“Then how come you’re talking right now?”
“I do that,” he said, “when I’m sleeping.”
“You’re awake,” said the boy.
Charlie sighed, closed his eyes. He could hear Miss Alice out on the landing, talking to Mrs. Harrogate in hushed tones. He knew she had started sitting up in the night, watching them. He was grateful for the sound of her presence, and hated it, both. But he didn’t sleep when she wasn’t there.
The boy made a small noise in his throat. “Charlie?” he whispered.
He opened his eyes again. “What.”
“Are you going to Scotland too? Are you going to the institute?”
“You know I am.”
“Mrs. Harrogate says my father’s there. I’m going to meet him. Maybe yours is there too.”
“My father’s dead. I told you that already.” Charlie grimaced, rolled up onto one elbow, holding his mother’s ring tightly. “You never met your father before?”
“Uh-uh.”
“How’re you going to know it’s really him?”
The boy was quiet, thinking about it. “I’ll know. But he’s not my real father, anyway. He’s my … guardian. And family’s something you choose. Brynt’s my family. She’s far away though.”
Charlie looked at the kid. “Well, I got no family at all, Mar. And I’m fine.”
“I think that’s sad.”
“That’s cause you’re little. It’s not sad. It’s not anything.”
“I’m not little. How old are you?”
“I don’t know. Sixteen.”
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“I said sixteen.”
“I’m eight.”
“Good for you,” said Charlie, and then he said nothing more. For a long moment the boy too was silent and Charlie wondered if maybe he’d fallen asleep or if he’d spoken too roughly, but then the boy shifted closer in the darkness and reached his arm around Charlie’s body. It was warm, and soft, and impossibly light. It had been a long time since anyone had touched Charlie in gentleness like that, and he didn’t know what to do with it. His heart was beating very fast.
“You’re like me,” said Marlowe sleepily.
“I’m nothing like you,” said Charlie.
“I mean different,” murmured the boy. “You’re different too.”
And then the boy was asleep, curled up close to Charlie, his skin smelling of milk, and there was something in it all, something warm and sweet, that made Charlie, for the first time since he’d come back to the house, for the first time maybe in as long as he could remember, just close his eyes calmly, and a moment later he too was asleep.
* * *
Late, late into the night, Alice heard Coulton come stumbling in, the house dark and still, the boys unstirring in their bed. Marlowe’s little arm was thrown wide, across Charlie, who lay curled up around a pillow.
She heard the front door open and close, heard Coulton’s slow, heavy tread on the stairs. She knew it was him, knew the sound of his footfalls, and started to get up. But when he reached the landing she paused, listened. A thump, then a long soft scraping noise: Coulton was dragging something softly down the hall, into the back bedroom. After a moment she heard Mrs. Harrogate’s voice, hushed.
She got up. The house was dark. She knew the sound of a body being dragged. She wasn’t angry anymore, not exactly, her anger having cooled over the last two days into something else, something hard and sharp and grim, but she was tired of all the secrets. She went down to the second-floor landing and sat in a window seat there under the stained glass and waited for Coulton. But it was Mrs. Harrogate who came silently down in her black widow’s gown, carrying a candle in a dish.
“His name,” she said quietly, gliding onto the landing, “is Walter Laster.”
Alice looked at her calmly. “Is he another orphan?”
“No. Walter is … something else.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s hard black eyes glittered in the candlelight. She was standing with the dish suspended before her, her disfigured face shadowy and strange.
“Where do you get the names of the kids?” Alice said suddenly.
“Ah. Mr. Coulton said you would have questions.”
Alice ignored this. “I keep asking myself where. I can’t figure it out. Charlie Ovid doesn’t exist anywhere, not on a single damned registry. Don’t tell me he does. And Marlowe was a foundling in a freight train. No one on earth can trace a kid like that.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Harrogate matter-of-factly. “Clearly someone can.”
“You find this amusing?”
“Not at all.”
“I think it’s time,” Alice said slowly, “you tell me everything.”
“Your faith in me is most flattering. But I do not know everything.”
Alice chose to ignore this too. “You can start with what the hell was really hunting us in New York. And don’t tell me Jacob Marber’s anything like Marlowe or Charlie. He isn’t.”
Mrs. Harrogate was silent a long moment, as if deciding something inside herself. “It is late,” she said at last.
But she led Alice down to her study, opposite the parlor, and closed the door. Alice had not been in the study before and she was surprised by the smell of pipe smoke, by the dark leather furniture, by the enormous desk, all of it in a style preferred by men. She transferred the candle into an old lamp and the room softened in its glow. There was a cold fireplace behind the desk and Mrs. Harrogate went to the coal scuttle beyond and reached around into the wall and took out a bottle. Then she went to a cupboard, came back with two teacups, poured a knuckle of whiskey into each. She studied Alice in the lamplight. “Let us speak plainly, then.”
In her fingers there appeared a shilling, flipping silently across her knuckles. She held it up, turned it in the glow.
“There are two sides to everything that is,” she said quietly. “A facing side, and a hidden side, if you will. At any given time, it is so. But imagine that both sides are the facing sides. And that the hidden side is a third side, a side you never see. Inside the coin. The living and the dead are like the two sides of this coin. But there is a third side. And that is what these children are, these … talents.”
“What happened to speaking plainly?”
Mrs. Harrogate smiled. “Jacob Marber, who hunted you in New York, was a talent once, not so different from Marlowe or Charles. A dustworker. But he fell under the sway of a creature of malice and evil. It has had many names, but we call it the drughr. It is, or was … oh, how can I explain it?” She pursed her lips. “The talents, Miss Quicke, are like a bridge between what is living and what is dead. They exist between states of being. Between worlds, if you will. The drughr is a corruption of all that. A darker talent. The part of it that was living … is gone.”
“And what came after us in New York was a—”
“Jacob Marber came after you in New York. Not the drughr.”
“But he was doing its bidding?”
“He is its servant. Yes.”
“What does it want, this … drughr?”
“The children,” said Mrs. Harrogate simply. “It eats them.”
Alice, about to take a drink, froze with the teacup at her lips. She made an angry noise in her throat, halfway between a laugh and a growl.
“Understand, the drughr is not a creature of the flesh. But still it can decay. Its being must be … sustained. When it is strong enough, it will be able to walk in this world unmolested, it will be able to feed on the talents, both young and old.”
“This is madness,” Alice whispered.
The older woman frowned. “It’s been thirty years since I felt what you’re feeling. I forget how peculiar it all seemed, at first.”
Alice looked away. She was remembering her first encounter with Harrogate, in the hotel room, when she’d been recruited. She was trying to understand how any of this fit with what she’d been told then. And then she remembered something.
“My mother,” she said, picking her words carefully. “You said it was because of what happened to her, what she saw, that you … sought me out. You said—” Alice swallowed. “You said you knew about it.”