She crossed the room and cut the boy’s arm. Bright red blood flowed slowly down over his wrist, his knuckles, it dripped on the white tiles. The boy was gritting his teeth in pain, gasping, and he turned his face and stared down at the wound. As they watched, the incision closed over.
Margaret Harrogate looked at Coulton. He shrugged, bored. She turned back. “There are five families of talent, Charles. You belong to the second. You are a haelan, what Dr. Berghast would describe as a regenerator. When your cells begin to die, any part of you, in fact, your body revivifies. It is a rare and extraordinary talent. You will age differently than the rest of us. You will understand risk differently, danger differently, love differently. Now, think carefully, Charles. Is there anything else you can do?”
“Anything else—?”
“Unusual. Special. Can you … manipulate your flesh? Say, reach objects that should be too far away? Did you ever slip into a space too small for you, that you shouldn’t have been able to slip into?”
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Harrogate. No.”
“There is a box in the corner. Do you see it? I want you to try to reach it. Concentrate, now.”
Ovid closed his eyes. Opened them. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Close your eyes. I want you to imagine a white sky. Nothing is in it. Now, in that white sky is a dark cloud. It is shaped like a door. It is getting closer. Look at it. There is a keyhole in it, and you hold a key. What happens when you turn the lock?”
The boy looked confused, unhappy.
Margaret ran her tongue over her teeth, considering. Perhaps it was not a part of his gift, the mortaling. Perhaps he simply needed to learn control. No matter.
“Tell me about your mother,” she said, changing her approach. “Tell me about your happiest memory of her.”
“My mama?”
He peered suspiciously at Margaret, eyes hooded. She waited.
“My mama…,” he repeated, softer.
Now she could see the powder was taking effect.
“Mama’s just about the only good thing there was for me,” he said. “I don’t even remember her voice now. She used to sing in the church, used to sing like sunlight was just shining on the angels. Like honey on your tongue. That’s how it felt. This one day, she came back home smelling like flour and sugar because she was working in those days in this old kitchen, and they were making pies that week. And she rolled up her sleeves, and there was all this sugar on her elbows and arms, and we licked the sugar off them together.”
Margaret smiled. “Could she … do things? Like what you do?”
“No.”
“And your father, could he? He was white, obviously—”
“I don’t remember my pa,” said Charles abruptly, angrily, and he dropped his eyes and stared at the red starbursts of blood on the white tiles.
She could see he didn’t want to say more, and she felt a quick pang of guilt, but it was necessary; she needed to know certain truths. The boy was struggling against himself but the powder was in him. “Pa died taking us to California,” he said at last. “I always wanted to find where he was buried and tell him I’d grown up and tried to be a good person like Mama said he was. He was a good man, and he loved us, and he believed in a better world. That’s what Mama always said. But he was afraid too, all the time, afraid for me. Maybe he knew what I could do, I don’t know. I was just a baby.” Charles looked up. His eyes were glassy. “Maybe it was just he knew there was no place on this earth for someone like me. Nowhere I’d ever belong.”
“Ah.”
“He was from here. I know it.”
“From London?”
“No, ma’am. From here.”
Margaret frowned, unsure of the boy’s meaning. She glanced across at Coulton, who was listening intently. She was going to ask more but something stopped her, some instinct she had learned long ago to trust and to listen to, and instead she brushed her hands on her skirts and turned away. “That’s fine, Charles, thank you. Now, I want you to concentrate. I know you’re tired, but I have one last question for you. What is it you want, Charles?”
The boy’s head drooped suddenly, then jerked back up. “I don’t want to be hurt anymore,” he said. His words were thickening.
“How much powder did you give him?” asked Coulton. “I reckon he’s about finished here. Did you get what you needed?”
Margaret nodded.
“I want to know what he looked like … what my father looked…,” mumbled the boy. “I want to hear Mama’s voice again, I can’t remember her voice.…”
She unlocked the manacles on the chair, helped Coulton lift him, stumbling, to his feet. He was thin, gangly, his legs folding sideways under his weight.
“The poor thing,” she said, stepping back. “All of them. They deserve better from us.”
* * *
Charlie Ovid awoke in the parlor, on the velvet sofa, his arms folded up under his head. A fire burned in the grate. His head was aching. He lay still, trying to remember the examination, what had happened.
Wind was in the flue of the fireplace, like a low keening. A drunk was singing faintly streets away. Horses clopped by on the cobblestones outside. A slow steady dap of rain sounded against the window, easing for a time, coming back.
He shifted uncomfortably, then sat up in the gloom. He ran a hand over his face. Even at night, it seemed, Blackfriars seethed with life. Someone had opened the window a crack, and the rainy air left a chalky taste in his mouth. His nostrils when he picked at them were crusted with a black rime. He’d never known anything like this place, this London, the magnitude of such a city built by human hands, old, yes, impossibly so, like it had always been there, and going on for miles and miles like the great brown Mississippi he loved, and the filth, and the deep vanishing alleyways and crooked lanes and shadowy stairs into cellars where figures emerged like apparitions, all of it, only just glimpsed through the murky rain at speed as the hansom splashed its way through the crowded streets from St Pancras Station—
What was the matter with him? He rubbed at his wrists. Mrs. Harrogate had seemed pleased, in that creepy room in the cellar. He didn’t trust her, of course, the way she glided in her black dresses soundlessly over the floor, her gaze dark, unblinking, the disturbing purple mark across her weathered face. No, he thought sharply, that wasn’t fair of him, he knew what it was to look different too. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that when she looked at him she was sizing him up, weighing him like a sack of dry goods for the value. Oh, he didn’t trust Mr. Coulton much either; it was true. But at least he’d watched that man closely, and he’d come to believe he was a good man, whatever that meant. A man ruled by compassion is how the young pastor at his church might have said it. He supposed they’d both retired to their bedrooms upstairs, up where that creature too slept, that litch, tied and drugged, its gray-blue skin and bloodred lips like a thing out of a nightmare. Charlie lay back down, wondering about it, and the institute, what it all would be like. It filled him with dread.
And that was when he heard it.
A door, somewhere in the house above him, creaking open. Slowly. But no footsteps followed, no squeaking of the floorboards. He waited. No one came.
And then he heard a soft scrabbling sound, like little claws on wood, and he sat up and stared hard at the stairs leading up into the house.
Nothing. The grandfather clock made out of bone ticked out its soft seconds. No other sound beyond the rain at the glass. He got up and walked to the base of the stairs and put a hand on the banister and listened.
“Mr. Coulton, sir?” he called up. “Mrs. Harrogate?”
There was no answer.
In the stillness, he started up the stairs. The second-floor landing was dark, silent. So was the third floor. But on the fourth floor, the door to the litch’s room stood open. Beyond lay an absolute darkness.
Charlie stopped, his heart beating fast.