Blythewood (37 page)

I POUNDED ON the door, screaming for help, until I realized that no one was coming for me. Everyone was outside in
the gardens, enjoying the spring sunshine, while I was trapped
underground with the
tenebrae
and Nathan dragged Raven into
the woods on a fool’s mission to save Louisa. If Nathan forced
Raven to show him the door to Faerie it was likely he’d enter
it—and never come out. The other alternative was that Raven
would refuse and Nathan would kill him. I couldn’t bear to
think of either scenario. I had to get out of here, find help, and
go after them. But how?

I turned away from the door to face the dark stairs and immediately felt a wave of panic sweep over me. Without a lamp
I was in complete darkness. I could feel the
tenebrae
writhing
around me, pressing their way into my mouth and nose . . . and
into my mind.

I was back in the Triangle fire, smoke billowing around me,
choking me, forced between two choices—death by fire or by
jumping. I had two choices here, too—I could let the
tenebrae
inside me or I could throw myself down the stairs and hope my
neck broke. Those were the choices my mother had faced. I saw
now that she had done the harder thing. It would be easier to

let the Darknesses inside me. They were already whispering to
me, telling me how easy my life would be with them at the helm.
No more difficult choices. They would steer me toward a life of
riches and power. I’d never have to worry about money or work
again. And I wouldn’t have to choose between Nathan and Raven. Nathan was already with the
tenebrae
, and Raven—Raven
was an illusion. What future could there be between a Darkling
and a human? I only felt the way I did toward him because he
had beguiled me, seducing me with his kisses.

But at the thought of Raven’s lips on mine I felt a warmth
that beat back the
tenebrae
.
No
, that kiss had been
real
. The
memory of it was like a sweet bell ringing in my head.

The bells
. I had used them to break free of van Drood. I
could use them now to fight the
tenebrae
—and I had the repeater to help. I took it out of my pocket and pressed the stem.
The two tiny figures struck the bells, playing a tune. At first the
bells sounded tinny and faint, like funeral bells whose clappers
had been muffled. I thought it was because the
tenebrae
were
already in my head and they were muffling the bells, but as I
focused on the sound it became clearer . . . and louder. As they
rang I felt the
tenebrae
retreating down the stairs from me.

And as my mind cleared I remembered the passage that led
through the candelabellum chamber to the special collections.
If I could find my way there I could reach the library and get out
through the trapdoor. Of course, it meant going through the
candelabellum chamber by myself . . .

But I wouldn’t think about that now. I started down the
steps, keeping one hand on the damp wall and one on the repeater, which now played a tune that was echoed by the bells
in my head. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I felt panic rising as I realized I had no light to guide my way. It was
pitch black in the tunnel—as black as the well I’d fallen into
after the crow attack. Even now the
tenebrae
could be crawling inside me . . .

The voice was an insidious whisper at my ear.
Unless they’ve
been inside you all along, making you mad.
“No,” I said aloud. “I’m not mad.”
Aren’t you? What kind of girl falls in love with a demon?
“Raven’s not a demon,” I cried. “He showed me the truth
about the Darklings.”
The truth? In a teacup?
How did the shadows know about what Raven had shown
me in the teacup?
I heard laughter.
We know because we were there. Inside you. We’ve always been
inside you, just as we were inside your mother. We passed from her
blood to yours. Tainted blood. That’s why you don’t fit in here at
Blythewood. They all know your blood is tainted. If you don’t believe us, look . . .
Somehow I had found myself in a doorway. The
tenebrae
had led me forward. I should run back. But where to? Then I
caught a whiff of gin and paraffin. I’d found my way to Sir
Malmsbury’s study, where, I recalled, there was a lamp and
matches on the desk. I felt my way into the room, dreading
the thought of the cases full of tiny skulls leering at me in the
dark, and found the lamp and matches just where I remembered
them. With fumbling hands, I struck a match, lighting up a
roomful of snakes.
I screamed and dropped the match, plunging me back into
the dark with the horrible creatures.
Not snakes, I told myself,
tenebrae
. I needed to drive them
back with the bells. The repeater was still playing in my pocket,
faintly and slowly, as if the mechanism was running down. I
reached into my pocket and pressed the stem. Focusing on the
tune, I lit the match again. The
tenebrae
recoiled into the corners of the room as the match flared, still snake-like, but at least
now they were retreating. I lit the lantern and braced myself to
go back into the corridor. I would find the passage that led to
the candelabellum and pass through it.
Where all those shadows dwell?
Just pictures on the wall, I told myself, just as these writhing coils were just smoke and shadow. They couldn’t get inside
me if I kept listening to the bells. I held the lantern high and
focused on the sound of the chimes coming from the repeater.
The
tenebrae
shrank away and pooled around the desk, fingering the pages as if flipping through them, looking for something . . .
A page turned, and then another, and another, making a
sound like dry leaves scraping over gravestones . . .
Over your mother’s grave. You wanted to know her secrets. You
wanted to know who your father was? Look!
In spite of my resolve not to listen to the
tenebrae
, I couldn’t
resist. I went to the ledger and held the lantern up to look at the
page. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was a complicated chart, like an octopus with a hundred tentacles—
moving
tentacles. The
tenebrae
were swarming over the page, encircling a name at the bottom.
Evangeline Hall
. My mother’s name.
What was it doing in Sir Malmsbury’s chart? Sir Malmsbury
had disappeared twenty years ago. My mother would have been
only a girl of fifteen, younger than I was now. I put my finger
on her name and traced the line above it to where my grandparents’ names appeared: Throckmorton Hall and Hecatia van
Rhys. Next to my grandmother’s name and my mother’s name
were drawn tiny bells with circles around them—the icon for
a chime child. Sir Malmsbury had drawn a line from one bell
to the other. Tracing that line upward I saw that it connected
circled bells from generation to generation. This was a family tree—of my family. A note in the margin read, “The chime
child germ plasm travels through the matrilineal line, but may
be strengthened by breeding to males descended from chime
children.”
By breeding?
Bile rose in my throat. Sir Malmsbury was
talking about my family as if we were cattle. He had studied my
family—and others, I saw from the other branching diagrams
on the page—just as he studied lampsprites, to figure out how
we came by the ability to hear an inner bell and use the power of
the chime child. I saw other family names on the chart—Sharp,
Driscoll, Montmorency . . . He was trying to determine which
family produced the most chime children. There were a few
in the Sharp lines, but there were also several crescent moon
symbols. I looked around the page for a legend to the icons and
found a small box at the bottom. The crescent moon, I read, denoted a “tendency toward lunacy.”
With a pang I saw that there was a crescent moon drawn
next to my mother’s name. I scratched at it with my fingernail,
wanting to strike it out, but as I did I scratched off a narrow strip
of paper that had been glued next to my mother’s name—and
connected to my mother’s name with a hyphen, as husband’s
names were connected to their wives’. Beneath the strip was my
father’s name! But why was it covered up?
Because your father’s name was stricken from the ledgers.
Perhaps because they weren’t married (I didn’t see the lowercase
m
that signified a marriage), but I didn’t care about that.
I still wanted to see . . .
The name was written in stark black ink, darker than the
other writing on the page, as if Sir Malmsbury had pressed the
pen harder—or perhaps it looked darker because the whole
world around the name had grown dim by comparison. The
name written where my father’s name should be was Judicus
van Drood.
“No!“ I said aloud, my fingernails digging into the page.
“That monster is not my father!”
I looked closer at the entry. There was no date of marriage.
Sir Malmsbury had disappeared when my mother was only
fifteen, three years before she would have been married. The
notation had been made because of a betrothal—a thought that
still roiled my stomach—or because Sir Malmsbury
thought
they should marry.
Yes, that must be it. I looked over the chart again and understood. Sir Malmsbury was figuring out how to produce a chime
child through breeding, and he’d come up with the pairing of
Judicus van Drood and my mother. It didn’t mean they’d ever
married.
But I
had
been born a chime child.
A coincidence?
Or my mother had fallen in love with someone else with the
chime trait?
The answer to who that was might lie in this chart.
I ripped the page out. The tearing sound scattered the
tenebrae
. The repeater was chiming madly, as if it had grown
as agitated with my discovery as I had. I stuffed the page into
my pocket, muffling the sound of the repeater. Holding up the
lantern I strode from the room, scattering
tenebrae
in front
of me. They were fleeing . . . or perhaps they were leading me
on. I found the passage to the candelabellum chamber easily
enough. At the door I hesitated. I pressed my ear to the door
and listened, but there was no sound inside. It was only a room
with bells. Dame Beckwith’s warning not to enter the chamber alone—that those who had done so had emerged insane—
echoed in my ears. But it was the only way out.
I turned the knob and entered the dark room, holding up my
lantern, which cast the candelabellum’s shadow onto the wall
and showed me the door on the other side. I had only to cross
the room. I lowered the lantern, not liking the shadows it threw
across the walls, and walked slowly over the stone-flagged floor,
careful not to bump into the chairs and table, hardly daring to
breathe. Halfway across the room, my hand brushed against
my skirt, and the page I’d torn out of Sir Malmsbury’s crackled.
A crystal bell shivered in response. I froze and drew my
shaking hand away from my skirt. The paper crackled back
louder, as though it had caught fire. The bells of the candelabellum tinkled as if ringing an alarm. I gasped—and the intake of
my breath stirred the delicate brass rings into motion. The bells
began to play a tune that was different from the one they had
played when Dame Beckwith had struck them.
The candelabellum plays a different story depending what bell
is struck first.
What bell had
I
struck? What story would it tell?
You don’t have to watch it, I told myself. I was only a few
feet from the door. I could reach it with my eyes closed. I didn’t
have to listen to the bells, which were playing a tune that sounded like the song my mother had used to sing me to sleep . . .
Could the candelabellum tell me my mother’s story? But
how? It was made hundreds of years before my mother was
born.
Because the candelabellum contains the pieces that all stories are made of. All it had to do was rearrange the pieces and
it could tell every story that ever happened and every story that
would ever happen. It
knew
my mother’s story.
I raised the lantern so fast the flame flickered. For a heartstopping moment I thought it would go out, leaving me alone
in the dark, but instead the flame pulsed and shot up, bursting
the glass case of the lantern. I dropped it and it crashed onto
the table. The fire gusted over the wood as I remembered the
flames bursting through the windows of the Triangle and pouring over the examining tables, hungry for fuel. The fire soared
up and lit all the candles at once.
The rings moved faster, the bells rang my mother’s song,
and the shadows leapt up on the walls and ceiling. A young
man and woman. It might have been Merope and the prince,
but it wasn’t. It was a young girl here at Blythewood, ringing the
bells, learning to shoot arrows, flying a hawk, reading a book in
the library. There was a young man with her in the library. He
looked familiar, but just when I thought I recognized him his
face would merge with the shadows, slipping in and out of the
dark. I saw him walking with my girl, giving her a book, and
then a letter . . . but she gave back the letter and the book. I saw
her walking away from him, and then running away into the
woods, where a great winged creature swept down and stopped
the other man from following her. As the man turned away,
shadows leapt up around him, twining about his feet, growing
wings and plucking at his sleeves, his hair, his skin. I saw him
retreating to his library, to his books, walling himself up behind his books. I saw another woman trying to pull him away
from his books, looking on with a worried face, but there was a
wall of shadow between the young man and her. I saw him going down into the dungeon and to the candelabellum, where he
watched the shadows whirl round and round. I could make out
the girl’s face among those shadows, and wings. As the shadows
grew, there was less and less light to see them by. They
swallowed
the light, just as they were swallowing the young man’s
soul. They were filling him up, pouring in through his eyes as
he watched the shadows, through his ears as he listened to the
bells, his mouth as he gasped his beloved’s name.
Evangeline!
The bells played my mother’s name, and then I heard my
mother’s voice, as clearly as if she had been in the room with
me, give back his name. Then the shadows swallowed him and
the music stopped. I was alone in the dark room with only the
echo of a man’s name in my mother’s voice.
Judicus.