I stepped out of the workshop, wiping my cheeks, my mind on the way a gaze could change from storm cloud to stone, and paused. The hallway was wrapped in silence, heavy and thick like dust. The door across from me stood slightly ajar. “Mustn’t touch,” I heard myself say, and saw again Lane’s jerk of discomfort at the sight of my hand on the latch. I listened for another moment to the quiet, to the reckless curiosity now buzzing through my head, to the breath of temptation whispering along my neck. I hurried across the hall, and slipped inside the door.
Sunshine flooded through two open windows, muslin curtains swaying in a breeze that was both hot and fresh. The room was simple, with walls of plain gray stone, iron pegs driven in where spare shirts and a jacket hung. A pair of darned socks lay on the floor, boots sat askew by the bed, rumpled linens and a depression in the mattress showing where a body had recently been. I looked quickly away from this, heart thudding, and gave my attention to the other end of the room.
A workbench stood there, but there were no paint spatters, only some small, sharp tools, metal filings, and an amber substance that I discovered, upon touching, to be beeswax. And then I found the shelf. On the wall above the bench stood a row of little figures, miniature and gleaming in silver, the polished surfaces reflecting dully in the light from the window. There were perhaps a dozen of them — horse, stag, hound, and owl — beautifully crafted, and each drew my eye and held it, not just with the intricacy of its design, but with the story it told. The wolf bared its teeth, body tense, hackles rising in threat, and then the owl seemed to catch sight of me, twisting its head. I touched one finger to a falcon, wings out and back in a plummeting dive, feathers ruffling in an imagined wind. The metal seemed alive almost in the same way as one of Uncle Tulman’s toys.
My eyes drifted downward, and I saw a square of white plaster on the workbench, the impression of a sleek, winged form in its middle. I picked it up, touching the indentations, running my thumb over the painstaking cuts of each individual feather. Splashes of bright, hardened silver dotted the plaster on one end. My gaze darted back to the falcon. Lane had made these things, carving them from wax to make a plaster mold, and pouring molten silver after that. I pictured the way he must look when alone in this room, the gray gaze neither angry nor cold, only sure and calm, carving delicate wings, telling stories to himself with a single object. It was a vision I could not reconcile with the way he looked at me.
I set down the mold carefully and took a step away from the workbench. Now I knew exactly why Lane had not wanted me in this room. I had seen something that was far more personal than an unmade bed or some discarded clothing. I had glimpsed a private piece of his soul. And it would be for what I’d seen, not for what I’d said, that he would never forgive me. I ran quickly back into the empty hallway and let the door click shut behind me.
I found Ben waiting outside, as promised, and we strolled the path beside the water, beyond Lower Village and the busy docks. He had been correct. A cooler breeze blew here, soothing my head.
“I wonder if you realize, Miss Tulman, what a feat of engineering you are looking at?” I followed Ben’s gaze as it swept over what I had been calling the river. “This is a man-made canal, very clever, though it predates the current Mr. Tulman by centuries. There is a water gate at the head, where it branches away from the river …” He waved a hand. “… maybe a mile or less behind us, so the canal can be drained for repairs and what have you, and look at this….”
He indicated the stretch of water we were approaching. The path we walked was steadily descending, but the canal remained at the same height, rising farther and farther above our heads, held in place by a dike of stone.
“This wall protects the entire lower portion of the estate, and has done so for more than two hundred years.” Ben grinned at me apologetically. “You will have to pardon my enthusiasm, Miss Tulman. But I have been fascinated with this canal ever since I was a child.”
I tried to put an answering smile on my face, to not seem sullen and out of sorts to the one person who was actually doing me a kindness. I groped for a subject. “I believe you said your aunt was the housekeeper here at one time, Mr. Aldridge?”
“Yes. Old Daniels. My father’s spinster sister.”
“And did you visit her here?”
Small lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes. “Why, I lived here, Miss Tulman. For two years.”
“Really?”
“In the Upper Village. It was very new then, built around the old servant and farm cottages, and the workshop was just being constructed. I never saw Mr. Tulman, of course. Only certain people had run of the big house. Miss Marianna was gone by that time and keeping house servants was rather difficult. But Old Daniels stayed on. And Mrs. Jefferies.”
“Then you knew Mr. Moreau?” The idea of Ben and Lane being children together seemed strange to me. But then again, I was learning there was much I didn’t know, perhaps about either of them.
“I only knew him a little. He was five years younger, and even then your uncle’s keeper. Not that Aunt Daniels would have allowed me his company in any case. I’m sure he …”
My obvious surprise made him pause, and his smile broadened.
“Why, I would not have been allowed his company because his father was a French soldier, Miss Tulman. Jean Moreau had fought with Napoléon Bonaparte all the way across Europe, right to the French defeat at Waterloo. Not a few in the village had family blood poured out on those battlefields, so you can imagine the sentiments. It’s a wonder Miss Marianna allowed the man here at all, really, but she always was one for doing things her own way, or so my aunt Daniels said.”
“But these ill feelings do not seem to be present now, Mr. Aldridge.” Now they are all reserved for me, I thought bitterly.
“Very true. Perhaps as time went on and Jean Moreau was gone they forgave the son the sins of the father. But that change would have been after my time. My own father was at sea with the Royal Navy — protecting the coasts from those ‘dirty French frogs,’ to quote Aunt Daniels — and it was relative to relative for me, until I was sent away to school. So only a short stay, I’m afraid. Though I never forgot it.”
I digested these things as we walked, a small barge moving along the canal above my head. It occurred to me to wonder how a French soldier could have come to live and marry on an English estate. It also occurred to me that if the housekeeper Daniels was the unmarried sister of Ben’s father, then Ben did not bear that father’s name. But perhaps it was an indelicate matter to mention. Ben pointed ahead.
“And here are the gasworks, Miss Tulman.”
I looked up to see a handsome brick building on the canal bank, the coal smoke from its chimneys borne high and aloft in the wind, and then to the storage structure beside it, a familiar sight to one who had spent all her days in London: round, red-bricked, and metal-domed, utterly dwarfing the first building in size. The metal dome ascended slowly within tall wrought-iron supports, rising little by little if one watched carefully, pushed upward by the pressure of the gas vapors inside it. I watched as I walked, realizing that the ground beneath me had also risen. The canal wall was gone, and we were once again on the same level as the water.
“G’day, Ben Aldridge.”
I turned to see a wizened old man leading a cow down the path. He was gap-toothed and grinning until he met my gaze. Then his wrinkles turned downward and he looked right through me, as if he had come across cast-off entrails or horse dung, something too vile to be taken notice of. I looked away.
“Good day, Mr. Turner,” Ben replied gravely, hands behind his back. I watched the slow-moving water, listening to the cowbell move away down the path. “This circumstance,” Ben said, “is not one in which I’d like to find any sister or acquaintance of mine. Are you … certain, Miss Tulman, that you wish to do what you’ve come for?”
I closed my eyes briefly. “I always do what I have to, Mr. Aldridge, no matter how unpleasant.” Thirty days I had agreed to; I had t
wenty-eight of them left. “I think … I’ll go back to the house now, if you don’t mind. The heat, you know.”
“Miss Tulman,” he continued, as if I had not spoken, “if you find yourself in need of help, or advice, I am always here.”
I pressed a bead of sweat from my temple into the sleeve of the worsted, hoping my silence would not be taken for lack of manners. Responding to kindness was something I had no experience with.
When I crested the rise, I saw Mrs. Jefferies at the bottom of the slope, leaving through the door in the garden wall. She had her basket over one arm, and with the other made sure the garden door closed slowly and without noise behind her. Then she glanced left, right, and left again, and hurried straight out into the empty grass of the moors, at a surprising speed for so stout a woman, never once looking to the top of my hill.
I was glad to see her go. I trotted down the slope, through the door, and into her cabbage patch. After much pulling and soiling of my hands, I had managed to twist a new cabbage from its leaf bed. I placed the cabbage on the steps to the greenhouse, where I trusted a boy with a rabbit might easily discover it. If I had to spend twenty-eight more days here, then I would not allow those days to turn me into the likes of Aunt Alice. No matter what I had to do at the end of them.
The next day I was back in the workshop, the steam engine humming through the floor, Uncle Tulman huddled in his usual position, hunchbacked and cross-legged on a floor cushion, his papers now blackened with jottings of numbers. Lane was at the workbench, painting in silence, the gray eyes never once piercing mine.
“Do you think I might play today, Uncle?”
My uncle looked up, his joy bubbling. “Oh, yes! You must! You must, indeed, little niece!”
That got Lane’s attention. The brush stopped moving, paint dribbling down it. “Why, Mr. Tully?” He looked as if he hadn’t meant to speak that thought aloud.
“Because she likes it, just as she likes clocks! My little niece is very good at clocks, she knows just the right way to wind them.”
I got up from my place on the floor. “Shall I help Mr. Moreau paint, Uncle?”
“Yes, yes! But let him show you how, niece. Show my little niece, Lane, so she can do it the right way. Lane always knows the right way.” He went happily back to his scribbling while I approached the bench, trying to seem friendly. The paintbrush was already moving again.
“He let you wind the clocks,” Lane said. But I knew it was not really a statement; he was demanding my answer.
I kept my eyes on his paintbrush. I had stood for a long time after leaving that cabbage for Davy, thinking of my twenty-eight days, the garden breezes pushing me this way and that before I picked up my skirts and ran through the house to the clock room. There I’d stood once again, this time just outside the doorway, watching my uncle. He’d been chattering as he wound, happy and lost in his own ticking world until he whipped around, the beard spreading wide, his shout of “Simon’s baby!” ringing out over the noise of the clocks. We took turns after that, counting the revolutions of the winding keys, my uncle clapping when I did it right. But it wasn’t until I was tiptoe on a stool, stretched full length to wind the birdcage clock, that I saw my uncle was no longer counting. He was waiting, eyes closed. The little bird whistled and the clock beside us boomed, the first chime of the noon hour, one clang in a cacophony of sound that made me drop the key and cover my ears. Uncle Tully jumped to his feet, laughing and waving his arms as if the noise were something he could swim through. “Listen, little niece!” he’d yelled over the din. “They are telling us when! Listen to the clocks tell us when!”
“He let you wind the clocks,” Lane’s low voice repeated, breaking my reverie. I looked up to see the gray eyes now fully on me, dark brows down, and realized I had been smiling. I settled my expression, lowering my eyes back to the paint.
“Yes, he did. The essential thing was to note how many times the winding key should be turned, and to always be turning clockwise before the reverse. We made short work of it, and … I think my uncle enjoyed himself very much.”
Lane’s paint went up and down on the wooden square, his fingers moving the brush in long, expert strokes. Here was someone else I could not sort. I did not like that. I thought of the silver falcon and the intricate cuts on its ruffling wings, and wondered what other skills Lane chose to hide from the world. The silence stretched long.
“Well, are you going to show me how, then, or shall I just stand here?”
He set down the brush, jaw tight, and handed me a piece of wood identical to his. It was very light. “What is it?” I asked.
“A dragon scale. A few got knocked off during your little demonstration the other day, and need to be fixed.” He gave me a brush, and I dipped it into the green paint. “The ‘essential thing,’ as you say, is to leave no lines in the paint. If there are lines, then Mr. Tully will have to count them.”
I nodded. I understood that sort of frustration. I began on the square of wood slowly while Uncle Tully talked to his papers, trying to be careful of my dress, though I didn’t really care whether the dress had paint on it or not. I wished I didn’t care if Lane were angry with me or not.
“Mr. Moreau, would you be available Monday afternoon to take me to the Upper Village? I have not seen it yet.”
Lane painted on without answering.
“I hope you haven’t changed your mind about our agreement?” I prodded.
“You’re the one who seems changeable. One moment you’re having a conversation, the next you’re running out the door.”
I took a long breath, and soldiered on. “I was thinking perhaps Monday might be convenient, after a morning spent at the water-side. Monday, I believe, is the day my uncle sets aside for trying new things, and I was able to point out to him yesterday that seeing his fish swim in the canal might be interesting and could even inspire further improvements. Mr. Aldridge is eager to observe this, too, I believe. They were both quite … excited by the idea.”
Lane’s voice momentarily lost its slight inflection and became very proper. “Then I’d have Mr. Aldridge take you on a village tour, Miss Tulman. That would be more suitable, I’m sure. And of course, I’m certain you understand that I have my duties to attend to.”
It was a not-so-subtle slap. “Of course,” I said, eyes on my dragon scale. “That will be most suitable, indeed.”
“It is time!” shouted my uncle suddenly. I sighed and set down my brush. There were sixteen lines in my paint.
It was night, the sky was studded with stars, and I stood barefoot on the path beside the canal, the wardrobe of Marianna’s bedchamber before me on the bank. The water was bright blue in the starlight, a tropical blue, and though I walked on dirt I could hear the faint groan of floorboards beneath my feet. I approached the massive wardrobe. The carven faces covering its doors and edges were whispering to one another, soft creaks of discussion, and they were discussing me. Then the door on the left swung wide and I saw the black closet-like space behind it, while on the right the wooden eyes of an openmouthed nymph turned toward me. “Misssss,” she hissed slowly, and the mahogany face became that of Mary Brown.
“Lord, Miss, wake up!”
I sat bolt upright in Marianna’s bed, my nightgown twisted around my legs. The windows were dead dark, the wardrobe door stood a little way open, and Mary Brown’s eyes were two pools among freckles in the light of an upheld candle.
“You’ve a visitor, Miss! And Mrs. Jefferies says … oh, you’ll never be guessing who it is!” Mary’s nightcap shook as she bounced. “Mr. Babcock!”
In fifteen minutes I was dressed and hurrying down a corridor, wide-awake after a short argument with Mary about my boots. They’d been found in the bathtub, caked with drying mud, a circumstance Mary insisted that I had caused by straying off the path at the canal bank, when I knew perfectly well that I had done no such thing and had left them beside the bed in respectable condition. I could not fathom why Mary would not just admit that she
had borrowed my shoes. I had, after all, borrowed her dress. But she was still annoyed as she hustled me down a hallway, barefoot, while I limped along, pinched in her too-tight boots. “Where are we going?” I whispered, speaking low only because the corridors were dark.
“Drawing room!” she said, turning confidently to the left to patter down a set of stairs I was unfamiliar with. I wondered just what else Mary had been doing with her days besides cleaning my room.
We entered the drawing room by the stairs at the back of it, the grand stairs in the room I had thought of as an entry hall on my first visit, but it was the only thing about the place I recognized. The dust was gone, and so were the dust sheets. The color of the walls was softened in the dimness, the furniture grouped and arranged comfortably, gleaming and polished in the light of a crackling fire. The other thing this firelight illuminated was the ugliest man I had ever seen.
“Miss Katharine Tulman,” the man said, coming forward and extending a hand. He was short and rotund, with a misshapen nose, large jowls, and a head too small for his body. “I have been wishing to meet you these many years, and now, at last, my wish has been granted. I am a lucky man.” He kissed the hand I put into his, bowed, and gallantly offered me a seat. I sat on the edge of the chair, trying to contain my astonishment, tucking Mary’s unpolished shoes beneath my skirt.
“I am very glad to meet you as well, Mr. Babcock,” I said carefully, “though I cannot say the wish has been years in the coming. I have known your name for less than a week.”
“Ah,” he said, settling his roundness into the depths of the chair opposite. “The Tulman men have a distressing tendency to short life, an affliction that has removed anyone who might have enlightened you to my particular nomenclature, I’m afraid. But I have known your name, my dear, since you were born. I was present, in fact, on that auspicious day, the day you entered this world and your mother left it.” He shook his jowls sadly. “Joy and pain blended, Miss Tulman, joy and pain blended.”
The Dark Unwinding Page 8