The Rookery

by Deborah Hewitt

  The glimmering cord linking Reid to her nightjar looped down between them, pulsing with muted vitality. Alice’s old tutor, Proctor, had once told her that an aviarist couldn’t touch someone else’s nightjar – but Proctor had been wrong; she had once stroked Sasha’s, and it had given her a glimpse of Sasha’s most secret memories. But that had been accidental and deeply intrusive. Sasha’s memories had been private and none of Alice’s business.

  But this time . . . now . . .? Reid had been trying to tell her something.

  With only a moment’s hesitation, Alice reached for Reid’s nightjar, avoiding the cord. Her fingers brushed gently against the feathers and circled back to stroke the soft head. The professor’s nightjar opened its eyes and blinked at her.

  ‘Show me,’ Alice breathed.

  She caught the bird’s gaze. Eyes like the dark, glossy surface of a lake locked on hers. The light from the incandescent cord glowed brighter, haloing the nightjar’s head, and Alice was mesmerized. Dark . . . glossy . . . surface of a lake. The room flickered around her. She felt herself mentally tip forward, falling towards the bird’s gaze . . . and broke through the surface of the lake. She sank into the bird’s mind like a lead weight. Memories – Reid’s – flashed across her vision like gunfire: snatches of her school days, holidays, her graduation . . . glimpses of laughing faces, some unknown and some faintly recognizable – a younger Marianne Northam? They burst in front of her and died away. Another memory rose to take their place, then another . . . Alice screwed her eyes shut. Reid exhaled softly next to her . . . and a new memory rose up and thickened around Alice, came to life like the outline of a sketch painted in. The living room at Alice’s old house; she remembered it from old photographs: familiar carpet, furniture, trinkets . . .

  Her eyes flew open. She was Reid. Not Alice. And her body was alive with grief and dread, sparking through her limbs like electricity. A terrible fear, smothered by an even more terrible hope, sat in her gullet, waiting to choke her. Keep her safe. Make it count.

  ‘And here she is.’ That was Tilda. Business-like. Trying to make it quick.

  The couple had eyes only for the Moses basket. Their hands were gripping each other so tightly their skin was blanching. They didn’t think she could see it – their naked desperation, their swollen hearts – but she saw everything now: how foolish she’d been, how naive . . . everything.

  ‘You’ll take good care of her,’ said Tilda. Not a request – a command. Tilda bent down to tuck in the blanket without looking inside; she hadn’t wanted to look too closely on the journey here. Too painful, she’d said, her lined face crumpling. Her hair was so grey. Was it the grief that had aged her?

  ‘We’ll give her everything we have,’ said the man. A tall man, with broad shoulders – he’d need those – and the sort of face that was quick to smile. Mike, that was his name. He put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, squeezing reassurance into her muscles. The woman – Patricia – barely seemed aware of what he’d said. Her eyes were fastened to the baby.

  ‘The other social worker—’ he began.

  ‘Retired,’ said Tilda. ‘Uncontactable now, I’m afraid. She’s moved to the south of France.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ said Patricia, smiling fixedly into the Moses basket.

  ‘We . . . did have a small complication,’ said Tilda.

  Patricia’s eyes shot up, her panic palpable. She was worried they would take the basket away again. Maybe they should.

  ‘A mistake with the paperwork.’ Tilda gestured at the sleeping baby. ‘Her file was misplaced. We moved offices – you understand, these things happen. Still.’ She smiled tightly. ‘It’s not a problem, is it?’

  ‘No,’ replied Patricia, the relief clear in her tone. ‘Not a problem at all.’

  ‘Her mother – her natural mother, that is – is dead. It’s all very sad.’ Tilda turned away to busy herself with the sheaf of papers they’d signed. She stuffed them carelessly into her handbag. Was she hiding her face? ‘Well,’ she said, spinning back with a grim smile. ‘We’d better leave you to it. Catherine?’

  A shake of the head. No. Not yet. Not like this.

  She saw Patricia tense. Saw the worry written over her face. ‘We’ll take the best care of her. We’ll love her to the ends of the earth.’ She glanced nervously at her husband. ‘Won’t we, Mike?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘She’ll want for nothing – not money, a nice home, love. Nothing.’

  ‘We’ve been waiting for her all along,’ Patricia said quietly. ‘I knew the minute I laid eyes on her. I’ve waited all my life to love her.’

  A pain. In her chest. Take the basket from them and run.

  ‘We’ve . . . we’ve got some names picked out,’ said Mike, casting around for something to say: a convincing sales pitch to make them leave, and leave the basket behind. She knew it.

  ‘Rose. For my grandmother. Or—’

  ‘No.’

  He stopped short and looked over at Patricia. His wife glanced at Tilda.

  ‘My colleague here . . . is Catherine Rose,’ said Tilda. ‘And she’s never been especially fond of her own name.’ Tilda smiled, trying to ease the strange atmosphere in the room.

  ‘Oh.’ A warm, defusing laugh from the husband. She had been right – he was quick to smile.

  They all smiled. A roomful of smiles. Smiling was the thing that would carry them through to the end.

  ‘Well,’ said Tilda. ‘We wish you all the very best. We know you’re the right match, and we hope you will all be very happy together.’ She paused and gestured as though to encourage speech, or a last goodbye.

  But she had already said her goodbyes: to the child and to her mother.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said, the words like ashes in her mouth.

  Mike and Patricia were bent over the basket, enraptured.

  Later, they would find the signet ring, tucked into the folds of the blanket. It had been important to pass it on. Fitting, somehow. No other trace of her mother would be left. Tilda planned to destroy the books, but the ring was special. She would never know who she was. But she might wear the ring one day, and touch hands with her past.

  Alice shrank back from Reid’s nightjar with a gasp, her fingers tingling and her head pounding. Kuu fluttered onto her shoulder and pecked at her hair. The bedroom blinked into existence, the mattress creaking under her and Reid wheezing softly, only semi-lucid.

  Alice blinked rapidly, still trying to focus. ‘Vivian?’ she managed, disoriented. That had never happened before. The first time she’d done this, with Sasha and without her permission, she’d been a bystander in Sasha’s memories. This time, she’d not merely been right in the centre of things, she’d slipped behind Reid’s eyes. She’d experienced the memory as though she was Reid – feeling her feelings and thinking her thoughts – and the next minute was thrust back into her own mind and her own body, in the very real here and now. It was like time travelling; she’d just been standing in her old living room, twenty-six years in the past: the day her adoption had been finalized. Had she experienced the memory differently this time because she’d featured in it, her infant self perhaps recalling some unconscious connection with it too?

  Alice peered closely at Reid. Rifling through her memories hadn’t hurt her; Sasha had never even been aware.

  ‘Vivian?’ said Alice. Then, more insistently, ‘Catherine? Catherine Rose? Is that your real—?’

  ‘No,’ moaned Reid, her eyes flickering open. ‘Not that . . . If Marianne . . . He did this. He’s here . . .’

  ‘Tuoni?’ Alice threw out sharply.

  Reid’s glazed eyes widened and she released a strangled gasp. The cracked ceiling groaned. A thick wooden joist, destabilized by the quake, swung loose, and before Alice had time to react, it crashed down across Reid’s abdomen, pinning her to the bed. Her eyes bulged at the pressure and Alice yelped in shock, diving towards the already injured woman.

  Alice thrust her hand out, all of the tension focused on
the ball of her palm. The air warped and the wooden joist exploded into dust.

  ‘Reid?’ she yelled.

  Reid’s shoulders twitched and she began to convulse, her legs kicking out. Alice leapt the bed and ran for the door.

  ‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘An ambulance! Now!’

  The door of Coram House swung open, and there was a long pause in which Crowley studied her intently. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  She opened her mouth to speak, to explain, but found she didn’t know where to begin. So instead, she moved past him, into the house, without a word.

  He sat her in a kitchen chair and pressed a hot tea into her hands, then frowned and waved a hand at the fire. Flames burst into the grate, the orange glow dancing across her face. She wasn’t cold. It was the shock.

  He didn’t sit with her. He seemed to understand she didn’t want to be examined. She just wanted to sit in peace – and Coram House had always brought her that.

  The tea grew cold in her hands. Alice was utterly motionless. Her breathing was so shallow and so calm that she could have been mistaken for dead. She had spent the afternoon thinking unthinkable thoughts.

  What if Reid dies in the hospital? She tried out the idea in her mind, imagining how it might feel to be told the news. But she couldn’t seem to absorb the possibility. Reid had been a constant fixture, a blunt thorn in her side, for months. She couldn’t just die.

  The shock of seeing her parents and childhood home in Reid’s memories had ebbed away, and now she was simply numb. Vivian Reid – a woman she’d never met before taking a job at the university – had a connection to her childhood. But if the fragments of the professor’s speech were to be believed, Reid had not known Alice was the child she and the older woman had handed – reluctantly – over for adoption. Not until she’d seen Alice wearing the signet ring her mum had given to her before she’d left Ireland.

  She tried to think back to that conversation, to how she’d wrongly inferred that the ring had been a Wyndham heirloom, but she couldn’t quite recall it now. Patricia Wyndham had never worn it. Why would she? The much younger Vivian Reid had left this ring for Alice. And yet, she was nothing like the Vivian Reid that Alice knew: arrogant, volatile, sharp-tempered, with little regard for anyone else. She had gone by a different name in the memory, too: Catherine Rose.

  ‘Are you ready to talk?’

  Her eyes darted up to see Crowley looking down at her with concern.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. I’m ready.’ She took a deep breath and told him everything. Everything that had happened since she’d returned to the university, even her trip to The Necropolis with August, the attacks, everything – right up to the moment she’d arrived on his doorstep.

  ‘The earthquake,’ he said at last. ‘Vivian Reid—’

  ‘Crushed by a dislodged ceiling joist,’ she said, looking around at the kitchen, just now noticing it was untouched by the tremors that had so disturbed her university apartment.

  ‘And it was this afternoon?’ Crowley clarified. ‘Not yesterday, at the same time as the midsummer disaster?’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly, confused. Of all the things she’d revealed to him, why had he focused on this one? It was the third quake to hit the Rookery – he must have felt it too. She frowned again at the kitchen. And yet—

  ‘Alice,’ he said, his voice feather-light with patience. ‘There has been no earthquake today.’

  ‘What?’ said Alice, incredulous. ‘Of course there . . .’ She trailed away.

  She hadn’t seen any new damage to the university grounds when she’d fled the building to come here. If what he was saying was true . . .

  ‘Oh my God,’ she murmured. ‘There was no earthquake. Reid tried to tell me.’ She rubbed her face wearily with the flat of her hand. ‘Reid said, “He did this; he’s here.” But I didn’t . . .’ Alice tipped her head back to the ceiling in thought.

  ‘Someone wished to silence her?’ Crowley asked. ‘To stop her speaking with you?’

  ‘I don’t . . . Maybe,’ said Alice. ‘She wanted me to go with her – to her apartment, I think, to see what was left of her research. She mentioned . . . Crowley, she mentioned Crane Park Island. I mean, she was distressed and not making much sense, but . . . it sounded like her research project had something to do with it. Or at least she felt it did.’ She pored over the moment a panicked Reid had thrown out those words. Was it just Reid being arrogant? To assume that whatever she’d been working on was capable of such a thing?

  ‘She’s safe now,’ Alice murmured. ‘I think. The university nurse went with her in the ambulance. She was sure Reid would be okay, but . . . she won’t be out of hospital for a while.’

  ‘Do you know where Reid lives?’ Crowley asked tentatively.

  ‘Islington,’ said Alice. She’d travelled to the Rookery’s version of Islington to drop some papers off to Reid months ago. ‘Why? You think we should break in and look for whatever it was she wanted to show me?’

  He raised a musing eyebrow. ‘Is it breaking in if nothing gets broken?’

  She gave this some thought. Whoever had tried to silence Reid hadn’t yet discovered her address – that’s what she’d said. How much time did she have before they found it? And should she try to get there first? Prioritize the test or Reid’s apartment?

  ‘My next membership trial is so close,’ she said, her voice strained. ‘I have to pass that test tomorrow. I can’t risk a failure. Maybe . . . afterwards, we could go?’

  They lapsed into silence again. Her thoughts were a fog of uncertainty. Frowning, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a photograph. ‘I grabbed this before I left,’ she said, passing it to him. ‘I found it with another photograph in Reid’s drawers when the lab was trashed.’

  Crowley’s stare turned blank as his eyes ghosted over the picture. It was the old group photo of the picnic. Half a dozen smiling girls and young women sat between two middle-aged ladies. A magnificent townhouse towered over them.

  ‘There’s Reid,’ she said, pointing to the girl named on the back as Catherine, who sat with her arm around a wet Labrador.

  The Reid in the picture was glancing at something out of the frame, a half-smile on her face. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Next to her, a scrawny girl a few years younger stared up at her, eyes gleaming. Marianne: Crowley’s maternal aunt. His face stiffened when he caught sight of her.

  Alice pointed at one of the older women – in her forties, tall, with a stately bearing. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and her dress patchy with wetness – from the dog, Alice assumed.

  ‘Do you know her?’ she asked.

  He shook his head, his eyes drawn instead to a face at the other end of the row: Helena, his mother and Marianne’s sister.

  Alice returned to the older woman and the words on the back of the photograph: Look at Tilda’s wet dress! She told me she’s banning either dogs or pond-dipping next year! I almost told her I’d rather she banned herself but I bit my tongue to keep Mother happy!

  Tilda. This woman had appeared in Reid’s memory. Tilda had pretended to be a social worker signing off Alice’s adoption. Tilda knew the truth about where Alice came from – because she was the one who had left her in Henley-on-Thames. This woman had had a hand in her adoption. She’d been there, right at the very start.

  ‘Do you recognize the others?’ Alice asked quietly, mindful of Crowley’s drawn expression.

  ‘Other than my mother and Marianne, only this one,’ he said after a moment, tapping the young woman on the end. Brown hair in long braids and smiling warmly at the camera, she could only have been in her late teens. ‘Leda Westergard. Future Rookery chancellor. This must have been taken years before she took office.’

  Alice nodded. Her skin prickled as she saw a signet ring on her little finger. The same ring from the other photo.

  ‘The Annual Jarvis Fundraiser,’ she said, referring to the words on the back. ‘Do you think they were all friends? Family fr
iends, maybe – that would account for the range of ages.’

  ‘I think,’ Crowley said quietly, ‘that back then lots of the established families understood the values of quid pro quo better than the value of friendship. The Northams, Westergards and Roses had much more clout than they could ever hope to have today. Now, they’re no better than anyone.’

  He glanced up. ‘May I keep the picture?’

  She hesitated. The fire sparked in the grate, the only sound. The picture was her only real clue. But then she wondered when he’d last seen his mother’s face, and nodded.

  ‘This . . . Vivian Reid,’ he said, glancing at the pencilled writing to double-check. But of course, the name listed next to Marianne’s was Catherine, not Vivian. He frowned and laid the photograph flat on the table. ‘The Roses were a big House Pellervoinen family. Her father – Catherine Rose’s father – was the founder of the Fellowship,’ Crowley said, his voice brittle. ‘She disappeared over two decades ago.’

  Alice sat back. Catherine Rose. The Fellowship. No wonder Reid had had that leaflet. Had she been an active member all this time, or had she left the Fellowship when she’d abandoned her name?

  ‘Why did she disappear?’ Alice murmured.

  ‘It was . . .’ Crowley cleared his throat. ‘Not long before the . . . Cranleigh Grange dinner party massacre.’

  Alice noted the tension in his jaw. The Cranleigh Grange massacre was the night that Marianne had descended on his family home and slaughtered his mother and grandparents. Crowley had been very young, and his sister a newborn. Marianne had led the slaughter in revenge for her sister polluting their bloodline by marrying a non-Väki – non-magical, human ‘filth’. Crowley had harboured a hatred for Marianne all his life.

  ‘The news from the time,’ said Crowley in a tight voice, ‘suggested that when her father died, Catherine had been seen as a voice of reason, a modernizing force within the Fellowship. It set her at odds with Marianne Northam, whose preferred methods are brutally old-fashioned: wholesale slaughter. The Fellowship almost disintegrated in the wake of the Cranleigh attack. It survived, unfortunately, but its mania was . . . diminished. It stopped attracting new members so easily and Marianne – the new leader – had to resort to other methods to . . . coerce membership.’