But she knew plenty else. She knew, for instance, that the old talents at Cairndale were dying. There were eleven of them left, gray old men and women, shriveled like insects under glass, and they moved with the slowness of death. Sometimes they would take a turn about the yard, their nurses pushing their wheeled cane chairs, or themselves shuffling slowly in slippers and bathrobes. And she knew some of them went across to the glyphic at night, in the old rowboats, and that a few never came back, or came back weaker, frailer. No, not everything at Cairndale was as it seemed; but, of the many secrets that haunted it, none were sadder than Dr. Henry Berghast himself.
Oh, he was a good man, she had no doubt of that. It was Dr. Berghast, after all, who kept them all safe. Where he came from, she didn’t know. His age, his past, his family were all a mystery. He spoke with no accent at all, a curiously smoothed-out manner of speaking, as if he were from nowhere and everywhere at once. Strong-shouldered, fierce, he looked to be a man in his prime, but she knew he could not be. For there was a strain about his eyes; and his hair had all turned white. She’d heard the old talents talking: He’d been guarding the glyphic for eighty years at least, before even their memory. Seeing that the orsine stayed closed. But his obsession with the drughr was alarming. He slept little, leaving often in the night on business, no doubt in pursuit of the drughr and Jacob and what Jacob had become. Miss Davenshaw said he blamed himself for it. All Komako knew for sure was that this ancient, ageless man, this person with pale gray eyes and a deep sense of rightness inside him, this doctor, was slowly destroying himself, in his restless stalking of that monster. And it broke her heart to see it.
It was for this reason she hadn’t gone directly to him, hadn’t reported her suspicions about the disappeared, hadn’t warned him about the dark carriage. They didn’t know anything, not yet. But the three of them had taken to watching the skies for bonebirds, and creeping out to the wire loft where they roosted whenever they sighted a new arrival. Komako and Oskar would keep watch while Ribs snuck in, untied the message, read it swiftly, and then replaced it, all the while the bonebirds clicking and rustling and turning their eyeless sockets as if to see her better. So far they’d learned little, a few strange messages from Mrs. Harrogate in London, a message in garbled code from somewhere in France.
But then one morning Komako was sent as a runner to the old storeroom, Dr. Berghast’s laboratory. Standing at the beakers and distillers and weird bottled potions, Berghast had rubbed his eyes tiredly, taken the letter, dismissed her. As she turned to go she saw, stacked on his work desk, several plain brown manila folders. She knew where those files were from; and they gave her an idea.
If they wanted to trace the disappeared kids, they’d need someone who could clamber up the outside of the manor, in darkness; who could climb through Berghast’s study window; who could unlock the door from the inside. Then Ribs could get in, and bust open the big cabinet, and search through the files of all the talents who had ever been admitted to the institute until she found what she was looking for: the files of the missing kids.
In other words, they’d need Charlie Ovid.
Komako hurried through the halls of Cairndale, whistling softly to herself.
Because Charlie had just agreed to do it.
21
OTHER PEOPLE’S SECRETS
Alice Quicke found herself, as she traveled south to London, thinking of the dead.
There was Coulton, of course. She could still hear his voice, its dry reedy accent, she could see the wispy auburn sideburns he’d cultivated and the thinning hairs he’d comb across his pink scalp and the ruddy, pocked, jowly shape of his face. He’d made her crazy, true: secretive, insufferable, sarcastic half the time and smug the rest. But she’d trusted him, trusted him because he’d earned that trust and because he’d never treated her like a woman detective, just as a detective, and because above all he was a good man, and a good friend.
And yet, as she’d stalked the railway platform in Edinburgh, watching small groups of beggars fan out across the tracks, or sat unspeaking with Mrs. Harrogate in a candlelit dining car, their plates swimming with gravy and mutton and hash, it wasn’t Coulton who came to occupy her thoughts, but her mother.
Why that should be, she couldn’t have explained. Her mother’s name was Rachel Coraline Quicke. Alice hadn’t seen her in years; part of that was hurt, part of it disgust. She’d had no childhood at all. Her earliest memory was of Rachel in the mud of a Chicago street, screaming at the shutters of their landlord, flinging gobbets of muck because their tenement door was locked and she’d lost the key. There was such fury in her. Her hips were wide, her belly soft to the touch. She’d drink whole boots of lager at the Irish saloon off Declamey Street and stagger home cursing. She worked in a German bakery in the next ward, snorting like a horse in the early hours, shaping with clever fingers the little dough figures in the empty bakery, the night outside very black, the pretzels and pastries and jam-filled tarts warm and sweet-scented. It was the only time she seemed at peace. When she was very little Alice sometimes went with her, pretending to help stoke the stoves, wipe the flour from the tables, not minding the hour. Then when she was four, her father left. After that it was just the two of them. For a time she’d had a little Irish setter named Scratch but then one day he’d run off too, killed in a fight or kicked by a horse or maybe just he too decided he’d had enough and there were easier places to live.
Alice herself, in those early years, was already a gutter rat, haunting the tumbledown west side where they lived. She ran with a pack of older immigrant kids in the alleys, mostly Irish, all of them weaving between the wheels of the carriages and cabs, starting little fires in the produce market on Randolph Street, throwing rocks at freight yard windows and running from the watchmen. Her friends were seized, beaten; but she never was, being too quick even then. Chicago in that decade was a sprawl of mud and filth, of flooding and sewage. The river reeked in the summers, the streets thickened into a stew of muck in the spring and fall. Even the horses floundered in the deepest intersections. And everywhere were the railroads, the hotels, the supply stores, the vast yards of sheds and livestock pens and grain elevators, all lit up. It was a city of fire.
Alice was seven when her mother found God. What followed was a strange time of prayer and church gatherings and riverside picnics on Sundays in the summer. She had one dress, which her mother washed exhaustively. Her mother’s temper didn’t soften; but her faith, if that’s what it was, filled her with a renewed intensity, so that she’d lash her pink back before sleep each night with a birch branch, the red welts angry and oozing. She’d take to the street corners on a wooden crate in the afternoons, when she got off work, haranguing passersby to look to the state of their souls. And maybe it all poisoned her work, too, who could say. Because later that year she lost her job at the bakery, the only job Alice had ever known her to hold, the one steadiness in their lives, and after that everything changed.
At the Church of New Canaan there arrived a woman from the West, from a small religious community in the wheat fields of Illinois. Her name was Adra Norn. She was tall, with long hair the color of lead, and a face like sun-dried fruit, and huge rugged hands, masculine hands, hands that could rip a Bible in two. When she spoke, even the men listened. She said their God was an angry god, a vengeful god, and that his anger was directed at the men of the world. Her community was a place for women only, a refuge from the world’s corruptions. If Alice feared her mother, what she felt for Adra Norn was different, closer to awe. The woman would sweep past with the force of a hurricane, her gray skirts whirling, her huge raw hands scooping up whatever needed doing. Her speech sounded biblical and disturbing and her accent was but half-intelligible though her meaning was clear: God does not love you, God does not need you. Risk his displeasure and be harrowed.