The Dark Unwinding (22 page)

“A gyroscope, Miss Tulman. A simple concept, though in this instance, applied in an utterly new way. That is true genius.” He tucked the boat into the crate alongside the cask and the fish. “Did I not tell you we live in a fantastic age? An age where nothing is impenetrable, and where ideas can be rewarding, indeed. But I am overdue and must therefore bid you adieu, my dear.”

He laughed once at his little joke, then took three long steps across the room, grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck, and kissed me, hard on the mouth. “You deserved that,” he said as he shoved me away, all his laughter gone. “You shouldn’t have looked so pretty on your birthday. Thank God there are more of you in Paris.”

He picked up his crate, very cautious not to bump it, and had a foot on the first step before he looked back at where I stood, still stiff with shock, the back of my hand over my mouth. “The village committees are meeting with Mr. Lockwood this morning, Miss Tulman. Very soon, actually, as dawn has broken, and I daresay that will be the proverbial nail in your coffin. I don’t have any of the cucumbers you love so well, but that bottle of claret is just there beneath the workbench. Had the devil of a time with the dosages, never did get it right, but judging by your reaction before, there should be more than enough left to do the job. There are far worse things than death by opium, Miss Tulman. You might prefer it to the indignities of Bedlam.” He favored me with the boyish grin I had so come to associate with Ben Aldridge. “Au revoir.” The steps creaked, the door to the cellar shut, and I heard a key turn in the lock.

I sat down on the floor again, in the awful smell and mist of dust from Ben’s movements above, the lantern light wavering, thinking of death by opium. There were opium dens in London, I had read about them in the newspapers. Men — sailors, many of them — hooked like fish by the pleasures, but who could not stop, even when their raving dreams drove them mad. Laudanum was made of opium, and that had been in the bottles upstairs. I could hear Ben smashing them now. And hadn’t medicine gone missing from the infirmary, the night the old man had died? Mr. Cooper said it had been misplaced, but Mr. Cooper had also signed a document denouncing my sanity. Bottles of laudanum, and sugar with the bitter, slightly familiar taste …

And there, sitting on the dirt floor of a cellar in my ruined dress and almost certainly on my way to an asylum, I experienced a rush of undiluted happiness. Katharine Tulman was not insane, never had been insane. She had not even been poisoned. Katharine Tulman had been drugged. I thought of the bottles of laudanum, boiling, leaving the potent brown residue in the pots, sticky opium that could be scraped away and mixed with sugar. And Davy knew of it and knew how to enter my room through the wardrobe, to come from the nursery and turn the inside latch — no need for a key — to replace the sugar for my nightly tea.

And then I thought of footsteps in the corridor, my things moving, disappearing, the portraits changing, my bonnet tied to the flagpole. Davy, who could move so quietly, hide so well, and who knew all the ways of the house. How had Ben coerced him? But I knew that, too. All Ben had to do was threaten the rabbit, and Davy would have felt he had no choice. I remembered the odd, blank look, and the way Davy had tugged my hand, pulling me away from Ben’s cottage when I had been offered tea. What guilt the miserable child must have suffered, and the risk he had taken to try and tell me, to show me, by bringing me here.

But why force Davy to do these things? Ben had wanted to keep me from going to my aunt, to keep Uncle Tully at Stranwyne, but he was leaving now. With Mr. Lockwood asking questions, Uncle Tully was in just as much danger from Aunt Alice as he’d always been. Ben said he’d gotten what he needed. But what had he needed? What had he wanted so much?

I got to my feet, brushed off my hands, and rummaged as quietly as possible through the workshop while the movements carried on upstairs. I found nothing, nothing but the bottle of opium-laced claret beneath the bench, as Ben had said. Every paper was taken, the fish, the boat, and the cotton gone, even most of the odor had dissipated, or at least I could no longer smell it. I sat down again to rest, closed my eyes, and instead of sorting what was in front of me, sorted through what was in my head.

Ben Aldridge had said he was going to Paris. He was taking Uncle Tully’s little boat with him as well as the fish, the boat with its new spinning mechanism, the gyroscope. And then I remembered. On winding day, Ben had mused that perhaps the dragon and the fish worked in the same way, and now the boat balanced on its keel, the same way the dragon balanced. What if they all worked by gyroscope? I remembered the way Ben had leapt to his feet at my party, spellbound by the boat. If he understood how Uncle Tully’s fish worked, how did that help him? But Ben didn’t just want a fish that worked. He wanted a fish that would explode.

My eyes flew open, and I held my breath. I could see the fish swimming beneath the water as it had in the canal, its empty snout full of the volatile cotton, silent and unseen but for a small trail of bubbles, holding its course, holding its depth, and when it hit something solid, say the hull of a ship, the explosion that would follow. Ben had said that France was making new ships made of iron, impenetrable to cannon fire, but what had he said only a few minutes ago? That nothing was now impenetrable? And he wasn’t going to London, he was going to Paris, where the nephew of Napoléon was now the president. Where the ability to sink every ship in the English navy would be worth a mighty reward, indeed.

And it was for this he would destroy me. I looked up at the silent ceiling, the cottage above me now still. Ben was gone. I thought of my father, the sea closing over his head as his ship journeyed down to the depths. And what about Davy? Davy had betrayed Ben, and Ben knew it. What would Ben do to him?
Anything
, I thought.

I jumped to my feet, grabbed a box of tools, and dumped the contents all over the workbench, the clatter grating in the quiet. I held up the lantern, searching, and it was the work of a moment before I found something that would serve my purpose. A small, thin chisel.

I
t took longer than I had anticipated to pry the pins from the cellar-door hinges. But once I had them out, the whole door slid away from the lock and scraps of wood I had used for props and went thudding to the floor planks. I ran full speed through the empty cottage, barefoot, muddy, and in my filthy blue dress, out the front door and down the sun-dappled path. I had to find Davy.

I burst through the little white gate onto the High Street, and was almost immediately yanked back by a strong grip on my arm. I squealed until I saw that the grip belonged to Lane.

“Where is he?” I panted.

“Who?” Lane shook his head. His hair was loose and tousled, his chin unshaven. “Never mind. Come with me. Now.” He half ran down the street, dragging me with one hand, his rifle in the other. “Should have known you’d go there,” he was muttering, “I should have known….” He seemed angry and pained all at once, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I gave a sudden jerk, tearing my arm from his hand, and took a step back.

“Where is Davy, and where is Ben Aldridge?”

Lane turned and put both his free and his rifle hand up, as if I might startle like a pigeon. Or no, I thought, it was the same way he looked at my uncle, trying to ward off a tantrum. “Calm down,” he said, very gently. “Come with —”

I stepped back again. “Where are they? Have you seen them?”

“You have to come with me, now. Please …” The gray eyes were darting right and left, and it occurred to me that it was getting on into the morning, and the street around us was deserted. Then I remembered the magistrate and the committees. I took another step back, hand on my throat.

“Are they coming for me?”

“Yes. Mr. Lockwood already came, but you’d … thank God you were gone. Let’s go to the tunnel, and I’ll take care of you. I’ll get both you and Mr. Tully out, I promise.” He held out his hand. “Just come with me. Please …”

“I am not insane.”

“Katharine …”

“I am not!” I shouted. “I understand now. It was opium, because of the fish….” I knew from the look on his face that I sounded exactly like what I was declaring myself not to be, but I had no more time. “I can’t go without knowing where they are.”

“If I tell you, will you come?”

I looked at him warily. “Yes.”

“I passed them not fifteen minutes ago, on the way to the Lower Village, with a cart of things for Mr. Tully. Ben was going to keep Davy away, until all this was …”

But that was all I heard. I was already running, fleet as a deer for the Lower Village.

I was all the way to the canal wall before he caught me; fear for Davy lending me a speed I would have never guessed I had. Lane’s long arm got me around the waist and jerked me right off my feet.

“Shhh,” he said in my ear as I tried to kick his shins, a move not nearly as effective as it would have been with my boots on. “Stop! Let me help you….”

And then I saw the boat coming down the canal. “There!” I yelled. Lane must have seen them, too, because his grip on me loosened.

Almost the entire boat was visible, a testament to the amount of rain we had received; the canal must have been running nearly to the top of the wall. Ben stood in the stern with the tiller, the white smoke of the steam engine puffing, the boat moving fast, one hand on Davy’s collar as the child cowered on top of the wooden crate from the cellar. I thought his cheek might be bleeding. Ben saw us looking up at him and took his hand off the tiller, grinning as he waved. Then he glanced once at Davy and back at us. Before I could comprehend what I was seeing, he grabbed Davy in both hands, lifted the child up, and heaved him over the side. The small body made a slow arc through the air.

Lane gasped behind me, Davy hit the water, and I heard someone screaming. The screaming was from me. “Can he swim?” I yelled. “Can he swim?” But Lane had already dropped me and the gun and was at a dead run for the slope where the banked earth met the canal wall, clambering up to reach the level of the water.

I looked up into Ben’s angelic smile, shining down on me from above. If I had been hot with fear and anger before, now I was dead cold with it. Eyes still on Ben, I bent down and snatched up the fallen rifle. I’d never shot a gun. I didn’t even know if this one was loaded, but I knew enough to pull back the hammer. It clicked into place. I raised the muzzle, aiming at the boat that was running closer and closer to the edge of the wall. I could see Ben very clearly, and that crate of cargo that had been more precious to him than my life or Davy’s. The smile left his face, replaced with puzzlement, and perhaps a bit of curiosity as to what I might do next. I pulled the trigger.

The gun jerked back hard, knocking me down, and at almost the same instant, bafflingly, the boat above me exploded, pieces of wood and iron boiler spewing upward, sending a force of air over my body and a pulsing ball of flame to the sky. I felt a grinding thud in the ground beneath me as what was left of the boat struck the canal wall.

I left the rifle where it was and tried to stand, confused and with my ears ringing. Water and tiny pieces of boat rained from the sky. Lane scrambled up from where the blast had knocked him down and began climbing the bank again. I ran, crawling up the rising land after him, and when I got to the canal he was already in the water, diving below the pieces of burning wreckage floating here and there on the surface. There was no sign of Ben. Or Davy.

It was a long time before Lane came out of the water, dripping and empty-handed. He ran his hand once through his hair, wringing out the wet, and we did not speak, just half walked, half slid down the bank together. My thoughts were unwound, leaving me loose, beyond functioning. We walked to the low place in the land, at the base of the canal wall, where Lane’s rifle lay on the ground beside the path. He looked at the rifle, and back to the top of the wall.

“Gunpowder?” he said.

“He had a kind of cotton, that he said … would … explode. But I didn’t … I didn’t think …” I couldn’t say any more. What had I done?

“But why? And Davy? Why?”

I knew the answer to his questions, but I had no more speech. I watched the gray eyes, blank as they stared up at the canal, suddenly narrow in concentration. I followed his gaze. Thin lines of wet were streaking down the wall, making dark stripes against the stone. Near the top, where they originated, a crack now ran through the mortar, trickles of water seeping from it.

“Katharine,” Lane said slowly, “I think Mr. Tully is in the tunnel. Go quickly, and take him to the chapel. And if you hear Lockwood or the men coming to the chapel, go back in the tunnel and shut the door. But just wait on the other side of it, don’t run back toward the workshops. Do you understand?” He turned to me. “Hide, and take care of Mr. Tully until I can come for you. I think I’ve got to close the water gate and drain the canal, just in case. Do you understand? Can you do it?”

I nodded.

“Go now,” he said, and pushed me gently toward the workshop, waiting to see me on my way before picking up the gun and sprinting off toward the upper end of the canal. I hurried down the canal path. How I wished he didn’t believe I was a lunatic.

I was still far from the green-painted door when I saw someone small slip inside it. I ran harder and found wet, bare footprints, child-sized, drying on the paving stones. I threw open the door and burst into my uncle’s sitting room.

“Davy!” I called. “Davy!”

My feet made soft, quick slaps through to the hallway, but the gas in the workshop was unlit, my uncle’s menagerie a collection of bizarre, black shapes in the dark. I searched the hall again and opened the door to Lane’s room.

“Davy! Where are you?”

The boiler room and foundry were also empty, no smell of coal smoke, none of the engines running. I dashed back down the hall to the tunnel door, and flew down the stone steps. “Davy! Uncle Tully? Where are you?”

My voice echoed as I called, again and again, my limbs beginning to shake as I ran down the tunnel. I thought my legs would give way, or that I might be sick before I stopped, and then I saw a small figure just before the bend in the tunnel, stock-still and dripping in the gas glow.

“Davy!” I yelled, but I saw that he was ready to run if I came too near. I slowed. “Are you all right?” I said, trying to sound calm, though I was fighting my panting breath, and my stomach, and tears. “We couldn’t find you. Thank God you can swim!”

His large eyes were down, and he did not acknowledge me. I stopped while still several feet away and went down to my knees on the floor stone, so he would know I would not try to chase him, and so I could rest. “I want … to … tell you some things. Will you let me?”

I waited, the seconds ticking one by one in the hiss of the gaslights, until Davy took a few halting steps forward. He stopped, still well out of my reach. He was such a lonely little figure, standing there without his rabbit, bereft, and with a cut on his cheek.

“I want … to tell you,” I said slowly, “that I understand what you were trying to say in the cottage. You did … very well. You showed me everything I needed.”

He looked up then, and I could see him clearly in the glare, from his darkened, wet hair to his muddy pants and shirt. And his eyes were unshuttered, dark expressive pools. I saw remorse and fear and grief that made me ache, and there was hatred, too, not for me, but for the one who had made him hurt those he hadn’t wanted to.

“I know,” I whispered, “and I am sorry. And I’m not angry, not at you.” I held out my hands to him. “You are not to blame. Do you understand me? It’s not your fault.”

He took one step toward my hand and stopped. A distant rumble vibrated through the tunnel, and we both looked to the stone ceiling. I had thought it was thunder, but instead of fading the rumbling grew louder, nearer. I stood. I could feel the shaking in my feet.

“Run,” someone told me, the voice echoing.

My head swiveled, looking for who else might be in the tunnel. The rumbling grew louder. Had the voice been in my ears or only in my head?

“Run!” the voice commanded, high and flutelike, but full of fear.

I turned to Davy, staring into the two black eyes, and then the gaslights flickered, and went out. The wrench of splitting wood ricocheted down the tunnel, and a then a wind, and a thundering roar. I ran through the dark, hands out, reaching for Davy. My fingers had just brushed the collar of his shirt when I was struck violently from behind, and the world became a black chaos. I was tumbling, spinning, hitting floor, ceiling, or wall, I knew not which, and there was no air, no breath, no control. I hit something hard, and the turmoil changed direction. My lungs burned, water was in my nose, and I slammed against something solid, a heavy weight pressing me to it harder and harder, squeezing the life from my body.

When I knew I would die the solid thing gave way, and I was thrown with a rush into a murky pool. I rolled, slowed, found something beneath my feet, pushed upward, and broke the surface of the water, gagging and spitting, pulling in gulps of precious air. Daylight spilled down from the glass-and-iron cupola above me, a roar replacing the water in my ears.

I was in the ballroom, but I was thigh deep in a brown lake of muddy water and debris. The grand stairs were a waterfall, and when I looked back I saw the piece of wall that was the tunnel door floating off to my right, the doorway itself now a spigot. “Davy!” I tried to yell, coughing, but I was alone, the rushing water deafening as it continued to rise.

I turned around, my skirt clinging, trying to comprehend. The tiny crack in the canal wall must have opened, perhaps the whole wall had come down. And if Lane had not reached the water gate, if he hadn’t closed off the flow, then not just the canal but the entire river would be emptying into the valley that was the Lower Village, and the lower end of Stranwyne. I moved, pushing my way through the current to the other door, the one Mrs. Jefferies had opened, but I stopped before I’d gone far. The water was now halfway up the door, past my waist, and the door opened into the ballroom. I would not be able to pull it open against the weight of all that water. I spun about, looking for escape, saw none, and panicked anew. I could not swim.

I tried to catch hold of the broken door to the tunnel, thinking to climb on top of it like a raft, but it moved away from me in the swirling current. I flailed after it, but the dress tangled around my legs and I could not stay upright. A wooden box floated past and I got my hand onto it just as the water lifted me from my feet. I clung to the floating box, nothing solid beneath me, breathless with fear, and when I licked my lips, I tasted saltiness. At least some of the moisture there was not from Stranwyne’s canal or even the river, but was my own blood.

I kicked, trying to keep the box lid well above the surface so it would not fill, feeling cool currents come up from below my legs. The stairs were still a waterfall, though a much shorter one now; the water would soon be above the opening. I thought of Davy, hoping he had been swept down the main tunnel to the chapel, where he could escape, and about my uncle. I prayed he’d never been in the tunnel at all.

I was more than halfway up the ballroom walls, the beautiful chandeliers coming within touching distance, the mirrors now reflecting a nightmare. I was so tired, and my head hurt, not from any cuts, but from my ears; they were aching from the inside, the air trapped by the rising water becoming a painful pressure. I gritted my teeth, got my feet on the nearest chandelier, and pushed hard to position myself beneath the cupola. How odd, the detached part of me thought, that I would work so hard to live the few minutes longer that glass dome would give me. I was going to drown like my father, only I would do it staring upward through glass, watching pink roses sway in the sunshine. I pushed again, finally grabbing the corner where the ceiling met the dome and pulled myself and the box inside it. I had five, maybe six more feet.

And then the pain in my head and ears grew so intense that I screamed. I kicked at the glass with my bare feet, and then I thought of my box, but I could not hit it hard enough against the thick glass without losing my grip. New, warm blood ran down from my nose. I thought to just let go, to let the water in my lungs and stop the hurting, and then a new thought struck. I flung the lid off the box, reaching blindly inside, and found, still dry of all things, the rolling skates. I got one in my hand and hit the glass.