He blinked softly, liquidly. He wet his lips. He was handsome, and frightening.
“There are some few among us, Mrs. Harrogate, old now, who were gifted once, who were born with certain ineradicable … talents.” He searched her face carefully. “The talent to manipulate dead cells, for instance. You’ve seen it, perhaps, in your husband’s work. No? It can appear in many strange forms. It can appear to heal, or to destroy, to suspend life or to resurrect it. It’s never the living tissue that is interfered with. These men and women have lived at Cairndale a long, long time. Since I was a child. Before that, even.”
“Cairndale’s a kind of … hospital?”
“A private clinic, you might call it. Most private.”
Margaret Harrogate, in her widow’s weeds, had stared hard at her visitor, thinking. “You are offering me his job,” she said, confused. “My Mr. Harrogate’s job.”
“Your husband had great faith in you. It was his own wish.”
Dr. Berghast got up to go. She saw the ferns arranged at the windows had not been watered, not in at least a week. From his satchel her visitor produced a thick ream of correspondence between her late husband and himself, tied with twine, and he laid it on the banquette.
“I am trusting in your discretion,” he said at the hat stand. “Whatever you decide.”
She read it slowly by candlelight over the following weeks. The institute, it seemed, occupied a manor house that had been built in the seventeenth century, on the edge of a loch, absorbing the property of an old monastery, all of it some distance northwest of Edinburgh. Dr. Berghast had been raised on its grounds, the son of the old director, of the same name, until he had taken on the role himself. There was much talk in her husband’s letters that she didn’t then understand, talk about an orsine, whatever that was, and the institute’s guests. In time she would come to know more of such matters than she wished. But at that time, as she read, she realized only that she’d seen it once, at a distance, that first summer of her marriage, walking the length of a low crumbling wall that encircled its grounds, arm in arm with her husband. Sunlight, a sky so blue it was nearly black. That was high on a cliff of strange red clay, overlooking a dark loch, and an island beyond, the stone ribs of an ancient monastery just visible on it, and a golden-leaved tree rising up out of the ruins. There was a fine manor house on the landside shore, beyond. A stand of dwarf pines swayed darkly in the wind below. In the stone perimeter stood an archway, built maybe in the fourteenth century, green with moss, etched with strange markings, gated now with a black gate with the Cairndale crest prominent upon it, and it was there she and her young husband had stood, peering through the bars, going no further.
So it had been.
Intrigued, at a loss, she had written to Dr. Berghast that she would indeed be pleased to take on her late husband’s duties. And her strange second life had begun, her life as it had been for nearly thirty years now, her life of secrets and darkness.
Her work did not often take her north, to the institute. On the rare occasions that it did, she would halt the carriage sometimes at the gate, remembering her husband, wondering at the life she might have had. The years passed; she grew old.
Then a new thing appeared, something awful. Dr. Berghast called it a drughr, a creature of shadow, neither dead nor living. She’d already heard rumors by then, of course, hints of strange goings-on at Cairndale, whispers of Dr. Berghast’s experiments. She’d tried to stopper her ears against them. But she herself had glimpsed, on her occasional treks north, how he was changing: she knew he was afraid of something, something unnatural. And so, when he wrote to her about the drughr, warning that it was stalking the young talents, the unfound children, she too was afraid.
Which is how it all started, ten years ago: the findings. Dr. Berghast sent two men to 23 Nickel Street West to work under her instruction. They would locate the children, orphans all. Both were capable men, quiet, grim. And they would bring the orphans to her, squirming in burlap sacks if need be. Their names were Frank Coulton, whom she had met before; and Jacob Marber.
Jacob: there was a time she’d almost pitied him. Found by Dr. Berghast himself on the grim streets of Vienna, plucked out of poverty, gifted a better life. But no one had seen him in more than seven years, not since that terrible night when he’d attacked Cairndale itself. That was when it all went wrong, when he turned against the institute and slaughtered those two children on the banks of the Lye, starting in on those awful unnatural acts, what he did, what he swore he’d do, those acts from which there’s no way back, not when a darkness gets into you and corrodes what you are and leaves you turned inside out, the seams showing. After that he’d vanished, stolen away off the face of the earth. Some said he’d been devoured by the drughr. But Margaret knew otherwise: she knew he’d been seduced away by it, had fallen under its sway, and that he was out there still, stalking the children, like a monster from bedtime stories.
Oh, few things frightened Margaret Harrogate. But Jacob Marber did.
* * *
All this was in Margaret Harrogate’s thoughts as she wrestled Walter out of the hansom, and through the locked iron gate at 23 Nickel Street West, and up the four flights of gloomy stairs to the room she had prepared. She’d employed neither servants nor cooks since the death of her husband on account of privacy and her own solitary nature. Hard work never bothered her, even when she was a girl. But she could not abide gossip nor the superstitions of servants.
She left Walter unconscious, tied at the wrists and ankles to the strong oak posts of the undressed bed, and went back down for the glass specimen jar, and placed it, after some uncertainty, on the parlor table under the window. She took down the potted ferns, one by one, put them on the landing.
When she returned upstairs, Walter was awake, staring at her with a mix of fear and deviousness. He had somehow lost his shoes. She went to the wardrobe in the corner and took from the top shelf a pipe and a little chipped dish and a tin canister the size of an ointment jar. She unscrewed the lid and took out, with care, the small black gum of opium, and she cut off a little twist of it and smeared it in the dish. Then she untied one wrist. Walter rose up weakly onto his elbow and took the pipe without speaking, and she went out and came back with a candle and she passed the flame back and forth under the dish until the black gum began to bubble and smoke. He breathed the fumes in through the pipe, long deep drafts. Fell back in the bedsheets with a sigh.
Her usual method did not involve opium, of course. She kept a powder in small brown-paper packets in a locked drawer of her desk, a powder that encouraged the more recalcitrant of her visitors to share their truths. It got them talking. But Walter would need something stronger.
Margaret Harrogate set down the dish and blew out the candle and took the pipe from Walter’s damp fingers. Then she lowered her face so that her lips were next to the shell of his ear. She knew many things already. She knew Jacob Marber had left Walter here, in the filth of London, to hunt down the keywrasse. She knew it was a weapon of such power it could destroy even what Jacob had become. She knew he feared it; and she knew he must never find it.
Slowly Walter’s chin lifted. His eyelids were fluttering, translucent, as the drug took hold.
“Walter, Walter,” she said softly, “go on now, tell us. Tell us about Jacob. Was he here in London with you? You must try to remember.”
Walter’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Jacob … Jacob was here.…”
“Yes, yes, good.” She stroked his bald head gently, like a mother. “But he went away?”
“Jacob … he left me.…”
“Yes, he did, Walter,” she murmured. “But where? Where is Jacob Marber now?”
5
AND BRIGHTER STILL