I had finished my second cup and only half my toast when all at once my uncle shouted, “Teatime is over!” Lane set down his cup, his spoon at careful angles, and the sight of the dark brows and tan skin, more suited to Spanish armor and flagons than yellow-striped teacups, made me want to giggle. I put a hand over my mouth, surprised at myself, but then again, I didn’t much care. I felt happier than I had in weeks, years even. Uncle Tulman leapt up from the floor, snapped his arms stiff at his sides, and looked me in the face, unblinking.
“Good night!” he shouted. “Good night!” he said to Lane in the same manner, and again to Mrs. Jefferies. Then, as if released from a spring, he ran to the workshop door and slammed it behind him. Mrs. Jefferies put her hands on her hips and turned to look down her nose at me.
“Were you giving that Mary Brown a bedroom?”
“What?” I said, my eyelids heavy.
“Mary Brown. Were you telling her she could sleep in one of the bedrooms? She’s been moving furniture and cleaning like the devil up there all day.”
I yawned. “I think Mary Brown should have a bedroom wherever she likes.” I stretched my limbs and smiled brightly at Lane. He looked startled.
“Well, you just tell her to be staying out of my kitchen,” hissed Mrs. Jefferies. She cleared the tea things, muttering, while I got to my feet, brushing off my dress, my fleeting gaze fixing on an iron ladder that ran up the wall, past the gaslights, and up into the dimness of the ceiling. One would be able to see the entire workshop from up there. The benches, the toys, the top of Lane’s head, like a bird, hanging from the sky like a bird …
I realized my feet were walking, that I was already halfway across the room, my hand reaching for the first rung. I grabbed a handful of my skirt instead, forcing my feet to stop. What was I thinking? Of course I could not climb the ladder. What an absurd thing to consider. Lane was stacking Uncle Tulman’s papers and putting away the paint, so I swung my arms while I waited for him to finish, still with a handful of the worsted. Swish, swish, swish, went the cloth, like dancing. When Mrs. Jefferies began to push the loaded cart, I flitted through the workshop door, away from the temptation of the ladder, and turned toward my uncle’s sitting room and the green-painted door.
“Not that way,” Lane said, once again just behind me. “If Mr. Tully says good night after tea, he means it. He’ll be sleeping by now.”
Mrs. Jefferies came with the rattling cart, and I watched Lane pull down a large lever-shaped switch on the wall. One by one, the gaslights dimmed, popped, and went out, and he turned a key in the lock of the workshop. Ben Aldridge must have a key, too, I mused. I rocked back and forth on my heels. “What’s in here?” I asked, reaching for the nearest door latch.
“Nothing,” Lane snapped, immediately softening his tone. “Nothing. It’s just my room, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling hugely. “Mustn’t touch, then.”
Mrs. Jefferies had pushed the cart down the hall to the door on the left and was unloading the tea things into a basket sitting on the floor. Lane opened the door and a black space yawned behind it. “This way,” he said. I peeked around his arm. A stone staircase wound down below the floor.
“Take the basket back to the house, love,” said Mrs. Jefferies. “I’m off to see to Davy.” Lane nodded, and she bent him down to place a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek, throwing me a look of sheer malevolence as she did it. I stifled my giggles. Lane took both the basket and the kiss without comment, and then gestured to me, indicating the staircase. I stepped down into the darkness, clinging blindly to the rail, feeling Mrs. Jefferies’s eyes on my back as I descended.
About halfway down, the light grew, the air cooled, and at the bottom of the winding stair I found myself in another tunnel. Sconces of gaslight were set on a twisting, wrought-iron letter S, like in the carriage tunnel, but this time there was no curving brick. The lights were connected by pipes tacked onto huge squares of rough-hewn stone, and the ceiling was much lower, uneven. Water dripped, the burning lamps hissed, and Lane’s footsteps came softly down the stones while I twirled my dress, swishing as I looked around. “Is it old?” I asked when he reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes. Older than the house, even, except for the chapel. It led to the brew house, once upon a time.” He adjusted the basket handles and began walking. I skipped after, hurrying to keep up with his voice. “Mr. Tully uses it to go back and forth, when he goes back and forth at all, but that’s only on Thursdays now.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You ought to use this way, too. It would be better, I think, if you didn’t walk through the village. Not on your own.”
I wondered vaguely why this might be as I trailed my fingers along the damp wall, counting the gaslights on each side as we passed. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three … The pitch of Lane’s voice was so low and resonant in the tunnel. I wanted to hear it again. “Tell me about pink,” I said.
After a few moments, he replied, “Aunt Bit says her mother told her that Mr. Tully would cry and cry as a baby, and bang his head against anything hard, so that they had to sew pillows to cover all the cradle wood. The only place he calmed was in his mother’s room, and that was …”
“Pink!” I guessed.
“That’s right. So Miss Marianna had the whole house painted or papered that way, every room. I don’t think Mr. Tully’s brothers liked that much.” Lane paused. “Did your father … did he never speak about Mr. Tully, then?”
“I’ve never talked to my father. He was dead before I could’ve.” I hopped over the puddles, waving my arms for balance. “But you can bet your buttons Aunt Alice doesn’t know.”
Lane nodded. “Miss Marianna spent her life keeping Mr. Tully hidden.”
“Oh, I reckon Uncle George just didn’t have the courage to tell her,” I said. “I wouldn’t have, if Aunt Alice had been my wife. She’s a nasty old so-and-so.” The flames in the gas globes seemed to jump and twist, like sparks. Two hundred and sixteen dancing sparks. I smiled, and then I realized that Lane had paused and was half turned to me.
“There’s not much that any of us wouldn’t do for Mr. Tully,” he said. “You should remember that.” He was another darkness in the tunnel, a lithe shadow amongst the shadows of the gas glow. Then he adjusted the basket and walked on, and I came after him, my dress swishing. One hundred thirty-three, one hundred thirty-four, one hundred thirty-five …
I realized he was climbing another set of stone steps, ducking through a low door at their top. I did the same, and we were standing on the far end of the chapel room, near the hearth. I looked back and saw a square of wall standing open, the stones a thin ruse mortared onto a heavy, thick-planked door. Lane shut it, and the door disappeared into the wall. “The people who built Stranwyne Keep must have been Catholic, I think,” he said. “Rich Catholics, in need of a quick way out.”
I stood still, panting a little, breathing in the scent of old stone. The room was much darker than when last I was in it; the sun did not penetrate the windows. The mirror stood a few feet away, to my left, and then I glimpsed the parson, smiling from his little table, his cracked face leering in the dim. I stared, my gaze caught as if in a net. I took a step forward, tripping a little over my skirt.
“Careful,” Lane said. Then for the first time, I heard him chuckle, a very throaty sound. “Do you know who that is?”
I shook my head, still moving forward, my breath coming hard. The walk must have been longer than I thought. My head was light, spinning.
“It’s Mr. George,” said Lane. “He thumps the table and scolds when you turn his key, or he did before he got broken anyway. Mr. Tully dressed him like a parson because he said George was always telling him what to do.” Lane laughed again.
I inched forward, staring at Aunt Alice’s dead husband, the echo of Lane’s laughter moving loud and soft, loud and soft around the walls.
“And all because I found that parson’s hat,” he said, “blowing across the moors….”
“Then the coal shipment was delayed and we couldn’t run the engines and Mr. Tully got upset, and well, it was best to move it out, before anything else got smashed….”
The parson grinned, and I saw the smaller cracks that ran outward from the large one on his cheek, spiderwebs of breakage spreading over the pale face. The creeping fear coiled around my neck, squeezing out my breath.
“Mr. Tully said a chapel was the proper place for a parson….”
Laughter slithered along the walls, but I could not move or look away. I could not feel the floor beneath my feet. The parson’s cracked gaze glittered black into mine as I stood there, heart beating in my ears and throat, suffocating from lack of breath, unable to break the spell of my stare. And then, very slowly, the eyelids came down, and the glass eyes blinked.
I ran, pushing past Lane, fleeing headlong through the chapel and into the corridor, away from the broken, blinking eyes, every rational thought sucked away into the void of terror that was now my mind. I stumbled through my turns and up the two sets of stairs, careening down the hall of the portraits until I had twisted the knob to Marianna’s chamber. I flung the door shut behind me, panting, my hair unpinned and the rose-spattered walls turning circles around my head. I saw Mary straighten from the fire she’d been building, and then I watched her straighten up again, and again.
“Oh, Lord,” her voice said. The words echoed in my ears. “She’s gone and gotten tipsy. Tipsy …” I heard her repeating. “Mum told me about such things. There now, don’t fall, Miss. I’ll be taking care of you….”
I let her hands tend me, her prattle fragmenting into meaningless sounds as she put me to bed and pulled the blankets up to my chin. The trogwynd blew that night, howling outside the window. I clung to the coverlets, shaking and sweating, as if they might keep out what haunted me, watching the bed curtains writhe in their own phantom breezes before sleep took the visions away.
I stayed late in bed the next morning, waving Mary away when she tugged at my blankets and brought me tea. My memories were uncharacteristically muddled, vague as if seen through steam, though I was certain I remembered Lane and the tunnel, and something about the chapel, and the parson’s eyes.
I turned on my side, letting my head sink into the pillow. I had never believed in the infamous “overwrought nerves” of a female, though I had certainly found it a convenient excuse once or twice. But last night, I conceded, could have been nothing else. The strangeness of my surroundings, the heaviness of the choice I would be forced to make, it all must have overwhelmed me. I knew I could not have seen that broken parson blink, and therefore, logically, I had not seen it. That was very simple and very believable in the normality of the morning sunshine. I threw back the covers, my limbs tired and heavy, and went to sit at the dressing table.
I looked at myself while I worked out the knots in my hair, through glass that was now clean and shining. It was not the reflection, I decided, of someone without a firm grip on their faculties. I ran the brush down the length of my hair, all the way to the ends that touched the cushioned bench, and was pinning it all up again when I noticed a small square of paper lying on the floor. Someone had slid it beneath the door. A large hand had written:
MR. ADOLPHUS BABCOCK, SOLICITOR
WODEHOUSE, BABCOCK, AND KNOTTS
15A NORTH AUDLEY ST., HANOVER SQUARE
LONDON
Lane was keeping his word, then. What he had made of my bizarre exit from the chapel was beyond imagination. And mortifying. I put it from my mind. “Mary!” I called.
The shaking of the floorboards told me Mary was on her way through the connecting rooms before the door to the bathing room burst open. “I’m that glad to see you awake, Miss. Are you —”
“Mary, how do you receive your post, here?”
“Post? Do you mean letters, Miss? ’Cause if you’re meaning letters, we get them off the riverboat, Miss, or put them on it, though most of us don’t have anybody on the outside to be writing to, if you —”
“When does the boat leave?”
“The letter boat leaves late morning on Thursdays, Miss, like always. What do you —”
“Is today Thursday?”
“Yes, Miss. I —”
“Then fetch some ink, quick as you can, Mary. I need to write a letter, and I don’t want it to miss that boat. But bring a cup of hot tea first, if you will. I’m sorry, but the one from earlier has gone cold.”
“I’m certain it has, Miss. I’ll go double quick. Likely you’ve got a head fit to bursting, if you don’t mind me saying, but I’ve got some tea put back special in my room, so as not to always be running down to the kitchen. Mrs. Jefferies don’t know what’s what, she don’t, so I’m doubting she’ll miss it, and then I’ll be finding the ink.”
She tore out the door, nearly careening into a chair in her effort to hurry. I went to my trunk to rummage for paper and pen, wondering just why Mary would think I had a headache.
When I stepped down the path to the Lower Village, Mary running fast ahead for the letter boat, the first man I saw spat at me. Or rather, he spat at the ground, but the act had been deliberate, his eyes on my face. I walked on, pretending not to have seen, though we both knew I had. Lane and Ben Aldridge were deep in conversation before the green-painted door, their talk stopping abruptly when I approached.
“Good morning,” I said, and pushed past into my uncle’s sanctum before either could reply.
My uncle wasn’t there, and neither was he in the workshop. The room was empty and dim, with none of the engines running; it was quiet enough to hear the gas hiss. I pulled off my bonnet, wandering past the tools and benches to the far end of the room, to my uncle’s menagerie. I touched the head of a monkey, the fur real and coarse, then let my fingertips brush over the woolen jacket of a towheaded boy holding a top. The glass eyes stared back at me, expressionless. And he didn’t move. Not one of them moved. Of course they did not, but I was relieved all the same. I wondered if I turned the boy’s key if he could spin the wooden top; I wondered if he was my father.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” the low voice said, echoing against the walls. I had known Lane wouldn’t leave me on my own for long, but the tone made me bristle. Or maybe, another part of me warned, it was my own embarrassment for my inexplicable behavior the day before. I ran my hand over the boy’s hair. Real, of course.
“Where is my uncle, Mr. Moreau?”
“It’s clock-winding morning. He’ll come when he’s finished. Why did you —”
“And at what time, precisely, will that be?”
He took a moment to answer. “Half past one.”
“And since we are both aware that he will not arrive a moment sooner or later than his set time, that gives me nearly three hours, Mr. Moreau, to do as I wish.”
“She’s right, you know,” Ben interrupted, his head poking through the doorway. “There’s no point in keeping her out —”
Lane’s voice was sharp, cutting Ben’s words. “The workshop belongs to Mr. Tully, not her!”
I took my hand from the boy’s head and spun around.
“And might I remind you, Mr. Moreau, that neither this workshop, nor anything else at Stranwyne, actually belongs to you. I assume you receive your wages here, just like everyone else?”
A dead silence followed this, and I stood motionless, struck by a lightning bolt of guilt that shocked me from my head to my feet. I had heard Aunt Alice use those very words once, while sifting through a housemaid’s personal belongings. Lane’s gaze of granite examined me for one more heartbeat, and then he turned, slid past Ben, and after a few moments I heard a slam and a harsh jangle, as if the little bell outside the green-painted door had just been flung to the ground. Ben shook his head.
“You are correct, of course,” he said. “But he w
ill not forgive you for that. Not readily.”
I turned back to the boy with the top, my eyes stinging. I knew full well that Lane considered himself more family than servant to my uncle, and that my uncle felt the same; the only real question was who considered himself the father and who the child. I pressed a finger against my temple. I might be many things, but never, ever had I thought I could be like Aunt Alice. “Mr. Aldridge, I’m …” I steadied my voice. “I am glad to see you this morning. I wonder if you happen to know who is in charge of paying the men? I would like an introduction, if at all convenient.”
Ben spoke from the workshop door. “There is a committee in charge of things like that, one for each village, I believe. But feelings being what they are, I … I don’t know that a meeting with any of them would be pleasant, or indeed even wise, Miss Tulman. Not at the moment, at least.”
“I see,” I whispered, thinking of the spitting man. I may not have had Mary’s headache before, but my head was pounding now. “Then please feel free to look about the workshop, Mr. Aldridge. Take out the fish, if you like. I don’t think Mr. Moreau or my uncle will be back for some time.”
“Miss Tulman, could I interest you in a walk beside the water?” Ben didn’t wait for me to respond, but came across the room. “You seem flushed, and the wind is much cooler on the path. I’m sure it will do you good.” He smiled down at me, offering his arm. “Come on, then.”
“Thank you, Mr. Aldridge. But … would you mind giving me a moment to … to put on my bonnet?”
“Of course. I’ll wait outside.”
As soon as the workshop door closed I took a deep breath, thoughts and feelings churning in random disarray. This would never do. What difference could it possibly make if the servants, or the villages, or every soul on the Stranwyne estate thought badly of me? Hated me, even? It would not change what I had come to do. But it did make a difference. To me. And it would have been so much easier if it didn’t.
The Dark Unwinding Page 7