On the mudbank crouched the drughr, animallike, savage, not in the form he had come to know her by, not a pale and beautiful woman, but hulking, and shaggy, fanged in shadow. She was staring at her own reflection in the water, fascinated.
Behind her, huddled in the low bracken, were the two children she had asked for. The two children he had brought her. He could sense her eagerness.
“Is there no other way?” he said quietly.
She did not reply.
The children were maybe thirteen, fourteen years of age—a boy and a girl, siblings maybe—intercepted on their way to Cairndale. They would be talents, of course. Located and sent north from Mrs. Harrogate in London, just as he’d used to do, as he’d done when he found the Japanese girl, the dustworker Komako, and that little invisible urchin. Remembering that, he felt a faint twinge of regret, of sadness. Then it was gone. He’d deliberately not asked the names of these kids, nor anything about them. He didn’t want to know. He knew he should feel sick, seeing them, knowing what the drughr would do to them. But he didn’t. They seemed curiously insubstantial, as if he could see time passing through them, like light, as if they might dissolve at any moment. Truly, he had been in that other world too long.
He was bonded now to the drughr. She was a part of him, as he was of her. That is how he thought of it. He could feel her desires, her fears, just as if they were his own, or almost so, just as if they were the shadow sides of his own longings. He felt, for instance, her raw hunger for the two children, for the power in their talents. She wasn’t strong, in this world. Not yet. She would absorb the two children in her feeding. Drain them. And then she would do what she needed to do: weaken the glyphic’s wards at Cairndale so that Jacob could smuggle the baby out.
You are certain you can get inside?
“I have it arranged,” he replied.
The child is everything, Jacob. You must bring him to me. You must not fail me.
Jacob met her eye and nodded.
Him, meaning the baby. The boy without a name, the shining boy. The child whom Henry Berghast had stolen and was keeping now at Cairndale, locked away, to use, as Jacob feared, for his own sinister purposes. He didn’t know all that child could do but he knew enough to fear its life would be an awful one and though he felt very little that was human and pitying he did feel for the baby, had felt for him, had held him in his arms and stroked his soft cheek and he’d felt it, a kinship, something close to love, and he’d thought: You are like me. We are the same. And he’d promised that baby right then that he would not suffer a childhood like Jacob himself had suffered.
The drughr knew none of that. And so Jacob was afraid, afraid the drughr would find out what he really intended, his betrayal, and afraid too that he’d fail, and what that would mean for the baby, and for himself.
For he didn’t plan to bring the baby to her at all. He would steal the shining boy away, far away, to some place where no one could hurt him, not Berghast, not the drughr, not anyone at all.
The sky darkened. The hour drew near. In the dusk the drughr turned toward the children. They were huddled together, staring at her in terror. They had already shouted themselves hoarse.
Go now, she said to Jacob, dismissing him. I will interrupt the wards as long as I can.
He went.
There were no screams, no cries from the two children. But as he climbed away from the river, making for Cairndale and the baby there, Jacob heard the wet ripping sounds of the drughr, feeding.
* * *
In a large well-appointed room, overlooking the deep loch, in the upper east wing of Cairndale Manor, there came a knocking at the door. The nursemaid rose from the window seat and from the cradle she was rocking. She was still a girl herself, in most ways. She buttoned her blouse. Her breasts ached, heavy with milk, and she hesitated tiredly and tucked her black hair up under her bonnet. It had been the envy of the village girls until recently. She knew the baby would sleep now until she slept and then he’d awake and cry and only settle when she walked the length of the room again, crooning to him. Yet he was a dear and sweet thing all the same. She drew the curtains around the crib, around the baby sleeping warm within. Her name was Susan Crowley, and she’d worked in the kitchens at Cairndale until a year ago when she was herself with child. That was because of a dairyman’s apprentice down in the valley, who was himself married; and though she’d done what she could to rid herself of the pregnancy in the French manner, nothing had worked, and she’d carried the baby to term. And then she’d given birth, and fallen at once in love with her tiny daughter and sure enough, that was when she was taken from her, taken by the good Lord like a kind of punishment. For that wee girl slept now in a churchyard in Aberdeen, dead of fever nine months ago, and Susan had cried herself sore every night after and still did sometimes, though she’d been engaged again here, and lucky enough for it, engaged for seven months now as a wet nurse to a foundling boy.
A boy unlike any other.
Oh, she’d seen him shine that strange beautiful blue shine, of course. She didn’t know its meaning or its cause. There’d been no harm in it, no danger that she ever saw. Only beauty. But she’d seen how Dr. Berghast looked at the baby, the fear and the fascination flickering in his eyes, and she’d known: the child was special.
The knocking at the door repeated, soft.
It was Dr. Berghast. He stood in the hall, the sconces casting his craggy face in shadow. For a long moment he only looked at her. She didn’t like the man, never had. It wasn’t only his gray eyes, the firelight twinned within them or the eerie way they followed you around a room. It was something else too, some indistinguishable part of him, like a scent, a scent of dark suspicion.
She stood aside as he came in, taking his hat from his outstretched hand.
“He is sleeping, then,” said Berghast, running a palm along his white beard, smoothing his whiskers.
“Yes, sir,” said Susan, dipping.
He swept past. Henry Berghast was tall, powerfully built, immaculate in his dress. He wore his snow-white whiskers long and his hair long over his collar in an old-fashioned style Susan had sometimes seen as a girl on her grandfather and his associates. She knew he was old, far older than he looked, though she did not know his exact age. He was a man of science, it was true; a doctor, no less; but he was also a man of dark proclivities with a sensitivity to the impossible, like everyone at Cairndale. You couldn’t live at the institute without seeing what shouldn’t be seen and understanding the nature of what went on.
Where, exactly, the baby had come from, Berghast did not say. But she had heard rumors, bits of stories, and knew it had something to do with the dustworker no one spoke of, the one named Marber, who frightened the old talents. There were no other babies at Cairndale, never had been; the next youngest talent was nine years old and cut her own meat and changed her own bedding.
Dr. Berghast slowly drew aside the curtain and stood over the crib. He looked at the baby, sleeping there. He had given the boy his own name—Henry—but he never called him by it and neither did she, if only because she thought it didn’t suit him, being the name of a man of ego and severity, and more like a stamp of ownership than a person’s name.
“Would you like to hold him, sir?” she said now.
But there was wickedness in her, asking that, and she knew it, for she knew the answer already. Dr. Berghast had never once held the baby, nor even touched him, and there was a quick flash of alarm in his face as he registered her words. Then he turned away.
“The child looks healthy, Miss Crowley,” he murmured. “You are doing well. I am grateful.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It cannot be easy, being alone here.”
“I don’t think he minds it, sir.”
“I meant yourself, Miss Crowley.”
Had any other person said such a thing, she’d have thought it a kindness at best, rather too forward at worst; but with Dr. Berghast she knew it was neither, merely a statement of fact.