“I could have told you that leaping from high places is often enough to fledge your wings. My father tossed me from the top of a tree when he thought it was time.” He twisted his lips in a wry smile at the memory and I pinched his arm.
“You should have told me that! All these months I’ve had to wonder when it would happen and what it would feel like . . .” I stopped because my voice was hoarse with tears. I hadn’t realized until now how angry I was at him for letting me go through this alone. But then I realized I hadn’t been alone. He’d known I was working at the settlement house.
“Have you been following me?”
“You needn’t make it sound so predatory. I’ve wanted to make sure you were all right in case you were being pursued by the tenebrae and to be there when you fledged . . . in case you needed me,” he added. “How did it feel?”
I blushed at the intimacy of the question. “Painful, frightening . . . amazing!” I admitted. “Like I was free for the first time in my life! Like I could have kept on going into the clouds . . .”
“. . . and straight on till morning.”
I laughed at the quote from Peter Pan. “Yes! Only the changeling saw my wings.”
“I wouldn’t worry about the changeling. They’re shy, retiring creatures who don’t like to make trouble.”
“So they don’t steal human babies?”
Raven snorted, a sound so uncivilized that it attracted the attention of a stout matron on the edge of the dance floor. We had fallen out of step with the other dancers, and people were beginning to stare at us. Raven waltzed us out the open glass doors and into the garden. He put his arm around my waist and steered me away from the crowd. I could feel the warmth of his arm through the thin silk of my dress. My wings quivered at his touch pressing against the corset. I could barely follow what he was saying. Something about the Order spreading myths . . .
“. . . a changeling only takes the place of a human baby if it’s dying. They’ve spared many a human family heartbreak over the centuries. I hadn’t heard of them taking the place of missing people, but from what you’ve told me, this changeling spared the Blum family the grief of losing their daughter.”
I collected my senses at the mention of the Blums. “But if the Blums had known that Ruth was missing they could have told the police!” My voice had grown so loud that Raven pulled me into one of the secluded bowers at the end of the walled garden.
“Do you have any idea how many girls go missing in this city? And what usually happens to them? I’ve carried the souls of the departed to your mortal afterworld enough times to know how often they perish alone and unloved in unheated tenements or beneath the icy river.” His voice grew husky and he looked away, as if the memories were too painful to share.
“I wish I could make you see . . .” He looked back at me, his eyes glittering. “I will make you see!”
Before I knew what he meant, he had shucked off his fake wings and unfurled his real ones. My own wings tingled in sympathy against my corset, but they were restrained by Raven’s arm tight around my waist.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, but my words were drowned out by the beat of his wings, which seemed to be keeping measure with my heart as he pressed me tightly against his chest and we rose into the air.
“People will see us!” I cried.
“Not if you stop squirming,” he snapped back. “Our wings cloak us from human sight, but that dress of yours is awfully . . . bright.”
I was going to object that he had picked it out, but then I realized I didn’t know that for sure—and it seemed a minor point now that we were flying over the city, sailing over rooftops and streets like Wendy and her brothers in Peter Pan. We were flying southeast, over rooftops of mansions with statuary and gardens that no one would ever see and, as we flew further downtown, humbler tenements where the occupants had dragged out their mattresses to sleep in the cooler air. An old woman in a headscarf lifted her head to watch us winging toward the river.
“I thought you said we couldn’t be seen,” I whispered.
“By humans. Not everyone who lives in this city is human.”
“What sort of non-humans . . .” I began, but he hushed me.
“Quiet. We’re almost at the river. Do you hear her?”
“Hear who?”
“Use your inner ear,” he told me.
I was going to ask what he meant, but suddenly I knew. All summer I’d wondered at my strange new sensitivity to noise, picking up whispers I shouldn’t have been able to hear. Now I made out an underground stream running just below the surface of the night, full of sighs and clicks and whistles that made my ears tingle and my hair stand on end. Some of the clicks came from a flock of pigeons that had joined us. Raven clucked back to them.
“They’ve seen her, too. We have to hurry.”
He ducked his head and folded his wings. We were suddenly diving, caught in a current of wind that was rushing us to the East River. I heard the water—and smelled it: the reek of refuse mingled with a tang of salt where the river met the tides from the bay. And then we were caught in those tangled currents of air.
“Hang on,” Raven yelled above the roar of the river. “She’s there on the pier.”
We were fighting the wind to reach the shore where a lone figure stood on the edge of an old rotting pier. Even over the shriek of wind and water I could hear her ragged breath—because I was meant to, I realized. She was a soul in danger and I was a Darkling. I was meant to save her. My wings itched under my skin, my ears burned, I felt my heart beating with hers in fear—
Of what?
She looked over her shoulder, but there was nothing there but shadows.
Shadows that writhed like snakes. Tenebrae. She was running from the tenebrae. They reached out for her . . .
She screamed and plunged into the river. Raven dove toward the water, but he couldn’t reach for her because he was holding me. I stretched out my arms for the girl, but when she saw us she screamed and flailed away. Still I was able to grab her wrist.
“I’ve got her!” I screamed.
But something was pulling her away from me. She was caught in a current—but no ordinary current. It wasn’t pulling her to sea; it was dragging her down into a whirlpool. I’d heard stories of dangerous tides on the East River. The sailors and wharf rats had a name for the river.
“The Hellgate!”
Raven’s voice was tight with fear. “It traps souls—even a Darkling’s soul. If you’re caught you’ll spend eternity there! You have to let her go.”
“No!” I cried. The fetid stink of the river rose out of the churning maw—all the refuse of the river concentrated here like a foul breath belched from a hungry mouth.
It was a mouth, a hungry, gaping mouth that ate souls. I couldn’t let this girl sink into it, but Raven was right. We would be trapped if I didn’t let her go. I felt her hand slipping from my grip. Her eyes locked on mine. I saw terror in them—and more. I saw her life, the glimpse a Darkling was granted of a dying soul. I heard a dying woman say her name—Molly—and saw a windowless room where bent-backed women sewed until their fingers bled, and the dirty floor on which she slept. Then I saw a man whose face was blurred by shadows. He had lured her away from her family with promises of a sweeter life, but then he had locked her away into another hell. This hell was pretty and soft, full of satin and velvet and feather beds . . .
The vision became blurry when it moved toward the bed, and I wondered if Molly was trying to shield me from seeing what happened there or if she was too ashamed to let me see.
I’m here with you, I said, not out loud, but inside her head. You’re not alone.
I felt something relax in her. You have to let me go, she told me, before I turn into a monster.
I cringed at the word monster—and her hand slipped from mine.
“No!” I shoute
d, reaching for her, but Raven was pulling us back, out of the way of something that shot past us and dove into the water. Raven shouted something as the water broke over us. It sounded like a name: Sirena.
“Who’s Sirena?” I asked.
“One of our fledglings. She’s too young to try to save a soul from the Hellgate whirlpool. She might get stuck there—”
Before he could finish, the girl Darkling broke the surface of the water and rose straight up. In her arms she held Molly. Only it wasn’t the flesh-and-blood girl who’d held my hand, but a luminous transparent phantom. A soul. Molly was dead.
“Can’t we try to save her?” I cried.
“Sirena has saved her soul,” Raven said. “That’s more than we could do.” He was already winging away from the churning whirlpool.
“We have to go back!” I cried, pounding Raven’s chest with my fists.
“She’s gone.”
“Molly, her name was Molly. I saw her life, saw what happened to her . . .” I poured out everything I had seen as we flew back over the city. Raven was silent, his arms tight around me. He didn’t speak until we lit down in the Montmorency Gardens, in the same bower we’d taken off from.
He put me down on the bench and put his wings around me as I sobbed out the whole of Molly’s story for the third time. I would have started a fourth, but he stopped my mouth with a kiss. The warmth of his mouth on mine shocked me into silence. I shuddered all over, aware for the first time of how cold I was. His warmth poured into me. When he pulled away he touched a finger to my lips.
“There,” he said. “You can stop now. You were with Molly in her last moment. She knows that her life was seen, her voice heard. You have borne witness. It’s what we do. You can let go now.”
My whole body began to shake and he folded me back into his wings. When I stopped shaking I raised my head and looked at him. His face was wet—with my tears, I wondered, or his?
“You saw, too?”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “I was connected through you. I wish you hadn’t had to see . . . those horrors.”
“But now that I have—now that we have—we can’t rest until we find the place where those girls are being kept.”
“We’ll look. I’ll talk to Sirena and see if she found out anything more.”
“Sirena. She’s . . .” I tried to think of a way of asking what she was to Raven, but only ended with “She was very brave.”
“And reckless,” Raven said shaking his head. “She could have been trapped inside the Hellgate. I should go and make sure she’s all right.” He stood up and looked down at me. “Are you all right?”
I looked down at my limp dress. The silk had been drenched in the water of the East River. I smelled awful. “Well,” I said, “it’s not exactly how I thought my first dance would go.”
He laughed—a short bark. “Me neither. You still owe me another dance.”
With a movement fleet as hummingbird wings, he brushed my cheek with his lips. Then he was gone, vanished into the darkness.
I made my way through the gardens slowly, not sure if I was ready to join the bright lights and gaiety of the party after the horrors I had witnessed. How could I make light conversation and eat cucumber sandwiches after what I’d seen?
You have to let me go, Molly had said, before I turn into a monster. I had held that girl’s hand and given her some comfort. I hadn’t felt like a monster then. I had felt . . . useful. If that’s what being a Darkling meant, then I would gladly be a Darkling. But I hadn’t been able to save her. Sirena had. Perhaps I was no good as a Darkling. Perhaps I didn’t belong in either world.
I slipped through a side door into a dim hallway lined with dark wood and carpeted with thick Oriental rugs. There was a gilt-framed mirror tucked into a velvet-upholstered niche. I peered into it and was shocked at what I saw there. My hair was standing on end, my costume wings were twisted and crumpled, my dress plastered to me and torn—and I smelled like a garbage heap. I could never go back into the ballroom. I’d have to sneak out the back door and find my way home.
I heard a door opening behind me. I pressed myself into the niche to hide myself.
Male voices—deep and throaty with amusement and content—billowed out of the room on a gust of smoke. This was where the men went to smoke their cigars and talk of matters deemed too coarse for female sensibilities. Through a scrim of smoke I made out the stout, prosperous shapes of three of my classmates’ fathers—Alfred Driscoll, president of the New York Bank; Wallace Rutherford, owner of the New York Sun; and George Montmorency, councilman and, many said, soon to be the next mayor. There were others—men in dark, expensive evening coats and sleek whiskers, one in a police uniform with medals, another in a cleric’s collar, and one, half-hidden in the smoke and shadows, who was looking straight at me.
Impossible! I was hidden inside the niche and he couldn’t see me through all that smoke.
But I felt the force of those eyes on me as strongly as if they had pinned me in place—and I heard the bass bell gonging in my head. The last time I had felt this frozen immobility and heard my bell ring so madly was when I’d encountered Judicus van Drood on the streets of Rhinebeck. Was it him?
But then the door to the smoking room closed and the spell vanished. I broke from the niche like a pheasant flushed from the underbrush and ran through the servants’ quarters to find the service door, my wire wings trembling behind me and all the clocks in the house chiming midnight as though I were Cinderella fleeing the ball.
6
I MET NATHAN and Helen at the Fifty-Ninth Street station where the Sea Beach Railway embarked for Coney Island. Nathan looked cool and crisp in striped linen trousers, matching jacket draped nonchalantly over one shoulder, and a straw boater tipped rakishly low over his face. I didn’t know how he managed it. The walk downtown had left me drenched and limp as last night’s violet corsage, which lay on my night table. Helen was also enviably fresh in a frothy lace dress with matching parasol, which looked more suited for tea with the Astors than a train ride with the masses. I wondered if she had ever ridden in public transportation before. She was peering around her at the morning holiday crowd as if she’d just landed in a spice bazaar in remotest India.
“Where’s your bathing costume?” she demanded as I joined them.
“I don’t plan to bathe,” I replied primly. “This isn’t a holiday outing. We’re going to find clues to Ruth Blum’s whereabouts, not to have fun.”
The truth was I would have loved to swim. My mother used to take me on Sundays and holidays to the beach. We’d wade in, hand in hand, squealing at the slap of waves so excruciatingly cold I couldn’t imagine going an inch farther, but when she cried “Now!” I would dive blindly into the swell. My mother would emerge laughing, her hair slicked back like a seal’s fur, her face radiant, as if the cold salt water had washed away the sadness that always clung to her like the lingering scent of smoke.
My body ached for that kind of release. But how could I risk even the most modest bathing costumes with my newly emerging wings? Besides, after all I’d seen last night through poor Molly’s eyes, I wasn’t in much of a holiday mood. But I was more determined than ever to find Ruth.
“Nonsense!” Helen sniffed. “This is my first excursion to Coney Island, and I’m determined to enjoy the full experience. We will ride the Steeplechase, eat fried clams, and bathe in the ocean. I’ve brought a bathing costume for you.” She held up a basket that dangled from her arm and pulled out a red and white striped bathing costume covered with ruffles and ribbons. “I used it at Newport last summer, so it’s out of date, of course, but it should do.”
“Ava’s four inches taller and ten pounds lighter—” Nathan began, until I kicked him in the shin. Aside from not wanting my physical attributes described—had he been paying such close attention?—I’d just realized why this outing was so important to Helen. Last
summer—and every summer of her life before that—Helen had spent the season in Newport, but she and her mother could no longer afford such luxuries.
Instead, she had spent this summer in the hot, dusty city helping her mother pack up their Washington Square brownstone and sell their most valuable possessions to move to a dreary suite of rooms at the Franconia Hotel. Mrs. van Beek had let it be known within her social circles that she’d sold the brownstone because she was tired of its dark narrow rooms and was looking about for a grander residence on Fifth Avenue, but what she was really “looking about” for was a husband for Helen who would lift them both out of the encroaching maw of poverty. Poor Helen. She deserved a holiday.
“We’ll see,” I said, looking doubtfully at the dreadful bathing costume. I would look like a candy cane in it. “You can certainly swim while I show Ruth’s picture around.”
I showed Nathan and Helen the photograph.
“Oh, how droll!” Helen cried. “It looks like they’re driving down the Champs-Elysées. Do let’s get our picture taken, too!”
It was rather sweet to see Helen, who had had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, so enthusiastic about having our day in Coney Island memorialized in a souvenir photograph, but when I looked at Nathan I saw the color had washed out of his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The man,” Nathan said between tight lips. “He looks familiar.”
“How can you tell?” Helen asked. “His face is all funny.”
“That’s just it. That’s how I remember him—the man who questioned me that day in the Wing & Clover. Whenever I think of him—or dream of him—his face is a blur just like that.”
“If it’s the same man,” I said, remembering the day that Helen and I spied Nathan in our local Rhinebeck tavern beside a strange gentleman, “that means the man who took Ruth is Judicus van Drood.”
A gust of cool salt air hit us as soon as we got off the train in Brooklyn. It felt delicious but didn’t blow away my ominous thoughts. I’d learned last year that Judicus van Drood was Nathan’s real father, but Nathan didn’t know that. And if I had anything to do with it, he never would.
Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) Page 5