Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (3 page)

He wouldn’t.

“The child won’t be joining us?” asked Mr. Havelock, tucking the fresh, beautiful flower back in with the rest.

Mrs. Foster laughed. “Oh, no. This way, please.”

Mr. Havelock moved, slowly, stare unwavering. It made Jack want to fidget, but he stayed still.

She led Mr. Havelock into the parlor, closing tight the door on exclamations, introductions, her friends like chattering birds, lofty in their trees of wealth and leisure.

There wasn’t much time. Too soon, Mrs. Pond would come looking for him, a thrashing promised for not coming when called, though she never did it. Bootlaces curled like snakes on the tile, left behind as he padded across the floor, silent, to crouch on his knees, press his eye to the keyhole.

Inside was dark as night, a single candle on a table the one winking star. Heavy velvet curtains had been drawn, and seven straight-backed chairs sat in a circle on the edge of the faint pool of light. If he squinted, he could just make out parts of Mother and Mr. Havelock facing the door,
but the rest were just blurs of elegance, as her friends had always been to him.

“Not
everything
has a soul, surely,” said one of them, in a voice like thick treacle. “Why, these diamonds are beautiful, but they are not
alive.
”

“Oh?”

A glittering hairpin, shaped as a bird, took off from her head to swoop once around the room. Jack fell back from the keyhole, and by the time he righted himself, the bird had returned to her hair, perfectly still and ordinary.

A few of the women tittered. Mr. Havelock leaned forward, the spectacles shimmering darkly, as if they were catching the candle smoke, trapping it within.

“A parlor trick,” he said. “In fact, you are right, good woman, but most things do. Regardless, we are not here to summon the souls of your pretty jewels, even if they had them.”

More tittering.

“Concentration is essential if the spirits are to cooperate!” he said. Jack turned his head to press his ear to the keyhole. Mr. Havelock sounded . . . angry. Angry at the silly giggles and trying to hide it.

Footsteps tapped in the kitchen. Mrs. Pond was coming. He wouldn’t get to see anything interesting, which just wasn’t fair at all. Even Mr. Havelock had asked if Jack
would be joining the summoning, but Mother didn’t want him.

“You must be dedicated to your goal,” said Mr. Havelock sternly. “Willing to do whatever is required to obtain that which you seek.” Not angry now. Jack peered through the keyhole again. Now Mr. Havelock sounded like a thirsty man who had just had a glass of wine set before him. A solemn cloud hung over the table.

The kitchen door opened.

Mr. Havelock’s head snapped up, looking past the women, right to the keyhole. Jack blinked, scrambling back on the chessboard tiles, sure it had been a trick of the light. An errant flick of the candle from an unstoppered draft, catching the dark glass and making Mr. Havelock’s eyes flash with flame. A trick of the light, he thought, as Mrs. Pond hoisted him by the elbow to drag him away.

•  •  •

Jack’s bedroom was large and blue and hadn’t changed at all since he’d been a baby, except that a bed stood where his cradle used to be. Other rooms went from green to white to hideous floral wallpapers at his mother’s whim, but this she left alone. Or simply forgot. It had been his grandfather’s room once, long ago, but Jack had never met him and didn’t know if it’d been different back then.

Bookshelves of fairy stories, dictionaries, and the kind
of thick tomes that people feel they should read but never do lined one of the walls. Jack had, in fact, read most of them, but the fairy stories were his favorites, filled with dragons and unicorns and phoenixes and princes with swords who saved the land.

Windows took up another wall, rows of toys the rest of the space not occupied by his bed. His favorites were the toy soldiers that had once belonged to his father, mixed in with newer ones so Jack could build proper armies of age and rank. Young corporals who did all the fighting under the direction of colonels who would be fat if not for that they were made of wood. He wondered if they did have souls, like Mr. Havelock said.

The room had taken on a dusty, unused air since Jack went off to school, only slightly stirred by his return for various holidays. A school trunk stood empty by the wardrobe, ready to be filled again. Headmaster Adams and the rest of Jack’s teachers might be strict in their quest to raise decent, educated, upstanding young men, ready for the rigors of London business and society, but he slept better there, in the dormitory he shared with five other boys, than in this big, lonely room he had all to himself.

“Come downstairs, Jack, and no dawdling, mind,” Mrs. Pond called from the landing below. More cake, he was
sure. She was already returning to the kitchen when he left his dull room for the dull, darkly paneled stairway, her round body and snow-white head descending down through the dull, dull house.

“Hands washed,” she commanded, wiping her own plump ones on a floury apron. He was already lathering the soap, making sure to clean his fingernails because she was watching.

A loud thump echoed through the house. Mrs. Pond clicked her tongue but said nothing.

“Do you think that was a ghost?” Jack asked.

“I think you should eat your cake and drink your milk.”

He took a bite. The kitchen glowed with a lucky shaft of sun, determined enough to break through the gray haze ever present over the city, particularly in summer.

Mr. Havelock was in the parlor again, as he had been many days since that first. Jack caught glimpses of him, but always felt that tingle down his back, as if he were the one being watched with fiery eyes. Every time, the spiritualist asked Jack’s mother if the boy would be taking part. Every time, she said no.

Another thump. The chatelaine hanging from Mrs. Pond’s waist jangled as she shuddered, keys and scissors and thimble swinging.

Perhaps she was frightened of them, but they didn’t
frighten Jack. It was interesting, the talk of ghosts and spirits and other worlds.

He liked the idea. There was always the chance those worlds were more interesting than this one.

Wisely, he didn’t say so to Mrs. Pond.

“Your mother would like to know why the gramophone isn’t working.”

Jack shrugged. “A ghost must’ve got to it.”

At this, Mrs. Pond smiled in the way that turned her face to an apple left to soften too long. “None of that cheek, you, and fix it.”

“I will,” said Jack sulkily. They’d all be grateful when the needle stopped wobbling. “When will Father be home?” He was careful not to say he had nothing to do; Mrs. Pond had some very tedious ways of keeping him amused, like shining the silver.

“Not until the party,” she said, “and you aren’t to disturb them. Baroness Watson is coming, and such a job I’ve had getting everything up to scratch for royalty, I can tell you.” She turned back to a chopping board full of vegetables, a large knife in her hand.

Royalty. Well, la-di-da. Jack didn’t see what made them so special. Sitting around all day with a crown on one’s head couldn’t be particularly difficult. Perhaps the crown was heavy and they went to bed with aching heads every evening.

Behind the parlor door, someone screamed, another laughed. The knife struck—
thwack
,
thwack
—potato slices falling to either side. Jack toyed with the crumbs on his plate.

A loud buzzing filled the room. “Oh, my stars!” Mrs. Pond said this every time. Sometimes, she would mutter, “
Infernal contraption
,” beneath her breath when she thought no one could hear. Knife in hand, she crossed the kitchen to a bank of round buttons set into the wall, pressing the one for the parlor. The light behind it faded to nothing. “Verity!”

“Coming, marm.” The maid burst through the cellar door, brushing grime from her apron, and hurried out to the parlor.

Good-byes filtered in as the ladies, full of an afternoon’s amusement, set off to their own homes, husbands, and children. Jack heard his mother promising tea on this day or that, or excursions to the new milliner about whom everyone was saying such complimentary things. He waited for Verity to return, dart back to her business in the cellar, and made his own way to the parlor, for he had not seen his mother since breakfast.

But she was not alone.

Voices spilled through the closed door, poured from the keyhole. Jack put his eye to it, as he did so often, to see her
wringing her hands, large rings glinting in the light from the open drapes.

“He has always been an odd child,” she said. Jack scowled. He was
not
odd. Just because she liked to spend her time giggling with other silly women rather than read or play chess and thought tinkering with clocks and gramophones was a job for common workmen . . . And how would she know he was odd, even if he were? She had sent him away to school. She scarcely saw him.

“Of course, of course,” said Mr. Havelock soothingly. “I detected it the moment I saw him. You understand that naturally this would make him a good candidate.”

“An apprenticeship, you say?”

Jack thought his ears might pop clean from his head, so hard was he straining to hear.

“He would be well taken care of,” said Mr. Havelock, so silkily that Jack’s mother did not seem to notice it wasn’t quite an answer to her question. She paced the room, moving in and out of view from the keyhole. A swish of purple velvets and lace, back and forth.

“Clearly the movement is only gaining strength,” she said. “Why, the Society counts among its number a vast array of influential, prominent persons, myself included, if you will excuse me.”

“Quite, madam. He would witness untold mysteries,
secrets permitted to only a fortunate few from this world.”

Mrs. Foster wrung her hands again, squeezing the air from Jack’s lungs through the keyhole. Did she want to send him away again, somewhere new, to learn from Mr. Havelock, who said he wasn’t a magician but Jack was not so sure?

“Sadly, my husband, while indulgent, isn’t nearly so forward-thinking as ourselves.” She turned from the window, so Jack could see her face, pretty, distant. “Far more concerned with the material, the tangible. No,” she said, shaking her head. “I mustn’t. His father would be furious. Generations of Fosters have attended that school, successes every one.” Her back straightened.

“I assure you—” Mr. Havelock began.

“No,” she said. “Strange he may be, but he will stay where he is.”

Mr. Havelock did not like this. Jack squinted. Those dark glasses shielded the eyes, but not the tightening of Mr. Havelock’s jaw, the thinning of his lips below his mustache. “You are making a grave error, madam,” he said, and his voice was not silky now. It was a voice with teeth trying not to bite.

“I expect so,” she answered, cool and brittle. “It would not be the first.”

He nodded once. His hat lay on the table beside the single candle, snuffed and smoking, and he picked it up.
Jack scrambled from the door, to the stairs. All the way up he ran, not stopping or caring who heard his thumping, rushing footsteps. She did not want him here, but that was not so very unusual—Jack’s room at school was full of boys whose parents felt thus—but nor would she allow him to learn something truly interesting, more so than maths and Dickens and silly history, as if it mattered a whit what this king or that once said atop a hill. The one time he actually
wished
to be sent away, and she wouldn’t do it. As if she knew and wanted to spite him.

Jack pushed his face into his pillow and hated her.

T
HE SKY GREW
nearly dark as he lay on his bed, waiting for Mrs. Pond to bring his supper on a tray. The toy soldiers gathered a few more flakes of dust on their shelves; the books stayed shut and squeezed together, telling their stories only to themselves between their covers.

The landing creaked, but it was not Mrs. Pond who pushed the door open with her back, hands full of milk, boiled eggs, toast. Jack sat up. Mrs. Foster, lovely in a blue silk dress, stepped inside. She was coming to say she’d changed her mind, and Jack’s heart lifted until he remembered that she didn’t know he’d heard the conversation at all.

“Hello, darling,” she said, staying close to the door, head cocked, listening for the first guests to arrive. “Your clothes are getting too small. I don’t know how I didn’t notice. Mrs. Pond will take you to the outfitters tomorrow.”

“Why won’t you take me?” he asked. “Or Father?”

His mother smiled with very red lips and patted her hair. “Your father has to work, of course.”

“He doesn’t have to,” said Jack. “We are rich enough.” The Foster family had traded in valuable metals for a very long time, metals that built ships and formed rings around ladies’ fingers.

“Don’t be crass,” snapped Mrs. Foster. “The company is a proud family tradition, and it will one day be yours. You should be grateful your father works so hard.” Her voice softened. “And I would take you myself, darling—you know that—but I promised Mrs. Hamilton I would visit before they leave for the continent. Poor Eleanor. She’s had such a difficult time of it recently, what with her father . . . At any rate,” she said, touching a hand to her hair again, “you’ll go with Mrs. Pond, and mind you listen to her. No running off.”