I ran a finger over the slick blue fin. “It looks too heavy to do anything but sit on the bottom.”
“Ships much heavier than this sail the oceans every day.” It was the challenge of a schoolmaster.
“But they are wood,” I protested. “This is different.”
“Ah! But at this very moment the emperor of France is building a ship completely encased in iron, Miss Tulman, an iron ship impervious to cannon fire, and he expects it to float very well. But you are right, this is different, because this fish does not float or sink like a ship. It swims its course underwater in a straight line, right, left, up, or down. How I long to know how it would fare against current or in surf! I would take it apart if I did not fear my own inability to put it back together again, and the loss of your uncle’s hard-won favor.”
I watched him place the fish reverently back in the water.
“We live in a fantastic age, Miss Tulman. At the edge of a time when nothing will be denied us, not the moon or stars or even life itself. Your uncle is a genius. It would be … a crime, you know, to lock it away, to let it rot in a lunatic’s cell.”
“That is not my choice,” I said. “I only do what I am … compelled to, just as you.” Suddenly I felt very tired. “But all knowledge aside, do you not think my uncle is a danger to others or even to himself?”
“No, I can’t say I believe that. He is easily upset, and he has his own set of rules that he feels compelled …” His gaze slid to me on the word. “… to follow. His works are like his own children. He is protective of them, frightened of having someone take them away. He finds it extraordinarily difficult to trust another human being. It has taken me weeks to be allowed in this room on two consecutive Saturdays, and then I still cannot ask questions or even see Mr. Tully’s drawings.” He turned to look at me again. “He trusted you almost immediately.”
I thought of my uncle’s face the last time I had seen it. “I doubt that is the case now.”
“You should try again, Miss Tulman, indeed you should. As I shall keep trying to understand this fish.”
“If you come in here when my uncle is asleep, Mr. Aldridge, why do you not simply find the drawings for this fish?”
“Because they do not exist, or do not exist that I know of. No more than the drawings of that dragon you saw yesterday exist.” He smiled again. “Mostly your uncle finds written plans unnecessary. His drawings are for the foundry, and are generally piecemeal or incomplete.”
“And what about ledger books, Mr. Aldridge?”
He frowned slightly. “It would surprise me greatly if your uncle has ever kept a ledger book in his life.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “We should be bobbing off, Miss Tulman. Mr. Tully’s guard dog will be along soon.”
“His guard dog?”
He took my elbow, steering me to the door. “Surely you’ve noticed your uncle’s guard dog? Dark, moody, and prone to an angry expression?”
I smiled at this description of Lane, but removed my arm. “I’ll risk a few more minutes, if you don’t mind. I haven’t done what I came to yet.”
Ben’s brows lowered for a moment, but then he smiled and inclined his head. “I hope to see you again, Miss Tulman. And … do be careful.”
I gave him a small curtsy in return, wondering who he was warning me against: Lane, or my uncle.
My perusal of the desk with the jumble of papers proved unrevealing. The peacock drawing — which looked complete to my untrained eye — had been replaced, and the bits of broken glass swept away, but there were no books, no records, nothing to indicate how much of Fat Robert’s inheritance was being spent, or how much of it might be left. But someone had to pay the men, order the coal, buy the base metal, and likely a dozen other things that had never occurred to me. And I doubted very much that it was my uncle.
I stepped out of the workshop. There were voices in the engine room, male voices, and I heard the scrape of a shovel on a brick floor. I had dallied too long. I tiptoed down the hallway, pushed soundlessly on the sitting-room door, and peeked inside.
Early shadows had collected like cobwebs in the corners, and on the little couch where I had rested yesterday lay my uncle, a blanket pulled up to his chin, breathing deep and slow in his sleep. Lane was stretched long on a blanket on the floor, his arms behind his head, conveying the readiness to spring even while in the depths of slumber. Beside the couch, on top of a cabinet, sat my bonnet.
My fingertips had just touched the brim when a voice said, “What are you doing, Miss Tulman?”
I started, my hand jerking back of its own accord. Then I snatched up my hat and turned around. Lane was on his bare feet, hair tousled and chin shadowed, his voice rough with sleep. “I am getting my bonnet, Mr. Moreau.”
“You didn’t come down here for your hat.”
The gray eyes bored back into mine, but this time they were not like stone. They were wild, unpredictable, like a storming sea. I opened my mouth to protest, and found I had nothing to say.
“Why didn’t you leave?” he demanded.
My gaze darted to my uncle. Lane was not shouting, but he was not whispering either. He crossed his arms.
“He’ll not wake,” Lane said, “not after he’s been upset. Why did you send away the wagon?”
“I’m not obligated to tell you anything of —”
“Yes. You are.”
I clutched the hat to my chest. My uncle had moved slightly, a corner of his tucked blanket now hanging loose to the floor. “I have only come for my bonnet,” I whispered. I turned away and hurried for the green door.
“It doesn’t match your dress!” I heard him call, the latch clicking shut on his words. I stood on the doorstep, blinking in the dawning sun, resentment rising slow and hot into my face. None of this was my doing, the result not my responsibility; I had settled that firmly with myself on Marianna’s mattress. Lane Moreau had no right to show me such open contempt; as Mr. Tulman’s niece, I was due his courtesy, at the very least. In London such insolence would have had him packing his bags. I lifted my chin, pushed down the latch, and marched back through the door.
Lane wasn’t there. The room was silent but for the breathing of my uncle. I crossed the room slowly and looked down on him. He wasn’t just beneath the blanket, I saw, but cocooned in it, the tight cloth only just moving against his intake of breath, the dangling corner carefully tucked back in. The white hair was wild, and yet his face was peaceful, trusting, like a swaddled child.
I smelled cooking from the garden, and when I entered the kitchen, Mrs. Jefferies, wearing a starched apron and with her hair combed and pinned, looked up from a sizzling pan. Her brows rose, at Mary Brown’s dirty skirt, I supposed, but she kept her remarks to herself. The table was set for four and had a cloth upon it.
“Are you expecting company, Mrs. Jefferies?”
“I thought we’d sit and have a proper breakfast, is all. Unless you’d rather not, of course.” Something like hope momentarily crossed her face. “Lane will be along soon.”
I remained silent. A meal with the two of them was not likely to be a pleasurable experience, but I had a feeling it was wise to take food at Stranwyne when offered. I eyed the fourth plate. “Will my uncle wake in time for breakfast?”
“Mr. Tully don’t come to the house to eat,” Mrs. Jefferies snapped, “and when people are going and getting him upset, he’s …” She stopped the rise of her voice. “I hear he’s a bit peaky this morning, that’s all. The other plate’s for Davy, of course.”
I had not noticed until then the brown head and tattered jacket in the corner by the fireplace, Bertram placid at his side. While Mrs. Jefferies busied herself with the pan, I set the bonnet on the table and went to the hearth. I bent down, reaching out one finger to stroke the rabbit, but Davy scooped him up and scooted quickly in the ashes of the hearthstone, putting his back to me. I knelt down.
“Davy,” I whispered, hoping the noise of the cooking would be enough to fill the ears of Mrs. Jeffer
ies. “I want to tell you I’m very sorry that I frightened you. I was quite frightened myself at the time, so I rather think I know how it felt.”
His back hunched, hovering over the rabbit, but other than that, he did not acknowledge me.
Lane came, dark, silent, and with no mention of our previous conversation, and ten minutes later I was having the oddest breakfast of my life. Mrs. Jefferies served bacon, ham, tea, toast with marmalade, and a kidney pie in a room that tinkled with the clink of cup and plate, while fairly crackling with a strain that was more sensed than heard. I hardly cared; I felt as if I hadn’t eaten properly in a fortnight. I polished off a second plate, four pairs of eyes watching every raise and lower of my fork, three of those pairs wishing me rather more ill, I fancied, than not. The rabbit, surely, could have no opinion in the matter. When I finally sighed and set down the utensil, Mrs. Jefferies cleared her throat, and looked hard at Lane. He broke the silence.
“Aunt Bit and I have a right to know what …” Lane stopped himself and, like his aunt earlier, adjusted his tone. Politeness, it seemed, was the new policy of the morning. “We would … appreciate knowing your plans, Miss Tulman.”
“Can you tell us … how much time we’re likely to have?” Mrs. Jefferies added. Her voice was trembling.
Now I understood the breakfast and even the tablecloth. I made lines in it with my fingernail, counting the stripes. The moment was upon me, and I did not know what to do with it. At length I said, “I cannot tell you my plans, because … because I do not know them myself.”
Lane leaned forward in his seat. “Then you are undecided.”
I made more stripes. There was nothing to be undecided about. My plans were clear, or at least they should be. But there was still so much that I did not understand, even the simple fact of whether Robert would inherit a fortune or a derelict pile of stone that came with nine hundred paupers. And the sight of my uncle’s sleeping face, my father’s only living brother, my only blood relative besides Fat Robert, had unsettled me.
“Then agree to a bargain,” Lane said quickly. “Wait one month. Thirty days until you go to your aunt, and after that, tell her what you will.”
“And what will change after one month, Mr. Moreau?” I looked him full in the face. “I could go back to London and tell them that Frederick Tulman is a respectable old gentleman on the verge of a peerage, and my aunt would still find out the truth in time. Nothing will change.”
“I know it,” he replied. “We’ve all known it, one way or another. The relatives will come, the law will come, Mr. Tully will die. It cannot last, unless …” The gray eyes met mine, his face expressionless. “But you could buy us time. Maybe years, even. You might come to think that worth the lie.”
I bit my lip. He could not know the slow suffocation those years would be to me. But then a new thought occurred. What if Fat Robert did have a sizable fortune? Aunt Alice was cunning; she could hide the extent of it from me, if she wished. And now that this idea had presented itself, it seemed quite clear that this would be exactly what she would do. No matter what might happen in the meantime, I would have to go back to London, and doing so armed with that particular piece of knowledge would be greatly to my advantage. Mrs. Jefferies dabbed her eyes while Davy’s round hand caressed the rabbit.
“If I were to agree to this plan,” I said slowly, “then you would have to tell me everything. Nothing secret and no more hiding, whether it helps your case or it hinders it. I cannot … make a decision without the facts. And in return for your candor, I would give you one month. Could we agree upon that?”
Lane leaned back in his chair, dark brows furrowed, arms crossed. He nodded once.
“Then I think I should start by spending the afternoon with my uncle, in his workshop.”
“No,” he said immediately. “Mr. Tully doesn’t mean harm, but he just doesn’t …” Lane’s jaw set. “The workshop is Mr. Tully’s, and Mr. Tully sets the rules. He won’t allow you back in it.”
My own brows came down, and Mrs. Jefferies put a hand on Lane’s arm. “Davy says to let her.” I looked in surprise at Mrs. Jefferies, and then at Davy, silent as always, his small hand rubbing the long ears of the rabbit, his large eyes on Mrs. Jefferies. “And Mr. Tully, he did take to her….” Mrs. Jefferies shot me a glance, as if there was no accounting for taste. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
“I won’t have him upset,” Lane said. He looked at me. “In the workshop, we abide by Mr. Tully’s rules. If he won’t allow it, then he won’t allow it.”
“Davy says not to worry,” Mrs. Jefferies said. My gaze darted back to Davy, brows raised.
Lane flung his napkin down onto the table. “Fine, then.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “And sometime before tomorrow, if you please, I will also require the address of a Mr. Babcock.”
Mrs. Jefferies’s shoulders slumped, and Lane’s gray eyes narrowed at me appraisingly. But despite the ferocity of his gaze, I had the feeling that somehow we’d just shaken hands.
I sat on a cushion on the floor of the workshop, watching my uncle, kept silent by both my fascination and fear of offense. I was back in the worsted — after a tirade from Mary that would have impressed my aunt Alice — and Uncle Tulman had not only accepted my presence, he had welcomed it, to everyone’s shock, as if previous transgressions had never taken place.
Now Lane stood at a worktable, supposedly painting a small square of wood, but with his stony eyes on me like a mother hen’s on a hawk. Spending the afternoon with my uncle would not really further my purpose, I knew that; it might even hinder it were I to trample again on some enigmatic rule. But people, in my experience, could be sorted like numbers: evens, odds, groups that could work together, and others that could not. My uncle was someone I could not sort at all. I did not like that.
Lane’s brush tapped against the paint jar, and Uncle Tulman sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning over a wrinkled sheet of paper, making alternating numbers and shapes that captivated and yet meant nothing to me. A gaslight gave a soft pop, just audible over the engine hum. My uncle jotted two sets of three numbers on the paper, one upon the other, drew a line, and wrote four numbers beneath, all in the space of a breath.
“Uncle,” I said, “do you multiply in your head?”
Lane shook his head fiercely at me in warning, but Uncle Tulman looked up, as if surprised to find me there. “Simon’s baby!” he said. “Why aren’t you playing?”
Lane’s brows came together, and he looked to his paint, his expression now confused.
“I’m just watching today, Uncle,” I replied carefully.
“Simon watched me play,” Uncle Tulman said. “We did clocks.”
I considered this insight into the father I’d never known, listening to the pen dip and scratch. After a few moments I asked, “What is twenty-five times fifteen, Uncle Tulman?”
“Three hundred seventy-five.” The pen blazed across the page, scrawling a depiction of interlocking wheels. It took me several seconds to discover that my uncle was correct. I glanced at Lane. He was still, gazing at his paintbrush.
“Fifty times one hundred twenty-five?”
“Six thousand two hundred and fifty.”
“Two hundred fifty times three hundred?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
I had been choosing numbers I thought I could do in my head, but Uncle Tulman was answering before I could begin the first step. “Four hundred eighteen times eight hundred and six?”
“Three hundred thirty-six thousand nine hundred and eight.”
“Nine hundred forty-two times seven hundred and three?”
“Six hundred sixty-two thousand two hundred and twenty-six.” Uncle Tulman’s beard spread wide. Different numbers, letters among them, appeared in rows beneath the drawing. I had the same feeling as when I’d watched the dragon tower rise into the air. What was before me seemed impossible, and yet, there it was.
“Seven hundred seventy-four —” I began,
but all at once Uncle Tulman crushed his papers to his chest and leapt to his feet. I flinched.
“Playtime is over!” he yelled, and before the sound of his words had gone there came a knock at the door, three times, very precise. Lane set down his brush and put the lid on his paint. My uncle glanced back and saw me, still sitting on the floor cushion, and began plucking unhappily at his coat. Papers drifted to the floor like slow-falling rain.
Lane spoke up quickly, his voice low and calm. “She can have the green cup, Mr. Tully.”
“The green cup! Yes, yes, the green one. I was forgetting!” My uncle’s agitation evaporated. “Come in!”
Mrs. Jefferies came through the door, still in her cap, pushing a tea cart that rattled over the floor bricks. I wondered where she had gotten tea things. I hadn’t noticed them in my uncle’s little sitting room. Lane whispered from behind me.
“Scoot around. That’s Mr. Tully’s spot. And it would probably be best if you didn’t speak.”
Not inclined to disobey, I moved hurriedly and my uncle Tulman dropped to the floor where I had been, though I could not see what marked that place from the others. Mrs. Jefferies laid a clean cloth right on the floor bricks, as if we were having a picnic, and proceeded to produce toast — buttered, I noticed — hot tea, and a honey pot from the cart. She poured the tea into white porcelain cups, each with a different color stripe painted near its rim.
“Yellow for Lane, rose for me, and now green for you, little niece! Green is for special,” said Uncle Tulman. “That is the way things should be. Do more numbers, Simon’s baby.”
I saw Mrs. Jefferies’s eyes dart quickly to Lane, questioning, but he only lifted a shoulder. I amused my uncle by asking him to multiply or divide whatever random numbers entered my head while Mrs. Jefferies stood against the wall, frowning, watching every sip I took of my tea. I wondered if it bothered her that I was touching these dishes, as it had in the kitchen, but I resisted the temptation to play with the honey spoon. The tea was very good. Orange, maybe. Warmth, strong and sweet, flooded right through my middle, radiating outward to my fingers and toes.
The Dark Unwinding Page 6