The Dark Unwinding

by Cameron, Sharon

“Yes, well done,” the low voice said from behind me, very quiet, and I felt myself flush. I was quite certain he was speaking to something completely different than Ben.

  “I’m going to try to follow up on my advantage, I think,” Ben said, mostly to himself. “It isn’t Saturday, but perhaps Mr. Tully would allow me to come … after all …” He wandered off after my uncle, still talking, lost in some kind of mechanical dream.

  I turned around to find Lane grinning at the dripping boy beside him. “Well, Davy,” he said, “you’re something of a hero now, aren’t you? I think you’ve earned a reward. How would you like to go rolling?”

  The dimple jumped out again.

  “Go on and get dry, then, and I’ll see you there.”

  Davy scooped up Bertram and trotted off toward the village. I looked back at Lane, wanting to ask, but found the gray gaze already on me, appraising. He put his hands in his pockets. “You are showing unexpected talents, Miss Tulman. I wonder how far that streak might go.”

  I lifted a brow. “I’m quite certain I am equal to anything you might have in mind, Mr. Moreau.”

  He grinned at me then, and I could not decide what that smile meant. It was not approving, or encouraging, or even particularly friendly. I might have called it wicked. “Well, come along, then, Miss Tulman,” he said.

  I straightened my back and followed, spirits sinking under the sudden apprehension that what I had just agreed to was some sort of revenge.

  I stood with Lane in near darkness on the far eastern end of the house, in a wing that followed the terraced gardens and the contour of the land right down a hill. We waited at the bottom of three consecutive stairways, before two massive doors that were closed, the one high window blocked by vegetation and allowing only the barest sliver of daylight. The silence pressed down, warm and uncomfortable.

  “Davy’ll come soon,” Lane said. “Bide your time.”

  I peered at him through the shadows. I had not complained of the wait.

  “You sway back and forth when you’re impatient,” he explained.

  I stilled my rocking feet, a little embarrassed, and looked the other way, wondering what other things about me Lane might have stored up in his head, ready to pull out and use at a moment’s notice. I was certain he had brought me here to frighten or humiliate me in some way, but he’d done nothing alarming, or at least not yet. I tried to fill the awkward space. “Were you born in England, Mr. Moreau?” I had been curious on that point ever since the day he mentioned Moors, and my conversation with Ben Aldridge.

  “Yes. On the estate. I’ve never been off it, actually.”

  “Really?” I glanced at him, surprised.

  “I walk out beyond the tunnel sometimes, and a ways down the river. I reckon that’s off the estate.” He took off the red cap, twisting it in his hands. And that is what you do, I thought, when you are uncomfortable. “My dad only came to England after France lost the war and Napoléon was exiled. We spoke French at home until he died, but I have never been there. To France, I mean.”

  I wondered where he could have seen a wolf, to make it so real. “Would you ever want to leave here, to see another place?”

  He paused, the red cap going still. “I would like to see the sea. But I’d always want here, I think, to be coming back to.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. We stood for a minute or two, and when the silence again became too uncomfortable I said, “You don’t sound all that French, Mr. Moreau.”

  He shrugged. “I can sound as French as I need to. My dad insisted on that. Didn’t want me going back like an Englishman, I suppose.”

  “To France, you mean? Why would your father want to send you back to France?”

  “Why, to carry on the cause of the Bonapartes, Miss Tulman. What else?”

  I could see his sly grin in the dim, waiting for my reaction, but I only said, “Your father remained loyal to Napoléon, then?”

  “When the news came that the new president of France was none other than the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, my dad stayed up all night shouting ‘Vive Napoléon le Grand’ and drank himself to the floor with smuggled French wine. So, yes, Miss Tulman, I would say he did.”

  I pretended to examine my dress, thinking what it must have been like to grow up the son of a man who fought on the wrong side of Waterloo, but then Davy’s head suddenly appeared right in front of me, Bertram with him. I jumped.

  “Where did you come from?” I gasped. Lane laughed, and Davy just dimpled.

  “Davy knows the house better than I do,” Lane said. “It’s a country all to itself, isn’t it, Davy?” He mussed the boy’s damp hair, and went to tug on one of the closed doors. Davy set down the rabbit and pulled on the other, and then both doors slid backward into the wall. A pale bit of light was on the other side, and a set of stairs the full width of the opening, maybe ten feet across, falling down into the gloom. “Wait here,” Lane said, and both he and Davy trotted off down the steps, Bertram’s ears flopping as he hopped after Davy.

  I rocked back and forth until I heard gas ignite, and light blazed up the stairwell.

  “All right,” Lane’s voice echoed. “Come down!”

  My feet stepped downward thirty-two times, and when they stood on the polished wood at the bottom of the stairwell, I could only stare at what was about me. I was in the largest room I’d ever seen, larger than the chapel or the workshop. The lower walls were pink, of course, the upper walls all mirrors trimmed with gilded scrollwork. But it was the chandeliers that were the wonder, eight of them marching down the length of the room, each at least the width of my own bedchamber at Aunt Alice’s, glowing and glimmering with hundreds upon hundreds of individual gaslights. The giant mirrors doubled and tripled the blaze, throwing sparkles from every wall.

  Lane came from the other end of the room, and my breath caught in my throat. He was not walking, but gliding, like a ghost or a spirit. He placed one hand on the banister and slowed to a stop.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “A ballroom. And almost completely underground. See up there?” He pointed to a glass-and-iron cupola that rose upward from the center of the ceiling. “That sticks right up into the gardens. Roses are growing over our heads, or at least they do when anyone tends them, and at night when the lights are lit, the garden glows, too. Mr. Tully thought of it, so we could have a ballroom and a garden, and work for the carpenters and the gas fitters and the foundry. We made the chandeliers ourselves….”

  “I mean, what are on your feet?”

  The smile from the canal bank returned, and he held out his arm. A pair of metal shoe soles, wheels fastened to them, dangled from his hand. “Skates,” he said. “Like for ice, only with wheels instead of blades. We roll in them. Sit on the stairs, and give me your feet.”

  My eyes widened. “You must be joking.”

  “Now, wait a moment, what was it she said, Davy?” Davy came whizzing by on the skates, Bertram, like a rag doll of a bunny, flopping unperturbed in his usual position. “Oh, yes, now I remember.” Lane raised the timbre of his voice. “‘I am equal to anything you might have in mind, Mr. Moreau.’”

  I sat down hard on the stairs and stuck out my foot. Lane’s grin grew larger as he pulled the leather straps of the skates tight over my boot tops. Then he glided effortlessly away, backward.

  “Well, up you go,” he said.

  I tried to stand, but my feet flew out from under me and I sat down again on the stairs, much harder than I had the first time. Now I understood his bit of revenge, but I did not intend to let him have it. Davy zoomed by, the noise of his rolling loud on the wooden floor of the ballroom. Lane beckoned.

  “Use the banister to get upright and find your balance, and when you’ve got it, give one foot a slide to the side, then do the same with the other. Come on. It’s easy.”

  I struggled upward and stood, teetering. Cautiously I pushed one foot to the side. The skate rolled, and kept rolling. In three seconds I was flat on the
ballroom floor, lost in a pile of skirts. I stayed there, and Lane’s wheeled feet stopped right in front of my face.

  “Do you want to quit?”

  “No.” Though I’d said it through my teeth.

  “Good. Because you haven’t really tried yet. Come on.” He helped get me to my feet, where I wobbled like a toddling child, clinging to his arms. They were surprisingly warm, as they had been at the dock, the muscles tense beneath my fingers. “Do what I said before, but in short steps, picking up each foot when you’re done. Show her, Davy.”

  Davy wheeled a half circle and changed his direction, slowing his pace so I could see the rhythmic push and glide of each foot. I watched, and when I looked back up again it was to see Lane’s mocking grin very close to my face. I clenched my teeth and pushed one foot, and then the other, one and then the other, clutching his arms with a grip of iron. We went a few feet and I stumbled, tripping so quickly I nearly knocked both of us down.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” I said. My temper was aflame, though I was trying not to show it.

  “Me neither,” Lane said. “I can’t see your feet under all that. Think about balancing, hovering right over the skates, and the rhythm of the wheels against the floor.”

  I set my jaw and tried again, pushing one foot and the other, wondering how I’d gotten into this mess, one and the other, pretending I was floating, flying just above the skates, back and forth, side to side….

  “Look up,” he said.

  I raised my gaze from my feet. I was halfway down the ballroom. “Am I doing it?”

  “Yes. And a right little fool you look, too.”

  I was delighted. “Let go. I want to try it by myself!”

  He released my arms, turned expertly in mid-stride, and continued his movement frontward as he watched. I pushed with my feet and instantly fell forward, landing on my hands and knees, where I got a close view of the sparkling reflections on the polished floor. I felt the air move as Davy went by. “I caught my skirt in the wheel, that’s all,” I said, waving away Lane’s hand. I got to my feet and held out my arms, fighting for balance, and then I was off. One, two, three, four strides, and my speed picked up. I could actually feel a wind in my face, and the tickling hum of the wheels traveled up my legs as I flew down the ballroom.

  “I’m rolling!” I yelled. “Look! I’m rolling!” I craned my neck behind to see if Lane and Davy were watching, but I could not find them. And the next thing I knew, I had slammed into something that was hard and soft at once, smelling faintly of metal and paint, and knocked myself to the floor. I had skated right into Lane, who had put himself there to keep me from crashing headlong into a mirrored wall.

  “Ow,” he said mildly. Once again he pulled me to my feet, holding my arms until I steadied. “Perhaps a little less speed, Miss, until you’ve learned to stop?”

  “I want to do it again,” I said breathlessly, and I looked up into a smile that was only teasing now, not mocking, stretching the tiny stubble of an unshaven chin. But the gray eyes above mine were different than I’d ever seen them: calm, soft, without storm or stone, a glassy sea, just as I’d imagined when I discovered the falcon. And inexplicably, they were looking at me.

  Heat spread through my chest, blooming like a hothouse flower, and I pulled away both my gaze and my arms, only just keeping my balance. What was I thinking? Had we been in London, the impropriety of this situation would have taken every shred of my good name with it. But I had not even considered such a thing, not here. Stranwyne was a place unto its own, as Lane had said earlier, with rules that were not the rules of the rest of the world. I felt the blossoming pink reach my cheeks at the thought of what my aunt and Mrs. Hardcastle would have said on the subject. And then I felt a tug on my skirt.

  Davy was there, holding out a hairpin. My hand flew to my head. Curls were everywhere, loose and spilling all down my back. I took the pin and hurriedly stuffed it into my hair.

  “Don’t bother,” Lane said. “It will just come back down again.” I peeked up to find the inscrutable gaze still there, now resting on my hair. He held out an arm. “Hang on and I’ll go beside you this time, and teach you how to stop.”

  I looked at the extended arm, at the skin like creamed tea below his rolled-up sleeve, thinking of the warmth I had felt before beneath my hand. I let my hair go free and took the arm. Aunt Alice was not here.

  We rolled the length of the ballroom again and again, and each time I went faster, my wild hair flying, the sparkling of the gas lamps blurring in the mirrored reflections. And sometimes I closed my eyes, the better to feel the exhilaration of the wind.

  The first time I opened my eyes, I could hear Mary’s voice, but the face I saw was Aunt Alice’s, her thick fringe of ironed curls stretching and constricting over features that changed their shape like candle flame. I watched her face bubble and melt, spellbound, until she reached out and grabbed my arm. I tried to pull away, but the nails gripped my flesh like claws. She put my hand into another hand, and I looked up to see Mr. Babcock. He wore a judge’s white-curled wig and, smiling like a predator, raised my hand to his lips as if he would kiss it. “No,” I cried out. “Stop!” But he did not stop. He bit me, slowly, sinking his teeth deep into my hand while Aunt Alice dug in her claws. I shut my eyes against the pain.

  The next time I opened them I saw Marianna’s bedchamber blazing with light, every candle lit, voices buzzing and humming with words I could not understand. And some extra sense, some feeling only just awakened, was telling me to run, that I must flee, that I had only seconds to do so. But I could not run, I could not even move, my arm was trapped. I screamed and fought, terrified, writhing in panic, and cold hands held me down, pinning me to the floor. I screamed again, and the voices changed their tone.

  And then I wandered away, calm and quiet, my fear forgotten. I padded through the dark corridors, the creaks and groans of the floorboards now familiar to me, through the empty kitchen and into the garden. The moon was full, riding high through tearing clouds, and I felt the gravel of the path bore gently into my bare feet. I was wearing Marianna’s blue dress, and in that dress I could move, fly, flit like a ghost through the warm grasses, all the way to the Lower Village. The village was quiet in the dark — deathly quiet — and I felt mud between my toes. I went shadowlike to the green door, through the sitting room and to the workshop, and then I knew. The mud was in here, too. I lifted the giant switch, the gaslights hissed, and I beheld a massacre. Dismembered arms of shattered porcelain, broken legs, cracked faces and cogs and wheels, all mixed into a jumbled wash of dirt and silt. They were ruined, all of them gone, never to be wound up again. I sank to my knees in the filthy pile, a mass burial gone awry, and cried as if it was me who was broken, who was lost. My crying echoed through the empty workshop, and I cradled the sodden head of my grandmother in my lap.

  When I woke, someone was singing, very soft, humming gently beneath their breath. Late morning sun laid yellow beams on Marianna’s carpet, and the coverlets on the bed felt heavy, weighing my body down into the mattress. I sighed, and a woman, a stranger, was suddenly looking down on me.

  “Awake, are you?”

  I blinked at her slowly. “Am … I ill?” I whispered. My voice was hoarse.

  “If you call coming off a bad drunk being ill, then maybe so.”

  I frowned, confused, and then the door to the bathing room opened, and Mary came out with a pitcher of water.

  “Oh, Miss! How are you feeling, then?

  “I’d say she’s got a head fit to split like a ripe melon,” said the woman.

  “I don’t have …”

  “Mum!” Mary cried. “I’ve been telling you, just because my lady was tipsy once don’t mean she was tipsy twice! She’s just been sick, is all, as anyone with eyes can see. Here, Miss, have some water.”

  I sat up, grateful to take it, steadied the glass with my hand, took two sips, and fell back against the pillow. My hand was bandaged, I saw, slight red stains sho
wing through the layers of cloth. I touched it, remembering the preying smile and sharp teeth. “Mr. Babcock … bit me,” I whispered.

  “Don’t be talking rot,” said Mary’s mother. “You were so daft with drink you bit yourself.”

  “Mum!” Mary protested. “My lady was sick, I tell you! She never did such a thing last time she was tipsy!”

  “Mary,” I said shakily, “I haven’t been … I haven’t had spirits since I came to Stranwyne, not even a glass of wine.”

  Mrs. Brown whished some disbelieving air through her nose while Mary sat down on the edge of my bed, her freckles wrinkling. “Are you certain, Miss? I would have sworn on my own dad’s Bible that first time that you …”

  “Not once, Mary. I swear it.” She looked back at me dubiously. “Just tell me what happened. Please.”

  She sighed. “Well, ’twasn’t long before midnight when …”

  “Wait … start before that.” I was having trouble recalling last night at all.

  “You came in a bit later than your usual time, Miss, remember? Your hair was all down and your cheeks was rosy and you were as chipper as them little larks that dart through the grasses …”

  My hair was down. Lane’s arm and rolling in the ballroom. I remembered that.

  “… and I asked what you’d been doing and you said I wouldn’t believe it if you told me …”

  Another disapproving “whoosh” from the other end of the room.

  “… and I had your bit of supper waiting and you got into your gown and had your tea and a think before bed, just like usual.” Mary turned to her mother. “My lady always depends on me to know just what —”

  “Mary,” I said again, trying to steady my voice. I remembered nothing of this, not even leaving Lane. “What happened after that?”

  “Well, I’d gone to my own room, you see, to be sewing on your dress …”

  Had I asked Mary to sew a dress? I didn’t remember.

  “… and I heard talk coming from your room, real loud, someone yelling ‘Wheeee!’ as if they were having the jolliest of times, and when I came running the voice was you, Miss, dancing about in your nightgown, and when I asked what my lady was doing, you said, ‘I’m a fish, Mary, and I fly!’ and then you went quiet, and … ’twas like you had a fit, Miss. You stared off into the mirror, and then you lifted up your hand as if you didn’t want to, like, and you bit it, good and hard, and yelled something fearful while you did, and I tied you to the bed and ran double quick and got my mum. She knows the curing of many a thing.”