The Dark Unwinding

by Cameron, Sharon

  “He’ll come back,” I said, though I was not sure it was true. I could hear Lane’s breathing, hard and fast, and then I understood that all his calm words had belied the fact that he was angry, very angry, in a fury only just held in check. I took my arm from the blankets, reached across the bedclothes, and found his hand. He let me take it, letting out a long, pent-up sigh. The familiar warmth made me think that some of my dreams had been real. “Where is my uncle?” I asked him.

  “Hidden. Purdue left, bad roads or no, but Mr. Lockwood is still here. We’re putting him in the Upper Village until he can leave safely, but I don’t think he’ll go even then. We told him Mr. Tully was upset by what happened and is ill as a result, and that you were ill and still are, but the man’s not an idiot. The rain has kept him indoors, but that’s over now. He’ll be about tomorrow, asking questions. Ben is with Mr. Tully at the workshop, and we’ve men looking out. He’ll get Mr. Tully into the tunnels if Mr. Lockwood comes around. Mr. Tully doesn’t … Aunt Bit told him you were tired from your birthday, and that the bad men were gone away. He doesn’t know.”

  Ben was keeping my uncle hidden. If I married Ben Aldridge, he would help me continue that process, I was certain of it. I looked to the dark shadow sitting on the edge of my bed. I had to do it. I would do it. For Uncle Tully, and for him. I felt empty inside. Lane swung his feet onto the bed and lay back against the pillows, one arm behind his head, our hands still between us.

  “You lied for us,” he said.

  “Yes.” I shut my eyes again, to better feel his closeness.

  “And what will happen to you now?”

  “I will be cut off when my aunt finds out.”

  “Can you come back here, if that happens?”

  “There will be no ‘here’ if that happens.” I listened to the fire spitting sparks at the hearth.

  “You weren’t drunk at the party.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Have you … ever been drunk?”

  I thought carefully before answering. If I spoke honestly, then there would be nothing left for him to know but the truth, that Mr. Lockwood had good reason to take me away. I took a deep breath. “No. I never have.”

  He did not speak for a time, and when he did, the low voice was very quiet. “How often does it happen?”

  “I don’t know.” My stomach was writhing, having to admit these things. “Sometimes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Better to be drunk, than … than …” I left the thought unfinished. “But they still have to think it. That I was drunk. They can’t know, I don’t want any of them to know.”

  Lane sat quiet, thoughtful, the tightness of his hand unchanging in mine. “Someone sent those men here to take you,” he said. “And someone poisoned you. Why both of these things?”

  I opened my eyes again. “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it.” Strangely, I’d accepted all the facts presented to me without once considering that someone, someone who knew me, must be responsible for them. “Do you know … who?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you did.”

  And then, like fitted cogs that intermesh, my thoughts came together, and I did know who. There was only one person who hated me so thoroughly, and would have done anything, I believed, to keep me from ruining Stranwyne. “It was Mrs. Jefferies,” I said. I felt Lane stiffen.

  “What do you mean?”

  I remembered the sheer spite in her eyes the night before my birthday, when she had said I would not want to go on living. And she had known I would eat those cucumbers. “It was her. She poisoned me.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Who else, then? You? My uncle? Ben Aldridge?”

  “We need to talk about Ben Aldridge.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We do.”

  He caught my tone, and turned on his side to better look at me, brows down, the gray eyes level with our interlocked hands. “Why?”

  “Because …” I looked away. “Because I’ve thought of a way … to fix this.”

  “Have you now? Took you long enough.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means that Ben Aldridge would marry my aunt Bit if he thought it would get him closer to Mr. Tully.”

  And I would marry Ben Aldridge in the blink of an eye to keep Lane and my uncle safe at Stranwyne. The thought made me glad and sick at the same time. Someone, at least, could be saved, even if it wasn’t myself. When I found the courage to look up again it was to an expression I knew well: dark, brooding, and with a thunderstorm brewing, a look I’d seen many times in my first days at Stranwyne. I tensed, as if anticipating a blow.

  “Do you really think,” he said to me, “that you can run off to London and be Ben Aldridge’s wife, and that somehow, in some miraculous way, that everything will come out right in the end?”

  I did not answer.

  “Ben Aldridge might protect Mr. Tully for the sake of his toys, but do you honestly think that he will take that much care of you? Do you truly think …” His words were rising like the wind. “… that you can leave here now, and that nothing will change? That everything will just go on being the same as it ever was?”

  I had nothing to say. Keeping Stranwyne unchanged was the very best I could hope for. I could feel his clouds growing thicker, churning.

  “Well, it will not be the same, Katharine. Not for all of us … Not for me.”

  I lay very still. His words made tiny fractures run all through my insides, like the minute cracks on the parson’s face. My uncle would be free, and Lane, and the people of the villages would have their homes. This I could give them, and whether Lane knew it or not, it was an infinitely better gift than my shattered self. He sat up suddenly. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. I felt ashamed, though it was all for him and Uncle Tully. But I had not been prepared for how fast or how violently his storm would break. Lane had flung away my hand and was on his feet before I had drawn breath. He leaned over the bed, his fists sinking down into the mattress.

  “Well, go on and do it, then, Miss Tulman. I won’t be stopping you. As you told me once yourself, there’s nothing here at Stranwyne that actually belongs to me. Enjoy that fine new house in London, down to your last miserable bloody breath!”

  I was hurt, exhausted, heartbroken, and poisoned, and all at once, in a flaming temper. I spat out the words. “If you are so eager for my misery and death, Mr. Moreau, why don’t you consult your aunt? She could offer you some excellent advice on the subject, I’m sure!”

  The look that was his response to this made me wish I was dead already. He straightened into a shadow I could only just see, melting away, and then the door to Marianna’s bedchamber slammed, shaking the room and the pictures on the walls. I buried my face in the pillow.

  “Well. It’s been nothing but smooth sailing around here since you walked through the door, Miss, that’s certain. But a hot temper is a good thing, in my book. People don’t die when their blood’s up.”

  I turned my tear-streaked face toward the hearth, where Mrs. Brown’s eyes were bright and snapping, not a trace of sleep in them. I tried to remember the last time I’d heard her snore, and couldn’t.

  “A piece of advice to you, Miss. One and one don’t always add up to two, and you can’t be making it do so. And if I was you, I wouldn’t be eating the first cucumber, or anything else for that matter, ’less it comes from my Mary. There. That’s two bits for you, and all for the price of one.”

  I turned my head back into the pillow, right into the wet spot my tears had left. Mrs. Brown spoke from close beside the bed.

  “Here, Miss. Have some soup, then. You’re as pale as the linens.”

  I looked up at her in surprise, then at the bowl in her hand, and shook my head. She smiled.

  “And that’s the first sign of sense I’ve seen from you, Miss, if you don’t mind me saying.” She sat on the edge of the mattress, a bowl
and spoon in her hand. “But I can swear that there ain’t been a touch on this but my girl’s own hand, and it came straight from my cottage, every bit. Been keeping it warm for you, too.” She offered up the bowl. “You will have to eat, Miss.”

  I looked into her round, plain face and decided that if Mrs. Brown was an assassin, then the world was no fit place to live in anyway. I sat up, and let her feed me.

  When I opened my eyes, the trogwynd was lowing, eerily soft, and Davy stood next to my bed. The fire was out, the room was black, and his face was the only thing I could see, illuminated by a wavering light that set his features in motion. The windows of his eyes were shuttered, telling me nothing, and one small hand was extended toward me. I took it without hesitation, without question, and we moved in silence, both of us barefoot on the carpet, in a pool of flickering glare that came from a lantern held in Davy’s other hand, the hand that was burned. Mary Brown slept by the hearth, and the wardrobe door stood open. Without letting go of my hand or disturbing his light, Davy leapt lightly inside and turned back to look at me, waiting. I lifted my foot, and stepped inside the wardrobe.

  Through the door and across the rotting rug of the forsaken nursery he led me, sending mice scuttling for the shadows, and on the far end of the room a piece of the wall swung open. I saw that it was not a wall but a door, paneled and papered to look just as the rest of the room, as the doors to the ballroom had been, and then we were in another bedchamber, picking our way through rubble where the ceiling had given way to damp. Out to the corridor of the portraits, the light briefly trailing its beams over the face of my guardian, Davy took me, ghostlike, to the stairs and then downward, into the lower reaches of Stranwyne.

  Around and through, his hand guided me, past the kitchen and into the room of the ornaments — there was no fire there now — and out the door to an unkempt corner of the garden, mist and moonlight setting it aglow. The rusting door of the iron-and-glass greenhouse creaked, and my feet touched potsherds and crumbling leaves, edges of broken panes glittering sharp, as Davy set down the lantern to pull an iron ring attached to the floor. A trapdoor opened, and he picked up the lantern and put his dirty foot on a stone step that led into the earth. For the first time I resisted, but when he turned and looked up at me, pleading, I realized that the round cheeks and long-lashed eyes I’d seen so many times were not really a child. They were only the mask of a child; beneath the exterior, Davy was like an old man. I took his hand again, and descended.

  This tunnel was narrow, low, and wet, built mostly of dirt with some reinforcing wood and stone, smelling strongly of earth. I went at a crouch, my unbound hair brushing both the roof and the walls, feeling for the first time the weakness of my body on this strange journey; my legs shook long before we reached another set of stairs. The steps led up to a hole in the ground, and Davy held aside a screen of hanging vines to let me crawl out, gasping, as I was finally able to stand upright. We were in a garden, the white walls of a cottage rising very close, light spilling from all of its windows.

  He let me rest for a moment, among flowers that swayed on long, untended stems, then the grip on my hand became tighter, and he pulled me silently to the door. We entered an ordinary cottage, not very tidy, and with an odd smell in the air, sweet with an underlying bitterness. Clothing was strewn about here and there, the hearthstone needed scouring, and unwashed dishes were scattered upon the table. One of the windows was propped open with a boot, and then I knew where I was. This was the cottage of old Mrs. Daniels. Ben’s cottage.

  “Davy,” I whispered, speaking for the first time, but he only tugged on my hand and hurried me to the stove. The bittersweet smell was stronger here. Davy set down the lantern, took both my hands, and laid them on a pot that was covered in a sticky brown resin. I protested at the unpleasant touch, but he lifted my hands and had me smell the strong odor, the same that was already in the air.

  Then he opened a cabinet, almost frenzied in his hurry, and took out empty glass bottles, handing them to me one by one, removing the tops and putting them below my nose to note the corresponding smell. “What is it?” I asked. He turned the bottle so I could see its label. LAUDANUM. Then he took my fingers and put them in a dish of brown sugar. He held my fingers up to my nose, then put them against my own lips. I tasted the sugar and caught a hint of the odor I had smelled. It was vaguely familiar. Like Stranwyne’s tea. “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

  But he only picked up the lantern and pulled my hand again, taking me to the back of the cottage where another door led into the earth, though this time with wooden steps instead of stone. We stepped down into a cellar and, as we descended, there was another smell, different from before, acrid and horrible, what I had smelled once before on Ben Aldridge, only many times stronger. I put my hand over my nose, and then we were at the bottom of the stairs and inside a small workshop. It was much more rudimentary than my uncle’s, even I could see that. There were a few tables, bottles, and tools, and, to my surprise, the boat my uncle had been playing with at my party, on its side now, the new wheel in its middle.

  But even as I took all this in, my eyes were drawn to a workbench in the center of the room, where a replica of my uncle’s fish lay propped in the air across two metal stands. It was larger than the original, and without any of the realistic touches provided by Lane’s painting. A panel hung open on its side, showing its cog-and-gear guts.

  Davy brought me to the workbench and held up the lantern carefully, as far from the fish as was possible, took my hand and placed it on the metal skin. He ran my fingers along the sleek body, asking me to feel all the way to the machine’s metal snout. And I found the difference. There was a joint where my uncle’s had none; the head of this fish was a separate compartment.

  I tried to move his lantern hand closer to better see, but he held the lantern away and, instead, placed my fingers into small pile of fine, cotton fluff. He had me take a piece of the fluff and put it to my nose, but I pulled my face away. It stank, like the cellar. I looked to Davy again, asking as silently as he might have, and with the fluff still in my hand, he led me to a corner, so extremely careful with his lantern that I had to crouch down to see.

  There was a jagged hole in the dirt floor, nine or so inches deep in the middle, splaying out for perhaps two feet in width. I touched blackened scorch marks on the wall stones. His large eyes solemn, Davy took my hand with the fluff and had me set the cotton in the center of the hole. He turned his arm, showing me the burn on his wrist, let me ponder this for a moment, then led me back to the workbench, placed my hand on the metal snout of the fish, back to the cotton fluff, and then back to the fish.

  My forehead wrinkled. I knew Ben was intensely interested in the workings of my uncle’s fish, particularly in its method of holding depth. But why build this one with an extra chamber? And if Davy was trying to show me that this cotton had somehow caused that hole in the floor, and the burn on his arm, then was the cotton somehow like gunpowder? Did the cotton explode? I looked again to his lantern, this time in alarm, and then a door closed above us in the cottage.

  Footsteps moved, a fine mist of dust raining down from the ceiling that was also the cottage floor. Davy’s hand left mine, and he shrank instantly beneath the workbench, his lantern chasing the shadows that had gathered below it. A moment later the light was blown out, Davy could no longer be seen, and I stood where I was in the darkness.

  The footsteps were hurried. I heard water being poured and then the clink of glass and plates. It sounded as if Ben were tidying up. I slid down to sit in the dirt on the floor, my legs no longer able to support me, the horrible odor in the workshop not just a smell but a taste in my mouth and a burn in my lungs. I wondered if I had the strength or the courage to climb the cellar stairs, and how I might explain my presence without implicating Davy. Perhaps I should join the child under the workbench? Or perhaps Ben would leave the cottage without coming to the cellar at all.

  The cellar door opened, and light poure
d down from above. I glanced at the workbench, relieved to see that the darkness beneath it was still impenetrable, and when I looked up again, blinking, Ben Aldridge was on the stairs with his own lantern and his usual grin.

  “Miss Tulman,” he said. “I am honored. And I had thought you confined to your bed.”

  He came farther down the steps, dragging a large wooden crate with his other hand. I opened my mouth, but could find nothing to say. I used the table behind me to pull myself upright.

  “Please,” he said, “don’t trouble yourself.” He tossed the crate onto the floor and set the lantern on another workbench, well away from the cotton. “I do apologize for the smell. It’s terrible, I know, but other than that, how do you like my little workshop? It’s nothing to your uncle’s, of course.”

  “It’s very nice,” I said slowly.

  “And this?” he asked, stroking the spine of the fish. “Lacking the more attractive aspects of the original. But a much more functional machine, to be sure.”

  “What is it for?”

  His eyes crinkled, and he hoisted his crate onto the workbench. It was full of sawdust. “Tell me, Miss Tulman, how are you feeling? Any lasting effects from your party?”

  “I am … tired.”

  “But not too tired for a jaunt to my cottage in the middle of the night? Not that I mind, Miss Tulman. And not that I don’t know exactly who brought you here.”

  I had completely forgotten it was the middle of the night. The journey from my bedchamber had had such dreamlike quality, so much of my life lately had had such a dreamlike quality, it was just now dawning on me that all this was real.

  “But really, Miss Tulman,” Ben chided, “you truly are a sight. Quite wild. What would Mr. Lockwood say to such behavior? As a friend, let me advise that you can scarce afford any more oddities at this point. That man is ready to cart you away.”

  My brows came together. “But I was poisoned, not … Mr. Lockwood will know I was not …” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Mr. Cooper will have told Mr. Lockwood so.”