17
THE GOOD WORKS OF CAIRNDALE MANOR
Alice Quicke awoke in a strange bed, her knuckles bruised. She didn’t know whether it was morning or afternoon. Her clothes and hat lay folded and stacked on a night table beside her. Outside, she could hear the eaves dripping with rain, the sound of children’s voices.
Her left side ached when she breathed in, where Jacob Marber had impaled her, but when she felt gingerly for it with her fingertips she could find no wound. She tried not to breathe. Just squinted up at the rafters, wincing, struggling through her haze to remember.
There’d been the windy roar of the train, yes, as it pulled away from that monster, smoke ribboning off Jacob Marber’s upraised fists. And Marlowe, cradled in her arms. Later, a dreamlike wait at a railway platform somewhere, while conductors fussed about, frantic, and huge gleaming locomotives snorted on the tracks. And she remembered a second railway carriage, at night, and then an old Scottish barouche with collapsed springs, stinking of cigars, its wheels banging over bad roads. Then … this. A dim room, high-ceilinged, sparsely furnished. Flagstone floors, the walls papered in a faded green Japanese pattern. She didn’t know where she was.
“You’re at Cairndale,” said the nurse who came in to change her bedding. “And you look a fair sight better. How do you feel?”
“Cairndale,” she echoed numbly. “Where’s Marlowe, is he—?”
“The shining boy? He’s about, I’m sure. He and his friend.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Oh, not so long as that. Easy, now. Ups-a-daisy. There we go.”
But it seemed to Alice that time had elongated, had stretched and shifted in strange ways since the attack in the railway carriage. It all felt so very far away. She watched the nurse roll up the bedsheets and stuff them into a basket on a metal cart, the door closing, the sound of the wheels and her footsteps receding. Then she got out of bed. Her ribs flared with pain. She stripped off the nightgown and slowly got dressed. Her Colt Peacemaker wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. She opened the curtains. Because of the rain the daylight was dim. And yet still the brightness of it hurt her eyes, made her skin tingle uncomfortably. Her side throbbed. She’d been beaten and kicked and battered dozens of times in the course of her life but what Marber had done to her, where his dust had hurt her, somehow felt different. She felt different.
It turned out not to be a window but a tall glass door, with an old brass pull and white paint gone yellow with age. It’d been opened a crack for the air, and despite her pain at the brightness Alice went out onto the covered balcony beyond. She was on the second floor of an ancient stone manor, its windows dark, a courtyard pooling with shadow in the rain below. A hoop and stick leaned against one wall, like a memory of childhood. Three kids in gray cloaks were playing some sort of game under the eaves, jacks or marbles, it looked like. As she watched, one pulled a pipe from behind her back and puffed sneakily and then passed it around. A bull’s-eye lantern had been left burning on a stone bench outside the porter’s gatehouse. Beyond the gates she could make out a winding lane of red clay, dead brown grass, a cluster of distant outbuildings silhouetted in the gloom. They were high above a loch, and she could see an island there with a huge tree growing out of the ruins, the umbrella of golden leaves just visible. An ancient wall snaked distantly along the property. Altogether a chilly, lonesome sort of place.
Scotland, she thought grimly. You’re in fucking Scotland, Alice Quicke.
She saw no sign of Coulton, or Charlie, or Marlowe. No sign of any other life at all, except, in a tall window on the upper floor of the east wing, she caught sight of an old woman, withered hands clasped before her, thin white hair wild on her scalp. After a minute the old woman pulled the drapes shut.
“I was beginning to fear,” said a voice, “that you would sleep until midsummer.”
Alice turned. Mrs. Harrogate was standing in the doorway. She wasn’t wearing her veil. Her soft face looked badly bruised. Her left eye was purpled shut, a darker color than her birthmark. She wore a fine dress: black piping in scrolls down each breast, tight cuffs, an embroidered collar hiding her throat. But mostly it was the thick bandage wrapped around her head, concealing her left ear, and the fine web of dried scratches all over her face and hands that made Alice stare.
The older woman glided forward. There was in her eyes something drained and sad. “I am a sight, Miss Quicke, but you needn’t gawp so. Come; you ought not to be out of bed.”
“They took my gun.”
“For your own protection, I am sure. How do you feel? It is a most unusual wound, but it will improve, I am told.”
Alice put a slow hand to her ribs, absorbing this.
“Marlowe’s safe,” Mrs. Harrogate continued, guessing her thoughts. “I’ve sent someone to let him know you’re awake. You’ll find he’s quite famous, here. The boy who escaped Jacob Marber … The other children, even the older residents, all are most curious. No one imagined he’d be back, I expect.”
Alice grimaced. The nurse earlier had called him the shining boy. She remembered how it was in New York City, that night in the park, when Marlowe had healed her knee. How he’d taken the hurt into his own body. “Did he—?”
“Heal you? Mm. In the carriage, on the way here. I don’t know that you’d be here at all without him.” The older woman’s face darkened. “Dr. Berghast was quite satisfied.”
Alice wondered at that, but before she could ask, Mrs. Harrogate sat beside her on the bed and brushed her arm. “I must tell you, Miss Quicke. Now, while we are alone. Mr. Coulton is dead.”
“Coulton?”
Mrs. Harrogate’s little nostrils flared. “He was murdered by Jacob. On the train.”
“Oh,” said Alice, stunned.
“He was very strong. He thought nothing could hurt him. I … I thought the same.”
Alice remembered Coulton shoving her and the children behind him, the screams as the carriage darkened. “The last I saw him, he was … changed. He was using his talent, I think. He ran at Marber in the carriage. Directly at him. It gave us the time to get out.”
Mrs. Harrogate nodded. “Yes, that sounds like him.” She turned her face so Alice couldn’t see it. She adjusted the bandage at her ear, busied her hands. “Well, we must collect ourselves,” she said in a thickened voice. “Mr. Coulton would hardly approve of a show of feeling, hm? Now. You are dressed for travel. Is it so?”
Alice glanced at her clothes. “I, I wasn’t…”
“I’ll be returning to London myself. I have business there, business that will not wait. There will be room in the carriage for another.” She seemed to consider something. “You haven’t yet seen Cairndale, of course. Would you like to?”
Alice, still shaken, nodded mutely.