“You were a child. You know what you think you saw.” His eyelashes were long, and dark, and beautiful. “Adra was not like our residents here. She was never a part of our world. You understand that Bent Knee Hollow was not the only such community she founded?” He watched her closely and Alice felt—despite the gentleness of his voice—the concentrated and dizzying power of his attention. “Adra gathered around herself those she thought most … susceptible. Such as your mother. Ah, you are surprised. Of course I have heard about you. Is it not the reason Mrs. Harrogate believed you would be suitable?”
But Alice wasn’t surprised. She’d assumed Dr. Berghast knew all about her; would have been surprised, in fact, if he hadn’t.
“You must understand, Adra was always looking for something particular in her followers,” Dr. Berghast continued. “A particular kind of faith. She wished to know where the essence of a thing resided, in the cause or the effect. Is it a miracle because it happened, or because it is believed to have happened?”
“You mean, the Hollow was all just some sort of … experiment?”
“Miss Quicke, even the most saintly among us still burn when touched by fire.”
“People died.”
He nodded, said nothing.
Alice bit back her anger. She saw now she’d been hoping Adra Norn had been a talent, that there’d been some truth in what she and her mother had seen that night, when Adra walked through fire, something real to account for what her mother had done. But there was nothing.
“My mother believed it,” she said softly. “She believed it so much it made her crazy. She believed everything Adra told her. Adra used to say: ‘A strong faith makes its own change.’”
“We cannot change what we are. Only what we do.”
“How did she do it? How did she make it look like she could walk out of a fire?”
Dr. Berghast held out his palms, seamed with dirt. The bonebird clicked its wings at his shoulder. “That I do not know,” he said. “Carnival tricks, I expect. I am sorry about what happened. I have always believed faith and madness closely linked. I warned Adra. But she was willful, and determined to dabble in dangerous currents.”
“In her letters, did she ever … mention my mother?”
Dr. Berghast paused, studying her. His expression was calm, unreadable. He might have been searching his memory, he might have been considering how to answer.
“No,” he said at last. “Never.”
Alice, feeling a sudden fierce disappointment rise up in her, turned to go. “I appreciate your time, Dr. Berghast. And your candor.”
“And I,” said Dr. Berghast, holding out a hand to stop her, “appreciate all that you have done for young Marlowe and Charlie. Mrs. Harrogate tells me they would not have survived their journey north, not without you.”
“That was Coulton,” said Alice. “He’s the one deserves your thanks. And Marlowe’s guardian, who fought off the creature with all the teeth. Brynt.”
“The tattooed woman, yes. I did hear about her.”
“A terrible affair,” said Mrs. Harrogate softly. “A terrible loss of life. But there will be more. An evil is loose in the world, Miss Quicke, an evil of extraordinary appetite.”
Alice turned. She’d almost forgotten Mrs. Harrogate. “You mean Jacob Marber.”
“I mean the drughr.”
“Jacob is merely … its instrument,” said Dr. Berghast. He reached up to his shoulder and lifted the bonebird by two fingers up onto a perch. It shifted its grip sideways, cocked its head, its fragile bones clicketing. “I blame myself. It was I who found him in Vienna, you see. I glimpsed his talent. He was already who he would become, not a child any longer. I just did not see it then. I taught him myself; and when he came of age, I sent him in search of unfound talents. There was one child in particular, nine years ago, a dustworker like himself, in the Japanese islands. On the return voyage, he vanished. Your Mr. Coulton was with him; he said it had been a disturbing journey, that the child’s little sister had died.” Dr. Berghast slowly brushed the potting soil from his hands, with great heaviness. “Of course, we didn’t know then that Jacob had been seduced by the drughr. The following year, not far from here, a talent was murdered. A young mother. It was Jacob. He took her newborn child, right out of her dying arms, to feed it to the drughr. But I stopped him; I was too late to save the mother, but I saved the infant. I did that much, at least.”
“Marlowe,” whispered Alice.
“The boy you call Marlowe, yes. I stood as his guardian and father. But Jacob was not satisfied; he located two children bound for our institute here, and took the little ones instead down to the banks of the Lye, and cut their throats, and fed them to the drughr. And when the drughr was strong enough, it helped Jacob break into Cairndale. They were trying to steal Marlowe back.”
“Why? Why him?”
“That, Miss Quicke, I cannot tell you.”
Alice swallowed. “That is … it’s awful.”
“It was, yes. It still is. I blame myself. You must understand, at the time I knew so little about the drughr’s appetites. I’d thought the worst stories were like fairy stories. Oh, some of the old ones here believed. But I did not. I knew only that something had got through our orsine, that something had escaped.”
“What is this … orsine?”
“A passage to the land of the dead, Miss Quicke,” said Dr. Berghast. “Or so it appears; no one is entirely certain. There are two, in fact. The Paris orsine has been inactive for centuries, but ours still has the unpleasant habit of … opening. But the worlds must be kept separate, you understand, they must be kept in balance. And so we are tasked with keeping it closed. The dead are mortal, just as we are. They wander the gray rooms slowly forgetting, until gradually, over centuries, they dissolve away into the very particles of the universe. Imagine if they wandered back over.”
“How can you know all this?”
“How does a fisherman know what lives in the sea? I have lived alongside it all my life.”
“You are talking about souls.”
Dr. Berghast frowned. “I prefer to keep religion out of it. There are no hosts of angels, singing from on high. It is a world like this one, only different. And there is no returning from it.”
Alice rubbed at her knuckles, trying to take it all in.
“No returning from it, that is,” Dr. Berghast went on, his voice darkening, “except for the drughr. Somehow it did return. It is here now, among us, in this world. And it is growing stronger.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“A soul that fears death, more than anything else. A soul that fears the obliteration death brings. According to the old stories, it was locked behind an iron gate, centuries ago, after a great war. It was hoped the drughr would eventually dissolve, as the dead do, and that its evil would cease. In the stories, it drifted on the other side, preying on lost souls. But on this side, it is subject to decay, as are all things. Here it must commit unspeakable acts, in order to sustain itself.”
“The children,” said Alice.
Dr. Berghast nodded. “Because it is still weak. When it is stronger, it will feed on all the talents. Where the drughr goes, slaughter follows. Human life is of no consequence to it. It is a predator, and we are its prey. And Jacob Marber is its … host. It is not yet powerful enough to be in our world, without his assistance.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I need your help,” said Dr. Berghast. “I would like you to find Jacob Marber.”
Alice gave a surprised laugh. “Me?”
Mrs. Harrogate, standing quite still at the end of the row, spoke up. “As long as he is out there, Miss Quicke, your Marlowe is not safe. Charlie is not safe.”
Dr. Berghast placed the seedling he’d been repotting back into place under the glass. “At present, it still must act through Jacob; he is its weakness. Without him, it will be as nothing again. Yet with each new feeding, with each new child it devours, its power increases. Soon enough it will come here. You’ve seen what Jacob is capable of; the drughr is worse.”
“My methods are for people,” Alice protested. “Jacob Marber could be anywhere. How does a thing like him even think? You’d have to think like him to find him.” She shook her head. “Neither of you could find him before; what makes you imagine I can find him now?”
“We know he’s in London,” said Mrs. Harrogate.
“London’s huge.”
“And,” added Dr. Berghast, wiping the black soil on his smock and looking up, “we now have something we didn’t before.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”