The Golden Specific (22 page)

Theo waited. As twenty-hour approached, he heard the footsteps that he was expecting: four police officers hurriedly made their way up Broadgirdle's front walk. They passed through the gate, and one of the officers pounded on the door. A light went on in a second-story window. Theo smiled to himself in the darkness, but the smile was as much to encourage himself as it was to celebrate the success of this first step. He was deeply nervous.

More lights appeared, and finally, some minutes later, Theo heard the front door open. Broadgirdle's booming voice cut through the still night. “Well, officers? What are you doing here at this hour?”

“Mr. Broadgirdle, we received an anonymous tip that your life was in danger.”

“In danger? From what?”

“The note said that you were entertaining guests this evening and that one of them meant to assassinate you.”

There was a pause. “Does it look to you like I am entertaining guests?”

“Well, no, Mr. Broadgirdle, but we would nonetheless like to be certain. Especially after the tip that warned us of the prime minister's murder at Minister Elli's house. That one was correct, after all.”

“Very well. Come in.”

The officers entered, closing the door behind them. More lights were illumined on the ground floor. And then the rear door of the house opened.

“Mortify, Until!” Broadgirdle bellowed into the darkness.

Theo heard the scuffle of boots and then the rear door closing. He hurried to where the wrought-iron fence met the brick wall. Scrabbling up the fence, he peered into the garden. It looked deserted. He swung up onto the top of the wall, then dropped down. As his feet landed, the tension in his stomach crested, setting all of his nerves off like alarm bells. He did not have much time. Broadgirdle would allow the policemen to search the house, but his patience would soon wear thin.

Theo padded quickly and quietly toward the shed. A light was on inside; it shone dully through the dirty windows. The door was padlocked.
Of course it is,
Theo thought grimly. He could hear Broadgirdle protesting from somewhere inside the house. Rounding the shed, Theo found two
windows—firmly latched—and one small casement window, facing the brick wall, that was propped open.
Gotcha, Graves!
he thought. The space between the garden shed and the brick wall was tight—perhaps a foot and a half. Climbing into the shed was out of the question. But perhaps the window would open wide enough to let him see inside.

Theo shimmied up the wall, propping one foot on the bricks and the other on the shed until he was just below the window. Then he pulled it open as far as the wall behind him would allow and peered in.

A single gas lamp sat on a worn wooden worktable in the center of the room. Pruning shears, a watering can, and a roll of twine sat beside the lamp. Rakes and brooms, shovels, and a few broken beams filled one corner; empty wooden planters were stacked in another. Along the walls were more worktables covered with gardening supplies: pots, spades, burlap sacks of dirt. A chair stood by the worktable.

There was nothing unusual in the room. It looked just like an ordinary potting shed. Theo squinted, willing the room to come into focus, waiting for the secret guarded by the Sandmen to reveal itself. Nothing happened.

Broadgirdle's voice reached him clearly from an open window on the second floor. “Are you satisfied now? I would like to get back to sleep.”

Theo shook his head in frustration. He had only a moment before the Sandmen returned. Suddenly the lamp flickered, and the pruning shears, left carelessly open, took
on a different aspect. Was that rust on the cutting edge of the shears, or blood?

Unbidden, a memory of driving Graves's wagon broke over him. It was the first time Theo had been tasked with driving it, and Graves assigned it to him only because the wagon was empty. The air was deadly dry. The horses were slow and, as always, they were injured. Their smell wafted up behind them, and Theo felt like he was just one more pile of waste, sitting on the wagon bench downwind from the horses. He was driving alone from Refugio to Castle, where he would meet Graves. At the time, he had only been aware of how he hated the wagon and hated Graves and hated himself for driving one to the other. He hated himself most for not running away, now that he was left alone and in command of two horses—albeit two very worn and rather useless horses.

In later years, when he allowed himself to think about it, he understood that Graves had given him the task precisely with this objective in mind. He didn't care about getting to Castle sooner on his own fast horse. He only wanted Theo to feel gutted by a lack of courage; he wanted him to feel fully, during every one of those fifty-six miles, that he was
incapable
of running away. Graves was good at that. He knew what the slow cultivation of fear could do to someone, especially a child. It made you totally powerless, so that even when you seemed to have your freedom, you did not.

Theo had seen enough. He let himself drop down into the narrow space between the wall and the shed. As he hit the
ground, the casement window that had been propped open suddenly slammed shut, and the sound reverberated through the quiet garden. He froze.

There was silence from inside the house. Then several pairs of feet hurried out into the yard. “The rest of you stay inside,” one of the officers commanded. “Secure the front door and the ground-floor windows. Did that sound come from your shed?” he asked the MP.

“I cannot say,” Broadgirdle responded gruffly. “My guess is that it is one of the neighborhood cats. I very much doubt you will find an assassin hiding in my shed.”

His voice was terribly near. Theo felt himself shrink against the wall, wishing he could disappear into the ivy.

“Nevertheless, sir, we'd like to check.”

“Very well.” There was a brief pause as Broadgirdle fussed with his keys, and then the shed was unlocked. Theo crouched down. “As you see, I have nothing here but gardening supplies.”

Theo realized that this was his only moment to escape unnoticed, unless he wanted to spend the entire night crouching in the damp darkness. While they were searching the shed, he would have to circle around it and flee through the garden. Theo knew he had to, but he could not bring himself to do it. Graves's presence, so close and hidden by only the thin wall of a garden shed, muddled his thoughts. He felt like he was nine years old again, and shifting even a foot from where he had hidden himself seemed impossible.
You can't stay here,
a voice in Theo's head shouted at him.
Move. Move now!

With a burst of effort, he stepped as quietly as he could
along the wall, away from the main house and into the darkness. Once he was clear of the shed he took a deep breath. The garden spread out before him; it seemed a mile long.
I can't do it,
he thought.
Someone is going to see me.
Before he could doubt what he was doing, he turned to the garden wall and hauled himself up it, struggling with the creepers that tore, tore again, and finally held him. He rolled himself over the top and landed blindly in the neighbor's garden. Crouching against the wall, he fought to steady his breathing.

Theo could hear the men on the other side hurrying out of the shed. “A cat, you said?” the officer asked tersely. “I believe your garden has been invaded by something rather larger. I will leave two officers here—”

“That really is not necessary.”

“I insist. And we will wake the neighbors to see what manner of ‘cat' has visited them.”

Theo closed his eyes and pictured himself from overhead. He was sitting against the wall, and beyond it was the street, and beyond the street lay all of Beacon Hill, twinkling with lamps on every corner. His Goodyear was only a few blocks away. There were any number of escape routes. He just had to take one of them.

Rising quietly from the damp ground, he walked to the rear of the much smaller garden. Broadgirdle's neighbor, he realized with relief, was a reasonable human being who didn't hide bloody shears in his shed. There was a simple back gate with a latch and no lock. Theo opened it and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He closed the gate soundlessly behind him and took
a deep breath. Walking slowly, steadily, as if he had decided to take a turn around the neighborhood to get some fresh air, he crossed to the other side of the street. He thrust his hands into his pockets. They were shaking.

As he walked downhill toward the Goodyear, he began to feel better. He had learned something and he had not been caught. The euphoria started to make him giddy, and all that had seemed so frightening minutes before seemed suddenly laughable.
I'm on to you, Graves,
he thought, grinning fiercely in the darkness.
You're guilty as sin, and I'm going to prove it. This time, you won't get off so easy.

 24 

Errol's Pursuit

E
RROL
F
ORSYTH
,
THE
phantom hunter, sat at the table, mending his cape by the faint light of the fire. Seneca, the falcon, stood at the far end of the table, preening his feathers. They both glanced occasionally at the girl, Sophia, who, some half an hour after sighting the phantom, was still visibly upset. She had not protested when Errol began dragging the heavy wooden crate on wheels, but instead followed him dumbly, half weeping into her cupped hands. Now the planter stood outside in the courtyard of the abandoned house where he had been taking shelter for the past week, and the chickpea stew he had made earlier was bubbling over the fire.

The girl reminded him powerfully of his younger sister Catherine, whom he had not seen for so many years. She had the same unyieldingly serious face, pensive when she was glad, brooding and sorry when she was upset. Errol smiled to himself, thinking of the time he had banished that sorry look by teaching Cat to make the thrushes eat seeds from her palm. Observing the girl, he thought to himself grimly that it would take more than a few thrushes to expunge the memory of the phantom.
Poor child,
he thought. He finished the seam, tied a knot, and snapped off the thread with his teeth. Then he got up and ladled the stew into two ceramic bowls painted white and blue. He placed the bowls on the table, placed a pair of spoons beside them, and turned to Sophia.

“Come eat,” he said.

Sophia got up wordlessly. Before sitting down, she opened her battered satchel and took out an equally battered half-eaten loaf of bread. She gazed at it a little mournfully. “It tastes better than it looks.”

“Thank you,” Errol said gravely.

“Thank
you
,” murmured Sophia. “For taking me in.” She looked up and met his gaze. “And for before, in the street. Though I don't understand what happened.”

“I will explain all of that to you soon enough. For now, let's eat.”

Sophia found, to her surprise, that the chickpeas were delicious. She was so eager to eat them that she burned her tongue. Without saying a word, Errol ladled more into her bowl and
sat back to eat his own. After the second bowl, a hunk of the bread, and a glass of water, Sophia began to feel somewhat better. She looked around the room.

They were in a house that had once been comfortable. The shelves were carefully built into the wall and stacked with the blue-and-white dishes. The mullioned windows had fine lace curtains, and copper pots hung above the open fire. The table and chairs were worn but well cared for, and above the table hung an iron candelabrum that at one point had fully illuminated the room. Now there were only two candles, burned down to pale stumps.

The phantom hunter looked entirely out of place among the pretty crockery and dainty curtains. Even without his gray hood, he seemed like a creature more fit for the wild outdoors than a candlelit kitchen. Tall and angular, he had broad, callused hands with blunt fingers. His dark blue eyes met Sophia's and held them, making her more uncomfortable by the second. She could read nothing in those eyes about the man behind them, but she felt that her every thought, every moment of her past, was visible to him.

“Does your bird eat bread?” Sophia asked, scattering crumbs on the table. It examined them coldly.

“Seneca is a falcon. He eats meat, and he hunts it himself.”

“Oh. So you are both hunters.”

“I suppose you could say that. Seneca hunts mice; I hunt phantoms. You can see which one of us is wiser.” Errol lifted his finger and Seneca clacked closer to him, then pushed his
head against it. “I found him near Córdoba when he was only a ball of white feathers. Could not hunt at all, then.” Seneca bit his finger gently in protest. “Even now he is a lazy hunter. You are more philosopher than predator, are you not, Seneca?” The falcon turned away from Errol and walked back to his corner of the table, then contemplated the fire with a beady eye.

Sophia gazed solemnly at the falcon and then turned back to Errol.

He put his spoon down. “You want me to explain what the apparitions are,” he said flatly.

“Yes.”

“People here believe they emerge from the Dark Age. That they are sent to lure us into those dark pathways so we will be eaten to pieces by the spines.” He stood up, stretched, and put another log on the fire. Though the day had been blisteringly hot, the warmth had vanished with the sun, and now the night was sharp and cool. Errol sat back down. Despite his height, he moved smoothly, almost gracefully, as though every motion had a foreseen and intended conclusion. “Perhaps they are right. I do not know for certain what they are. I can only tell you how I have come to know them.”

“All right,” she agreed.

“I come from the Closed Empire. You may have noticed it from my speech.” Sophia nodded. “I serve a lord there, my family does, near York. I was the falconer before I left three years ago. My twin brother worked with milord's horses.” He looked up at Sophia, as if expecting some response. She looked back at him expectantly. “My twin brother is named Oswin,”
he went on. “It was three years and seventeen days ago that I saw Oswin drawn away by a specter.”

Sophia caught her breath. “Drawn away?”

Errol gave a small nod. “He saw an apparition—unclear, insubstantial, but still recognizable—and was transfixed by it. I saw it all happen, for I was not far away. We stood in the field at dusk. I was returning from the stables, and he waited for me, as he often did, so that we might walk together and talk before sitting down to supper. But before I reached him, the phantom appeared.”

“Who was it?”

“It was not a person. It was the phantom of a thing—an animal. A horse that ran away when we were children. I recognized it by the toss of its head, and so did Oswin. I heard Oswin call to it by name. I followed, thinking as my brother did that some strange spirit of the horse, or the horse itself, had returned to us.” He shook his head. “But it was not the horse or its spirit. It was a fell thing that drew him across one field and then another. I pursued him, caring nothing for the horse but gravely distressed by how my brother seemed not to heed or even hear me. The night deepened, and we passed into the forest.” Errol turned to the fire. Sophia waited. “I lost him there,” he said, in a hard voice. “In the darkness. Though I could still pursue his trail. In the town beyond the forest they had seen him, and in the town farther south they had, also.” He passed a hand quickly over his eyes. “I will not tire you by telling you of every sign I sought and found, but suffice to say that I pursued Oswin for a year, farther and farther south, until we were
at the very edge of the Papal States, and I began to doubt my own sanity.

“But here,” he said slowly, “I found that others had seen phantoms. It was not so uncommon as it had seemed to me in York. I saw them for myself—other specters. As dusk fell, they emerged, each with its intended destination. The people in the cities and towns north of here live in mortal fear of the phantoms, believing if they are bewitched by them, they will be drawn into the Dark Age.

“Then I had a chance discovery. I ran out of arrows.” Errol paused and smiled briefly to himself. “The mistake of a novice. So I cut new ones from an orange tree—crude things with too much bend and hardly a point. And when I launched them at the apparitions, they vanished. Now I cut fresh arrows each day. The green wood is, as yet, the only method I have found for banishing the shadows—at least for a single night. They always reappear.”

Sophia felt a rapid pulse of relief.
She'll be back again tomorrow,
she thought.
She's not gone.

Errol picked up his spoon, then put it down again. “By then, I had reached the road from Seville to the border of the Dark Age. And there I lost the trail. No one had seen Oswin, though plenty had seen him farther north. He was easy to mark—a pale, blond youth from the Closed Empire, identical in appearance to me. Many before had seen him. But then all sign of him vanished. That was two years ago.”

He was silent for so long Sophia thought his story had
ended. Seneca walked across the table once, examined Errol's plate, then retreated to his corner and turned his back on them. Sophia felt her caution of the phantom hunter fading. He was just like her, this Errol Forsyth: seeking lost family, across great distances and with impossible prospects.
Here,
she thought, reaching into the pocket for the spool of thread,
is someone who will understand what I am doing. The Fates have been kind to place him in my way.

Suddenly Errol spoke again. “Then I began to see Oswin's likeness. It always arrives at dusk—that was what you saw. A sad, pathetic thing. With a strange face that seemed made of some page from a monk's book. I do not know what it means.” He frowned, and his eyes, reflecting the fire, seemed filled with flames. “I refuse to believe that he is dead. I have seen the phantoms of the dead, and this is not one of them. True phantoms are heavy, toxic with grief. These are light, as if illuminated by a searching flame. He is alive,” he said fiercely. “I am sure of it.”

“Does he speak to you, too?”

“Yes. Always some nonsense.”

“He says the same thing each time?”

“No. Different things. I have long since stopped listening. The words have no meaning. It is not Oswin, that specter.” He took a breath and his face relaxed, growing pensive. “For the last two years, I have traveled all throughout the towns and cities here, but I have had no further sign of him. I have circled the perimeter of the Dark Age twice, but I will not venture into it.”

Sophia considered him. “Because it is not allowed by the Orders, or because it is too dangerous?”

“I care nothing for what the Orders allow or do not allow. But the Dark Age is not to be trifled with. It may belong to some distant past, but it is still here. It is the dark heart of the Papal States. We all have one,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “a dark point at our center, where it is wise not to enter or look too closely. My Dark Age is as dark as any other.” He flexed his hands. “I refuse to believe he is there. Not Oswin.” He took his eyes from the fire to look at her. “And you must have lost your mother, or she would not have appeared to you as a phantom.”

Sophia nodded. The piercing blue gaze seemed kinder now, though the expression on Errol's face was unchanged. “She and my father disappeared when I was small. They were explorers. I'm here because I think there may be word of them in Granada. My mother left a diary there. I was to travel with another woman from Boston. Remorse. But she never boarded the ship. She . . . I don't know. She made arrangements for me to meet someone in Seville at the port. They weren't there. I am not sure if they ever will be. So who knows if I will ever get to Granada.” Errol gazed at her a moment longer after she had stopped speaking, then nodded.

“I will go with you,” he said without looking at her, standing up to throw another log on the fire.

She hesitated, surprised by the offer. “Thank you. But I can't keep you from your search.”

“You are not keeping me from it. And it is a long road to
Granada. It circles north all the way around the border of the Dark Age. Besides, this is what I do: wander futilely, hunting my brother's ghost while my brother himself continues to elude me.” He spoke without bitterness, but with a heavy sadness that sounded to Sophia very like defeat.