“I love you too, mama,” she answered as her mother, her double, and her best friend faded away.
Emmeline sobbed as she ran her hand over the seat of the empty chair, but there was no trace of her or the smell of her perfume. Taking a steadying breath, she admired the forget-me-not brooch before pinning it to the inside of her dress out of sight. Never could she remember a time when she was so alone. No one would be coming for her. If she was to leave, she would have to do it on her own, but why did she have to take him with her? The Spiritualists always said spirits could know things the living could not, and her mother’s last request was that she take the man below despite how cumbersome he would make her escape. While she could reach him, she had no idea how to get out. The only connection led between their cells and not to the rest of the house. She turned up her lamp and ran her hands up and down each plaster wall. Emmeline felt around doorways and moldings but found no hidden panels or means of escape except the loose boards that led to the catacombs.
Down the hall, she tried to doorknob again, but it still refused to budge. Grabbing the knife she saved from the previous day’s meal, she attempted to turn the screws holding the knob in place. Its tip was too thick and clumsily slid from the metal plate. In frustration, Emmeline jammed the knife under the edge of the doorknob. The wood flattened and splintered beneath it, but as she turned the utensil on its side, the knob popped off. Sticking her finger into the hollow space in the door, she tugged and pushed with all her strength, but the door was still locked from the other side. She tore at the molding, which broke off at the bottom and hung from the wall by its nails and rammed it into the wall over and over, but the plaster barely cracked.
With a tired sigh, she let the molding clatter to the floor and went back down the hall. The bathroom window seemed like an obvious escape route, but as Emmeline climbed onto the chair and pressed her face to the glass, she knew there was no way she could fit out there. Then there were the glass shards and the noise breaking it would make. She drew back and sat on the chair, staring into the hallway. It had been staring her right in the face, the dumbwaiter. Drawing back the panel, she held the light into the shaft and spotted the cord that raised and lowered the box lying against the wall of the tunnel. With a few tugs, the pulleys and tracks squealed to life as the dumbwaiter descended to the servants’ quarters. She tested the cart, pushing down with all her weight, but it didn’t dip or drop under the strain. Emmeline climbed onto the chair and into the box with her knees pressed up near her face, but for once her short stature was a blessing. Using the rope, she hoisted the dumbwaiter up toward the main floor one fist at a time. Halfway up, she rested, panting as her ribs strained against her thighs at the uncharacteristic exertion. By the time the scant light was peeking through the top of the lift, her delicate palms were raw from the coarse fiber of the rope and her back cramped from being hunched around her knees. That man had better be worth it, she thought as she slowed down as she reached the top, but the butler’s pantry was empty.
The room was dark save for the glow drifting under the door from the street lamps glaring through the front parlor and dining room windows. She held her breath as she listened for any sign of life but heard nothing apart from her own heartbeat and the occasional clatter of steamer wheels. The door of the pantry opened out into the kitchen, and with a glance to confirm the men were gone, she roamed the halls of the empty house. Going through each room of sheet-covered furniture in the moonlight, she wandered until she found the stairs leading to the servants’ hall.
Off the empty common area, there were two doors. Emmeline recognized the first door as being the backside of the one in her chambers with its tarnished brass knob and peeling white paint. She threw her weight into it and tried to turn the knob, but it was locked with a key she did not have. Her heart quickened at the thought of having to stuff the deformed man into the dumbwaiter. There had to be another way to reach him, but where was the door the heavy-footed man opened to reach him? She peered into the far room, which stood open but was nothing more than another bedroom. Under where the stairs clamored over the empty bedroom, there was a sloped door that resembled a coat closet, but when she opened it, it revealed a set of bare, wooden steps leading into the earth beneath the foundation.
Emmeline blinked in the darkness, hoping her eyes would quickly grow accustomed to the complete absence of light as she inched her way down the stairs by the touch of her toes. She cursed herself for not taking her lamp or at least a candle. At the last step, her foot slipped and she collided with the stalwart door at the bottom. Feeling around the edge, a smile finally crossed her lips as she touched the cold of a metal brace. It held a thick timber across the prison cell, but with a lot of grunting and puffing, she finally dislodged the bar and guided it to the floor with her back and legs buckling under the strain. The door groaned on its ancient hinges, and within the chamber, the man crawled toward the back corner, trembling against the bricks at the dreaded sound. She could barely make him out amid the shadows, but as she stepped forward, he picked his head up at her familiar tread.
“We are getting out of here tonight,” she said as she groped through the muddy blackness until her outstretched hand brushed the shelving, “but I need to get a few things first.”
“How?”
Emmeline stood on the second ledge and swatted at the boards above her head until the plank finally dislodged and light to stream in. “Out the front door I suppose.”
With a final push, she hoisted herself up and fell face-first into her bedroom. She stripped the blankets from her bed and wardrobe and gathered her remaining stockings before tossing them onto the shelf below. In the bathroom, she found the slipper that had fallen into the toilet right where she left it. No matter how disgusting she found it, she knew she had to put it on if she wanted to walk outside in the November cold. The girl darted around the bedroom, trying to decide if there was anything else they could possibly need. She debated taking a few penny dreadfuls with her, but if she had to lead him around, it would be too hard to carry them all. In the end, she put her jewelry from the party under the drab wool of the maid’s uniform and descended into the catacombs with her lamp. The man was waiting for her, rocking back and forth on his heels, but when she dropped onto the dirt floor, he gripped the bricks and staggered towards her.
“I am going to try to take this off, so you can see.” As she pinched the edge of the fabric and attempted to pull it out far enough to wiggle over his head, he yelped and pulled away. Holding the lamp closer, she noticed the splotch on his blindfold spreading rapidly. She threw the woolen blanket over his head and tucked it around his shoulders and neck, hiding his misshapen face as best she could. The icy flesh of his feet was bare, so she helped him into her spare stockings before wrapping his limbs in scraps of the white cloths that covered the wardrobe and chair. Emmeline averted her gaze as she noted all the wounds and bruises littering what she could see of his body in the dim light. She gently took his clammy hand, but as they walked toward the cell door, his lungs wheezed feebly at the slight exertion. The man wiped the saliva slipping from his hanging jaw before letting out a string of coughs that nearly jarred him off his feet. She sighed. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Seven:
Wimpole Street
Getting her fellow captive up two flights of stairs and through the front rooms to the entrance took over half an hour of tugging, pulling, and coughing. She could have been halfway to anywhere if her mother hadn’t made her take him. Her mother..., she thought as tears climbed to her eyes, but that would have to wait. They needed to make it to safety before the men returned.
From the moment they stepped onto the empty street, Emmeline knew they were no longer in Oxford by the sound of steamers running even at the late hour and people yelling and chattering somewhere in the distance. The medieval houses had been replaced by modern rows of dingy brick. She looked up and down the cobbled road, but in the sporadic light of the streetlamps, the p
arallel rows of houses seemed to stretch on forever like a red and tan hedge maze. A shudder passed through her small form as she stared up at the blackened windows. No house looked safe to knock on and no one reputable would be awake at that hour. Both directions looked equally bleak, but as she stared past the man beside her, the smell of honey and vanilla permeated the icy gale blowing through her dress. She grabbed his hand, holding onto it even as he instinctively yanked it back at her unexpected touch, and dragged him down the street behind her, following her mother’s perfume.
As the red buildings dissolved into yellow bricks and white Grecian temples, Emmeline glanced over her shoulder for any sign of the two men who had held them captive. How was she to recognize them? She had never seen their faces and had only heard the one’s voice, yet with every shifting shadow, she paused and pushed the blinded man into the nearest alcove until it passed or proved to be only a product of her fearful imagination. What if they were following them? Emmeline would never be able to recognize them, and while they inched blindly toward a destination she hoped would appear, she knew they still had the upper hand. She expected them to be thugs, the scruffy common men with shifty eyes who stared back at her from engravings in the paper, but her fears couldn’t slow her pace now. Nothing mattered except finding a place she would be safe and could leave him before returning home, but he was hindering her with his constant shuffling and staggering. She wished she could leave him tucked away in an alley or on a bench in the park up ahead until she could return with help, but when she let go of his hand for even a second, he stumbled over his rag-clad feet and called out to her in his disquieting, dissonant voice like a lost child. Tugging him forward, Emmeline fortified herself against his whimpers and wheezes. They would have to wait.
***
He wasn’t sure when he had been in so much pain. Even during the beatings, the pain resonated only in one or two areas at a time, but today his entire body ached from his toes, as he walked through another puddle of half-melted snow, to his head, which pounded rhythmically and crested each time his feet hit the pavement. The odd pressure in his jaw he had learned to endure, but the stab of lightning through his eye socket and into his skull was becoming so unbearable that he couldn’t string a coherent thought together. No matter how hard he worked to figure out how long he had been locked in that accursed oubliette, he could not tell if he had been there a month or a year. All the days had rolled into one never-ending night after they sewed the blindfold over his eyes. Even though he had wanted to take it off, he had to stop her when she tried to pull it from his face. The pieces of cartilage in his nose ground against each other, and the pain became so intense that he thought he would pass out or vomit what little was in his stomach if she continued.
As she pulled his arm to make him walk faster, he wondered if he should have let her take it off despite the possible repercussions. Now, he never knew where his next step would fall or what it would fall into. His guide never warned him when there was a curb or puddle of slush but still chastised him for being so slow and clumsy. How could she expect him to move as quickly as she did when he had to sightlessly manage obstacles with a blindfold on? Something wet trickled over the distended skin around his left eye, burning the open wounds until it combined with the drying delta under his nostrils. Licking his lip, he tasted the coppery brine as it seeped into his woolen shawl and coated his teeth.
The wind blew into his hood and ran down his spine, cutting through the tatters of his remaining clothing and carrying with it the subtle, earthy smell of trees from behind him. There were moments during the journey when he wasn’t sure if he was naked or clothed by the chill that passed through him, but with his free hand, he confirmed his clothes were there by patting and tugging the blankets closer. The girl never gave him a moment to fix the limp cloths bound around his feet, and somewhere near the trees, he lost the wrappings on one foot while the other remained only because it had been saturated by a puddle and clung to his clammy flesh until he could no longer feel his toes when they pressed against the cobblestones.
As they ambled on and the blood from his fractured features continued to drip into his mouth, his stomach churned from the dense liquid as it settled beneath the beef broth. Her grip on him slackened as he nearly walked into her but quickly drew back when the hem of her dress brushed against his leg. The sudden change in motion made his head reel as if he was swaying in open water, and before he could stop himself, the bile rose in his throat along with thick clots of blood. He staggered away from her until his outstretched arm hit the rough façade of the nearby buildings and retched. He groaned and held his ribs tightly when they seized and crunched under the strain of the bitter vomit pouring from his nose and dislocated jaw.
“I recognize this house,” she said, ignoring the man as he was sick behind her. The house on the corner was a mass of the usual red brick, but on its corner was a white tower with urns and laurels affixed to its face and a weathervane on its peak. Her gaze ran between the house and the rest of the street that ran perpendicular to the road they had been traveling on. It was so familiar. At the corner was a sign marked, Wimpole Street. Emmeline’s strigine eyes brightened in recognition. They were in London only a few hundred yards from her uncle’s house. She hadn’t seen him in a year, but she still remembered his was number thirty-six because it was the same number as her own. Her fellow prisoner was still leaning against the wall with his head resting on his arm as he struggled to catch his breath, but she could not wait for him as the rhythmic patter of footsteps echoed down the empty street.
Emmeline tugged at his arm, nearly knocking him over. “Come on, we have to go. We are almost to my uncle’s house.”
He shook his head, refusing to budge as he clutched his chest.
“You will move, or we will be caught and brought back to that horrible place. Do you want that to happen?”
What she didn’t understand was it wasn’t that he didn’t want to move, he couldn’t move. His lungs were expanding and contracting so rapidly that it felt as if his heart was being forced against his sternum. The thundering organ resonated up the armature of his throat, but as he tried to straighten up again, his heart skipped a beat, stumbling out of rhythm as it erratically writhed against his ribs in protest. The girl roughly pulled him upright, refusing to be ignored, but the string of coughs it elicited sent his heart back into its normal cadence. She wrapped the blanket closer to his mouth to muffle the sound as the steps seemed to grow nearer.
Emmeline looked over her shoulder and found that the disembodied feet echoing up the street came from the worn boots of a bobby walking his beat. She watched as the policeman prodded a ragged man who had been sleeping in the doorway of a house and hollered at him to keep moving otherwise he would be arrested for trespassing. Her companion looked as filthy and perhaps even more tattered than the beggar who had been thrown out of the respectable Westminster neighborhood. Five houses now stood between them and safety, but it only amplified her fear of being caught. The officer would never believe her explanation, and if he saw the other man’s face, who knows where he might take them. A steamer chugged past, shining its headlamps on them. Emmeline flinch in the spotlight, but it continued on without looking back at them.
Staring up at number thirty-six, Emmeline noticed a light illuminating one of the upper most windows of the house. Maybe they are still awake, she thought as she gave him a gentler tug to indicate they were at the front steps. The blindfolded man used the railing to grope his way to the landing until he was at her side. She quickly tidied his wrappings to better disguise his dangling jaw and mask before smoothing her own meager dress to give some semblance of decorum. Emmeline was about to reach for the doorknocker when she recoiled at the sight of a grinning metal skull. The constable was directly across the street from them when she grasped the knocker’s jaw and frantically banged it against the metal plate, hoping her aunt and uncle would be able to hear her. She was about to knock again when she spotted an indent a
round the nasal cavity, and upon pressing it, a buzzer sounded on the other side of the black door. One light flipped on upstairs and then another until finally the foyer lamps glowed brightly through the glass beside the door. The warmth and light from the rooms within seeped onto the porch until the winter wind scared it away. A redheaded woman with a thin, slightly upturned nose and sharp green eyes hesitantly opened the door to the strangers on her steps.
“May I help you?” she yawned. While she was still dressed, her gown was rumpled as if she had been sleeping in it.
“Aunt Eliza, it’s me. It’s Emmeline.”
The book dropped from the older woman’s hand as she searched the girl’s features. A gasp escaped her lips and her tired eyes flickered with recognition. “Emmeline?” Eliza Hawthorne scrutinized her niece’s face again before wrapping her arms around her. “Oh, you do not know how happy your uncle will be to see you. We thought—”
“I was dead?”
Before she could reply, the lanky form of Dr. James Hawthorne sprinted down the steps with his dressing-gown thrown over his clothing. “Who is it?”
“It’s Emmeline! She is alive.”
As Eliza stepped out of the way to allow the young woman in and to close the door, it was as if she noticed the threadbare man standing beside her for the first time. Each breath crackled louder until finally he fell into a fit of wet coughs. When he drew back his grimy hand, it was flecked with fresh droplets of blood.
“Who is this?”
Emmeline hesitated as she looked up at the faceless man and tugged his arm to make him cross the threshold into the house. “I do not know his name. We were trapped by the same people, and when I escaped, I took him with me.”
The Ingenious Mechanical Devices Box Set Page 32