The Dark Unwinding

by Cameron, Sharon

  “But what about your other escapades?” Ben came around the workbench to stand right in front of me, his boyish face inches from my own. I looked away. “About nighttime ramblings and self-inflicted wounds, and a certain balancing act in the chapel?”

  I did look up at him then, this time in horror.

  “Those are not the acts of someone capable of maintaining her own welfare, Miss Tulman. And I’m sorry to tell you there has already been a document signed to that effect, and by our surgeon, Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper states that while you have extended periods of lucidity, such behavior as this, and the unfortunate episode you suffered right before Mr. Lockwood’s eyes, are all symptoms of a chronic mental condition, indicating that you are a danger to others as well as yourself. He didn’t mention poison, I’m afraid.”

  I was thoroughly awake now, but with the thrills of fear I’d come to associate with my nightmares. Mr. Cooper didn’t mention poison. Of course he did not. For all he knew, I was about to take his home away from him.

  “Can you deny that you did these things, Miss Tulman?”

  I could not deny it, and somehow Ben knew. “They’ll tell him it’s not true,” I countered.

  “Who will?” His face was very close.

  “Mary, and …”

  “I don’t think her opinion will hold much weight. And if you were going to mention a particular young man, I think a servant to whom you’ve show a certain … licentiousness of behavior would be quite likely to lie rather than lose the privilege of your favors, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I looked up into the lines around those cheerful eyes. “Does the paper say that, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “But Mrs. Jefferies, the people in the village —”

  “Will not choose to defend the person who is responsible for removing them from their homes.”

  “Will you tell them it’s not true?”

  “No.”

  My gaze focused on the fish behind Ben’s shoulder. Ben wasn’t going to help me. He had never wanted to help me. I thought of Aunt Alice’s stories of asylums, and my heart beat harder. I had no way to defend myself, and an asylum was exactly where the magistrate was going to take me. Then I caught sight of Davy, sliding like a snake from beneath the workbench to begin a silent move toward the cellar stairs. I lifted my chin, keeping Ben’s eyes on me. “You wrote to the magistrate.”

  He smiled. “When you finally catch on, your mind works apace.”

  Davy was up three steps. Ben Aldridge was going to have me committed. Hopelessness flooded my chest, chilling, making me shiver. Seven steps. Why would he do this? Twelve steps, and Davy was away. There wasn’t even a speck of dust from the ceiling. I was alone. “Why do you hate me?”

  Ben’s smile faded. “Oh, my dear,” he said. “I don’t hate you. You are quite an interesting, pent-up little thing. It was just your misfortune to stand between me and what I want.” He shook his head. “I gave you every opportunity, you know. Again and again I asked if you would go to your aunt, and you were so … inflexible. I couldn’t let you take away what I so desperately needed, which was unfortunately tucked deep inside your uncle’s head. It’s rather ironic, you know, that at the eleventh hour, I got what I needed anyway.”

  “You got what you needed?”

  “Oh, yes. But it’s too late to turn the clock back now.” He sighed. “I am sorry for you.” He stepped over to the workbench and his crate. “But as for that child,” he continued, “that child is not trustworthy, and he is disobedient. He will pay for that.” He looked back at me and smiled. “I don’t enjoy being crossed, Miss Tulman. As I’m sure you will have noticed by now.” He lifted the fish carefully into the crate.

  “Will it explode?” I asked, trying to turn his mind from Davy.

  Ben’s face was so pleased I was startled. “Why, how clever of you, Miss Tulman.” He laughed. “Yes, it certainly shall explode, unless all my experiments are wrong. Did you see my little accident over in the corner? Only a tiny bit packed in a medicine bottle and the force was … gratifying. Moisture, I believe, will be the key to its safety. Or let us hope so anyway.”

  I watched him take a dripping cask from a large barrel of water, where it had been soaking, and gently pack the cotton fluff tight inside the wet wood. He wedged the wet cask into the crate, then picked up my uncle’s boat, saw me looking, and gave the little wheel a spin.

  “A gyroscope, Miss Tulman. A simple concept, though in this instance, applied in an utterly new way. That is true genius.” He tucked the boat into the crate alongside the cask and the fish. “Did I not tell you we live in a fantastic age? An age where nothing is impenetrable, and where ideas can be rewarding, indeed. But I am overdue and must therefore bid you adieu, my dear.”

  He laughed once at his little joke, then took three long steps across the room, grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck, and kissed me, hard on the mouth. “You deserved that,” he said as he shoved me away, all his laughter gone. “You shouldn’t have looked so pretty on your birthday. Thank God there are more of you in Paris.”

  He picked up his crate, very cautious not to bump it, and had a foot on the first step before he looked back at where I stood, still stiff with shock, the back of my hand over my mouth. “The village committees are meeting with Mr. Lockwood this morning, Miss Tulman. Very soon, actually, as dawn has broken, and I daresay that will be the proverbial nail in your coffin. I don’t have any of the cucumbers you love so well, but that bottle of claret is just there beneath the workbench. Had the devil of a time with the dosages, never did get it right, but judging by your reaction before, there should be more than enough left to do the job. There are far worse things than death by opium, Miss Tulman. You might prefer it to the indignities of Bedlam.” He favored me with the boyish grin I had so come to associate with Ben Aldridge. “Au revoir.” The steps creaked, the door to the cellar shut, and I heard a key turn in the lock.

  I sat down on the floor again, in the awful smell and mist of dust from Ben’s movements above, the lantern light wavering, thinking of death by opium. There were opium dens in London, I had read about them in the newspapers. Men — sailors, many of them — hooked like fish by the pleasures, but who could not stop, even when their raving dreams drove them mad. Laudanum was made of opium, and that had been in the bottles upstairs. I could hear Ben smashing them now. And hadn’t medicine gone missing from the infirmary, the night the old man had died? Mr. Cooper said it had been misplaced, but Mr. Cooper had also signed a document denouncing my sanity. Bottles of laudanum, and sugar with the bitter, slightly familiar taste …

  And there, sitting on the dirt floor of a cellar in my ruined dress and almost certainly on my way to an asylum, I experienced a rush of undiluted happiness. Katharine Tulman was not insane, never had been insane. She had not even been poisoned. Katharine Tulman had been drugged. I thought of the bottles of laudanum, boiling, leaving the potent brown residue in the pots, sticky opium that could be scraped away and mixed with sugar. And Davy knew of it and knew how to enter my room through the wardrobe, to come from the nursery and turn the inside latch — no need for a key — to replace the sugar for my nightly tea.

  And then I thought of footsteps in the corridor, my things moving, disappearing, the portraits changing, my bonnet tied to the flagpole. Davy, who could move so quietly, hide so well, and who knew all the ways of the house. How had Ben coerced him? But I knew that, too. All Ben had to do was threaten the rabbit, and Davy would have felt he had no choice. I remembered the odd, blank look, and the way Davy had tugged my hand, pulling me away from Ben’s cottage when I had been offered tea. What guilt the miserable child must have suffered, and the risk he had taken to try and tell me, to show me, by bringing me here.

  But why force Davy to do these things? Ben had wanted to keep me from going to my aunt, to keep Uncle Tully at Stranwyne, but he was leaving now. With Mr. Lockwood asking questions, Uncle Tully was in just as much danger from Aunt Alice as he’d always been. Ben
said he’d gotten what he needed. But what had he needed? What had he wanted so much?

  I got to my feet, brushed off my hands, and rummaged as quietly as possible through the workshop while the movements carried on upstairs. I found nothing, nothing but the bottle of opium-laced claret beneath the bench, as Ben had said. Every paper was taken, the fish, the boat, and the cotton gone, even most of the odor had dissipated, or at least I could no longer smell it. I sat down again to rest, closed my eyes, and instead of sorting what was in front of me, sorted through what was in my head.

  Ben Aldridge had said he was going to Paris. He was taking Uncle Tully’s little boat with him as well as the fish, the boat with its new spinning mechanism, the gyroscope. And then I remembered. On winding day, Ben had mused that perhaps the dragon and the fish worked in the same way, and now the boat balanced on its keel, the same way the dragon balanced. What if they all worked by gyroscope? I remembered the way Ben had leapt to his feet at my party, spellbound by the boat. If he understood how Uncle Tully’s fish worked, how did that help him? But Ben didn’t just want a fish that worked. He wanted a fish that would explode.

  My eyes flew open, and I held my breath. I could see the fish swimming beneath the water as it had in the canal, its empty snout full of the volatile cotton, silent and unseen but for a small trail of bubbles, holding its course, holding its depth, and when it hit something solid, say the hull of a ship, the explosion that would follow. Ben had said that France was making new ships made of iron, impenetrable to cannon fire, but what had he said only a few minutes ago? That nothing was now impenetrable? And he wasn’t going to London, he was going to Paris, where the nephew of Napoléon was now the president. Where the ability to sink every ship in the English navy would be worth a mighty reward, indeed.

  And it was for this he would destroy me. I looked up at the silent ceiling, the cottage above me now still. Ben was gone. I thought of my father, the sea closing over his head as his ship journeyed down to the depths. And what about Davy? Davy had betrayed Ben, and Ben knew it. What would Ben do to him? Anything, I thought.

  I jumped to my feet, grabbed a box of tools, and dumped the contents all over the workbench, the clatter grating in the quiet. I held up the lantern, searching, and it was the work of a moment before I found something that would serve my purpose. A small, thin chisel.

  It took longer than I had anticipated to pry the pins from the cellar-door hinges. But once I had them out, the whole door slid away from the lock and scraps of wood I had used for props and went thudding to the floor planks. I ran full speed through the empty cottage, barefoot, muddy, and in my filthy blue dress, out the front door and down the sun-dappled path. I had to find Davy.

  I burst through the little white gate onto the High Street, and was almost immediately yanked back by a strong grip on my arm. I squealed until I saw that the grip belonged to Lane.

  “Where is he?” I panted.

  “Who?” Lane shook his head. His hair was loose and tousled, his chin unshaven. “Never mind. Come with me. Now.” He half ran down the street, dragging me with one hand, his rifle in the other. “Should have known you’d go there,” he was muttering, “I should have known….” He seemed angry and pained all at once, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I gave a sudden jerk, tearing my arm from his hand, and took a step back.

  “Where is Davy, and where is Ben Aldridge?”

  Lane turned and put both his free and his rifle hand up, as if I might startle like a pigeon. Or no, I thought, it was the same way he looked at my uncle, trying to ward off a tantrum. “Calm down,” he said, very gently. “Come with —”

  I stepped back again. “Where are they? Have you seen them?”

  “You have to come with me, now. Please …” The gray eyes were darting right and left, and it occurred to me that it was getting on into the morning, and the street around us was deserted. Then I remembered the magistrate and the committees. I took another step back, hand on my throat.

  “Are they coming for me?”

  “Yes. Mr. Lockwood already came, but you’d … thank God you were gone. Let’s go to the tunnel, and I’ll take care of you. I’ll get both you and Mr. Tully out, I promise.” He held out his hand. “Just come with me. Please …”

  “I am not insane.”

  “Katharine …”

  “I am not!” I shouted. “I understand now. It was opium, because of the fish….” I knew from the look on his face that I sounded exactly like what I was declaring myself not to be, but I had no more time. “I can’t go without knowing where they are.”

  “If I tell you, will you come?”

  I looked at him warily. “Yes.”

  “I passed them not fifteen minutes ago, on the way to the Lower Village, with a cart of things for Mr. Tully. Ben was going to keep Davy away, until all this was …”

  But that was all I heard. I was already running, fleet as a deer for the Lower Village.

  I was all the way to the canal wall before he caught me; fear for Davy lending me a speed I would have never guessed I had. Lane’s long arm got me around the waist and jerked me right off my feet.

  “Shhh,” he said in my ear as I tried to kick his shins, a move not nearly as effective as it would have been with my boots on. “Stop! Let me help you….”

  And then I saw the boat coming down the canal. “There!” I yelled. Lane must have seen them, too, because his grip on me loosened.

  Almost the entire boat was visible, a testament to the amount of rain we had received; the canal must have been running nearly to the top of the wall. Ben stood in the stern with the tiller, the white smoke of the steam engine puffing, the boat moving fast, one hand on Davy’s collar as the child cowered on top of the wooden crate from the cellar. I thought his cheek might be bleeding. Ben saw us looking up at him and took his hand off the tiller, grinning as he waved. Then he glanced once at Davy and back at us. Before I could comprehend what I was seeing, he grabbed Davy in both hands, lifted the child up, and heaved him over the side. The small body made a slow arc through the air.

  Lane gasped behind me, Davy hit the water, and I heard someone screaming. The screaming was from me. “Can he swim?” I yelled. “Can he swim?” But Lane had already dropped me and the gun and was at a dead run for the slope where the banked earth met the canal wall, clambering up to reach the level of the water.

  I looked up into Ben’s angelic smile, shining down on me from above. If I had been hot with fear and anger before, now I was dead cold with it. Eyes still on Ben, I bent down and snatched up the fallen rifle. I’d never shot a gun. I didn’t even know if this one was loaded, but I knew enough to pull back the hammer. It clicked into place. I raised the muzzle, aiming at the boat that was running closer and closer to the edge of the wall. I could see Ben very clearly, and that crate of cargo that had been more precious to him than my life or Davy’s. The smile left his face, replaced with puzzlement, and perhaps a bit of curiosity as to what I might do next. I pulled the trigger.

  The gun jerked back hard, knocking me down, and at almost the same instant, bafflingly, the boat above me exploded, pieces of wood and iron boiler spewing upward, sending a force of air over my body and a pulsing ball of flame to the sky. I felt a grinding thud in the ground beneath me as what was left of the boat struck the canal wall.

  I left the rifle where it was and tried to stand, confused and with my ears ringing. Water and tiny pieces of boat rained from the sky. Lane scrambled up from where the blast had knocked him down and began climbing the bank again. I ran, crawling up the rising land after him, and when I got to the canal he was already in the water, diving below the pieces of burning wreckage floating here and there on the surface. There was no sign of Ben. Or Davy.

  It was a long time before Lane came out of the water, dripping and empty-handed. He ran his hand once through his hair, wringing out the wet, and we did not speak, just half walked, half slid down the bank together. My thoughts were unwound, leaving me loose, beyond functio
ning. We walked to the low place in the land, at the base of the canal wall, where Lane’s rifle lay on the ground beside the path. He looked at the rifle, and back to the top of the wall.

  “Gunpowder?” he said.

  “He had a kind of cotton, that he said … would … explode. But I didn’t … I didn’t think …” I couldn’t say any more. What had I done?

  “But why? And Davy? Why?”

  I knew the answer to his questions, but I had no more speech. I watched the gray eyes, blank as they stared up at the canal, suddenly narrow in concentration. I followed his gaze. Thin lines of wet were streaking down the wall, making dark stripes against the stone. Near the top, where they originated, a crack now ran through the mortar, trickles of water seeping from it.

  “Katharine,” Lane said slowly, “I think Mr. Tully is in the tunnel. Go quickly, and take him to the chapel. And if you hear Lockwood or the men coming to the chapel, go back in the tunnel and shut the door. But just wait on the other side of it, don’t run back toward the workshops. Do you understand?” He turned to me. “Hide, and take care of Mr. Tully until I can come for you. I think I’ve got to close the water gate and drain the canal, just in case. Do you understand? Can you do it?”

  I nodded.

  “Go now,” he said, and pushed me gently toward the workshop, waiting to see me on my way before picking up the gun and sprinting off toward the upper end of the canal. I hurried down the canal path. How I wished he didn’t believe I was a lunatic.

  I was still far from the green-painted door when I saw someone small slip inside it. I ran harder and found wet, bare footprints, child-sized, drying on the paving stones. I threw open the door and burst into my uncle’s sitting room.

  “Davy!” I called. “Davy!”

  My feet made soft, quick slaps through to the hallway, but the gas in the workshop was unlit, my uncle’s menagerie a collection of bizarre, black shapes in the dark. I searched the hall again and opened the door to Lane’s room.