I had heard enough. I stood. “Thank you, Miss Brown. I do appreciate your talking with me. You’ve been most helpful.”
Mary’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth opened, but I turned and walked away, past the nodding daisies, through the white gate, and down the road, thoughts traveling in a circle, like a problem of division that has no end. I passed more cottages, many of them, and a small church with a cemetery. I heard the clang of a blacksmith’s forge, and a mother calling for her child. I saw sheep dotting the pasture, made my way through a flock of honking geese, smelled someone’s baking bread. Nine hundred people. I wondered if my father could have known of all this. Aunt Alice, I was sure, did not. Robert’s gravy-spattered shirts might be given to the poor of the workhouse, but his inheritance never would.
My feet found the path snaking over the rise, and the blowing grasses rustled against my skirt. When I explained all that I had seen to the magistrate, Uncle Tulman was going to be put in an asylum. The law protected the inheritors of land. The estate would go to Fat Robert, and until Robert was of age, that would put Aunt Alice at the helm. I stopped walking. And when Aunt Alice was in charge, she was going to turn them out, every man, child, and Mary Brown of them.
The knowledge took firm hold while I stood on the path. They must have all understood what my presence here meant, from my first step over the threshold. Life at Stranwyne hung by a ribbon, a ribbon that was currently tied to my hand. I gathered my skirts and hurried up the slope, knees still weak from the last time I’d run up and down this hill. Lane’s reticence and hostility were no longer a mystery to me, or Mrs. Jefferies’s tears, or even the insults of Mary’s mother. Nine hundred people would go back to the workhouses, or worse. And yet, whatever might be left of Fat Robert’s dwindling inheritance could not be frittered away. It must stay intact. If it did not stay intact, then I would be left without the smallest hope of independence. I would die by degrees, smothered in the crimson of Aunt Alice’s morning room.
I looked up. I’d missed the turn to the kitchen garden. Stranwyne towered tall and brown on either side of me, throwing heat onto both cheeks while a stiff breeze whipped at my hair from behind. I entered a curving stone passage, house above and on either side, then stepped through an arch. There was the circular drive, the mouth of the tunnel straight ahead in the distance, to my right both land and house falling downward with terraced levels of rose gardens. A wagon was to my left, before the front doors of the house, my trunk corded onto its back and a boy lazing in the seat, waiting to take me away. Back to London, to Aunt Alice, her solicitor, and to the magistrate.
The wind had loosed many of my curls before the boy saw me, standing statue-like before the archway. He jerked upright and doffed his hat, but I did not acknowledge him. I stood, rooted to the ground like the weeds beneath my boots, because the path was no longer clear before my feet. The boy stirred, the reins held loose in his hands. A mighty gust of wind rammed my back, and I strode quickly to the front doors and grasped the latch.
“You may put away the horse,” I said over my shoulder, “it will not be needed. Not today.”
The latch rust was gritty, but the metal beneath it was shaded and cool, like the chilled stone of the chapel room. The memory of that soft laugh moved through my mind, echoing from nowhere, slithering across its walls, joined by the resonance that had wailed in the dark outside my window. I spun on my heel.
“And when that is done you may go to the Lower Village and bring me Mary Brown.”
“Lord,” Mary said, eyes sparkling. We had just hauled the trunk up two flights of stairs, into the corridor of the portraits, and opened the door to the bedchamber. “I never saw nothing half so grand, nor half so dirty. I …”
She chattered on in a way that rivaled my uncle while I stood in the doorway, a sense of unreality spreading numbness through my veins. Scant hours ago I had left this room thinking never to return, and yet here I was, and now it had a name. It was Marianna’s room — the blue of the ribbon and the auburn hair had shown me that — and the room itself no longer frightened me. It was what lay outside of it that made me tremble. I shut the door and turned the key in the lock, gazing at Mary dubiously. I had brought her here out of cowardice, really, to avoid being on my own. Now that I had her, I didn’t quite know what to do with her.
“Miss Brown …” I began.
Mary turned to me, hands on hips. “You must be calling me Mary. A body who’s gone and been pushing a trunk up all them stairs in a haunted house should be calling them that helped with the pushing by their Christian name.”
I chose not to puzzle through this logic. But Mary’s face was friendly, such an unusual expression when someone had their eyes on me, and she had been such a wealth of information before. “Mary,” I said, “I … I was wondering. Last night, when I was sleeping in this room, I heard a … noise, and …”
Mary leapt onto the bed and propped her chin on her hands, rapt.
“Rather like …” I bit my lip.
“Chains?”
I shook my head.
“Whispers? Creaks? Footsteps where there weren’t none?”
“More like … a howl.”
Mary’s nose wrinkled. “Good Lord, Miss, you don’t ever mean a trogwynd?”
I looked back at her blankly, mind full of ogres and evil spirits. Mary’s face fell.
“But a trogwynd is just … wind, Miss! Coming with a strong breeze north, and we’ve often got a strong breeze north. Ripping strong. My dad says ’tis an old word, and that the wind must’ve been making noise through the hills around here for a long, long time, but with Mr. Tully’s tunnel, ’tis like God blowing on an empty bottle of ale, that’s what my dad says….”
I closed my eyes. Wind. I’d been hugging my knees like a child over wind. Mary began wandering about the room as she talked, peeking behind curtains and opening cabinet doors.
“He says that’s where the house was getting its name, too, says it’s meaning ‘strange winds’ or some such nonsense, though that ain’t the way a body goes about talking now. You’ll have to be hoping for some better luck soon, Miss, or there’ll be nothing to be telling your grandchildren, and what a shame that would be, don’t you know, to get old without … Oh!”
Her squeal brought me running. She had opened the connecting door, the one I had blocked with a chair the night before, and behind it was a room devoted entirely to private functions. The floor and even part of the walls were smooth marble, impervious to water, and an enormous tub, a tub one could almost lie down in, stretched across one end of the room, a faucet hanging over its edge. The faucet was attached to a tall cylinder, pink roses painted on its side, a little door near its base with a cast brass flower for the knob. I tugged on the knob and saw soot inside, and some ashes. Then this was to heat the water. One could have a warm bath, and with no need for a kettle or running back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen.
Mary, meanwhile, stood enthralled before what my aunt would have termed a “convenience,” though it was unlike any I had ever seen. Another water cylinder perched high on the wall, with a chain hanging down from it, a little tasseled pull dangling from its end, tantalizing. Mary’s brown eyes met mine, and I shrugged. She took hold of the tassel, grinning hugely, and pulled.
A loud and sudden gurgle made me start, and a rush of orange-brown water poured into the convenience. Mary had leapt all the way to the far wall before she came cautiously forward again.
“Oh, the water’s poisoned, Miss! That’s a shame, that is.”
I stared at the water, regretting the long and uncomfortable trek to find a chamber pot that morning. “Wait a moment. I have an idea.” I went to where yet another faucet protruded over a basin and turned the handle. The water ran a deep orange for a few moments, lightened to the color of mud, and then cleared. “See, it’s not poisoned, the pipes are just …”
But Mary was not listening. She was on her knees, peering upward beneath the basin. “But where does it al
l go, Miss? Where does the water go?”
I had no answer.
Mary was like a trogwynd herself, I discovered, making noise and pushing those around her at all times. She found a basin and torn rags — from another room’s curtains, I suspected — and commenced scrubbing the various tables and shelves, and even the wooden sections of the floors with vigor. I pulled down the filthy bed curtains and dragged them through the bathing room and another small chamber to the library I’d seen the day before. I threw the bedclothes over a piece of old rope Mary had filched from beneath a mice-ridden mattress, then beat the dirt out of them with a tatty umbrella. It felt good to hit something hard. I counted the rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwacks against the heavy pink cloth, filling my mind with numbers and dust until there was room for nothing else.
At dusk the windows were open, the curtains hung and the linens turned out, and a fire burned in the hearth, driving away the damp. The temperature had dropped with the sun, so Mary and I sat together before the hearth and candle flicker in the darkened room, faces dirty and hair mussed, finishing the bread, cheese, and tea I had raided from the empty kitchen along with some kindling and a few lumps of coal. I stared into the embers, half-drowsing in exhaustion, lounging in a mental haze that hid away the thoughts of such things as inheritances and workhouses and the porcelain faces of people who had died.
“You ought to go home, Mary. Your mother will be worried,” I said, forgetting that the whole reason for summoning Mary in the first place was because I’d not wanted to sleep in Stranwyne alone.
“Don’t be silly, Miss,” said Mary, her mouth full. “I already told her I wasn’t coming back tonight, and I was right to tell her that, don’t you see, ’cause if I had been coming home after all, then she’d have naught but a surprise instead of a fright, while if I didn’t come home she’d —”
“But why,” I interrupted, something I now did more often than not, “did you think you wouldn’t go home?”
Mary’s voice was pitying. “Now how could I go and be your ladies’ maid from my own bedside, Miss?”
“My maid?”
“That’s right. They said you’d come all by yourself, and that means you didn’t have one, and that means you’ll need someone to be doing for you, and I know all about the doing of such things. My mum was laundress in a big house once, and the lady of that house had a maid, and the maid told my mum, and my mum told me all about it, don’t you see?”
The candle flames stirred with the air from the window, and my protest flew away like the fleeting idea that had created it.
“Anyhow, ’tis time for your bath. Ladies get bathed regular, my mum says, even once a week, and I couldn’t think to shirk my duties, Miss, not for a sixpence. ’Tis a grave thing,” Mary sighed, “to be taking care of a lady.”
Mary must have already filled the cylinder and shoveled coals from our fire through the little rose-petal door, because in less than two minutes I found my foot sinking deep into a pool of deliciously warm water. I slid into the tub all the way to my chin, experiencing a luxuriance I’d never imagined. The small aches of unaccustomed walking and work were coaxed away, and I allowed myself to be lulled even deeper into lethargy. Dimly I was aware of the creak of boards and the stamp of boots in the hallway of the portraits, just the thickness of a wall away from me, and then a fist banging on the bedchamber door. A deep voice shouted words, two of which I thought might be “Mary Brown.”
“You can go your own way, Lane Moreau,” Mary piped from the bedchamber. “My lady is having her bath and can’t be bothered by the likes of you. She’ll be taking visitors in the morning, and if you ain’t a visitor she’s wanting to see, you can be leaving her your card, if you’ve a mind to, and …”
I sank lower, letting my ears fill with the odd hum and rush of sound that was water, and many minutes later, when I slithered upward again, the commotion was gone. But as the water drained from my ears like consciousness, I was aware that the boards in the hallway were creaking, very quick and very light, as if slippered feet were stealing their way down a dark, rose-covered carpet.
A sky of watered ink hung above me as I shut the kitchen door and put one foot into the soft earth of the garden, avoiding the noise of the gravel path. I had woken in the predawn well rested, and with a head that was calm, the dim and whirling thoughts that had so troubled me yesterday now ordered and stilled. Whatever Aunt Alice chose to do with any information I gave her was neither my responsibility nor my sin. And she would find out in some fashion, whether from my lips or others. Better for those lips to be mine, especially if I wished to be kept in charge of the books. Being kept in charge of the books was as essential to my own future freedom as finding out just how much of Fat Robert’s inheritance might be left. Therefore I had slid my feet from beneath the sleeping Mary, curled protectively across the foot of my bed, and stolen the dress she had left thrown over a chair. I tied her kerchief around my head as I hurried through the dew-dampened garden. At least the width of the worsted would not immediately point me out as a stranger and an enemy.
The Lower Village was sleepy, lanes deserted and dock quiet, the occasional call of a cock or milch cow only adding to the stillness rather than breaking it. I approached the green door of my uncle’s workshop and very slowly pushed down on the latch. It did not open.
I stared at the door, surprised at my own surprise. I don’t know why I had thought my uncle’s workshop would be unlocked, open for just anyone’s perusal. I hurried around the corner, seeking another entrance. The building was much larger than it looked from the vantage point of the road. There were no other doors on the workshop end of the building, but on the river side, there were two wide ones for the delivery of coal, I perceived, and another beyond that, all of them locked. I checked the sky, paler and with one bright star shining just above the dawn. I went to the nearest window, and it pushed upward.
I thought for a moment and, after a quick glance at the deserted riverbank, scrambled headfirst onto the window ledge, swung one leg through and then the other, and landed lightly on the other side, brushing bits of dirt and crumbling paint from Mary’s skirt. And that, I thought, was one thing I would not be telling Aunt Alice. I looked around.
An enormous engine rose ten feet above my head, quiet now and partially obscured by a brick wall, tubes of polished copper and brass running out of it and along the walls. But I was looking for papers, not pipes. The numbers were so unbelievable, proof of my uncle’s expenditures might save me a certain amount of trouble and explanation. I moved across the soot-strewn floor and found a door with a short hallway behind it, two doors to the left, two on the right, and one at the end, which I recognized as leading to the little sitting room with the couch, where I had entered and left the day before. Silently I opened the second door on the right, and slipped inside my uncle’s workshop.
I was not alone. On the far end of the room, beyond the rows of Uncle Tulman’s toys in the faint glow of the gas lamps, a man had his back to me. He was in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, leaning over what looked like a trough that ran the length of the wall, something I had not noticed the day before. The man whirled about as if I had shouted, and the expression of dismay on his face softened into a smile of recognition. It was Ben Aldridge. He put one finger to his lips before turning back around, and I came noiselessly through the room to stand by his side. The trough he stood before was full of water.
“What are you doing, Mr. Aldridge?”
“The same thing as you, I expect, Miss Tulman, but I’d be most obliged if you would keep your voice low. Your uncle is asleep in his sitting room, and the walls do echo.”
I eyed him speculatively. “Do you often come into my uncle’s workshop without permission?”
“Only every blooming chance I can get, Miss Tulman.” He grinned, blue eyes twinkling in a sun-reddened face, making him somehow, just as yesterday, seem younger than his voice. “I am a student of science, and there is more knowledge in this workshop than in
all the scientific brains at Cambridge.”
“Have you attended Cambridge?”
“I am a graduate.”
I must have looked surprised, because he said, “How unfortunate it is to never be believed when I say that. I grew the side whiskers, but it doesn’t seem to help.” I smiled in spite of myself, and he laughed quietly. “I came here three months ago, Miss Tulman, after my graduation, to visit my aging aunt, the last of the old servants other than Mrs. Jefferies. My aunt had already died, I am sorry to say, but I stayed on, hearing at first the rumors of what this room contained, and then finally being admitted to see the marvels for myself. I wish to learn of them. But your uncle, I’m afraid, shares knowledge most reluctantly.”
“So you sneak in, in the middle of the night.”
“One does what one has to. I go to take up a private teaching position in just a few weeks’ time, so my opportunities are not unlimited.” He leaned on the trough, his sleeves rolled up and arms dripping wet, like a boy playing boats on a pond. “And what has brought you here so early, Miss Tulman? I heard your visit yesterday ended rather badly.”
“Ledger books,” I replied, “the estate’s accounts.”
Ben said nothing, but his smile disappeared. He stared pensively into the water, and after a time said, “Tell me what you think of this.”
He plunged his hands beneath the surface, breaking the reflection of the gaslights into rippling sparks, and out came a metal fish, some two and a half feet long, painted a luminous green and blue. “Your uncle calls this object a toy, Miss Tulman. And, indeed, the action of swimming, though clever, is no great mystery. The fins wave, the tail swivels, the casing does not allow the leaking of water. And like a fish, when this toy swims, it does not sink, and nor does it float. That all is simple mechanics. But this fish also holds its course, not just in forward motion, but in depth. What, Miss Tulman, gives this machine the ability to swim parallel to both the surface of the water and the surface of the earth?”
The Dark Unwinding Page 5