Absently, she pressed a finger to a sheaf of yellowed fashion plates sitting on the work table and regarded the partially finished dress on the mannequin before her. It was covered in dust. ‘Years out of date,’ she whispered. ‘Just like that woman … all out of date.’
She looked down at the gleaming wood of a low, scroll-backed chair that faced the window, ran her fingers along the freshly dusted windowsill, gently touched a miniature painting of the boy Harry presumed to be Matthew. ‘She sits here all the time …’
Miss Ursula went to her side, gazing down at the grounds. ‘Perhaps she enjoys the view,’ she suggested brightly. ‘Like a bird in its gilded cage.’
‘Or a spider in a web,’ said Harry.
‘Perhaps she’s a spider in a gilded cage.’ Miss Lyndon laughed and took another nip from her bottle. ‘I’m not sure I’d mind it myself,’ she murmured. ‘Certainly it’s a pretty cage, only in need of a little dusting.’ Harry eyed her, frowning. He wondered if there was gin in that little brown bottle of hers. ‘I wonder what’s in there?’ she said, loosely gesturing to a door on the far side of the room.
‘The light is very strong in there,’ said Tina.
Cautiously, Harry went to the partially opened door and, standing well back, pressed it open. It was a playroom. Charming in the warm light from its big windows, it was obviously a much used, well loved space.
Harry ventured inside. What Gladys wouldn’t give for these toys! Entranced, he gravitated towards a great dollhouse that stood like a frosted wedding cake on a table by the fireplace. He peered through the tiny frames of its downstairs windows at miniature tables and chairs, candelabras, a piano. He smiled to see all the dolls sitting upside down at the dinner table, their legs sticking in the air, then frowned to see their severed heads placed in a neat and grinning row on the sideboard. He straightened in a hurry, and the stench from the upper rooms of the dollhouse made him reel backwards in shock.
What on earth? With sinking heart, Harry placed his handkerchief over his nose and mouth and peered into one of the bedroom windows. The curtains on the four-poster bed were closed, the painted floor beneath it stained and gummy. Harry thought he only half-imagined the sound of buzzing flies.
He backed away. The room around him seemed heavy now with dreadful possibilities, and he stood in the centre of it, his handkerchief pressed to his nose, intimidated by the now glaring dolls. A stain on the floor drew his eye. Children’s footprints traced a dark circuit from it to the foot of a little bed and back again.
A furtive noise brought his attention to a wall of puzzle boxes piled by the window.
He listened, his heart hammering, until the sound came again – a dry, skittering flutter, then silence.
Reluctantly, Harry approached the boxes. Cheerfully painted, and all about six inches cubed, they were stacked carefully one atop the other, like a wall of building blocks. With dread, Harry opened the lid of the nearest box. It was filled with feathers, that was all: the fine, fluffy under-down and sleek pinfeathers of a sparrow, perhaps, all soft greys and browns. Emboldened, Harry opened the next. He slammed it shut again immediately, the sight of the gaping, skeletal beak and curled dead foot enough.
That weak little flutter of movement came again, drawing his attention to the last box on the top row.
Oh, I can’t, he thought. I can’t look.
‘It’s all right, Harry.’ Tina’s soft voice made him yelp; her hand on his back made him flinch. She picked up the box and carried it to the window. The sash squealed as she raised it. Fresh air flooded the room, dolls’ dresses rustled, puppets twisted on their strings.
The box thumped within Tina’s hands. ‘Poor thing,’ she whispered.
She placed it on the broad shelf of the outside windowsill and opened the lid. Harry stepped back, afraid of what horrible mutilation might emerge as Tina tilted the box. A sleek, speckled thrush slid out onto the granite sill. It seemed frozen with terror, until Tina lightly touched her finger to its shivering back, and in a startled thrum of wings and flicker of shadow it was gone. Tina traced the arc of its flight across the top of the windblown trees, then closed the window.
For a moment she stood looking around the room, scanning the shape of things Harry could not see. ‘The light was all over that little bird.’ She crouched, frowning, and pressed her hand to the polished boards as if checking for heat.
‘It’s all heading down there, Harry.’ He almost flinched when she looked up at him again, her eyes were so concentrated and fierce. ‘The light. It’s all heading for Joe.’
AS THEY DESCENDED from the top floor, Miss Ursula waved languidly to the ceiling, and bade Tina’s sighing followers ‘bye bye’. She’d put the little brown bottle away, but Harry thought she was far too relaxed for the circumstances – far too prone to stopping and touching things and humming.
The first-floor landing led from both sides of the upper staircase to an arched picture window overlooking the grounds. From this window, another curved flight of dark wooden stairs led down into the entrance hall. Peering over the banister, Harry could just see the rump of the stuffed horse below. The quality of the light and the cool shift of air told him that the front doors were still open to the breeze.
There were four doors on this floor, one at each corner of the landing, all set into deep alcoves. Tina made straight for the door to the left of the big window and tried its handle. Outside Harry could see the dogs. They were asleep on the grass, their blunt noses facing the house. There was no sign of any of the human inhabitants.
‘It’s locked,’ said Tina, loudly rattling the door.
‘Hey,’ hissed Harry. ‘Keep it down! Try another one.’
‘I need this one,’ she cried.
Ursula drifted to Harry’s side and gazed wistfully down at the dogs. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Puppies. I had a puppy once. Mother taught him to dance while I sang.’ She rapped on the glass. ‘Coo coo,’ she called. ‘Coo coo! Puppies!’
Tina began banging on the locked door.
‘Oy gevalt,’ said Harry. He pulled Tina aside and crouched to peer at the lock. ‘Just a very old double tumbler,’ he muttered. ‘Piece of pie.’ He slipped his lock-pick set from his sock, and in a matter of moments was twisting the handle and pushing the door. He grinned up at Tina, expecting praise, but she just shoved past, frantic to be inside.
Harry scowled. Climbing to his feet, he took Ursula Lyndon by the arm. ‘Come on, ma’am. Let’s leave the doggies alone.’
He ushered the old woman into a world of quietly ordered sound and movement. The room was large, taking up perhaps this floor’s entire right wing. Many windows flooded the space with light, and it was packed with bookshelves, tables, display cases and desks. The activity within was a stark contrast to the rest of the silent, morbid house. Clocks ticked softly from the crammed bookshelves. Lizards and snakes and chameleons rustled in cages filled with foliage. There were many aquariums, all alive with darting fish and crabs and creeping molluscs. They were fed bright streams of air by clockwork bellows, and filled the room with the sound of flowing water and the regular, gentle shush of a sleeper’s breathing.
Tina pushed determinedly through a maze of glass display cases. Harry went to follow, then paused at a tall desk. Someone was obviously working on a project here: there were many reference books opened, many jotters filled with notes. What looked like a scientific periodical sat open to one side. It was well thumbed, the text in French. The opened page was underlined in many places. A piece of paper had been wedged into the spine, and on it, in the same bold copperplate hand as in the jotters, someone had written: ‘De Bary’s ideas on mutualism interesting here. Reread Die Erscheinung der Symbiose.’ And then, underlined many times, a note in different ink, presumably added later: ‘The living together of unlike organisms! De Bary has hit on it. I am certain. Should I tell Cornelius?’
Harry blew a light coating of dust from these pages. He flicked the pen in its dry inkwell. Whoever had written this h
ad not been at work in a while.
Glancing up, he saw Tina pass behind a series of specimen jars. Their lifeless contents hung suspended in amber liquid, and neat labels told their names: ‘Remora’, ‘Leech’, ‘Tapeworm’. Tina’s slim shape shifted and warped within the curved belly of each container as she passed it by.
‘He’s here somewhere,’ she whispered. ‘The light is all straight lines here, all clear and ordered. Because he’s here.’
By the door, Miss Lyndon perused a shelf of books. ‘Someone likes their Jules Verne,’ she murmured. ‘And en Français, no less.’ She snatched a very old-looking book from the shelf. ‘The Life of Olaudah Equiano. Why, of course!’ She ran a finger along the spines on the shelves, excited. ‘No Frederick Douglass? How odd, especially considering the … shall we say mixed nature of our dark friend’s relationships.’
Tina cried out suddenly, from somewhere near the front windows. ‘He’s here! He’s here, Harry!’
Harry ran along the aisle of cages. Dried worms shivered and shook as he forced his way between their closely packed display cabinets. ‘Tina! Wait for me!’ He emerged to dust-laden sunlight and a window filled with golden sunset.
Tina stood within this radiance, her face resplendent with discovery. On a trestle before her rested a box, long and narrow like a sword case, its red lacquered wood gleaming in the dying light.
‘Harry!’ she beamed, her hands on the box. ‘It’s Joe!’
Harry didn’t know what to say. He had been expecting Joe’s body. Or a door, a secret passage – a cage, even – but this? ‘Tina,’ he said gently. ‘That’s not …’
Tina bent low and whispered into the box’s ornate silver lock. ‘It’s all right, Joe. It’s all right now. I’m here.’ She caressed the lid and looked up at Harry again, her brown eyes shining. ‘Open it, Harry. Please. Let him out.’
Harry knelt by the box. His hands were shaking as he once again removed his lock-picks from their little canvas roll. It took him several tries to insert them into the lock. The mechanism was nothing, a mere trifle, but it took longer to undo than any he’d ever encountered. All the time Tina crouched by his side, her skirts pooled around her, her eyes fixed gravely on his clumsy fingers.
‘It’s the light,’ she whispered as he once again failed to engage the tumblers. ‘It must be very distracting, the way it keeps wrapping around your hands. Here, let me …’ She swiped at the lock, as if brushing something from his way. ‘I think it likes you,’ she said. ‘That’s why it keeps holding on like that.’
He stared at her and she smiled encouragingly. ‘You can do it,’ she said.
Harry had no doubt he could. He just wasn’t too sure he wanted to. After another moment of fumbling, he took a deep breath and told himself to be a man. He pressed up with the first pin, pushed in with the second, and the heavy silver latch popped.
Tina sprang up, flinging back the lid. Harry got slowly to his feet, watching as her expression changed from joy to sorrow.
‘Oh, Joe,’ she whispered.
Her eyes filled with tears and she placed her hands in the box, laying them gently on the dry and rustling thing that nestled within. Harry eyed it with a mixture of nausea and fascination. It was like a deformed snake: the desiccated body of some strange, appalling rat-king of snakes. What P.T. Barnum wouldn’t give for that thing, he thought, taking in the tangled knot of multiple heads, the strange intestinal curl of the maggot-like body.
Tina ran her hands over it, tenderly, lovingly. Small flakes of its skin floated up at her touch and crumbled to pearlescent dust on her fingers. A tear fell from her cheek to darken the papery swell of its belly.
‘Tina,’ whispered Harry. ‘You can’t possibly think that’s Joe.’
She shook her head, her hands still in the box, her face wet with tears.
‘That’s not Joe, Tina. Look at it.’
She stilled, frowning slightly. Harry saw confusion begin to surface through her grief. He gently took her hands from the creature’s body.
The sound of a door banging open made them startle, their hands clenching round each other’s. Out of sight, Cornelius Wolcroft demanded, ‘What in blazes are you doing in Vincent’s laboratory?’
‘Why, looking for our supper, of course,’ Ursula Lyndon laughed. ‘Have you come to deliver it?’
Harry squeezed Tina’s fingers and quietly closed the lid of the box. She looked from him to it and back, her dark eyes troubled as he pressed the latch shut. ‘I promise,’ he whispered, taking her hands again, ‘that’s not Joe.’
Wolcroft stepped into view at the far end of the room, his face sharp with suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’ he snapped. ‘You cannot be here. Get out.’
He scanned the area as they exited, as if looking for evidence of tampering or theft, but he seemed content to follow them soon enough. Closing the door behind them, locking it from his set of keys, he stalked back up the stairs, leading the way to their rooms.
Ursula Lyndon followed close behind, asking questions he didn’t give any sign of hearing.
‘Your dark-skinned friend,’ she said. ‘He is a scientist, sir? Certainly the preponderance of equipment in his room would indicate such? The son of an African king, perhaps? Sent to Europe to be educated. Is that it, sir? Did you meet in college? Or …’
She hurried up the steps until she was by Wolcroft’s side, and Harry saw her glance slyly up into his face.
‘Is he a relative?’ she asked softly. ‘An indiscretion, perhaps – taken in and raised as part of the family? I knew an American fellow once. His father had black brothers and a black sister. His grandfather’s children, you know, by one of his slave women. The family were quite open about it – not like Mr Thomas Jefferson and his children. My friend’s family allowed his cousins to live on family land, gave them a little farm. All the little piccaninny-children were educated side by side with the white. Personally I think that was wonderfully charitable of them. I admire that kind of thing greatly.’
Cornelius Wolcroft slammed to a halt in the bedroom doorway. Without warning, he blocked the way with his arm, causing Ursula to come to a halt. He glared down at her. It was the first time he’d acknowledged her existence by his side, let alone the fact that she was speaking to him. His expression made it clear he wished she would shut up, but after a moment he simply lifted his arm from her way and Ursula Lyndon sailed past, a small, triumphant smile on her face.
‘Oh,’ she cried from within. ‘You’ve brought my dresses! How wonderful!’
Tina came to a halt as Wolcroft turned to look at her. She had maintained a grip on Harry’s hand that was both possessive and protective, and now this grip tightened as she and Wolcroft locked eyes. The man was breathing deeply, his mouth a hard, determined line.
Within the room, there was the sound of cloth rustling as Ursula Lyndon moved things about. ‘This bed is so dusty!’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank you for spreading a sheet down before you laid these out.’ She tinkled another little laugh. ‘What am I saying?’ she said. ‘Of course you didn’t lay them out. You had a maid do it, I’m sure.’
The day was dying, all traces of the golden sunset draining from the already gloomy corridor. In the fading light, Wolcroft’s eyes glowed flat and reflective like a dog’s. Harry felt as if he were caught in a suffocating dream. The only thing that anchored him, the only thing that said, This is real, was Tina’s painful grip on his hand; the feel of her warm presence by his side.
‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to,’ she whispered.
Wolcroft nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I suspect you know that the same does not apply to everyone.’ His luminous eyes shifted to Harry, then slid sideways to the old lady still chattering out of sight in the bedroom.
Harry felt fear squeeze his heart. ‘Don’t you dare,’ he cried. ‘Don’t you use me as—’
‘Be quiet,’ murmured Wolcroft, and Harry was.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Miss Lyndon. ‘Did you say so
mething?’
Wolcroft gazed at Tina. ‘Did I?’ he asked. ‘Did I perhaps ask her to do something?’
Tina shook her head. Wolcroft stepped gracefully to one side, indicating with a small bow that she should enter the room. Tina squeezed Harry’s hand.
‘You won’t hurt him?’ she said.
Wolcroft smiled. ‘Of course not.’ He gestured to Harry. ‘Go to your room and rest. The women and I need privacy.’
Every molecule of Harry’s brain was screaming at him not to leave, but his body, dear God, his body simply walked to the far room, opened the door and went inside. Once there, he couldn’t quite recall what it was he was supposed to be doing, so he sat on the edge of the bed and watched as the last of the light drained from the tumultuous sky.
Something Old, Something
New, Something Borrowed
AS CORNELIUS ENTERED the room and locked the door, the old woman removed a ring from a small wooden jewellery box and slipped it onto her finger. The girl stood watching him, her hands clenched, her expression piercing. He went to the bed and laid his hand on the heavy gold brocade of the sequin-covered gown.
‘You shall wear this one,’ he said.
The actress turned in surprise, the jewellery box still in her hands. He saw that her pupils were contracted to pinpoints and realised with disgust that she had been dulling herself with the laudanum.
She laughed at the sight of the dress. ‘Oh, that one is very pretty,’ she agreed. ‘But a touch ornate for a séance, don’t you think? Unless … Am I to entertain, sir? Are you expecting guests?’
Cornelius shut his eyes against a surge of violent impatience. ‘Not you.’ He looked again to the girl. ‘Take off your clothes,’ he ordered. ‘Put this on.’
There was a moment of perfect stillness.
‘But,’ whispered Ursula Lyndon, ‘those are my dresses.’
Resonance Page 16