Resonance

by Celine Kiernan

  Tina knelt by his side. She laid her hands on his. Harry, she thought. Wait. She allowed her thoughts to caress his mind – felt him succumb and rebel at once, a fuddled, terrible mixture of affection and resentment.

  Don’t you do that to me! he thought. Still, his fingers loosened on the rim of the jar, and he dropped to his knees before her as if awaiting instruction.

  Joe and me will take care of the Beloved, Harry. You go to the stables now, get yourself a horse. Leave while you can.

  Harry tried to pull away. ‘No,’ he whispered.

  Tina tightened her grip on his hands. She smiled. Yes, Harry. Joe and me have things to do here. But it’s much better for you to leave. Go back to the theatre – back to your plans. You’ve so many plans, Harry. You’re going to be so famous. You’re going to be so rich. You need to go back to that.

  Harry turned his head the miles and miles it took for him to see Joe.

  ‘Joe,’ he managed. ‘Stop … stop her.’

  Joe looked at him – one of those rare, direct looks that showed the world just how blue his eyes were. ‘It’s all right, Harry,’ he said. ‘Go to the stables. Get two horses ready.’

  His words seemed to undo a thin black thread in Harry’s chest, and, just like that, Harry was rising to his feet and walking from the room.

  When he reached the door, Tina said, Harry, put in your earplugs. He smiled back at her and did as he was told. Then he was outside the candlelight and crossing a dark hall. He was in a book-lined room. He was pushing open a glass-panelled door and stepping into the moonlit night. He walked through the scent of roses and gave himself up to the darkness of a shrub-crowded path. His mind was set and sure, the clock-tower of the stable yards a beacon, guiding him through the maze of the garden.

  Every step of the way, Tina was with him, her gentle assurances sounding in his mind: It’s all right, Harry. Don’t worry. It’s time to go home.

  JOE CALLED HER mind back to itself, and Tina sagged, drained.

  ‘He won’t be safe out there,’ he said.

  She heaved herself to her feet and took hold of the jar. ‘Harry crossed an entire ocean on his own, Joe.’ She began to drag the jar across the room. ‘He dived to the bottom of a lake and back. He’s well able to wriggle past some kids and steal himself a horse.’

  She paused, breathless already, and looked up. Joe sat with his hands laced together, his elbows on his knees, as if calmly watching the sunset on the Royal Canal. He looked like a prince in those fancy clothes, his hair all soft and gleaming. He was something completely different now, completely different but still the same: her Joe.

  Down in his lonely cave, the Angel was shifting and turning about, trying to find a connection to the beloved. He had his own dead beloved slung about his neck. He carried it with all the grief of someone carrying a dead child, but he was torn by hope, too – and by need. Any moment now, he would begin to notice her again. He would begin to touch, then paw, then hammer at her receptive mind, demanding answers she couldn’t give.

  This jar was so heavy; her time was so short.

  ‘Are you going to help me or not?’ she snapped.

  Joe’s eyes dropped to the creature, then back to her. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m hiding it! What else? We’re not going to let them give it to the Angel! What would happen you then?’ She tried again to drag the jar. She felt so bloody weak and useless. Her head was starting to swim. Why wouldn’t he help her?

  Joe got to his feet. His expression sent a spear of rage through her, because she knew what he was about to say. The Angel paused his frenzied prowling and lifted his head. Oh, he had found her. By her pain, he had found her. He lifted his hands and his wings, feeling his own loss echoed in the rise of her panic. He began to sing, and Joe’s next words were barely audible above his voice.

  ‘This place will kill you, Tina.’

  ‘To hell with that!’ She stopped, gathered her anger, then lowered her voice, purposely using the tone she had only recently learned, the one that had turned Harry on his heel and sent him into the dark.

  Help me, Joe. Help me hide this thing.

  Joe just tutted, disapproving, and Tina cursed him as much as she loved him for the very same strength. He had never been one to do what he was told – sure, hadn’t that been the very thing that attracted her in the first place? In a world crippled by poverty, and cowed by violence, hadn’t Joe’s quiet sense of his own worth drawn Tina to him like a charm?

  ‘You’re not staying,’ he told her.

  ‘I bloody am!’

  She took hold of the jar again, and the Angel roared in sudden understanding. Beloved. Here. To me. Tina clenched her teeth against its terrible voice. Shuffling backwards, she began dragging the jar through the stands of flickering candles, squinting behind her for the trail of water that betrayed Wolcroft’s earlier journey from the well. She had so little time. The Angel was so loud.

  Silence clamped down as Joe’s hands grabbed the top of her arms. He dragged her up so they were face to face. ‘You want the theatre folk killed? Is that what you want?’

  ‘That doesn’t have to happen.’

  ‘It will happen if we don’t give your angel its creature. You know that.’

  ‘We can figure that out later. It’s not important now.’

  She shook free of him, reaching for the jar, and he grabbed her again. Tina felt the tiniest flare of fear, as he jerked her back around to face him. She’d seen so many men turn this way. Tenement love letters, Nana called them: black eyes and bruises, the language of men who knew only one way to find respect.

  But that wasn’t Joe. Never Joe.

  Tina pulled herself to her full height. ‘Let go of me,’ she said. ‘You’re not some back-alley bully with your mot.’

  ‘And you’re not some stupid young wan giving everything she is for some lad. Haven’t we both seen enough of that?’ He shook her, just a gentle shake, to emphasise his fear. ‘You have plans,’ he said softly. ‘Did you think I hadn’t noticed? There’s so much you want to do. Are you really going to give that up just to stay here, Tina? Here?’

  The candles were making everything about him gold – his hair, his eyelashes. Threads of light were falling and melting into him like snow. Tina took his face between her hands. He was hers: so utterly, so tenderly her own. Could he not understand that?

  ‘You’re part of my plans, Joe. We’re a team. You’ve never let me down. Do you think I’m going to run away and leave you?’

  He drew her hands from his face. ‘I’m finished, Tina. And this place will kill you.’

  He stepped back, releasing her, and the Angel’s voice flooded in, shredding, roaring, deafening.

  ‘This place will kill you,’ Joe said. ‘Tell me you’ll leave.’

  She lurched for him and he stepped back again, coming to a halt a scant two yards away. She pressed her fists to her temples, regarding him across the forest of the candle flames. Without his touch, the Angel’s voice was a knife in her head, hacking the inside of her skull.

  ‘Tell me you’ll leave,’ Joe whispered.

  ‘I’ll leave.’

  He looked away, as if ashamed. Tina held herself in place, fists clenched against her head, eyes narrowed against the pain.

  ‘Don’t be angry at me, Tina.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  He came and offered his hand. She took it. He stooped and gripped the lip of the jar with his free hand. She leaned to help, and between them they dragged the jar across the musty dimness of the hall and into the library. ‘It won’t be easy to get this over to that castle,’ Joe grunted. ‘But between us both …’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Tina. He straightened warily, as if suspecting she’d changed her mind. She pointed to the chill gap in the bookshelves, the books scattering the floor. ‘They left the secret door open,’ she said.

  At the threshold of the door, they stood gazing down into blackness.

>   ‘It’s very dark,’ said Joe. ‘Maybe …’

  Her hand tightened on his. ‘Joe! There’s something moving down there.’

  He crouched slightly, pushing her behind him. ‘Where?’

  She pointed a shaking finger. ‘Can’t you see it? There! About three steps down. I’m scared, Joe.’

  He pushed her further behind him, straining to see. ‘I can’t see it,’ he whispered. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure, Joe.’

  She pushed just hard enough to send him stumbling down the top few steps, and was already swinging the door shut as he turned. She had just enough time to see the panic in his eyes before the latch clicked shut. He began hammering almost immediately, and she pressed her face to the door, feeling the pounding of his anger through the wood.

  We’ll figure it out, Joe. We’ll think of something better than you dying and my going on alone.

  For a moment, the hammering ceased.

  I’ll be back for you, she told him.

  The hammering recommenced as she dragged the jar through the French doors, but once she was out on the terrace it fell from earshot. She was left only with dim and silent moonlight, and the terrible voice of the Angel gnawing at her mind. Across the flagstones, a spattered path of rapidly drying water betrayed Wolcroft’s route from the well. Tina regarded it a moment, in weariness and pain, then began the slow, scraping task of dragging the jar away from the house.

  The Heart That Pulled

  IT HAD BEEN a long time since Cornelius had felt the reassuring weight of a pistol in his hand. A long time since he and Vincent strode out together motivated only by the simple concept of kill or be killed. The old days were so old now, so distant and covered in dust, that he could barely discern sentiment from actual memory. But this? This was the past alive again; this was the vibrancy of youth pumping like fresh blood through his veins.

  Raquel fell into step with them as they came abreast of her. She had her little knife in hand – the one with which she had killed her husband, and so ended his wretched abuse of her. Cornelius was still appalled by her lack of fidelity to Matthew. But that did not stop him handing her a flintlock as they advanced together across the frozen grass. She took it without diverting her attention from the torches on the boating pond.

  ‘Is it the world?’ she asked. ‘Has it hunted us down at last?’

  ‘If it has, we shall soon see it off.’ He felt a flare of happiness at the sheer straightforwardness of that thought. The set look on Vincent’s face filled him with the fiercest joy. Yes, Captain. Yes! This place is worth fighting for, this little island of ours.

  He felt the cold air on his teeth and realised he was grinning.

  They came to a halt on the shore of the pond and spread out in a close-knit line, squinting towards the lights.

  ‘It’s Peadar,’ grunted Luke, lowering his fowling-piece.

  ‘So it is,’ said Vincent, uncocking his pistol.

  ‘It is the entire village,’ said Raquel. She picked up her skirts and followed Vincent out into the eddying bank of fog.

  Swamped with the most intense disappointment, Cornelius watched them go. The villagers. Come to beg access to the girl, no doubt – and now he would have to talk them all into going back home. He closed his eyes, the glorious anticipation of battle replaced with the tedious vista of diplomacy.

  Damn my life, he thought, wearily plunging the pistol into his belt.

  The ice was thick with frost and it crunched like snow beneath his feet. Voices came murmuring through the muffling fog, then Vincent’s slim figure resolved itself in a halo of torchlight. The villagers gathered around, their eyes flat coins of firelight.

  ‘What do you mean, you chased them here?’ Raquel asked Peadar. ‘Why would you drive them onto the estate?’

  ‘We didn’t drive them in, missus. We followed them, after we noticed their horses tied at the church gate. We were hoping the sight of the torches would panic them.’

  ‘Is it the seer’s family?’ pondered Vincent. ‘Could they have traced her here so soon?’

  Cornelius groaned. It was possible. They could have taken a train from the city, and then horses from the nearest town. Damnation. ‘We had best search the grounds. Douse those lights; they’ve done their job. The sudden darkness will better serve to unsettle the intruders further, and give us the advantage.’

  There came a series of violent hisses as a dozen or more brands met their death. The villagers’ eyes now blinked back green from hazy darkness. Peadar asked, ‘Do we drive them off, or put an end to them?’

  Cornelius glanced at Vincent. Intruders were not as common as they had once been; the hordes of pitiful skeletons that the great famine had driven across country were already a distant memory. Even in this remoteness, however, vagrants weren’t unheard of – the occasional family dispossessed by the land wars, the occasional pedlar. He and Vincent simply drove those kinds of trespassers from the place. But if this was the girl’s family, the girl’s inevitable fate and that which they planned for the artistes would quickly become clear to them. It was impossible that they could be allowed free to spread tales.

  Complication upon complication, he thought.

  ‘We must do away with them,’ said Raquel.

  Cornelius stared at her a moment – her clear, handsome face, the calmness of her expression. She was absolutely correct. So why did this pain him? He could not answer, but there was no satisfaction to it when he nodded his agreement.

  ‘You are right, of course, my dear. Let us make a clean sweep of this. Vincent, Luke and I will take the house and its immediate grounds. Raquel, will you take a group around the topiary gardens and the maze?’

  ‘The rest of us will split between the drive and lawns and woods,’ said Peadar.

  ‘Thank you, friend. Be careful in the woods. I think the children may be there.’

  Raquel and the villagers drifted away. It was not the first time they had done this; they knew their roles. Soon Cornelius was left in fog and silence, Luke by his side, Vincent at his back.

  ‘The children are not to be allowed to amuse themselves, Luke.’

  There was a small, resentful silence.

  Cornelius sighed. ‘I am adamant, Luke.’

  With a tut, Luke nodded, and trudged away.

  Cornelius looked back at Vincent. ‘Best to it, I suppose, Captain.’

  To his night vision, the fog was beautiful, billowing around his motionless friend in softly luminous veils. The brightnesses of Vincent’s eyes flashed towards him, then away.

  ‘Captain?’

  ‘When was it we began to so casually use people up?’

  ‘Tell me you are joking.’

  Vincent didn’t answer.

  Cornelius’ stomach tightened in inexplicable fear. ‘Have you forgot where we came from?’

  ‘I recall the youth we escaped. I recall the mire from which we freed ourselves.’

  ‘Aye, by stealing your father’s ship and crew, Vincent! By clearing my father’s strongroom. By becoming pirates. Murder and theft were the very foundation of our present fortune. Our entire livelihood has been based on the misuse of others.’

  Vincent looked off into the swirling emptiness of the fog. ‘I cannot help but think that was different.’

  ‘Different!’

  ‘Yes. Different. What are we doing here, Cornelius? Eating children up. Hunting old women in the dark. For what? That we may continue to live like leeches in a bog?’

  Cornelius’ heart began to pound. What are you suggesting?

  ‘I do not like what we have become.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That this is no longer worth the price, cully.’

  ‘You will die if you leave.’

  Vincent shrugged. ‘We do not know that for certain.’

  ‘Things are going to improve. Once the Angel is—’

  I can no longer do this, Cornelius. I can no longer live this dusty, empty life.

 
; Vincent’s eyes once again flashed towards him. ‘Come with me, cully. We can resume our adventures. We have many ships at our disposal these days, centuries of accumulated wealth. Let us travel the world with it – take Raquel and head to South America, sail up the Amazon and see what we can see. Let us travel to Africa. Or we could tour Europe! Do you know that on the Russian steppes there are—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cornelius, we could—’

  ‘No. I will not go with you.’

  Vincent hung his head in defeat. He sighed. ‘Very well. I will speak to Raquel about dividing our fortunes into—’

  Cornelius laughed. The harsh sound of it frightened him; the anger he felt frightened him; but he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t. It was like a tide rising. A great black rush of bitterness, and he couldn’t stop. ‘You don’t honestly think you can go without me, do you? How in God’s name would you manage?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You? Touring Europe? No doubt you would set yourself up in the finest hotels? Visit the great houses, perhaps – view their collections of art? A Byronic dilettante sampling the highest of culture?’

  Vincent chuckled. ‘I know it seems out of character, but I—’

  ‘I can picture you now, sitting in a café by the Rhine, ordering yourself a dish of cheese and a glass of good wine. Dear Raquel, how nice it will be for her to sit there with you. How long do you think it will take for you to get served? Oh, and what shall you pretend to be? Her cab driver? Her servant? The amusing wild-man act from a travelling circus?’

  Vincent went very still and quiet. Cornelius could feel his own heart battering his ribs as if panicked by his words; as if appalled by them. But his mouth kept moving. It just kept moving, and this vileness poured out.