Gloria nodded gleefully and tucked the tiny bottle into her pocket. Smiling, she turned to Lily.
‘The best emotion in the city, miss,’ she said, as if imparting a great secret. ‘The very best.’ And with that she left the shop.
Miss Devine deftly rolled up Gloria’s contract and slipped it, along with the drawstring bag, under the counter.
‘Your master may be some time, girl. He is selecting alchemical equipment from my storeroom.’ The glass-maker stepped round the counter, resting one hand on Lily’s shoulder. It felt hard and dry. ‘How long have you worked for this physician?’
‘Not long, madam,’ Lily said, easing herself away from Miss Devine’s touch, while keeping her eyes respectfully lowered. There was no point in being bold with someone she didn’t know, especially when she seemed to have power over her master.
‘Are you prepared for your duties?’ Miss Devine took a strand of Lily’s dark hair and twisted it round her finger. ‘You’ve seen work, girl, I can see it in your hands. But have you seen death?’
Lily felt her stomach begin to churn. She had tried to keep that thought out of her head.
‘Only once, madam,’ she said. ‘When I took the doctor his lunch… down in his workroom…’ The awful blank stare began to rise before her and she shuddered.
‘A doctor’s assistant must see much death, girl. Wounds and sickness, and then there are the flies…’ Miss Devine smiled. ‘Forgive me, but you must be prepared. You look pale at the thought of it.’
‘I…’ Lily swallowed. She could feel her insides squirming.
It was stupid; she had always told herself that a dead person couldn’t harm her, but…
‘It’s blood. It makes me feel sick… It…’ Lily faltered. She didn’t know the word for what she felt.
‘Don’t worry. Lily, is it?’ Miss Devine said, walking back behind the counter. ‘Disgust is natural, one of the prime emotions. Of course –’ she leaned forward, resting her arms on the counter, a motherly smile on her face – ‘it is also quite a valuable commodity.’
Lily looked up, startled, as Miss Devine continued.
‘Useful to people to have a little extra disgust sometimes. It works wonders as a slimming aid for society women, while a touch of repulsion helps people to take a more balanced view of their business. I do quite a brisk trade in disgust. And a child’s disgust is the freshest, of course, before we become hardened to the world.’
Lily looked up. All around her, the shelves stretched up to the ceiling. On them, the tiny bottles clustered together, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. And each one, every one, contained part of someone, some piece of their mind, boiled down and ready for sale. She shuddered.
‘Miss Devine…’ Lily stopped. It seemed unnatural; her feet itched to run away, to wait for the doctor outside. But then again, what use was disgust? Fear kept her safe, anger gave her drive, but disgust? She could have done without that when they served food at the orphanage.
‘In payment for some of that glassware that your master is choosing, shall we say?’
Miss Devine pulled forward another length of paper and cut it off with a blade of glass. Lily watched as the contract formed before her. Three pieces of alchemical equipment in exchange for her disgust. She felt dazed, still not quite able to take it in. Her heart was beating in her mouth. But then, out of her churning thoughts, a practical voice asserted itself. She would be able to help the doctor without flinching; he could continue his research. It would solve so many problems.
She pressed her ring down into the warm wax.
Miss Devine rolled up the paper and drew aside a curtain in a corner of the room. Beyond it, a dark chamber filled with a large and tangled shadow greeted Lily’s eyes. As Miss Devine brought in the lantern, the light gleamed off a web of glass tubing curling round in a labyrinth of globes and beakers. In the far corner, a mass of pipes fed into a large, squat device covered in cogs and pistons. In the centre of the apparatus, beneath the largest of the glass spheres, there was a leather chair.
‘Sit down, Lily. It will only take a moment.’
Lily moved forward, her footfalls resonating through the apparatus. As she sat in the chair, a feeling of unease stole over her. Miss Devine lowered a mask of smoked glass from the middle of the machine. Lily opened her mouth to speak, but her words were stifled as the glass-maker covered her face with the mask. She could feel tubes spiralling out from it as it pressed down over her eyes, nose and mouth.
‘Don’t move, my dear,’ Miss Devine called out, as she scuttled across to the machine in the corner.
Lily lifted her hand to move the mask, deciding to speak, to say that perhaps this wasn’t a good idea.
There was a deep hum. The machine was on.
For a moment, Lily felt nothing. Then she became aware of a rushing behind her ears, as though wind was howling through the pipes above her. The noise grew louder and louder. Her head was filling with air and the wind was reaching down, deeper and deeper…
Then, rising inside her, Lily felt happiness, sadness, fear, elation, horror, indifference: each flashed through her more intensely than ever before, bubbling up from within, passing into her head and then, with a rush, out through her eyes and mouth. Dimly, she saw a rainbow of fizzing, glowing gases escaping up into the tubes above her, spinning faster and faster round the web of glass beyond.
Lily was numb. She sat dully, watching the colours whirl. Somewhere above, she saw a thick, black gas separate from the others, saw it sink down, condensing, dripping into a flask beside her – her disgust. She felt emptied out, hollow. Then there was another noise. Lily turned her eyes. The doctor had pushed his way into the room. He was shouting something, but she was too tired to listen, too sluggish to move her head. He pulled one of the controls.
With a rush, the machine shuddered into reverse. For one awful moment, the coloured gases hovered above her. Then they all fell at once, streaming into her. Lily gasped, clutching at the mask, trying to tear it off her face as every emotion she had ever felt forced its way into her head. Laughing and crying, screaming and smiling, she leapt up from the chair. Behind her, she heard the wrench of glass and then a crash. The mask flew from her face, shattering on the ground.
She looked up as the doctor loomed towards her, his face full of rage. She had never seen him angry before. Even as she looked, Lily felt another surge of emotion, but just one this time – fear. Overwhelming, petrifying fear of that face. She turned and ran.
She ran through the shop. She ran out into the streets. She kept running, faster and faster, running until her legs ached and her lungs screamed for rest. But it was not until the fear faded, until her overwhelming panic settled again into the back of her mind, that she stopped and sank to her knees, gasping from exhaustion.
She lay down in the filth and mud, and closed her eyes.
Chapter Five
THE MANSERVANT
Mark was awoken by a tremendous knocking at the front door.
Rubbing his eyes, he stumbled down the stairs, wondering if Lily had had to do this every time a visitor came. Then again, in all his time at the tower, he could not remember a single visitor.
Gritting his teeth, Mark tugged at the rusting bolts that held the door shut. A voice from the other side spoke impatiently.
‘Open up! The Count asked us here at the fourth hour after midnight precisely. I am not in the habit of rising at such a time.’
Grunting out apologies, Mark dragged the heavy door back. The next moment, he was pushed aside by a young man in a thick brown coat who swept into the hallway. He glared at Mark, plucking a three-cornered hat from his head and shaking out a mane of red hair.
‘Is it a common practice for you to leave your master’s guests out in the cold, boy?’ he demanded, thrusting the hat into Mark’s hands.
Mark scowled at the hat, but muttered something about being new to the job.
The visitor gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Carry on in this fashion and you
are likely to be new to a great number of jobs in quick succession.’ Elegantly, he peeled off the coat and dumped that too in Mark’s arms.
‘Pay no attention to the boy, Laud. We waste our time shouting at the staff.’
Two more coats – one of gaudy green silk, the other of cheaper, black cotton – fell into his arms as two more men entered, bringing with them a blast of chill night air. The speaker was a large, genial-looking older man who leaned on a walking stick, his brightly patterned waistcoat straining under his bulk; the other, a man of middle years in impeccably neat, formal black, stayed silent. The older man gave a cough.
‘I think it is better if we see ourselves up.’ He turned to Mark. ‘Boy, has your master ordered breakfast at this unnatural hour?’
Mark nodded, even as his heart sank. He had never cooked anything in his life. The men seemed satisfied.
‘Bring it soon,’ the red-headed visitor ordered, before turning to the older man. ‘Come, sir, we must not keep the Count waiting.’
Mark hurried back up the stairs to the kitchen, behind the guests, wishing that the Count had warned him how early the visitors would arrive. This was not what he would have called morning. Not sure what to do with the hat and coats, he laid them on the kitchen table, as neatly as he could, and began to open cupboards frantically, seeking anything that might be edible. They were well stocked, but the meat was still raw, the eggs uncooked. As he stood in the cold kitchen, Mark realized that he didn’t even know how to get the fire going. He was jolted out of his thoughts by the jangling of the Count’s bell and fell to scrabbling for whatever he could find, hoping that somewhere, despite her rush, Lily would have left instructions as to what the Count liked.
A few minutes later, he surveyed his findings. Hungry as he was, he could not say he was tempted by the lump of cold ham he had found in one of the more obscure cupboards, even when he had piled some home-made bread around it. He hoped that the dark liquid in the thick bottle would make up for it. It looked a little like his father’s old rum, but smelled fruitier.
Grimly, he loaded up a tray with this fare and began the long climb to the top of the tower. As he stumbled up the last steps, however, he stopped in his tracks. The door ahead of him was ajar. Lily had told him everything she knew about the Observatory and one thing was certain – the Count never left the door open. Mark shivered. All Lily had had to do was ring the bell and push his meal through the hatch. Mark had wanted to do the same – perhaps then the fury of the Count might be held off. No chance of that now.
Gingerly, balancing the tray on a hand and shoulder, Mark knocked on the door. It reverberated, but there was no response. He pushed it open.
Beyond, a circular antechamber presented itself, lit dimly by two old oil lamps. In the centre, a spiral staircase made of wrought iron and decorated with sharply pointed stars curved upwards, through an open trapdoor, into the ceiling. From above, Mark could make out the rumble of the Count’s voice, just out of hearing, and the answering sharper tones of someone younger, probably the redheaded man. Mark’s heart sank. It had been hard enough to come through the door; now it seemed he was going to have to walk into the middle of their conversation. He hesitated, not knowing what to do for the best.
‘Are you going to wait there all day?’
Mark jumped and the tray fell to the floor with a clatter. In desperation, he lunged for the bottle, which was, miraculously, unbroken but had rolled away from him. Mark fell to his knees, but then watched in dismay as it came to rest under a shiny black shoe.
‘I appreciate your eagerness, boy, but I prefer my liquor in a glass. So much more efficient.’
Mark looked up. A curious smile and a raised eyebrow appeared out of the gloom, followed by a proffered hand. He took it. The skin was rough, but as the man helped him up, Mark noticed that his nails shone in the lamplight as though they had been polished. Between two fingers, something gold glimmered.
Mark stood up, clutching the bottle. Now he looked more closely, he recognized the man as the third visitor, the one who hadn’t spoken. No wonder Mark had missed him: in his black waistcoat and breeches he was almost invisible in the darkness. Even his hair, unremarkable brown in ordinary light, seemed to melt into shadow in this gloom, making his startlingly green eyes seem all the brighter as they caught the glow.
‘Thank you, sir… I…’ Mark gestured hopelessly at the ham, which lay on the floor.
The man laughed. ‘No need to “sir” me, boy. I am a mere servant, such as yourself. And don’t trouble yourself about the meal. The Count, I am reliably informed, goes without eating for days on occasions. As for his guests –’ the man flicked the gold object between his fingers idly – ‘the elder gentleman, my own master, the Honourable Mr Prendergast, has recently become a vegetarian teeto-taller on the advice of his doctor, so you have saved him from the social embarrassment of having to refuse your offerings.’
‘What about the red-headed man… Laud?’ Mark asked.
The man smirked.
‘I think, perhaps, that Mr Laudate should speak more civilly to servants if he wants efficient service, don’t you?’
The man’s smile broadened into a grin. His teeth too were surprisingly bright in the murky room. Mark couldn’t resist smiling back as he bent down to pick up the ham.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ the man said, suddenly leaning forward.
Mark told him while he pulled the remains of the meal together and the man gave a sigh of satisfaction.
‘A good name, that. Strong, simple. You can build on a name like that. Tell me then, Mark, do you know what this is?’
Mark looked up. The man held out his hand, then flicked the tiny golden object from finger to finger. It was some kind of metal disc.
‘No, sir,’ Mark said.
The man tutted. ‘What did I say about “sir”? Snutworth is my name.’ Seeing Mark’s look of incredulity, he added, ‘My parents were blessed with many things, Mark, but judgement in choosing my name was not one of them. I wouldn’t mind, but it is such a mouthful, and impossible to shorten without making it worse.’
Snutworth chuckled and Mark found, to his surprise, that he was joining in.
‘Anyway,’ Snutworth continued, raising one finger conspiratorially, ‘I’ll tell you what this is, Mark…’ He leaned very close, holding the disc between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s a mark!’ He drew back triumphantly, letting the disc drop into Mark’s hand.
Mark looked at it. It seemed like the seal of a signet ring, covered with an unknown script that didn’t resemble any of the words in Lily’s book. In the centre of one side, there was a portrait of someone looking away.
‘What is it?’ Mark asked.
Snutworth plucked it delicately from his grasp.
‘A piece of history, Mark. A token used to represent something real. An illusion. They called it a coin once. Men would kill for them. Often did.’
Mark looked at him, incredulously.
‘It isn’t that pretty,’ he said, squinting at the coin.
Snutworth closed his hand round it.
‘But it is something to hold on to, Mark,’ he said softly. ‘You would be amazed how important that is.’
‘Snutworth!’ The voice of Mr Prendergast, the old visitor, called from the room above. ‘Has that servant arrived yet?’
‘He wishes you to know that the cupboard is bare, sir,’ Snutworth called up with a wink.
Mark smiled his gratitude.
‘Irrelevant, Snutworth. We want the boy for something else. Send him up.’
‘Of course, sir,’ Snutworth said.
Mark stepped backwards, but Snutworth laid a reassuring hand on his arm.
‘My master has approximately four hundred and thirty-two different tones of voice and that one was definitely not anger. I’d hazard a guess at curiosity, with just a hint of smugness.’ Snutworth pushed Mark to the base of the stairs. ‘That is most definitely one of his better moods. It looks like you are going up
in the world.’
Mark put one hand on the banister, feeling the cold iron beneath his hand. He turned back to Snutworth, who nodded encouragingly. Mark took a deep breath.
As he climbed the stairs, up towards the square of lamplight in the ceiling, where the trapdoor to the Observatory above lay open, his new-found confidence drained away. If he did even one thing wrong…
He had seen those no one would take, the damaged goods. They huddled together on the streets, watching for scraps to grab. They never bothered to ask anyone for aid, for they had nothing to give in return.
The lamplight grew brighter. Mark gripped the banister harder and climbed up.
In an instant, the gloom of the chamber below vanished in a burnished glow. Mark’s eyes opened wider than ever as he caught his first glimpse of the telescope. Vast and complex, a monolith of shining brass, it dominated the centre of the room, pushing its way out through the walls of glass. And beyond that, through the windows, the stars seemed to rush towards him, so many in the crisp night sky, all so clear through a thousand interlocking windows.
‘The boy shows interest. That is promising.’
The voice of Mr Prendergast, warm and encouraging. The stars shone brighter.
‘He would, I suppose, be an adequate replacement for the girl,’ said Mr Laudate, the harshness of his earlier voice overlaid with an intrigued lilt. It was impossible for Mark to tear his eyes from that glorious sight.
‘Mark, come here.’
The Count’s words worked their way into his consciousness. Suddenly all thoughts of stars and skies were banished from his mind. Now he was, once again, a shabby servant boy standing in the midst of three powerful men. He bowed his head. His feet, he noticed, were still bare and grimy. He shuffled forward.
‘You wanted me, sir?’ he ventured.
‘Look here, Mark.’
He raised his eyes.
The Count’s clothes glinted with gold stitching. Like a warlock of legend, he wore a deep-blue coat that glimmered with stars, but for him the stars were more potent than any spell. They were the symbol of Count Stelli. The old man held his gaze, the deep lines on his face made darker by the flickering candlelight. Mark couldn’t begin to imagine how old the Count was, but despite the white hair and the dry skin he was sitting upright, utterly still, as though not even a bolt from the heavens would move him from that spot.
The Midnight Charter Page 5