“Yes, Oskar, what is it?” said Miss Davenshaw, turning her face in his direction.
The boy entered the schoolroom, out of breath. He had a string tied around his finger and he was wrapping and unwrapping it nervously.
It was then Charlie saw, squeezing in behind, a second figure, a hulking shapeless thing. It could have been the boy’s shadow except it was massive and solid, or nearly so; it seemed in fact to be the consistency of jelly, shuddering slightly as it moved, but marbled and slick like raw meat: a faceless thing that turned its faceless head this way and that, as if trying to see whatever Oskar was seeing. Yet it had no eyes to see by, nor ears nor lips nor mouth nor nose. Flies buzzed around it; a reek of turned meat entered the room and lingered. Beside Charlie, Marlowe caught his breath. But Charlie had no time to wonder at the thing, at the—what had Ribs called it?—the flesh giant; for Oskar had been sent with a message.
Alice had woken up at last.
19
HOUSE OF GLASS
Marlowe and Charlie, Charlie and Marlowe.
They were what Alice had, now.
She was kneeling in the grand foyer of that manor house, as if to receive some sacrament, while the two boys came to her, and she took them into her arms, and she held them to her heart.
She could have held them like that forever. But there was much to discuss; and after Mrs. Harrogate had taken her leave, the boys walked Alice carefully, worriedly, back up to her room. They were wearing identical white shirts and gray waistcoats and gray trousers, unfussy, ill-fitting. She hated the anxious tenderness of it, but was grateful too. She would not meet the girl who had run in first until the following day; nor any of the other young talents, the girl who could disappear, the boy with the flesh giant. Instead she and Marlowe and Charlie remembered Coulton; they grieved him, Marlowe steadfastly refusing to talk about Brynt; and together the three of them, that first night, went out onto the lawn after moonrise and held hands and said a prayer in memory of their dead.
Not everything was sorrowful. Cairndale’s crooked halls, its labyrinthine interior, the drift of voices and old persons disappearing around corners, all of it made their first days there eerie and lovely, somehow, as if they had stepped inside a children’s story. They stood on the stony beach of the loch and peered across at the island, and the ruined monastery, the golden tree growing up out of the stone ribs. Alice herself slept, and continued to heal.
And on the third morning, as she was rising from her breakfast, she was informed that Dr. Berghast wished to see her.
She was taken by a servant through a rear corridor and outside to a glasshouse, domed and built of wrought iron, its thousands of little panes steamed over and opaque. Constructed against one side of the carriage house, with a bare sandstone patio facing south, it looked, she thought, more like a delicate landlocked ship than an orangery. Across the lawns she could see the stables, and far beyond that, the low stone wall marking the property.
The first thing Alice noticed was Mrs. Harrogate, waiting for her in the entrance, the bandages taken off her ear. Harrogate’s face still looked battered, her eyelid marbled but no longer swollen.
The next thing she noticed was Mrs. Harrogate’s outfit: a checkered cloak and a matching hat, a small traveling case clutched in both hands. She was leaving for London.
Last of all she noticed a powerful-looking man down one aisle, white-bearded, wearing a leather apron with pockets, whom she at first mistook for a gardener. A gray-and-white bird hunched on his shoulder. He was bent over a little iron cart, repotting a seedling of some kind. But under his apron he wore a black suit and a crisp high collar, too fine for such work.
“Oranges, Miss Quicke,” he called. He nodded up at the trees beside her, his hands still working the soil in the pot. “And we have strawberries also, for consumption in January. The heating is the difficulty. I am told they construct boilers now that can run all the night through, far more efficient than steam.” He glanced up at her. His eyes were a startling pale gray, as if lit from within.
Alice, uncertain, shot a questioning look at Mrs. Harrogate.
But Dr. Berghast, for that’s who he was, only beckoned her closer. The joints in his wrist and shoulder popped softly as he did so. “A visitor once came to Heraclitus for advice and was embarrassed to find him warming himself in a kitchen. Kitchens, you see, were undignified spaces in ancient Greece. But Heraclitus only said, ‘Come in, come in, do not be afraid. There are gods here too.’”
Just then the bird on his wide shoulder made a strange clicking noise and Alice saw, with some alarm, that it was made out of bones. An iron brace like a kind of armor held its delicate vertebrae in place. Its sleek feathers were stark against the armor.