The Dark Unwinding (21 page)

W
hen I opened my eyes, the trogwynd was lowing, eerily soft, and Davy stood next to my bed. The fire was out, the room was black, and his face was the only thing I could see, illuminated by a wavering light that set his features in motion. The windows of his eyes were shuttered, telling me nothing, and one small hand was extended toward me. I took it without hesitation, without question, and we moved in silence, both of us barefoot on the carpet, in a pool of flickering glare that came from a lantern held in Davy’s other hand, the hand that was burned. Mary Brown slept by the hearth, and the wardrobe door stood open. Without letting go of my hand or disturbing his light, Davy leapt lightly inside and turned back to look at me, waiting. I lifted my foot, and stepped inside the wardrobe.

Through the door and across the rotting rug of the forsaken nursery he led me, sending mice scuttling for the shadows, and on the far end of the room a piece of the wall swung open. I saw that it was not a wall but a door, paneled and papered to look just as the rest of the room, as the doors to the ballroom had been, and then we were in another bedchamber, picking our way through rubble where the ceiling had given way to damp. Out to the corridor of the portraits, the light briefly trailing its beams over the face of my guardian, Davy took me, ghostlike, to the stairs and then downward, into the lower reaches of Stranwyne.

Around and through, his hand guided me, past the kitchen and into the room of the ornaments — there was no fire there now — and out the door to an unkempt corner of the garden, mist and moonlight setting it aglow. The rusting door of the iron-and-glass greenhouse creaked, and my feet touched potsherds and crumbling leaves, edges of broken panes glittering sharp, as Davy set down the lantern to pull an iron ring attached to the floor. A trapdoor opened, and he picked up the lantern and put his dirty foot on a stone step that led into the earth. For the first time I resisted, but when he turned and looked up at me, pleading, I realized that the round cheeks and long-lashed eyes I’d seen so many times were not really a child. They were only the mask of a child; beneath the exterior, Davy was like an old man. I took his hand again, and descended.

This tunnel was narrow, low, and wet, built mostly of dirt with some reinforcing wood and stone, smelling strongly of earth. I went at a crouch, my unbound hair brushing both the roof and the walls, feeling for the first time the weakness of my body on this strange journey; my legs shook long before we reached another set of stairs. The steps led up to a hole in the ground, and Davy held aside a screen of hanging vines to let me crawl out, gasping, as I was finally able to stand upright. We were in a garden, the white walls of a cottage rising very close, light spilling from all of its windows.

He let me rest for a moment, among flowers that swayed on long, untended stems, then the grip on my hand became tighter, and he pulled me silently to the door. We entered an ordinary cottage, not very tidy, and with an odd smell in the air, sweet with an underlying bitterness. Clothing was strewn about here and there, the hearthstone needed scouring, and unwashed dishes were scattered upon the table. One of the windows was propped open with a boot, and then I knew where I was. This was the cottage of old Mrs. Daniels. Ben’s cottage.

“Davy,” I whispered, speaking for the first time, but he only tugged on my hand and hurried me to the stove. The bittersweet smell was stronger here. Davy set down the lantern, took both my hands, and laid them on a pot that was covered in a sticky brown resin. I protested at the unpleasant touch, but he lifted my hands and had me smell the strong odor, the same that was already in the air.

Then he opened a cabinet, almost frenzied in his hurry, and took out empty glass bottles, handing them to me one by one, removing the tops and putting them below my nose to note the corresponding smell. “What is it?” I asked. He turned the bottle so I could see its label.
LAUDANUM
. Then he took my fingers and put them in a dish of brown sugar. He held my fingers up to my nose, then put them against my own lips. I tasted the sugar and caught a hint of the odor I had smelled. It was vaguely familiar. Like Stranwyne’s tea. “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

But he only picked up the lantern and pulled my hand again, taking me to the back of the cottage where another door led into the earth, though this time with wooden steps instead of stone. We stepped down into a cellar and, as we descended, there was another smell, different from before, acrid and horrible, what I had smelled once before on Ben Aldridge, only many times stronger. I put my hand over my nose, and then we were at the bottom of the stairs and inside a small workshop. It was much more rudimentary than my uncle’s, even I could see that. There were a few tables, bottles, and tools, and, to my surprise, the boat my uncle had been playing with at my party, on its side now, the new wheel in its middle.

But even as I took all this in, my eyes were drawn to a workbench in the center of the room, where a replica of my uncle’s fish lay propped in the air across two metal stands. It was larger than the original, and without any of the realistic touches provided by Lane’s painting. A panel hung open on its side, showing its cog-and-gear guts.

Davy brought me to the workbench and held up the lantern carefully, as far from the fish as was possible, took my hand and placed it on the metal skin. He ran my fingers along the sleek body, asking me to feel all the way to the machine’s metal snout. And I found the difference. There was a joint where my uncle’s had none; the head of this fish was a separate compartment.

I tried to move his lantern hand closer to better see, but he held the lantern away and, instead, placed my fingers into small pile of fine, cotton fluff. He had me take a piece of the fluff and put it to my nose, but I pulled my face away. It stank, like the cellar. I looked to Davy again, asking as silently as he might have, and with the fluff still in my hand, he led me to a corner, so extremely careful with his lantern that I had to crouch down to see.

There was a jagged hole in the dirt floor, nine or so inches deep in the middle, splaying out for perhaps two feet in width. I touched blackened scorch marks on the wall stones. His large eyes solemn, Davy took my hand with the fluff and had me set the cotton in the center of the hole. He turned his arm, showing me the burn on his wrist, let me ponder this for a moment, then led me back to the workbench, placed my hand on the metal snout of the fish, back to the cotton fluff, and then back to the fish.

My forehead wrinkled. I knew Ben was intensely interested in the workings of my uncle’s fish, particularly in its method of holding depth. But why build this one with an extra chamber? And if Davy was trying to show me that this cotton had somehow caused that hole in the floor, and the burn on his arm, then was the cotton somehow like gunpowder? Did the cotton explode? I looked again to his lantern, this time in alarm, and then a door closed above us in the cottage.

Footsteps moved, a fine mist of dust raining down from the ceiling that was also the cottage floor. Davy’s hand left mine, and he shrank instantly beneath the workbench, his lantern chasing the shadows that had gathered below it. A moment later the light was blown out, Davy could no longer be seen, and I stood where I was in the darkness.

The footsteps were hurried. I heard water being poured and then the clink of glass and plates. It sounded as if Ben were tidying up. I slid down to sit in the dirt on the floor, my legs no longer able to support me, the horrible odor in the workshop not just a smell but a taste in my mouth and a burn in my lungs. I wondered if I had the strength or the courage to climb the cellar stairs, and how I might explain my presence without implicating Davy. Perhaps I should join the child under the workbench? Or perhaps Ben would leave the cottage without coming to the cellar at all.

The cellar door opened, and light poured down from above. I glanced at the workbench, relieved to see that the darkness beneath it was still impenetrable, and when I looked up again, blinking, Ben Aldridge was on the stairs with his own lantern and his usual grin.

“Miss Tulman,” he said. “I am honored. And I had thought you confined to your bed.”

He came farther down the steps, dragging a large wooden crate with his other hand. I opened my mouth, but could find nothing to say. I used the table behind me to pull myself upright.

“Please,” he said, “don’t trouble yourself.” He tossed the crate onto the floor and set the lantern on another workbench, well away from the cotton. “I do apologize for the smell. It’s terrible, I know, but other than that, how do you like my little workshop? It’s nothing to your uncle’s, of course.”

“It’s very nice,” I said slowly.

“And this?” he asked, stroking the spine of the fish. “Lacking the more attractive aspects of the original. But a much more functional machine, to be sure.”

“What is it for?”

His eyes crinkled, and he hoisted his crate onto the workbench. It was full of sawdust. “Tell me, Miss Tulman, how are you feeling? Any lasting effects from your party?”

“I am … tired.”

“But not too tired for a jaunt to my cottage in the middle of the night? Not that I mind, Miss Tulman. And not that I don’t know exactly who brought you here.”

I had completely forgotten it was the middle of the night. The journey from my bedchamber had had such dreamlike quality, so much of my life lately had had such a dreamlike quality, it was just now dawning on me that all this was real.

“But really, Miss Tulman,” Ben chided, “you truly are a sight. Quite wild. What would Mr. Lockwood say to such behavior? As a friend, let me advise that you can scarce afford any more oddities at this point. That man is ready to cart you away.”

My brows came together. “But I was poisoned, not … Mr. Lockwood will know I was not …” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Mr. Cooper will have told Mr. Lockwood so.”

“But what about your other escapades?” Ben came around the workbench to stand right in front of me, his boyish face inches from my own. I looked away. “About nighttime ramblings and self-inflicted wounds, and a certain balancing act in the chapel?”

I did look up at him then, this time in horror.

“Those are not the acts of someone capable of maintaining her own welfare, Miss Tulman. And I’m sorry to tell you there has already been a document signed to that effect, and by our surgeon, Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper states that while you have extended periods of lucidity, such behavior as this, and the unfortunate episode you suffered right before Mr. Lockwood’s eyes, are all symptoms of a chronic mental condition, indicating that you are a danger to others as well as yourself. He didn’t mention poison, I’m afraid.”

I was thoroughly awake now, but with the thrills of fear I’d come to associate with my nightmares. Mr. Cooper didn’t mention poison. Of course he did not. For all he knew, I was about to take his home away from him.

“Can you deny that you did these things, Miss Tulman?”

I could not deny it, and somehow Ben knew. “They’ll tell him it’s not true,” I countered.

“Who will?” His face was very close.

“Mary, and …”

“I don’t think her opinion will hold much weight. And if you were going to mention a particular young man, I think a servant to whom you’ve show a certain … licentiousness of behavior would be quite likely to lie rather than lose the privilege of your favors, wouldn’t you agree?”

I looked up into the lines around those cheerful eyes. “Does the paper say that, too?”

“Of course.”

“But Mrs. Jefferies, the people in the village —”

“Will not choose to defend the person who is responsible for removing them from their homes.”

“Will you tell them it’s not true?”

“No.”

My gaze focused on the fish behind Ben’s shoulder. Ben wasn’t going to help me. He had never wanted to help me. I thought of Aunt Alice’s stories of asylums, and my heart beat harder. I had no way to defend myself, and an asylum was exactly where the magistrate was going to take me. Then I caught sight of Davy, sliding like a snake from beneath the workbench to begin a silent move toward the cellar stairs. I lifted my chin, keeping Ben’s eyes on me. “You wrote to the magistrate.”

He smiled. “When you finally catch on, your mind works apace.”

Davy was up three steps. Ben Aldridge was going to have me committed. Hopelessness flooded my chest, chilling, making me shiver. Seven steps. Why would he do this? Twelve steps, and Davy was away. There wasn’t even a speck of dust from the ceiling. I was alone. “Why do you hate me?”

Ben’s smile faded. “Oh, my dear,” he said. “I don’t hate you. You are quite an interesting, pent-up little thing. It was just your misfortune to stand between me and what I want.” He shook his head. “I gave you every opportunity, you know. Again and again I asked if you would go to your aunt, and you were so … inflexible. I couldn’t let you take away what I so desperately needed, which was unfortunately tucked deep inside your uncle’s head. It’s rather ironic, you know, that at the eleventh hour, I got what I needed anyway.”

“You got what you needed?”

“Oh, yes. But it’s too late to turn the clock back now.” He sighed. “I am sorry for you.” He stepped over to the workbench and his crate. “But as for that child,” he continued, “that child is not trustworthy, and he is disobedient. He will pay for that.” He looked back at me and smiled. “I don’t enjoy being crossed, Miss Tulman. As I’m sure you will have noticed by now.” He lifted the fish carefully into the crate.

“Will it explode?” I asked, trying to turn his mind from Davy.

Ben’s face was so pleased I was startled. “Why, how clever of you, Miss Tulman.” He laughed. “Yes, it certainly shall explode, unless all my experiments are wrong. Did you see my little accident over in the corner? Only a tiny bit packed in a medicine bottle and the force was … gratifying. Moisture, I believe, will be the key to its safety. Or let us hope so anyway.”

I watched him take a dripping cask from a large barrel of water, where it had been soaking, and gently pack the cotton fluff tight inside the wet wood. He wedged the wet cask into the crate, then picked up my uncle’s boat, saw me looking, and gave the little wheel a spin.