Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

“Then I guess we should start looking around.” Emma tried to sound excited at the prospect, but she felt exhausted. No sleep the night before, the long trip on the train, her worry about Cristina, had all sapped her energy.

Julian looked at her critically. “I’ll make tea,” he said. “That’ll help.”

She crinkled her nose at him. “Tea? Tea is your solution? You’re not really even British! You spent two months in England! How did they brainwash you?”

“You don’t like coffee, and you need caffeine.”

“I get my caffeine the way right-thinking people get it.” Emma threw up her hands and stalked into the office. “From chocolate!”

She began to pull the drawers out of the desk. They were empty. She examined the bookshelves; nothing interesting there, either. She started to cross the room to the closet and heard something creak. She turned back and knelt down, shoving the rag rug out of the way.

The floor was stripped oak. Just under the rug was a square of lighter wood, and the faint black lines of seaming where the square outline of a trapdoor was visible. Emma took her stele out and placed the tip against it.

“Open,” she whispered, drawing the rune.

There was a tearing sound. The square of wood ripped away and crumbled into chunks of sawdust, tumbling into the hole she’d uncovered. It was slightly bigger on all sides than she’d thought. In it were several small books, and a large, leather-bound tome that Emma squinted at in puzzlement. Was it some kind of spell book?

“Did you just blow something up?” Julian came in, his cheek smeared with something black. He glanced over Emma’s shoulder and whistled. “Your classic secret floor compartment.”

“Help me take this stuff out of it. You get the giant book.” Emma picked up the three smaller volumes; they were all bound in worn leather with a stamped MFB on the spines, their pages rough-edged.

“It’s not a book,” Julian said in a slightly odd voice. “It’s a portfolio.”

He retrieved it and carried it into the living room, Emma hurrying after him. Two steaming cups of tea stood on the kitchen island, and a fire was blazing away. Emma realized that the black stuff on Julian’s face was probably ash. She pictured him kneeling here, starting a fire for them, patient and thoughtful, and felt a wave of overwhelming tenderness for him.

He was already standing at the island, gently opening the portfolio. He caught his breath. The first picture was a watercolor of Chapel Cliff, seen from a distance. The colors and shapes leaped out vividly; Emma could feel cool sea air on her neck, hear the cry of gulls.

“It’s lovely,” she said, sitting down opposite him on a tall stool.

“Annabel did it.” He touched her signature in the right-hand corner. “I had no idea she was an artist.”

“I guess art runs in your blood,” Emma said. Julian didn’t look up. He was turning the pages with careful, almost reverent hands. There were many more seascapes: Annabel seemed to have loved capturing the ocean and the curves of land that bordered it. Annabel had also drawn dozens of pictures of the Blackthorn manor house in Idris, lingering on the softness of its golden stone, the beauty of its gardens, the vines of thorns that wrapped the gates. Like the mural on the wall of your room, Emma wanted to say to Julian, but she didn’t.

Julian’s hand stopped on none of those, though. He paused instead on a sketch that was unmistakably of the cottage they were in at that moment. A wooden fence surrounded it, and Polperro was visible in the distance, the Warren crawling up the opposite hill, crowded with houses.

Malcolm leaned against the fence, looking impossibly young—he clearly had not yet stopped aging. Though it was a pencil sketch, somehow the drawing caught the fairness of his hair, the oddity of his eyes, but they had been rendered in such loving lines that he looked beautiful. He seemed about to smile.

“I think that they lived here two hundred years ago, probably in hiding from the Clave,” Julian said. “There’s something about a place you’ve been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone . . . they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.”

The firelight touched the side of his face, his hair, turning them gold. Emma felt tears rise in the back of her throat and fought them back.

“There’s a reason Malcolm didn’t just let this place fall into ruins. He loved it. He cared about it because it was a place he’d been with her.”

Emma picked up her tea. “And maybe a place he wanted to bring her back to?” she said. “After he raised her?”

“Yes. I think Malcolm raised Annabel’s body nearby, that he planned to hide with her here the way he had so long ago.” Julian seemed to shake off the intense mood that had come on him, like a wet dog shaking water off its fur. “There’re some guidebooks to Cornwall on the shelves—I’ll go through them. What have you got there? What’s in the books?”

Emma opened the first one. Diary of Malcolm Fade Blackthorn, Age 8, was scrawled on the inside cover. “By the Angel,” she said. “His diaries.”

She began to read out loud from the first page:

“My name is Malcolm Fade Blackthorn. I chose the first two names myself, but the last was given to me to use by the Blackthorns, who have kindly taken me in. Felix says I am a ward, though I don’t know what that means. He also says I am a warlock. When he says it, I think it is probably not a good thing to be, but Annabel says not to worry, that we are all born what we are and can’t change it. Annabel says . . .”

She broke off. This was the man who’d murdered her parents; but it was also a child’s voice, helpless and wondering, echoing down through the centuries. Two hundred years—the diary wasn’t dated, but it must have been written in the early 1800s.

“?‘Annabel says,’?” she whispered. “He fell in love with her so early.”

Julian cleared his throat and stood up. “Looks like it,” he said. “We’ll have to search the diary for mentions of places that were important to both of them.”

“It’s a lot of diary,” Emma said, glancing at the three volumes.

“Then I guess we’ve got a lot of reading ahead of us,” said Julian. “I’d better make more tea.”

Emma’s wail of “Not tea!” followed him into the kitchen.

*

The London Shadow Market was located at the southern end of London Bridge. Kit was disappointed to find that London Bridge was just a dull concrete edifice without towers. “I thought it would be like it is in the postcards,” he lamented.

“You’re thinking of Tower Bridge,” Livvy informed him archly as they began scrambling down a set of narrow stone steps to reach the space below the London Bridge railway lines, which crisscrossed overhead. “That’s the one in all the pictures. The real London Bridge was knocked down a long time ago; this one’s the modern replacement.”

A sign advertised some kind of daytime fruit and vegetable market, but that had long since closed. The white-painted stalls were battened down tightly, the gates locked. The shadow of Southwark Cathedral loomed over it all, a bulk of glass and stone that blocked their view of the river.