The Dark Unwinding (5 page)

“Marianna says when people go away it is right to remember. I am quite forgetful, yes, too forgetful. But Marianna knows what should be, so I have to do just as she says, and so I remember. I made her not too many, so she could play and play and never make her fingers tired. People get tired when they are too many, and Marianna likes that kind of play. I like —”

“Uncle,” I interrupted, “did you … make this?”

He pulled at fistfuls of his coat, shaking his head. “No. Not this toy. Not all the pieces. I just do the numbers and the pictures. Then Lane takes my pictures and brings back my pieces and I put them together until they are what they should be. But this toy did not come out of my head. No. It came from someone else’s head, though they did not tell me how.” The little figure of my grandmother paused and began her song again while my uncle’s face brightened. “I’m thinking I shall show you what I’m playing with now. It’s from my head. Every bit from my head. Lane? Lane! We shall show my little niece!”

I was pulled to my feet and trotted again through the menagerie, dimly wondering how many of the toys we passed were also people that had “gone away.” Uncle Tulman chanted to himself while he pulled at my sleeve, a discordant accompaniment to the sweetness of my grandmother’s music.

“Little first, big next. Little first, big next, little … wait!” I was jerked to a halt. “Lane!”

Lane appeared like an evening shadow.

“Backward, Lane! We shall do it backward! Big first, little next! Big first, little next! Come on, come on!”

I glanced at Lane’s silent face, so strained that I wondered if he were in some kind of pain. But he followed my uncle, who bounded to the room’s center like a child through the schoolhouse door.

Uncle Tulman stopped beside a large statue, maybe twice and half again my height, lying alone and on its side in a wide, bare swath of the bricked floor. It was a dragon, I saw, coiled like a snake around a thin white tower, the kind one might see in a book of fairy tales. I also saw why it was lying down. The bottom of the tower was narrow like a sharpened stick, coming to a point smaller than the palm of my hand. It could never stand upright on its own. A rubber tube came out of the bottom of the tower, connecting it to a hole in the center of a round, flat pedestal.

My uncle let go of me and ran to a metal wheel that hung on the wall. He spun it, and a hiss like an enormous teakettle came from the dragon. A softer
click, click, click
faded along with the hissing, until nothing could be heard in the room but the minuet, the throb below my feet, and a curious, humming whirr. Lane gave a gentle upward tug to the top of the tower. I thought he meant to lift it, but then the statue lifted itself, slowly and majestically, and without human effort. My head tilted upward inch by inch, watching it rise, until the narrow end had settled perfectly into the hole in the pedestal. Then the tower stood there alone, impossibly, balanced on a pencil point, the red eye of the dragon leering down at me from twelve feet in the air.

My uncle jumped up and down, clapping his hands, as a cloud of steam spewed from the dragon’s nostrils, drowning the sound of the pianoforte.

“Is it not fun, little niece? Is it not just as it should be?”

My heartbeat thudded in my ears. I vaguely understood the workings of clockwork, how cogs and wheels could make my little grandmother move in ways that seemed a miracle. But this … it could not be real.

“Now the best part! The best part! Watch, Simon’s baby!” My uncle made a run at the statue and shoved it, hard. The dragon teetered and I flinched, ready for it to fall, and it did fall, but inexplicably slowly, moving closer and closer to the floor as if lowered by a string. The dragon finally scraped against the floor bricks, scattering a few green scales, and then rose up again of its own accord, defying every law of nature. I stepped back, my hand at my throat.

“It isn’t magic,” Lane said from just behind me. He was sitting on top of an untidy desk, watching Uncle Tulman. “It’s just a machine. I can’t explain it, because I don’t know myself. But it’s just a machine.”

“And … did you … help him make this?”

“I painted it.”

I watched my uncle knock the statue down again, trying to regain my composure. “And how many other men does my uncle employ to help him make these … things?”

The gray eyes moved back to me and turned to stone. “Time to play something else,” Lane said. He slid off the desk and went to my uncle.

I stayed where I was, my uncle talking incessantly of “little things” and “little things that become big things” while the air thrummed and the dragon whirred, all against the sounds of a simple minuet. But my mind was moving. Not only was there a gasworks, I thought, there were steam engines, and a foundry. There must be a foundry, for the metal, and …

And then I looked properly at the desk. In the midst of the jumbled papers was a drawing of the peacock, gears and wheels and things I did not understand traced out in a scrawling map of the bird’s innards. I picked up the paper, peering at it in the garish light. Numbers mixed with letters moved like hieroglyphs along the page, a mathematical language I did not know. A cog clicked in my head.

“Uncle!” I called. “Uncle Tulman! Do you use numbers to build your machines?”

My question echoed and died against the metal and brick. I looked up. My uncle was staring at the paper in my hand, the blue eyes unblinking, blood burgeoning beneath the wrinkles of his skin. His arm seemed to twitch, and before I could move or even comprehend what was happening, something made of glass had flown from my uncle’s hand and exploded, smashing into a thousand shards on the desk beside me. I stood there, dumbfounded, bits of glass sticking to my dress. The minuet played on, oblivious.

“No!” my uncle screamed. He was shaking, his red face something demonic. “No, no, no!”

Lane sprang forward, hands out. “Put it down!” he shouted over his shoulder.

I dropped the peacock drawing as if it burned, still staring, but not before Uncle Tulman had launched himself at me, arms outstretched. A box of tools went spinning, mixing in a deafening clatter with the broken glass on the floor as Lane caught the old man in his arms and pinned him there.

“Go!” Lane yelled. “For God’s sake, get out!”

My uncle flailed at the restraint, spitting words that were senseless, hands convulsing as they reached for me.

I fled.

I
ran through the green door and slammed it, shutting away the howls of my uncle and the vision of his grasping hands. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, letting my knees steady and my lungs slow, attempting to bring order to my thoughts. After what I had seen in the workshop, the presence of an entire village was certainly no longer a surprise to me. If there were engines and gasworks and foundries, then there had to be carpenters, masons, and bricklayers to build them, and run them, and men to bring the supplies in, not to mention the vast amounts of pipe that must have been made and then laid. And all so my uncle could play his games. Amazing games, but games nonetheless.

I opened my eyes. Aunt Alice’s solicitor had been very clear. Insanity could not only be proven by the testimony of family and the signature of a doctor, but also by gross misadministration of an estate. Considering what these “games” must cost, the only real question at Stranwyne Keep was if Fat Robert had any inheritance left to be squandered. But the solicitor would want to know just how many men my uncle was supporting. I would discover that, and put this place behind me. I reached for my bonnet strings, but they weren’t there. No matter. I smoothed my hair instead, straightened my back, and made a beeline for the village.

The first cottage I came to on the main road was small, tidy, and made of whitewashed stone, red and yellow roses twining around the door frame. A girl perhaps two years younger than myself, hair tied gypsy-like in a kerchief, weeded in an herb garden that was wilting in the sun, while well past the back of the cottage an older woman — her mother, I supposed — was taking advantage of the heat by hanging out her laundry. I pushed open the gate, and the kerchiefed head snapped up.

“Excuse me. Could you tell me, please, how many men are currently employed in the —”

“I know who you are,” said the girl. “You’re that tart come to take away Mr. Tully.” She smiled broadly, stretching her freckles. “My mum says you must be a hard-hearted so-and-so, but you ain’t looking so very hard-hearted to me, or much like a so-and-so, but then again, you can’t always be telling about these things, not straight off. I hear you were giving poor Davy a fright, but he’s a strange one and no mistake, and I hear you’ve been wandering about the big house on your own….” She leaned forward, saucer-eyed. “I think a body might go right off their rocker running about the big house on their own. What do you say? I’d do it in a second, given half a chance. How else would a body know what it’s like to go right off their rocker? You could go a lifetime without finding out, that’s what I say, so you might as well be taking the chance when it comes along. You ain’t off your rocker now, are you?”

I blinked.

“Well, no matter if you are, there’s a fair amount of it going around. I hear you’ve been in Mr. Tully’s workshop. I pressed my nose to the window glass once, when I was a wee thing, but it upsets Mr. Tully to see noses squashed on his glass, so mostly we stay away. It’s an awful thing to upset Mr. Tully. We —”

Apparently it was swim or drown with this girl. I chose to swim. “Excuse me,” I said again, loudly. “What is your name?”

Her eyes grew impossibly larger. “Why, Mary, of course. Mary Brown.”

“And you have lived in the village how long, Miss Brown?”

She chuckled. “
Miss
Brown! Listen at you! I’ve lived here six years, right from when they was putting up the cottage stones, and never been called nothing but Mary during one of them, though that never was so in the workhouse. I got called lots of things in the workhouse. My dad came first, don’t you see, and my mum came after that, so my dad, he didn’t know —”

I glanced once toward the back of the cottage. The girl was a fount of information, and I feared the matron that was currently pinning up someone’s frilly underthings might try to put a stopper in the flow. “Miss Brown,” I interrupted, “the day is very hot. Would you like to come and sit with me for a few moments?”

Mary’s cheeks rounded. She flounced around the corner of the cottage, where a bench was nestled in the roses by the front door, and dropped herself onto it, smoothing her skirt, leaving smudges of black earth on the cloth. I sat down beside her and smiled. I would start small, in case my well had a mind to run dry.

“You said you’ve been here since the village was built, is that right, Miss Brown? And that is six years, you said?”

“Oh yes, Miss. Little Tom wasn’t born when —”

“And before that, where did your family live?”

“Saint Leonard Workhouse, Miss.”

“And how many of you came here from the workhouse?”

Mary’s nose wrinkled, the freckles merging into a single mass. “I suppose I don’t rightly know, Miss. You see, we —”

If this girl was not even aware of the number of her own family, I was wasting my time. “Perhaps you could guess, Miss Brown. A guess would suffice.”

“Does that mean my answer don’t have to be just so?”

I nodded, and her thinking continued. “Well, I’m guessing it might’ve been about three hundred.”

I stared. “Three … hundred?”

“Oh, yes, Miss. Maybe more. We —”

“Do you mean to say that three hundred people came to the Stranwyne estate from the Saint Leonard Workhouse?”

Mary chuckled heartily. “Oh, no, Miss! Don’t be silly. Of course not! We wasn’t all from Saint Leonard’s! There was lots of different workhouses, mostly London, I’m thinking, though I can’t remember that much about it, being a wee thing, though I do remember the stink, and Mr. Babcock, when he banged his silver stick on the table and when he —”

“Who is Mr. Babcock?”

Mary looked surprised. “Why, Mr. Babcock, Miss, the solicitor!”

I tucked the name away for future reference.

“Mr. Babcock’s the one to come and get us, of course! I’d gone sneaking into the big room, you see, looking for my mum, as we weren’t allowed to see our mums or dads at Saint Leonard’s, and my littlest brother, he was that unhappy about it and I wanted to tell my mum so, and Mr. Babcock, he climbed right up on the table where they was dishing the porridge and banged it with his silver stick, saying any able man wanting to earn better bread could come and get in line. And my dad did that, and got his name wrote down in a little book, and he got my mum, and my mum got my brothers and me before they could sell us off and now my dad steers the riverboats.”

I looked away while Mary paused for breath, observing the daisies that grew along the cottage path. I had been inside a workhouse once. A sooty pile of ill-laid brick that gathered poverty to itself and imprisoned it there, breeding misery that no bag of Robert’s cast-off shirtfronts could have possibly alleviated. I found Mary eyeing me critically.

“I’m surprised you don’t know all that, Miss. They teach it in the schoolhouse.”

I ignored this slight on my education, and said, “How many would you say live in the village now, Miss Brown?”

“Well, I can’t say as I know, having never counted it on my fingers, and having never had that many fingers to do the counting. I’ve the proper number, as you’ll likely have noticed. Having extra fingers is a thing people mostly notice right away. Now for the Upper Village, you’d need fingers and toes to be keeping up with all of them, as the babies have been growing up and having babies themselves, which is the way of the world, as I’m certain you’ll have —”

“Wait …” I frowned, trying to sift through the nonsense. “You said ‘Upper Village,’ Miss Brown. Is that where we are now?”

“Lord, Miss! Don’t you even know where you’re sitting? This is Lower Village, the new one! Upper Village is that way …” She pointed toward the river. “… downstream near half a mile, I’d say.” She shook her head, kerchief ends waggling. “For being Mr. Tully’s niece and all, you surely don’t know much, though I suppose it ain’t your fault if you’re not very —”

“And is Upper Village as big as this?”

“Didn’t I say the babies have been having babies, Miss? Upper Village has been here a good long time. We’re the newcomers in Lower Village, that’s what they’re calling us, the new —”

“More than three hundred?”

“More like six, I’d reckon. Their babies won’t be remembering the workhouse….”

I had heard enough. I stood. “Thank you, Miss Brown. I do appreciate your talking with me. You’ve been most helpful.”

Mary’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth opened, but I turned and walked away, past the nodding daisies, through the white gate, and down the road, thoughts traveling in a circle, like a problem of division that has no end. I passed more cottages, many of them, and a small church with a cemetery. I heard the clang of a blacksmith’s forge, and a mother calling for her child. I saw sheep dotting the pasture, made my way through a flock of honking geese, smelled someone’s baking bread. Nine hundred people. I wondered if my father could have known of all this. Aunt Alice, I was sure, did not. Robert’s gravy-spattered shirts might be given to the poor of the workhouse, but his inheritance never would.

My feet found the path snaking over the rise, and the blowing grasses rustled against my skirt. When I explained all that I had seen to the magistrate, Uncle Tulman was going to be put in an asylum. The law protected the inheritors of land. The estate would go to Fat Robert, and until Robert was of age, that would put Aunt Alice at the helm. I stopped walking. And when Aunt Alice was in charge, she was going to turn them out, every man, child, and Mary Brown of them.

The knowledge took firm hold while I stood on the path. They must have all understood what my presence here meant, from my first step over the threshold. Life at Stranwyne hung by a ribbon, a ribbon that was currently tied to my hand. I gathered my skirts and hurried up the slope, knees still weak from the last time I’d run up and down this hill. Lane’s reticence and hostility were no longer a mystery to me, or Mrs. Jefferies’s tears, or even the insults of Mary’s mother. Nine hundred people would go back to the workhouses, or worse. And yet, whatever might be left of Fat Robert’s dwindling inheritance could not be frittered away. It must stay intact. If it did not stay intact, then I would be left without the smallest hope of independence. I would die by degrees, smothered in the crimson of Aunt Alice’s morning room.

I looked up. I’d missed the turn to the kitchen garden. Stranwyne towered tall and brown on either side of me, throwing heat onto both cheeks while a stiff breeze whipped at my hair from behind. I entered a curving stone passage, house above and on either side, then stepped through an arch. There was the circular drive, the mouth of the tunnel straight ahead in the distance, to my right both land and house falling downward with terraced levels of rose gardens. A wagon was to my left, before the front doors of the house, my trunk corded onto its back and a boy lazing in the seat, waiting to take me away. Back to London, to Aunt Alice, her solicitor, and to the magistrate.

The wind had loosed many of my curls before the boy saw me, standing statue-like before the archway. He jerked upright and doffed his hat, but I did not acknowledge him. I stood, rooted to the ground like the weeds beneath my boots, because the path was no longer clear before my feet. The boy stirred, the reins held loose in his hands. A mighty gust of wind rammed my back, and I strode quickly to the front doors and grasped the latch.

“You may put away the horse,” I said over my shoulder, “it will not be needed. Not today.”

The latch rust was gritty, but the metal beneath it was shaded and cool, like the chilled stone of the chapel room. The memory of that soft laugh moved through my mind, echoing from nowhere, slithering across its walls, joined by the resonance that had wailed in the dark outside my window. I spun on my heel.

“And when that is done you may go to the Lower Village and bring me Mary Brown.”

“Lord,” Mary said, eyes sparkling. We had just hauled the trunk up two flights of stairs, into the corridor of the portraits, and opened the door to the bedchamber. “I never saw nothing half so grand, nor half so dirty. I …”

She chattered on in a way that rivaled my uncle while I stood in the doorway, a sense of unreality spreading numbness through my veins. Scant hours ago I had left this room thinking never to return, and yet here I was, and now it had a name. It was Marianna’s room — the blue of the ribbon and the auburn hair had shown me that — and the room itself no longer frightened me. It was what lay outside of it that made me tremble. I shut the door and turned the key in the lock, gazing at Mary dubiously. I had brought her here out of cowardice, really, to avoid being on my own. Now that I had her, I didn’t quite know what to do with her.

“Miss Brown …” I began.

Mary turned to me, hands on hips. “You must be calling me Mary. A body who’s gone and been pushing a trunk up all them stairs in a haunted house should be calling them that helped with the pushing by their Christian name.”

I chose not to puzzle through this logic. But Mary’s face was friendly, such an unusual expression when someone had their eyes on me, and she had been such a wealth of information before. “Mary,” I said, “I … I was wondering. Last night, when I was sleeping in this room, I heard a … noise, and …”

Mary leapt onto the bed and propped her chin on her hands, rapt.

“Rather like …” I bit my lip.

“Chains?”

I shook my head.

“Whispers? Creaks? Footsteps where there weren’t none?”

“More like … a howl.”

Mary’s nose wrinkled. “Good Lord, Miss, you don’t ever mean a trogwynd?”

I looked back at her blankly, mind full of ogres and evil spirits. Mary’s face fell.

“But a trogwynd is just … wind, Miss! Coming with a strong breeze north, and we’ve often got a strong breeze north. Ripping strong. My dad says ’tis an old word, and that the wind must’ve been making noise through the hills around here for a long, long time, but with Mr. Tully’s tunnel, ’tis like God blowing on an empty bottle of ale, that’s what my dad says….”

I closed my eyes. Wind. I’d been hugging my knees like a child over wind. Mary began wandering about the room as she talked, peeking behind curtains and opening cabinet doors.