“What?”
The pen scratched across the paper. “‘Miss Davenshaw reports that Eleanor has exhibited a fine aptitude in all her studies, even surpassing Miss Onoe, whose scholarship has been rather a disappointment of late.…” Her voice trailed off. “That’s more like it.” The pen paused. “You all right, Charlie? Your own file’s right there.”
His fingers hovered over it. But if he’d been hoping for a different Ovid, a second file, a hint as to who his father might have been, he was disappointed. He opened his file and read it carefully beginning with the first clipping but the details were sporadic and unhelpful. A list of the charges against him from Natchez. An interesting letter from Mr. Coulton describing Charlie and his talent. A young man of integrity despite the cruelty he has been subjected to. A worthy candidate for Cairndale. There was no mention of his parentage or place of birth.
But at the back of the folder was a second folder, misplaced, stuffed badly away. It recorded the details of one Hywel Owydd.
His father.
Charlie knew it at once, even before he began reading. He’d never known his father’s name, not even that, and yet he had no doubts. His blood was loud in his ears. He turned away from where Ribs was standing and slowly, in the weak light from the window, he began to read.
His father, it seemed, was Welsh. He had come to Cairndale at the age of twelve, after manifesting as a clink, a strong. It was the most common of talents. He’d been laboring in a rock quarry for two years by then despite his age and it seemed some form of inducement—that is the word the file recorded, “inducement”—had been necessary in order to free him. He was described as quiet, mathematically gifted, slight of stature. He had been reprimanded twice for swimming naked in the loch. There were several pages of annotated notes recording results in his studies and a further page with dates and abbreviations that made no sense. At the back of the file was a paper dated February 1864, detailing his sudden absence from Cairndale.
Sighted in London by R. F., a cryptic note read. Talent much reduced. Ex-73.
Charlie stared, trying to understand the shorthand. He could not.
At the bottom of the page was a scrawled note, in blue ink: H. O. disappeared. No further details. R. F. reports Thames is full. Subject presumed dead.
The study was still, faint moonlight coming in through the window. All around them the manor was silent.
Hywel Owydd, Charlie thought bitterly. Dad.
And yet he still didn’t know him, never would; his father, who’d walked these same gloomy halls when he was Charlie’s age, who’d fled to London for some reason, who’d had no family in all the world who wanted him except the family he’d someday make and someday lose in the endless American West.
“What’s that you got, then?” Ribs said at his shoulder. He tried to pull away but it was too late. “Owydd?” she muttered. “What, like … Ovid?”
“It’s my father,” he said quietly.
He felt her lift the file out of his hands and she turned the papers steadily and then she grunted. “It don’t make sense, Charlie, him bein a talent an all. That ain’t how it works. Talents don’t descend through bloodlines, they’re random, like. Our parents is what usually throws us out, when they see what all we can do.”
Charlie swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Huh. He were down in London?”
It was disconcerting, not being able to see Ribs as she talked. He looked at the file, floating in the gloom. “Does it mean something?” he whispered. “You ever hear of any talent ever leaving this place? You think he ran away?”
“All the way to London? Naw,” she said. “But London’s where they send the exiles.”
“What are they?”
“Them what lose their talents, when they come of age. It don’t happen to most, but to some. No one knows why.” Her voice went very quiet. “It’s just a awful sad thing. It ain’t easy for them goin back out among ordinary folk, an not able to do what they used to do. It be like losing a part of yourself, I guess. Your poor pa.”
Charlie rubbed at his nose with a knuckle. He tried to imagine it. “He was just a kid, like us.”
Ribs closed the file, returned it to the drawer. Her voice was very close to his ear when she spoke next. “You ever want to talk about it, I’m a good listener,” she said softly. “You ain’t even got to know I’m there. We all got stories, Charlie. We all know how it is.”
Charlie felt the heat rise to his face.
And then, mercifully, she was trying the desk drawers. All were locked. Charlie had turned away, confused, thinking about his father, when his eye glimpsed something on the carpet. It must have fallen out of the papers when Bailey was there.
Ribs picked it up. It was Berghast’s notebook. They still didn’t light the candle but went back to the window and in the weak glow from outside she turned the pages, struggling to decipher Berghast’s scrawl. There were lists of dates, and numbers, and annotated letters that maybe meant something to him but not to Ribs or Charlie. Over the page: diagrams and what were perhaps maps, they couldn’t say. Charlie’s bleeding had stopped in his arms and he drifted around the study peering at the strange objects and trying the doors quietly. But when Ribs made a sudden surprised gasp he came back over, stood near.
“What’d you get?” he whispered. “What is it?”
The journal, floating in midair, closed.
“Ribs?”
“I think I just found who we got to talk to,” her voice muttered. “An it ain’t bloody Berghast.”
* * *
“The Spider?” said Komako, later, in disbelief. She stared at Ribs. It was late; they were gathered in the classroom, keeping their voices down. She glanced at Charlie. “Is she serious?”
Charlie blinked in the candlelight. “I think so.”
He seemed deflated. Maybe he was just tired. His shirt was torn, bloodied. He’d have to get rid of it, she knew. Seeing him fall had been awful, the plunging weight of his body in the darkness, the hollow crack as he struck the ground.
“I am serious,” Ribs whispered. She was visible, wearing her gray smock, red hair standing up in thick tufts. “Cross me heart an hope to—”
“Okay, okay. I get it.”
“I don’t,” Oskar said nervously. Beside him, Lymenion gave a low puzzled growl in his throat, as if in agreement. “What would the Spider want with, with, with the missing talents?”
Ribs winked. “Maybe he eats them.”
Komako glared.
“Well the bloody journal never said, did it,” Ribs protested. “There was just them names in the one column an the Spider’s in the other. Course the next page had a list for a order of candles, an dates an times of delivery, so you tell me. I just reckon we got to just go on over an ask him.”
Oskar gulped. He was winding and unwinding the string around his finger. “Ask … the Spider?”
Komako grimaced. Obviously Ribs was right, they’d need to see what they could learn from the glyphic. It might be as simple as him looking for the talents in that way he had, by sensing them. Maybe that was all Dr. Berghast meant, maybe he was searching for the disappeared kids too. She looked up. “Where’s the journal?”
“Well, I put it back, didn’t I? I weren’t goin to just take it with me, like.”
“You put it back.”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Yes, good. And there was no sign you were ever there?”
“Nope.”
But something in the way Ribs said it made Komako suspicious. “Charlie? What isn’t Ribs saying?”
“What?” said Charlie. “Oh, uh, there was blood. Some of it might have got into his carpet.”
Komako wet her lips. “Your blood?”
He nodded, distracted.
“Old Berghast won’t notice,” said Ribs quickly. “An even if he do, he won’t know who it’s from. Charlie ain’t got a scratch on him. An what would any of us be up to, in his study? It ain’t a problem, Ko. We was like wind in the branches of a tree.”
“How poetic.”