger. She groaned, rubbed her neck, and put the paper she had been reading back in the filing cabinet. Trying to make sense of all the strange words was hard work.

‘Well? Found anything? Only it must have been over half an hour. I gotta go!’

‘Fine!’ she snapped. ‘I’m staying here.’

They both heard it: the squeak of the stairwell door. Charlie leapt to her feet, knowing, even as her eyes scanned the room, that there was nowhere to hide. Footsteps now, in the corridor. Tobias gestured for her to join him. She darted across the room and squatted beside him. She peered around the side of the generator but jerked back at once and hunched herself as small as possible. She was shivering with shock. She had just seen the laboratory door open and Alistair Windlass stride into the room, an unsheathed swordstick in his hand.