“I did,” said Alice.
Mrs. Harrogate frowned. A cold intensity seemed to rise off her, almost like a scent. “Miss Quicke is mistaken, child,” she said softly, dangerously. She gestured and the knife danced fluidly in the air. “It is true that you were adopted. But that changes nothing. I assure you, your father is perfectly real, and quite anxious to see you. You were taken from him by your nursemaid when you were just a baby. Stolen away in the night, from the Cairndale Institute.”
“My … father…” It sounded as if he were tasting the word on his tongue, trying it out, seeing how it felt.
“Yes. Until, as I say, you were taken.”
“Why would anyone take me away?”
“Because a man named Jacob Marber was coming to kill you,” replied Mrs. Harrogate matter-of-factly. “He had tried to do so once before. Oh, you were just a baby, child; it was none of your doing. You needn’t look so. Jacob Marber was raised at Cairndale, but he would not learn how to be careful with his ability. His younger brother had died, years ago, at the hands of a cruel master, in a city far away, and his loss consumed him. Grief and hate are close cousins, child. When he came for you that terrible night, your nursemaid did not believe anyone at Cairndale could protect you. It was wicked of her to take you. But she was right to fear Jacob Marber.”
Marlowe was listening, rapt.
“Something … happened. She died before she could return you. But you—you were found in a railway boxcar by a stranger, and spirited away, and might have been lost to us forever. We did not know what had become of you; but neither did Jacob Marber. When he could not find you, he vanished also. That is how it was, for your father. You were gone. His family was broken. Yet your father has borne it. Dr. Berghast has a great sense of purpose, a strength in him. As for Jacob, we have heard little of him for years. Now it seems he has returned. Your father, of course, fears for your safety; we must get you to Cairndale.”
Marlowe said quietly: “Jacob Marber is who tried to hurt us at the hotel, isn’t he? He’s the monster made out of smoke.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s face glowed in the soft light of the kitchen. “Monster is rather an extreme way of putting it. You understand that he still wishes to hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand why it is important that you are here, with us. And why we must take you north as soon as possible, to the institute. You will be safe there; Jacob Marber cannot enter there.”
“Why not?”
“It is … protected.”
The little boy gave a visible shudder.
“Mrs. Harrogate?” he said. “What is my father like?”
The woman’s eyes glittered. “He is as clever as the devil himself. You will meet him soon; then you will see for yourself. Now, I trust you will both eat a stew?”
After that, Alice didn’t like to leave Marlowe alone. There was too much space for so few in that big house. The bedroom Charlie and Marlowe were using, on the third floor, was large and uncomfortable, furnished with lace doilies on the ankles of the chair legs and even on the handle of the door, and there was an ornate divan at the foot of the bed, and heavy silk wallpaper. They shared the bed, curling up together in the four-poster like brothers, just as if they’d always had each other, and Alice started sitting up in the night watching them. She’d been given her own room, a strange room with stacks of odd wheeled contraptions leaned up against one wall—her late husband’s attempts at inventing a locution machine, Mrs. Harrogate explained—but the shapes were creepy in the dark and Alice was sleeping badly anyhow, waking often, feeling as if something was in the room with her, something watchful and hidden and filled with malice. So she sat up with the boys, wary. Harrogate herself slept at the end of the hall, her door permanently ajar, as if she was afraid of something passing in the night. On the fourth floor Alice had found, her first night at Nickel Street West, a stripped bed, and a wardrobe with a stained pallet stuffed inside, and knotted ropes, but no sign of whatever it had been used for.
Coulton, for his part, stayed gone.
* * *
The claw marks on Charlie Ovid’s arms were on fire. Or at least that’s how it felt, to him, as he lay in the half-light of the bedchamber, staring at the molded ceiling, trying not to think.
He should’ve healed by now.
He’d been back several days, but he still wasn’t right. He’d started to tremble the moment Mr. Coulton brought him into 23 Nickel Street West, and Mrs. Harrogate, observing it, had put him to bed at once. That first night, she’d sat up with him, and he’d told her everything, surprised at her gentleness. No part of him wanted to trust anyone but it was hard, very hard, after the strangeness of all he’d seen, to go on not needing anyone. But after that night, he’d not spoken of the litch again.
It helped that he’d seen no sign of it since. Not in the house, not in the way Mrs. Harrogate talked. But Coulton had gone back out almost at once, his chesterfield buttoned fast against the fog, his gun in his pocket, and was hardly ever around, even after that other one—the woman, Miss Alice—had arrived, so that Charlie knew the man was out hunting for the litch in those terrible dripping alleys.
Where he lay now, in the bedclothes, he could feel the new boy breathing beside him. Marlowe, he was called. He hardly spoke when the adults were nearby but when they were alone he would talk about his life in the circus, his huge tattooed guardian, and he even spoke a little about something that had happened in a rooming house in New York, an attack. He talked about how alone he felt and how afraid he was of the city and on their third night he told Charlie about his adopted father, who was at Cairndale, and waiting to meet him. All this Charlie listened to with his eyes hooded and he said nothing about his own experiences, his mother, his father whom he’d never known and never would. And the kid watched Charlie closely, as if he had any kind of answer, as if he knew something about the world they were stumbling into, as if Charlie could keep him safe. He was still little, that kid, though he acted like he didn’t know it. He wore his shoes on the wrong feet sometimes. One morning he forgot to button his fly.
Maybe it was the horror of what he’d suffered, the litch, its claws in the rain, maybe it was the feeling of being lost in a city as vast as a world. Whatever it was, when Charlie was brought back and was alone, he did something he didn’t ever do. He took a letter opener from Mrs. Harrogate’s desk and cut into his leg, ignoring the pain, and rooted around in the meat of his thigh until he found the silver wedding ring that had belonged to his mother. It was neither delicate nor effeminate, and he thought, now, it was maybe a strange ring for a bride. And while his wound closed over, he rubbed the ring clean and ran his fingertips over the markings and slid it onto his finger. It was tight, almost too small except for his second finger, and he’d taken it off again and looked at the strange crest, the twin crossed hammers and the fiery sun, thinking about his mother and the monster that had attacked him, and trying to imagine the cold fortress of Cairndale in the north, where he was bound. He knew his father’d had something to do with it, this ring was the proof. There was a truth buried there about who he’d been, what had happened to him. And Charlie swore to himself he’d find it out.
Since that night, he would lie awake, the ring turned inward on his finger and cutting into his palm like a talisman. It was on such a night that the new boy, Marlowe, whispered at him in the darkness, interrupting his thoughts.
“Charlie?” he whispered.
Charlie lay very still.
Marlowe wasn’t fooled. “Charlie, I know you’re awake.”
“I’m not awake,” he whispered. “Go to sleep.”
“I can see you blinking.”
Charlie shifted and turned his face. Marlowe was staring at him.
“I’m not awake,” he muttered.