In light of all that, Maris’s request seemed inevitable. Of course, he would be going to Summergrove. Everything he cared about was connected to the place.
Except for William.
But he didn’t want to think about that.
The next car was different. Benches lined the walls, and a narrow aisle went through them. The air hung heavy with pipe-smoke and the scent of bodies packed together. The sound of crying babies, squealing children, and arguing adults created a human cacophony that drowned out even the harsh metal sounds of the train. He’d sent Rosie and Rachel north to Summergrove in a cart like this, and thinking of that now, he wrinkled his nose and kept his head down through four identical cars until he reached the dining car.
He had royals in his pocket, and he’d skipped breakfast. Mostly because he felt horrible. Some tea might perk him up. A helpful young man with an awkward shadow of mustache met him and ushered him to a table. Chris couldn’t help but worry about the silverware and glassware atop it. What if the train stopped? He had to keep reminding himself that not only wouldn’t it stop with any real speed, it couldn’t.
A waiter promised him cucumber sandwiches and chamomile tea. Chris settled back into the chair and tried to let his mind wander. Maybe he could find some solace for his whirling thoughts by letting himself lose himself in them for a time. But allowing himself to go there was more dizzying than therapeutic, and images danced against the inside of his eyelids like a zoetrope. Rosie looking like a wild country belle in Doctor Livingstone’s photo. Rachel’s expression going blank and guarded when he asked about her brother. Fernand dead in his bathtub. Olivia actually blushing. Maris’s face twisted into a mask of pleading desperation. Doctor Livingstone, skeletal and hoarse-voiced, talking about work to be done in Summergrove. Avery Combs and Garrett Albany in his parlour, both trying to charm Rosie out of his grasp. The reporter Trenton Carter with his endless ambushes and questions.
Will.
Chris sensed movement and quickly reached up to remove all trace of tears from his eyelashes. He glanced up, smiling politely, expecting the waiter.
Instead, familiar eyes peered down at him owlishly from behind specs as thick as bottles. “Bloody buggering hells.” Sister Margaret, runaway Maiden of the Holy Church snorted and tugged one of her thick, dun-coloured braids. “Thought that was you, yeah? But you’re not nearly so handsome now, are you? Either you’re allergic to country air, or you’ve been blubbering your pretty blue eyes out.”
Chris opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. “Sister Margaret,” he said. He sounded as utterly mystified as he felt. “You… you’re….”
“Maerwald’s perky tits,” she groused, glancing about and quickly sliding into the seat across from him. She lowered her voice, eyes scanning the car for potential eavesdroppers. “Don’t call me that. Hells. I’ve got falsified credentials in my wallet, and if anyone finds me out, it’s right back to the bloody church!”
“Oh,” Chris said, not really knowing what else to say. He’d met the foul-mouthed, Northern-accented, streetwise little priestess in the investigation he and Olivia had pursued during the trial of Francis Livingstone and its accompanying heatwave. The last time he’d seen her, Olivia had bidden her get out of their way, and she’d vanished. In truth, Chris hadn’t spared a thought for her after their last meeting in the burned-out shell of her former church. She was a scrappy bull terrier of a girl and he’d effectively written her out of the narrative of his life. Seeing her here, now, in a new chapter, was… well, it was a shock to the system. For a moment, he felt entirely out of time.
When that moment passed, he realized that he desperately needed to say something, because she was gazing at him with eyebrows raised and lips quirked in silent laughter. “What shall I call you, then?”
She snickered and put her elbows on the table with her chin in her hands. “Glad to see you haven’t changed a mite. Gods, what a trip! I hadn’t expected to see you here, not a bit!” She fished about for a moment in the pockets of her high-waisted skirt, a workaday, simple style that was easy to purchase store-bought and looked frankly awful on her rather rotund figure. She resembled an overstuffed sausage struggling to burst free. She dropped a categorization card on the table between them. Margaret McKenna, the text weaved above a tiny world caught representation of her face read. An impish grin tugged at the corners of her lips in the likeness. The card listed her as a wildwhisperer. It was one of the easiest proficiencies to fake; an animal wasn’t likely to contradict a fraud’s version of its thoughts and feelings.
“Miss McKenna, then,” Chris said, sliding the card back toward her.
She snatched it with a laugh. “Oh, pull the other one. That’s not my real surname, you bleeding idjit. How is it being all proper and fancy-like if you’re calling me by a name, not even mine?”
“Miss Margaret, then?” Chris suggested.
“Bollocks. ‘Miss.’ You’re a strange bloke, you know it? Fine, it’ll do. Just don’t slip up and say ‘Sister,’ yeah, or we’ll have to pretend we’re related.” She showed stained and crooked teeth when she smiled, but it was so genuine Chris didn’t feel the need to recoil. “Where you headed? You with the Deathsniffer?”
“Ah, yes. And…” Chris snapped his mouth closed, all the confusing fog in his head causing him to completely forget, for a moment, if their destination was a secret. He shook his head. “We’re headed to Summergrove. There’s a murder case that Olivia’s knowledge of the area might help solve.”
Miss Margaret’s eyes sparkled behind her thick specs. “Ah, what a small world! I’m headed to the Grove, myself! What are the odds?”
Astronomically low. Chris’s sense of unreality deepened and he blinked hard. “Why would you be….?”
“Well,” she said, and she leaned across the table, folding her hands between them. “Actually, I’ve gotten political.”
Unease fluttered in Chris’s chest. “Oh?”
“Mmm-hmm!” Her bright, round face darkened for a moment and she mimed spitting on the dining car floor. Chris supposed he should be grateful that she didn’t actually go through with it. “Do you have any idea what I and all my kind went through when it was categorization time? You maybe think you do. Unpleasant for everyone, yeah? But for us who didn’t have bollocks in our heads to awaken, I don’t think you could imagine.”
She shook her head and looked away, unable to meet his eyes. “I owe you and your Deathsniffer and whoever else a world of thanks for keeping it all hushed up, but I have my contacts. I know Elisa was killing. Some of them heartily bloody deserved it, and you won’t convince me otherwise. But not all. Some of them were my friends. Her friends. Now, I’m not saying she was evil. I’m saying she was bleeding barmy. She thought the best thing she could do for me, as my friend, was set fire to the place where I lived. That’s blinking mad, it is, and facts are, she didn’t start that way. Lowry made her that way.”
Despite having spent his life trying to avoid being directly drawn into political discussions, Chris found himself utterly agreeing with everything she was saying. He’d thought many of the same things, investigating the priest-killer case, which the papers had eventually decided was all just a coincidence, after all, but was really the righteous rampage of a broken young lady who’d deserved better from life. And yet….
“What does this have to do with Summergrove?” he asked.
She glanced around again. Her eyes were as furtive as a clever rodent’s when she did that. “Just rumours,” she said. “Nothing I can say for sure. But a whole lot of folk back in Darrington who want to see things change are awfully fed up with Garrett bloody Albany’s way of running things. They want their good doctor back. And they think that he can be found up in the Grove. They think—” Her eyes narrowed sharply and she sat back in her seat.
Moments later, a waiter slipped a tea tray loaded with sandwiches, biscuits, a small vase of flowers, and a tea set onto the table, then turned to Margaret in askance. “W
ill you be ordering anything, miss?”
Her eyes glittered, and she swallowed loudly.
Chris couldn’t help but jump at the chance to do something decent for a change. “Oh, yes. Some biscuits and sandwiches for my friend, as well.”
“Very good, sir,” the waiter said, slipping away.
Margaret gave Chris a pinched-mouth sort of look. “I have the roys,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “Just, the last I saw you, you said that you were going back to the streets, and you’re here under”—he dropped his voice—“false credentials…”
“Like I said. I’m political, now. People in Darrington are looking for Livingstone, and they heard rumours about Summergrove, and they’re bankrolling this, um, retrieval?” Her brow furrowed. “Right. Retrieval, that’s what we’ll call it. It’s definitely that. So, uh, I don’t need charity, right.”
She might be telling the truth. Clear enough, the three months since she’d left the church hadn’t diminished her figure at all. But her eyes never left the sandwich he brought to his mouth to bite from as if she could devour it with her eyes.
“Where did they get this idea about Livingstone?” Chris asked after swallowing. He tried to sound as casual as possible, but his heart was thudding against his ribs. If they knew Livingstone was in Summergrove, he could be in real danger. After everything Chris had done to ensure he was set free, the thought of anything happening to him….
But of course, it wasn’t just that. If they knew about the good doctor, wasn’t it just a half-step to one side before they tripped over Rosie as well? He remembered Albany’s eyes in his parlour, shining with avarice, the second before Olivia had saved him from giving his sister over to the movement.
“Some lady scientist is working with him or some such.” Margaret shrugged one shoulder, eyes still locked on his food. “They say she’s in to Summergrove five or more times a month. Dark, like she’s from the savage continent. I’m supposed to be watching for her, too.”
Oh.
He swallowed hard. “Oh. I… I see. And you’re going to try and convince the good doctor to….?”
“Er, well. To come back to Darrington,” Margaret said with a little shrug.
“And the scientist?”
“She can help, too. The rumours all say that she and the doctor are trying to actually implement alternative tech. Now doesn’t that sound a lot better than standing around and fighting about it? That’s what we need, see. Actual solutions. The doctor isn’t offering any of those out there in the country, as far as we see it. Bring all that goodness to the people, yeah?”
If Chris trusted the reformists left in Darrington, he’d even agree with her. But the relocation had been necessary. The good doctor had a target on his back, thanks to those who still blamed him for the Floating Castle, and he’d said himself that Albany had infected too much of the official reformist movement for any of it to be trusted.
Chris narrowed his eyes and studied Miss Margaret, who was being so open and forthcoming. She wasn’t a fool. He’d spared not a thought for her after her church had burned. Why share all of this with him?
The entire encounter took on a sinister tone. What were the odds? How likely was it, really, that of every reformist in Tarland, the one who’d been involved in one of his and Olivia’s cases was here, on the same train like them, traveling to the same place, asking questions about a man they had put there, about a woman whose disappearance they were headed to investigate….
Coincidences only went so far.
He got to his feet. He’d only taken four bites from his sandwiches, but the unreality had stretched too thin and popped. He wasn’t entirely convinced that this wasn’t one of his grief-fueled fever dreams, that he wouldn’t wake up in his bed with hours until they boarded the train. Margaret looked up at him, blinking. “Hoo boy,” she said. “You really don’t look so good, handsome.”
“You’re right,” he said, fumbling for his wallet. He withdrew two crisp tenners and watched them drift down onto the table. “The honest truth, Miss Margaret, is that I’ve had a bloody hell of a week. I think I ought to go lay in my compartment. I feel really quite terrible.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Are you off to be sick?”
He managed a tight smile. “Something like,” he said, and fled.
The beautiful countryside barely registered with him as he made his way back. The distance between himself and his reality grew wider and wider as he moved through the train. The clamour in the public cars widened the gap farther, and, in comparison, the quiet and stillness of the private cars seemed to ring despite the sound of the train rumbling along beneath his feet.
Olivia looked up from a book when he entered their cabin. She sighed, tucked a marker between the pages, and closed it carefully. “Well,” she said. “Are you quite done with your tantrum, now?” And then she peered closer at him as he shut the door behind him. “Mother Deorwynn. You somehow look worse than when you left!”
He told her about Sister Margaret.
She listened with a furrow growing between her brows. It felt… good, saying it all out loud. He’d fled the compartment to be away from Olivia, but being back with her again snapped the sense of unreality straight again, like shaking the wrinkles from fabric. By the time he finished, the world seemed almost plausible, again.
“Well?” he asked when she didn’t immediately comment.
She tapped at her chin. “Well,” she said, drawing the word out. “Well,” she repeated, “I’m not sure what it might mean. It might be nothing at all. But you’re right. It’s odd, isn’t it? Too many coincidences lined up in a bloody row like this makes my nose twitch.” She considered, and then nodded once, firmly. “We’ll keep a close eye on Miss Margaret,” she said. “And the good doctor needs to know that his location may not be a secret.”
tepping onto the platform in Summergrove was like stepping into another world.
The train station itself was a simple longhouse with wooden siding. It couldn’t have fit more than a hundred people all standing. It nestled into a stand of trees, all bright with the colours of the turning season. Despite the chill, dog violets and honeysuckle flourished at the banks of a chattering stream that curled lazily, flowing over round, white stones. A dirt road with heavy ruts was the only roadway leading from the station. It split when it reached a wrought iron pole jutting from the ground, hung with wordwoven signs cut deep into the metal. The entire contraption squealed, swaying in the wind. SUMMERGROVE TOWN, one of the signs said, pointing down one fork that wound through around a stand of trees and vanished. LARKSPUR PARISH, another advertised, leading off into the grassy, rolling countryside until it could no longer be seen. MILLER ORCHARDS, the final one promised. It swelled up over a hill, blocking the rest from view.
Chris spun in place. He’d never seen so much… simplicity, so much open space.
He realized with a start that, beyond the train and its tracks, he didn’t see a single glimpse of spirit-glow.
Most other passengers had disembarked in Gilton and Cardinalia or were staying on for Northshire. Only seven of them, including Olivia and himself, milled on the platform. They’d spent six hours shooting far from the Tarlish civilization in a steel snake powered by lightning and fire spirits, and only five other people had made the journey with them. It felt strangely intimate.
Separating from a group headed into the station, Miss Margaret sidled over to him. She carried only a worn and threadbare valise. “Heading into town proper?” she asked. “Your Deathsniffer is bloody miniature. I bet the three of us could fit into one of those flies and share the fee.” She jutted her chin toward the two empty open-roofed, large-wheeled carriages, hitched to shaggy and moulting hippogryphs with leashed wings.
“Ah,” Chris said. “I’m not entirely sure where…” They weren’t headed into town at all, he imagined. Rather, it was the arrow promising the MILLER ORCHARDS that they’d be taking their directions from. He glanc
ed back to get Olivia’s input.
She stood with her arms akimbo, one of her bags dangling from each hand, and her face was turned toward the afternoon sun. It filtered through the fiery riot of leaves, dappling her skin with all colours from green to brown. Her eyes were closed… and she was smiling.
“Is she all right?” Margaret asked, brow furrowed.
Olivia didn’t make any move to acknowledge them, but her voice was incredibly dry. “Yes, Miss McKenna, I’m quite fine.”
Margaret’s lips twisted. “Not actually my name.”
Olivia’s twitched. “Not actually my problem,” she replied and lowered her arms. She blinked her eyes open, and her face was curiously beatific. “Goodness, Christopher,” she sighed. “Do you smell that air? Earth and green and apples.”
“Dirt and wet and worms,” Margaret retorted before Chris could say a word. “Come on, what do you say? I think the three of us could squeeze up. Er, this is all assuming one of you knows how to drive a fly.”
Chris flushed and averted his eyes. “Ahh. I can’t.”
Olivia laughed. “Goodness, you’re all a bunch of useless city folk! I can drive a fly. I knew how before I was eight. But,” she said, “unfortunately, Miss Margaret, we’re headed to the parish, not the town. I think you’d be better off going inside, getting on the mirror, and calling a hansom out here.”
Margaret sighed. Chris watched her carefully, but she didn’t seem to think anything of their different destinations. She seemed the same she always did: slightly nervous, slightly amused. “Right,” she said, and she turned her head off and spit, for real this time. The glob of phlegm landed on the dusty road, and Chris tried not to look at it. “Too much to hope. Might see you about, if rumours take me up into the parish. Though,” she said, scrunching her face, “I’d obviously prefer to keep my fat arse out of the sphere of Maerwald’s influence, here. She’d be within her rights to strike me with crotch-rot. Eh. Maybe I’ll see you folks at this Harvest Festival thing they’re all blathering on about being a big deal up here? Maybe not. Tootles.” With a jaunty wave, she hefted her valise and disappeared into the station.
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