Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (17 page)

Dementia seemed horrid, but Colin told himself he would prefer that to learning of his father’s death. Sir Edgar might be experiencing a certain amount of mental slippage, but at least Colin would be able to see him again, to provide him some comfort as he faded from the world. The man deserved that. For all of his eccentricities, Sir Edgar had been a proud, loving, and patient father.

Colin had left him behind without a single reservation, presuming that he would always be there, that there would forever be a home to which he might return, and the strange wisdom of Sir Edgar Radford to draw upon.

The air in the cellar was close and damp, warm even though the October days were chilly in Norwich and the nights even more so. Filgate had seen to it that there were lamps burning in the cellar before Colin descended, but as he examined the machine he wished he had arranged for more light, or less. A single lamp would have done the job almost as well. With several, the light shifted and shadows played tricks upon his eyes, so that he had to use the lamp in his hand to take a closer look at the various gauges and turns and vents to ascertain their true shape and attempt to determine their purpose.

No matter how much light he shed upon the mechanism, however, he could not divine its use. During its construction the cellar had been separated into three distinct spaces, one a wine cellar, one for cold storage, and one built around the base of a chimney, so that goods could be stored there in winter without freezing. Subsequent additions to the house had included expansions of the cellar, and it was in one of those that Sir Edgar had built his mechanism.

To Colin, it looked like discarded pieces of other machines, a tangle of pipes and flues, enormous cogs and gears, wooden joists and shelves and pulleys. He pulled levers and turned cranks, but his experiments with the thing yielded no result save for a clattering here and a grinding there. The machine, whatever its ambition, did not work. It did not run.

What puzzled him most were the thick iron pipes—perhaps four inches in diameter—that led off from the apparatus and directly into the stone walls in half a dozen places. They seemed intended to carry water or steam, but the mechanism worked not at all and so Colin could not determine which.

After half an hour wasted in the gloom, he doused the lights and ascended the stairs, to find Thomas Church awaiting him in the parlour. The ruddy-faced man had the paunch and thinning white hair of a friar, but his strong, scarred hands spoke of his youth as a mason, before circumstances conspired to raise him to a life in the magistrate. As a child, Colin had always found himself impressed by the air of authority Church carried with him, in spite of his meagre beginnings as a tradesman.

He spoke with that authority as he spoke of the search effort’s utter failure.

“We’ve peered into every hole in Norwich and combed the hills and fields,” Church said grimly, running his fingers through his shaggy beard. “If Sir Edgar isn’t hiding, or being hid, he’ll turn up at some point. The lads I’ve got out looking aren’t ready to give up quite yet, but in a couple of days I’ll have to call it off. They’ve got lives to return to, y’see. Jobs and families.”

“I understand, Mr. Church,” Colin said. “And I hope you’ll pass along my gratitude to each of them.”

It was obvious Church wanted to say more, that he felt gravely dissatisfied with his own performance, but Colin could think of no words he might have spoken that would have provided solace and so he offered none. He watched Church withdraw and then depart, allowing himself no outward expression of the despair that had begun to gnaw at his heart.

That night, in the darkness of his bedroom, he felt sure he heard the walls whisper his dead mother’s name.

At first he thought it might be the moan of the October wind through the gap he had left in his window. He had surfaced from a deeper sleep into a state of disorientation, that drowsy, floating limbo that always waited on either side of wakefulness. Now his thoughts began to clear and he listened more carefully, ascribing any sound to the wind, the creak of old houses, or the rustle of curtains.

And then, now fully awake, he heard it clearly. “Deirdre?”

Not a cry or a shout, or even a moan as he had first believed, but a calling, as if the name were spoken by a blind man, lost and wandering, reaching out for the touch of the familiar. Colin did not recognize the voice, but it had a parched, weakened quality that might have masked its true timbre.

He sat up in bed to listen and, sure enough, the voice came again, calling his dead mother’s name. “Deirdre?”

“Father?” Colin said, his own voice equally thin and reedy in the dark. Though the voice did not sound precisely like his father’s, who else would be calling for long-dead Deirdre Radford in the middle of the night?

Colin sat and listened closely, but long minutes ticked past without any further occurrence. Over time, however, he slowly became aware of another sound, a low thrum or vibration, so minimal as to be almost unnoticeable. Had he not been listening so keenly, he never would have heard it, and the sound would have remained part of the shush of the world’s quiet noise; the voice of a distant river, the wind on the grass, the soft breath of a slumbering lover.

Alighting from his bed, he went to the fireplace, at first believing it to be the source of the thrum. It did seem louder there, but when he bent to listen more closely, he realized the tone did not emanate from within.

As he cocked his head, trying to ascertain its origin, he placed his hand upon the mantel, then pulled it abruptly away as though he’d been burned. Thoughtfully, he put his hand once more upon the wooden mantel and felt the vibration there. With a glance around the room, wondering if the thrum was more pronounced in some corners than in others, he traced his hand along the mantel and then pressed his palm against the wall beside the fireplace.

That contact was rewarded with a shift in tone. The vibration became louder and turned, for just a moment, into a grinding noise, followed quickly by the clank of metal, like gears turning over, and then a sigh as though of steam, before it finally diminished once more to its original volume and tenor.

Somewhere in the midst of that noise, he might have heard the voice again, calling for Deirdre, but he could not be sure.

Barely aware that he was holding his breath, Colin pressed an ear to the wall. Beneath the continuous thrum he could hear a soft clicking, as of cogs turning. Abruptly he pulled away from the wall, fetched his robe, and slipped it on. Tracing his fingers along the wall to be sure the thrum did not subside or diminish, he went out into the corridor.

Colin kept his hand on the wall and then on the banister as he descended the stairs, but he already knew his destination. Only one new mechanism had been installed in the house during his time at university, and he had no doubt that his father’s mysterious invention must be the source of these unfamiliar sounds.

No one else stirred as he made his way through the foyer and then along the hall to the cellar door. He thought that one or more of the servants might also be roused by the noise, though perhaps they had all grown accustomed to it over time. His grandmother had not been awakened, but she was an old woman and he presumed her hearing had deteriorated with age.

Constantly alert to any change in the sound, afraid with each creak of a floorboard beneath his feet that it might cease, Colin fumbled to light the lamp that hung by the cellar door. Its soft glow cast strange shadows as he lifted it down from its hook, so that he turned quickly, thinking that Filgate or Grandmother Alicia had heard him wandering the house and come to investigate, secretly sure in the back of his mind that his father had appeared from some hiding place to explain all.

But Colin was alone there, in front of the cellar door. And suddenly it seemed to him a dreadful idea to be up by himself in the middle of the night, about to descend into the cold and the dark and the queer depth of his father’s obsession. As a boy, he had always feared the cellar, and somehow in the burgeoning confidence of his time at university he had forgotten that fear.

Now it returned.

But that mechanical hum still vibrated in the air, and when he touched the cellar door he felt it far more strongly than before.

“There’ll be no jumping at shadows,” he promised himself, and so doing, he opened the door and started down.

The cellar looked much as it had earlier. Colin took the time to light several of the lamps that Filgate had arranged for him, though it now occurred to him that some of them had likely been put in place by his father, when Sir Edgar had been working on the contraption.

Whatever he had been expecting upon his descent, however, his imagination proved far more active than the mechanism itself. The sound had gained in volume with every step and as he approached the room wherein the thing had been constructed, but when he stepped inside he had to stop and stare in surprise. No levers moved. No steam escaped the valves. Cogs did not turn. The machine was absolutely still.

Holding the single lamp in his hand, he manoeuvred around the mechanism just as he had earlier in the day, his robe catching on a hinge and tearing slightly. Colin swore and continued his examination. He reached out to touch one of the bars of the mechanism with a hesitation akin to petting a stranger’s dog, but only the dullest vibration could be felt in the machine itself, less so than in the wood of the cellar door.

Yet there could be no denying that the sound had grown louder as he entered this room. Colin began to walk the perimeter of the room to see if there were places where the volume rose or fell, and when he stepped over one of the pipes that jutted from the mechanism into the wall, he paused and looked back at the metal cylinder where it entered the stone foundation.

Crouching, he grasped the pipe. His whole arm trembled with the vibration travelling through it, and he pulled away. Glancing back at the machine, he saw that nothing had changed. It remained still as ever. But here, where the pipe entered the wall, its extremities thrummed with the workings of some other machine or some unknown engine to which this one was attached, off beyond the cellar wall.

Colin rose, staring at the wall. He turned in a circle, trying to figure where the pipes might lead. One by one he walked to each of the seven pipes extending from his father’s mechanism, checking to be sure, and he found that each of them vibrated just as urgently as the first. As he checked, he fancied he could hear more subtle noises now, his ears adjusting to the thrum. There were clicks and whirs, hisses and clanks. Machines.

But two of the pipes led into a wall that separated this room from another cellar chamber, and when he checked he confirmed that they did not exit on the other side of that wall. One led into a wall that bordered nothing but stone, and must have run far under the remainder of the house, although how his father had managed to install it without excavating down through the floor of the parlour Colin could not imagine.

This chamber sat at the southeast corner of the house, and of the remaining four pipes, two each had been pushed through holes in the south and the east walls, respectively. Colin wondered about those pipes. The two that led into the adjoining room did not emerge in that room, but what of these, which could run under the grounds outside?

He knew of only one way to find out.

With one last look at Sir Edgar’s mechanism, Colin doused the lamps and retreated up the stairs. He did not bother returning to his room. Rather, he fixed a pot of tea and nibbled on a leftover apple tart in the kitchen as he waited for the sun to rise, so that he could pay a visit to Mr. Church.

“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” Grandmother Abigail insisted.

The old woman frowned at him, arms sternly crossed. When Colin had returned from town with Mr. Church and half a dozen of his workers, Grandmother Abigail had demanded to know what he thought he was doing, ordering them to dig holes in the grounds around the house.

Reluctantly, he had told her the story of his experience the previous night, including his amazement that the sounds he heard in the walls did not rouse any of the house’s other residents from their beds. He had long suspected Filgate of relying heavily upon brandy to carry him off to sleep, which would explain the man’s sound slumber, but his suggestion that perhaps age had diminished his grandmother’s hearing brought this angry protest.

“I intended no offense,” Colin said, his tone as much apology as he could muster. “I simply cannot imagine how you managed to sleep through the noise. Granted, it wasn’t especially loud, but so consistent that the irritation alone would be enough to drive one mad if it persisted long enough.”

Grandmother Abigail’s expression faltered, and she shrank slightly. It lasted only a moment, but long enough for Colin to realize that her pique had been a mask behind which she hid some other, more subtle, response to his enquiries.

“What is it you aren’t telling me?” he asked.

She shook her head and looked away, gazing out the window at two of the workers, who even now plunged shovels into soft brown earth, piling rich soil high beside the waist-deep hole they’d dug.

“I don’t know what you mean,” his grandmother said.

“You did hear it,” Colin guessed. “You know precisely what I’m talking about.”

Her jaw seemed set, as though she might never utter another word as long as she lived. She took a deep breath and released it before turning to him.

“I hear nothing of the kind,” she said. “But your father heard . . . something.”

Colin straightened up. “Tell me everything.”

“He said almost exactly the same thing, about the sound being enough to drive one mad, given time enough. He heard . . . vibrations, yes, but he said whatever those machines were that he heard, they had a rhythm.”

Colin nodded. Though it had not occurred to him in those precise terms, he understood what his father had meant. “Was that when he began to build his own mechanism?”

Grandmother Abigail seemed pale in the sunlight shining through the window. “He thought if he could match his own machine to the rhythm, find a way to get the two in harmony, he could make his mechanism function on its own, without his—”