Dreamwood (19 page)

She remembered the day Angus had come.
You've been more than fair,
Gordon had said.

“Your father didn't think he'd been cheated,” she pointed out.

“My pa got ruined.” Pete yanked hard at the laces on his boots. “Course he didn't want to admit that. I don't trust Angus Murrain farther than I can throw him.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way,” Lucy said primly. “But Angus Murrain hasn't done anything to me. In fact, he invested in my expedition.”

“Your expedition? What?” Pete forgot he was supposed to be injured as he jumped to his feet.

Straightaway Lucy wished she could take the words back. But there was no help for it. “You laughed at me, so I struck a deal with him.”

“What kind of deal?” A heavy, angry look came into Pete's face.

Lucy pulled at the fringe on her tunic. She realized she should have told Pete—why hadn't she done that at the beginning? He'd surprised her by wanting to come. And then there'd been the excitement of getting started. She hadn't thought it would matter to Pete. Though now of course she saw that it did.

“He gave me fifty dollars for supplies,” she admitted. “And I said he could have half the dreamwood I brought back.”

Pete's jaw hardened. Then he laughed unpleasantly. “That's a good deal for him. He puts in fifty dollars and gets a fortune back.”

Lucy bit her lip. Put this way it did sound like she'd made a poor deal—she just hadn't thought that way at the time. But she didn't want to admit this to Pete. And besides, if she hadn't gotten that money they wouldn't have gotten their
antimorpheus
drops. Pete had no idea how much the little vial in her pack cost. “Is that what you're sore about?” she asked. “When I talked to him I didn't know you were coming. If I'd known—and if I'd known how you felt about him—I wouldn't have done it. I know you need the money. I'd have let you have all the dreamwood.”

Pete lifted his chin and his expression got stonier—she'd said the wrong thing. “That's not why I'm sore. I'm sore because I trusted you.”

Lucy's stomach sank—she could tell from Pete's tone this was a much worse offense. “And I trust you,” she began tentatively.

“No, you don't. Otherwise you'd have told me something this big.” He snatched up his blanket from the ground and began angrily to fold it. Lucy looked up at him, feeling that if he would just listen she could explain everything.

“I didn't mean to keep it from you.” She clasped her hands together, pleading with him. “It just happened.”

“Maybe so,” he said with a dark look. “But I guess it's easy to have all the answers if you don't tell anyone anything.”

Lucy felt the blood rush to her cheeks. She thought for a second about apologizing again, then threw that thought away. Someone who made her feel so awful didn't deserve it. She stood up and faced him. “So you
do
think I'm a know-it-all. Those things you said at the river—that's how you actually feel.”

His eyes flickered dangerously—the river still a fuse between them. “And you think I'm just some country boy who can't keep up with you.”

She took in a breath, bouncing on her feet with anger. “That's not true.”

“Lucy,” Angus called. “Can you spare a moment?” He was waiting expectantly with the map. Waiting for her thoughts and advice. She would much rather be with the timber baron right now. But if she went over there, Pete would think everything he'd said about her was true.

“Go on back to your
partner,
” Pete said as if he knew what she was thinking. “Seeing as how they're getting half the dreamwood, the least they can do is feed me. I'm going to find some breakfast.”

He stomped off. But by then everything was already packed up with the others waiting for them—and so they had to go on. Pete shot a knifelike glance at her. She had made him miss breakfast. If she'd wanted to make him angry at her, she couldn't have found a better way.

T
hey walked for several hours, up and down a series of steep hillsides, as they tried to make their way to the Thumb's high point. Angus wanted a vantage point to look down from, hoping to see their way from his map. But the slopes were choked with fallen timber, and it was slow going.

Even though she was still upset with Pete, Lucy kept her vitometer inside its pouch. She should just bring it out and read the way forward. Several times she had almost done that. But at the last moment, she'd hesitated, grasping the cord around her neck. And as the day wore on, Lucy felt it would be awkward to suddenly reveal her secret compass, and so she kept it hidden inside her tunic.

Pete was not speaking to her. Instead of getting over his grievance, he was settling into it, testing it—she would say something and he would merely grunt a reply—like someone breaking in a new pair of boots. Gradually, he'd fallen to the back of the group, while Lucy walked on ahead with Angus.

Silas and Jank were in the middle, making an odd pair. Silas was compact and quick, with a suspicious face beneath his fiery crest of hair. His eyes darted at every noise, and he continually thrust his hands into the pockets of his dirty leather vest, bringing out a protection stone like Pete's, which he fingered obsessively.

As they walked, he kept up a running commentary: “Leaves of four, settle a score. That there's Widder's Nuckle. Make a tea of it and you'll be dead before you can take your boots off. Hear that? That's the call of the blue-breasted tolliver; if one of those crosses your path it's thrice bad luck. Throw salt over your right shoulder quick as you can or you'll be sorry. Wolf-face newts heal chilblains, but you have to catch the buggers first . . .”

And then there was his opposite, Jank, almost comically big and muscular, though it seemed all his muscles had squeezed out his vocal cords, for he was woefully inarticulate except on the one subject that excited and terrified him: the devil.

Periodically he would give them all a fright by stopping abruptly and crying out, “There it is. The devil in the woods! There!” Then he would unsling his massive ax and plant his feet while his small eyes glared tremblingly at his unseen foe. These were episodes—Lucy quickly learned—you simply had to wait out. For nothing devil-like would appear and Jank would eventually grunt, fasten up his ax again, and resume tramping through the forest with that dead-eyed gaze of his, saying nothing to Silas's constant chatter.

Not so Cranbull. He walked behind Silas and tried his best to ignore the little man, but it was an effort beyond his abilities. About every five minutes Cranbull harrumphed and hocked spit, usually aiming in Silas's direction. Now and then he would simply stop and announce “bull pucky” to something Silas had said. Lucy was afraid the two would come to blows.

Angus paid them no attention. He helped Lucy over a series of logs, so the two of them were ahead of the others.

Gradually their lead increased. Lucy couldn't help turning around now and then to reassure herself that Pete was still following them. When last she looked back, Jank—impossible to miss in his red-and-white-checkered shirt—was having another spell of his, and as he stood there, twitching his ax, the others stood frozen in place lest he suddenly turn on them. But the timber baron saw no reason to wait. He kept walking, and Lucy, feeling important that she was by his side, walked with him as they climbed higher up the slope.

“Your father told me something of his research before he left,” the timber baron said. “He said he was writing a book about the history of ghost hunting in the American States.”

Her father had long spoken of wanting to write such a book, and Lucy always assumed she would help him research it. But since arriving in Saarthe she had seen how little he'd thought to tell her of his actual plans. She said rather grumpily, “I suppose that's why I was put in school in San Francisco. So I wouldn't interfere and he could write in peace.”

Angus looked at her with amusement. “I think he worried that he would stand in your way and interfere with
you.
”

That didn't make any sense. She stopped with one moccasin braced against a fallen kodok branch and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Stand in
my
way? How?”

The hillside was steep and even Angus's breathing was labored. He seemed glad to have a reason to stop.

“A ghost clearer?” he asked her, raising his eyebrows. “In this age of modern science and technology? Not exactly the sort of father one would wish for.”

Lucy's cheeks burned. This was what the girls at Miss Bentley's had said, though in much crueler words. “He helped people.” She scowled at him.

Angus rolled up the sleeves of his sweat-stained shirt. “Less and less. He told me electricity was putting him out of business. All the electric lights and currents we have around us are disrupting the spirit world. Ghosts are dying out, so to speak.” He allowed himself a modest smile at this clever expression.

“Yes, but some ghosts persist,” Lucy said, planting her feet.

“Perhaps. The only people bothered anymore by ghosts are the eccentric and weak-minded. Or the poor who light their homes by burning trash or snake oil.” The timber baron rested a hand on a nearby kodok; Pete and the others still hadn't caught up to them. “But this is what I don't understand. Instead of turning to something current and modern—for instance he could have done great work in the study of energy and charges—your father decided to look back. He went further in the wrong direction, standing in the way of progress, almost as if he wanted to ensure he'd never be a success.”

Lucy didn't answer, thinking of the Maran Boulder. Had her father been standing in the way of progress then? He certainly had wanted to save the boulder from the railroad.
What would it mean, Lucy,
she remembered him saying,
if there are concentrations of the Od that were found in certain places? In rocks or rivers, perhaps trees. Things we don't usually think of as alive. What is that power source? How could we understand it?
But the railroad hadn't wanted to understand it, they'd simply dynamited it.

Angus smoothed back his dark hair. “I remember we were in the Climbing Rose, and he told me he'd left you in San Francisco. Even in a place as superstitious as Saarthe he had trouble finding work. He wanted the reward so he could afford to keep you in school.”

“Keep me there?” Lucy was stunned. How many more knuckle raps and hours of being made to stand in a corner would she have accumulated in another year at Miss Bentley's? “So he never meant to send for me?”

The timber baron frowned. He'd caught his breath, but showed no signs of wanting to move on from where they stood on the steep slope. “Not that I know. He was worried about how he would pay the next year.”

Lucy stared fixedly at the bracken on the ground. The letter she'd kept in her pocket, his promise to send for her—that was all a lie?

“He talked about you,” Angus told her, while she grappled silently with her feelings. “Said you had a fine mind, were quick witted, and brave—all things I can see quite easily for myself.”

These were exactly the things Lucy had always wanted to hear about herself. But she didn't want to hear them with the rest of what Angus was saying.

“He also said you were getting to the age when a young lady's reputation mattered. How did he put it?” Angus searched the trees as if hoping they might remind him of the exact phrasing her father had used. “He wanted to protect you from the ‘taint of his association.' He was sure that in time you would come to see that it was for the best.”

Lucy didn't know what to say. He'd wanted her to stay at Miss Bentley's, a place she'd despised. That's what he'd wanted her to turn into? And he thought she'd think it was for the best? There was a lump in her throat as big as an egg, and her eyes stung with tears.

Angus sighed. “Of course he only did that because he cared for you.”

That wasn't true at all, Lucy thought bitterly. If he'd cared for her he would have kept her with him. She thought of Governor Arekwoy sending his raven men after Niwa, unable to let her go. Niwa's father intended to have her take over for him one day. Whereas her own father had simply cast her away—caring more about spirits than his own flesh and blood.

She was biting the inside of her cheek so hard the copper salt on her tongue made her realize she was bleeding.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” the timber baron said. He squatted down to be closer to her level. His deep brown eyes stared into hers with concern. She tried to turn her face away, but he
tsk'd
and cupped her face in his hand.

“There, there, Lucy.” He brought out a fine cotton handkerchief, monogrammed with an
M.
“Maybe your father did you a favor. Have you thought of that?”

A favor helped somebody, so she shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“You're free to make new friends.” He smiled gently at her. “Friends who care about you and see your qualities. Who appreciate you and think you're special.”

If she spoke she would cry, and she wasn't going to blubber in front of Angus. She had thought her father did think of her that way. He'd praised her for knowing the answers to the questions he asked; he quizzed her about matter and physics and ghosts. And she'd misinterpreted it all, thinking that because she knew the right answers she was part of what he did. But, no, he simply wanted to pack her off somewhere out of sight while he continued his work—not
their
work, as she'd once thought. Just his.

How she wanted to go home. But she had no home. There was no place for her.

Angus stood watching her, waiting for her to speak. She sniffed once and handed back his handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, making sure her voice didn't tremble.

“Keep it,” he told her as if he were made of pocket handkerchiefs. “I think you'll do better now. We're partners, aren't we, Lucy?”

She nodded. She remembered how excited she'd felt when they'd shaken hands in Gordon's study. The memory seemed like something from a long-ago, uncomplicated time.

“And we'll find the dreamwood together, yes?”

“Yes,” she said woodenly.

“I do need your help,” he said. “You see how Cranbull and the others are practically useless. They don't have the head for this sort of thing. I can't imagine what your father was thinking not bringing you when you've got all the training, and you know how to use the tools.”

Lucy scuffed the ground. “I guess he just wanted me to stay behind and be normal. Though I don't see how I would become a scientist if I stayed back there.”

Angus put his hands in his back pockets. “There are other ways of being what you want to be,” he said knowledgeably. “You can still be a scientist, for instance, but why muck around with ghosts? You're a smart girl. Why not be scientific and successful? You can
be
successful, you know—it does not mean you have to be dull. You could never be that.”

She pressed her lips together; it was not a smile, but the grimace of someone trying to convince themselves they were not about to cry.

“Goodness, your eyes are so big, you look like a hungry kitten.” Angus patted the pockets of his moleskin trousers. He bent down and confided to her, “I do have some toffees I've been keeping to myself. Here's one for you, but don't tell your surly friend. Can you keep it a secret from the others?”

Lucy nodded and clasped the candy in her hand. She supposed it was better to know the truth. And though she was not glad Angus had told her these things, the truth made her feel somehow older and more grown up.
For the best,
her father had said.
It's for the best.

And this must be another part of growing up; for the first time in her life she did not feel like eating candy. But she popped the toffee into her mouth anyway and felt the sugar crackle against her teeth without tasting any sweetness.

• • •

They reached a lookout point, but Lucy didn't even notice the view. She felt like a sleepwalker, cut off from the world and trapped in some private despair. She raised her eyes only when she heard Angus swear.

“What are those idiots doing? I've told them, no fires.”

Lucy felt her heart stumble as she saw what he was looking at: a thin plume of gray smoke rising into the sky. Without a word she started running back the way they'd come.

Please don't let it be Pete,
she thought as she careened down the hillside. Any minute she expected to hear a tree fall or see a boulder smashing by.

But the woods were quiet—frighteningly so. A feeling of watchful menace grew so intense that by the time she'd made it back to where she'd last seen the others she was no longer running, but creeping stealthily.

And then she saw that things were much worse than a fire.