“Yes.”
“What my mother saw that day. When Adra Norn walked out of that fire, unharmed. Her … miracle. Was Adra one of your … was she like your orphans, a … a talent?”
Mrs. Harrogate smoothed out the skirts in her lap. “I’ve said too much already,” she said reluctantly. “Dr. Berghast can tell you more.”
“Dr. Berghast—”
“At the institute. He knows what happened at Adra Norn’s community.” Her hair fell across her face, obscuring it. When she spoke next her voice had changed, had stiffened, was colder and distant. “We leave for Cairndale in the morning. All of us. Mr. Coulton has suggested it is time you were told more of what we do. I agree. Come north with us. Ask Dr. Berghast yourself whatever it is you wish to know.”
“I’m not going to Scotland,” she said.
Mrs. Harrogate got to her feet. She was looking past Alice, and when Alice turned, she saw Coulton had come in, was watching in the gloom. She didn’t know how long he’d been there.
“Get some rest, Miss Quicke,” said Mrs. Harrogate, the teacups clinking in her hands, the bottle vanishing into her skirts. “I hope you will reconsider. The express departs early. It will not do to be late.”
When she was gone, Coulton gave a long low groan and came forward. He sat where she’d been sitting. He looked awful, she thought, his face gray and lined with exhaustion. “Sleep for a bloody week, I could,” he muttered. He managed a smile. “But it’s good to see you.”
Alice watched him. “You and Harrogate not talking now? Is that it?”
“We’re good.” Coulton pinched his eyes shut in the lamplight. “Or will be. There’s just too much to say sometimes, it’s hard to get started. Bit of a disagreement about old Mr. Laster. I see Marlowe’s in one piece.”
“He’s better than Charlie.”
“Aye. The poor lad.”
“Marlowe’s taken a shine to him.”
“And it seems you’ve taken to Marlowe.”
She was quiet at that. She’d known the child only a little over a month and already felt something intense, so that she was filled with worry and fear and anxiety half the time, and an overwhelming love the rest of the time. It wasn’t like her to get attached. Ever.
“I pity him,” she said at last.
“Hm,” said Coulton, watching her. She wondered what he was thinking. But then he leaned forward and opened the little glass door of the lamp and lit a cheroot in the flame. “Margaret says you seen Jacob Marber. In New York City.”
She nodded. “It seems so.”
“I thought it were Charlie he’d come for.”
“How could you have known?”
Coulton studied her in the orange glow, shadows playing across his face. “Well, it’s my fault and I’m sorry. I knew him a little, years ago. We worked together, you could say. Tracking down our unfortunates. You wouldn’t never have even known him then. He was gentle, like. Shy. Back then, I always said he’d of been better suited to the clergy. Had the most exquisite fingers, he did, like a pianist’s. Ladies loved them. Used to embarrass him to no end.”
“You said you hardly knew him.”
Coulton looked at her with clear eyes, unembarrassed. “Some confidences just ain’t a person’s to tell,” he said. “You know that as well as anybody.”
“Was any of what you said about him true?”
“Aye, he did feel betrayed, Jacob did. Blamed everyone. Me most of all, maybe. Thing is, he were already turned by then. It weren’t any tragedy what did it. It were just him. Jacob.”
“Turned. You mean, by the drughr.”
Coulton looked at her a long moment. “Margaret don’t usually talk so much.”
Alice gave a grim little smile. “Well. I was courteous.”
Coulton smiled grimly back. “Jacob were turned by the drughr, aye,” he went on. “But he were a talent once, before that. A dustworker, his like’s called. Them kids we been collecting, they ain’t the only ones what can do things.”
There was something in the way he said it that made Alice pause. He’d leaned back in the chair so that shadows swallowed his face. Only the coal of his cheroot, flaring and fading, could be seen.
“In Natchez,” said Coulton, his face still obscured in the darkness, “you called Charlie a monster. All of them. But if they are, then I’m one too.”
She swallowed. “You’re like … them?”
“Aye.”
He said it with a heavy sadness in his voice, and she wondered suddenly at what he must have seen, what he must have lived through. She knew nothing about him. What did he mean, what could he do? Rip knives out of his arm? She stared at her hands, struggling, wanting to ask, trying not to. It wasn’t her business to know.
“I told myself this was the last one,” she said at last. “I told myself I was out, after getting Marlowe here safe. I don’t need this work. Not if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Maybe it’s time you found out.”
She looked away, suddenly tired. The house all around them was quiet. She thought of Marlowe, sleeping upstairs with Charlie. “Harrogate took a bottle of Scotland’s finest out from behind that scuttle there,” she said. “You think she’s got another one in there?”
Coulton leaned forward, his ruddy face coming into the light. He chewed at his cheroot, grinning. “I know that bottle. There’s only the one.” He met her eye, the smile fading from his eyes. “Listen. You want answers, you’ll find them in Scotland. That’s where you got to go. Did Margaret ask you along, yet?”
She nodded.
“So come. Come with us.”
“To Cairndale,” she said softly, as if to herself.
“Aye,” he grunted. He inhaled deeply on his cheroot and held the smoke in his lungs, eyes glinting in the firelight. “Come to bloody Cairndale.”
10
THE CALM THAT COMES BEFORE
It was still dark when Brynt followed the monster to St Pancras Station and in the early rush of law clerks making their hurried way into the city she watched him purchase a ticket and then went to the same wicket and asked where the other was going. The ticketing clerk gave her a queer look, removing his spectacles to frown up at her. Brynt wore yellow kidskin gloves made special by a glove maker in Toledo, made to hide her tattoos in a country of peasant Catholics, and she still wore her only suitable dress, her size being hard to come by, though it was going shabby now under the arms and its petticoats were pocked with dried muck and because she’d lost weight it hung off her badly. But she met the clerk’s eye and said she wanted a ticket on the same train and after a moment he shrugged and scrawled out a ticket to Horsechester.
“Where is this? Is it far?”
“It ain’t but thirty mile north of London,” said the clerk. “Quaint little village, it is.”
The train was departing in the dark and she hurried down to the platform, not seeing the monster anywhere. Then she sighted him, climbing up the platform steps, vanishing into a clerestory car. Brynt shouldered her way through the crowds, hauled herself up. She tried to find a seat in third class that allowed her to peer out the window and that was near an exit. The carriage was nearly empty but for a man in tweed slowly peeling an onion with a little knife, and a governess with her ward seated with hands in their laps, neither speaking. The little boy made her think, with a twinge, of Marlowe.
At Horsechester the monster got down, smoldering with darkness, that black scarf obscuring his face still, and ignoring the alarmed stares of the other travelers he strode away, out of the little station in the predawn light, along the cobbled streets of the bucolic town. Brynt, grim, hungry now, hurried after.