She withdrew slowly, thinking about it. And then she made her way back up to the kitchens. A serving girl, Mary, exclaimed in surprise at Abigail’s emerging from the cellars, but Abigail had little patience for it.
“Send for Mr. Smythe,” she said sharply. “And Mrs. Harrogate, if you can find her. Tell them to bring lanterns. There is something in the cellars that must be seen to. Hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl, catching the tone in her voice.
Abigail Davenshaw listened to the girl’s shoes clatter away across the floor. What she was thinking was that some of the children, the young talents, must have descended into the tunnels on a lark. But it would be dangerous, she knew, and if they became lost …
It did not occur to her—not in that moment, at least—that the tunnel mouth had been opened for the very opposite reason: because something had come in.
* * *
Quickly, now.
Jacob hurried up the stairs, through the kitchens, along the back passages to the servants’ stairs, up two more flights to the rooms at the top of the east wing. It felt strange, being back. He knew these halls, these rooms, the very shape of the manor as if he had always lived in it and never been away, even now, even with its differences, a strange shelf, a new wallpaper, a framed watercolor over a bureau that had not been there before.
He was surprised at how angry it made him. But surprised, too, by the longing that came over him as he crept through the dim halls. He saw no one. But he could feel through the walls the sleeping talents, the young ones dreaming of their unlived lives, and the old ones, nearly dead now, dry and thin as paper. They meant nothing to him. They had done nothing to help him, to bring him back from that other world, to offer him refuge when he’d glimpsed the true nature of the drughr and recoiled in fear. Somewhere ahead he could hear Walter, moving with a surprising stealth, his lantern shuttered now, stifling a cough now and then. Perhaps the man was not as useless as he seemed. Jacob himself walked calmly, with long slow strides, as if these rooms and this manor were his own.
But he was not calm, not really. He was listening with all his powers for a particular footfall. For somewhere among all of it, he knew, stalked Henry Berghast, restless, fierce, suspicious.
He’d known men like him, even as a boy, even on the streets of Vienna. Men who wanted what they wanted and let nothing get in the way, neither pity nor scorn nor human frailty. His brother, Bertolt, had fallen prey to such a man. Herr Gould, their sweep boss, had a huge round belly like a drum, and a red face, and hands the size of shovel blades. When he heard Bertolt had got stuck in a chimney across the city, he’d come and tied ropes around the boy and dragged him clear, despite his screams of pain. Jacob had tried to get up to stop it but he couldn’t, he was too little, there were men in the gathering crowd who held him back, and it was raining that day and his talent just wasn’t strong enough to do anything. Bertolt came out dead, his head turned backward. And Herr Gould had carted his twin brother away and dumped him in an alley among the trash when no one was watching, no one who mattered, that is, because Jacob and the other sweeps were there to see it. Jacob had sat with his brother’s body among the filth for hours, while night fell around him, and when he rose at last he wasn’t the same boy.
That’s how he thought of it, remembered it, now. If it was the truth or not, who could say. But in his mind it was his brother’s death that changed him, that opened him, in time, to the drughr.
He’d laid his brother out flat with his little hands crossed on his chest and cleaned the soot and grime from his face and neck and then he’d got to his feet, only just nine years old, and gone in search of Herr Gould. Blind with fury. He was turned away from the drinking houses and brothels but he found the man at last in a gambling den off the Unterstrass. The man at the door took him for a messenger lad and let him through and Jacob stood in the roar and the darkness with his fists clenched and he watched Herr Gould laughing and drinking at his cards and whatever it was that was in him, whatever evil, or fury, boiled up out of him, and that talent he’d had for twisting the dust just exploded. He felt the dust come to him, swirl around his fists, and a pain and cold shot through his arms and made his head swim. He lifted his hands. His cheeks were wet.
And then the dust was shooting out from his outspread fingers, wrapping itself in ropes of darkness around the big man, his chest, his throat. And it started to squeeze.
The lanterns flickered all around the room. By then the patrons were falling over themselves, overturning tables, scrambling to get out of the way, the prostitutes screaming in fear. And Herr Gould’s face reddened, then purpled, and his eyes half burst from their sockets, and the force of the dust had lifted him clean off his feet so that his big-knuckled hands were clawing at the air in horror.
When Jacob let him go, he fell in pieces to the floor. And Jacob turned, emptier even than before, and went out into the city, truly alone.
Somehow Berghast had heard of it. Somehow he’d come looking. Jacob had thought at first that the man had come to save him, but he hadn’t, he knew that now. He’d come to use him, as he used everyone. Little Jacob Marber, dustworker, killer of men, was to have been his weapon.
Walter was waiting for him in a small alcove shadowed from the wall sconce nearby and he licked his lips and pointed to the nursemaid’s door.
“It’s in there, Jacob,” the man whispered. “But the nurse is with it. She’s always with it. Don’t never leave it alone.”
“He is a baby, Walter. Not an it. And why ever would she leave him alone?”
The man nodded obsequiously. “Yes, yes, of course, why ever would she, hm?”
But Jacob was unnerved all the same. Berghast had put the baby in Jacob’s old room. He murmured instructions to Walter, telling how the man was to distract the nursemaid, and then he watched as Walter rapped softly on the door and stuck his hands in his pockets, then took them out, then smoothed his greasy hair.
Jacob slid forward, soundless.
The nursemaid who answered the door was young, a girl still, big-boned and black-haired. She watched Walter with a wary politeness as he spoke, asking after her, gesturing past her at something in the room, something needing repair, then stepping briskly through despite her protestations.
As she turned in irritation—“I beg your pardon, Mr. Laster, what do you think you are doing, I did not invite you in, sir, the wee babe is sleeping”—Jacob drew a fine cloud of dust around him, like a veil of darkness, and let himself silently in behind her. Then he crept along the perimeter of his old room. The nursemaid had lit only the two candles and it was easy for him to keep to the shadows.
Walter was making some nervous joke about a clock on the mantel, laughing weirdly.
Jacob slipped over to the curtain, moved it just slightly. Creeping like a nightmare toward the cradle. He held his breath. There, he saw, was the tangle of blankets.
And there, the helpless child.
31
THE BEGINNING
The fire crackled in the grate. Henry Berghast leaned back from his desk, uneasy, dissatisfied, unable to do any work at all. He screwed back on the lid of his ink bottle and drummed his fingers on his closed journal and then he put on his hat and took up a lantern and went down to the underground passage that led across to the orsine. If the drughr were to come, it would of necessity be through there.
He walked swiftly. He had not informed Bailey of his going. No matter.