“I beg your pardon,” said Margaret sharply. “How far along was she?”
“Ah. But you must remember, Mrs. Harrogate, time moves differently there. There are valleys and rivers where it slows down entirely, and hills where it speeds up.” Susan Crowley’s eyes darkened. “Jacob Marber found them, shortly after she’d given birth, and he killed the parents, and he took the baby. He brought it back out, through the orsine, into the ruined abbey at Cairndale. It is the only way out, you see, the only passage between worlds. The glyphic opened it for him. Jacob intended to steal the child, presumably. But Dr. Berghast stopped him.”
Margaret did not look away from the nursemaid’s face. She was still shocked. “Marlowe was born … inside the orsine?”
“In the land of the dead. Yes.”
She shook her head in disbelief. But she knew the strangeness of Susan Crowley’s account was its very truth, that Crowley was not lying. No wonder Berghast was so interested in the child. No wonder the child’s talents were so bizarre, so different from any other’s. No wonder Jacob and the drughr were hunting him.
He was something entirely new.
A stillness had descended. Susan Crowley lowered her voice. “I don’t know as this is still true,” she said, “but all the time I knew him, Henry Berghast nursed a grievance in his heart. When I think what he did—harnessing a glyphic, closing the orsine—I tell myself: if there was anyone who could find a way to destroy the drughr, it would be him.”
Margaret tightened her grip on her handbag. “That grievance is there still.”
“He is not changed, then?”
“Only for the worse. He is still obsessed with the drughr. Perhaps more than ever. I fear he will betray himself, betray Cairndale, betray everything he has built, in order to destroy it.”
“That wouldn’t matter to him. Not the Henry Berghast I knew.”
She paused. “But it has been his life’s work.”
“No, Mrs. Harrogate. His life’s work waits for him in the other world. Better for all of us if the glyphic were destroyed, if the orsine were sealed forever.”
“Is that possible?”
The nursemaid’s eyes hardened in the candlelight. “Not so long as Dr. Berghast lives. He would never allow it. Oh, he wants to be good. He is good, better than all of us. He’s the one who’s stood against the drughr, longer than any other could’ve done. But even back then, he’d already forgotten what goodness meant. It was always about the end result, for him. The method never mattered. I remember how he’d stand over the cradle, staring down, like the babe was a cut of meat. Like there was a use for him. But I’d … I’d vowed to keep that baby safe…”
Her voice drifted off.
“Which is why we’ve come to you now, Miss Crowley,” said Mrs. Harrogate. “So you can keep that vow.”
“What can I do?”
“You were entrusted with something once, by an old talent at Cairndale. You were wearing it around your neck when I found you, in that freight car.”
Susan Crowley gripped her elbows in her big hands and sat with her head bowed as if thinking it over and then she rose and went into the back room. She returned with a leather cord looped around her knuckles.
“Is it this you mean?” she said.
She opened her fist, and Margaret saw the weir-bents. Instantly a cold wave of nausea swept over her. She began to tremble. They were shaped like two keys, blackened as if they’d burned once in a fire, both ancient-looking, both heavy. Miss Quicke too flinched at the sight of them, visibly recoiling, the wrongness pouring off them like a smell and affecting her powerfully, far more powerfully than Margaret. That was all for the good, she thought. But Susan Crowley just handled the weir-bents without concern, just as if they were ordinary keys, as if she couldn’t sense any power in them at all.
Swiftly, using a handkerchief, Margaret lifted the leather cord from the table, careful not to touch the weir-bents. She folded the handkerchief in four, slid it all into her handbag.
“I can’t imagine what they open,” said Susan Crowley. “Such queer-looking things.”
“Indeed,” said Margaret, getting to her feet.
At the door, Susan Crowley drew the shawl self-consciously over her scarred collarbone and said, “Mrs. Harrogate, please. Tell me about the child. He must be eight by now?”
They stood in the open doorway with their backs to the fog-enshrouded lane. Mrs. Harrogate could feel the heavy weir-bents, weighing down her handbag. She nodded. “About eight, yes.”
“I can’t hardly imagine him. How tall is he? Is his hair still black? Yes, of course it is. Tell me, is he a good sort of boy?”
Margaret glanced at Miss Quicke. Behind and below drifted the night mists of Whitechapel, halos of yellow gaslight, ghostly figures.
“The best sort,” she said firmly.
The young woman’s eyes glowed then, remembering the baby he’d been, and for just a moment in the near darkness Margaret saw her hard features soften and fill with an old and undimmed love.
24
THE SPIDER
The thing about Oskar Czekowisz, the thing no one ever seemed to notice, or understand, was that he was terrified of being alone. Maybe it was because of Lymenion, his flesh giant, that no one thought it; for when was he ever alone?
And so, despite his own dread of the Spider, on that night when the others crept out into the cold hallway to go to the island—candles in the wall sconces snuffed, Miss Davenshaw already done her rounds and retired to her bedchamber—Oskar and his flesh giant were there, waiting, too.
At thirteen years old, he was short for his age, with soft shoulders and plump pale wrists. Everything about him seemed leeched of color. His hair was blond white, like an old man’s, and very fine, and it fell straight over his ears and his forehead and into his eyes. Those eyes were large and trusting, but radiated fright.
Lymenion was his one companion, his true friend. He’d always been there, it seemed, as long as Oskar could remember, sturdy and quiet and watchful and loyal. Oskar could fashion him out of any dead thing he’d find in the ditches or farmyards or even out of the slabs of meat in a butcher’s; he could make him and dissolve him at will, but always when he fashioned him anew and the meat and sinews took shape, it was Lymenion, his same friend, his only.
Lymenion liked the new kids, too. But they have been through much, warned his giant, the words forming directly in Oskar’s mind.
“I just hope they like us back,” whispered Oskar.
He hoped, yes; but he knew, too, how most people felt about Lymenion, the repugnant smell, the strange meekness of him, the way he copied Oskar’s every gesture, like a meat shadow; and that was without seeing what could happen when he ran amok, when Oskar’s own fury was aroused.