“How did she do it? How did she make it look like she could walk out of a fire?”
Dr. Berghast held out his palms, seamed with dirt. The bonebird clicked its wings at his shoulder. “That I do not know,” he said. “Carnival tricks, I expect. I am sorry about what happened. I have always believed faith and madness closely linked. I warned Adra. But she was willful, and determined to dabble in dangerous currents.”
“In her letters, did she ever … mention my mother?”
Dr. Berghast paused, studying her. His expression was calm, unreadable. He might have been searching his memory, he might have been considering how to answer.
“No,” he said at last. “Never.”
Alice, feeling a sudden fierce disappointment rise up in her, turned to go. “I appreciate your time, Dr. Berghast. And your candor.”
“And I,” said Dr. Berghast, holding out a hand to stop her, “appreciate all that you have done for young Marlowe and Charlie. Mrs. Harrogate tells me they would not have survived their journey north, not without you.”
“That was Coulton,” said Alice. “He’s the one deserves your thanks. And Marlowe’s guardian, who fought off the creature with all the teeth. Brynt.”
“The tattooed woman, yes. I did hear about her.”
“A terrible affair,” said Mrs. Harrogate softly. “A terrible loss of life. But there will be more. An evil is loose in the world, Miss Quicke, an evil of extraordinary appetite.”
Alice turned. She’d almost forgotten Mrs. Harrogate. “You mean Jacob Marber.”
“I mean the drughr.”
“Jacob is merely … its instrument,” said Dr. Berghast. He reached up to his shoulder and lifted the bonebird by two fingers up onto a perch. It shifted its grip sideways, cocked its head, its fragile bones clicketing. “I blame myself. It was I who found him in Vienna, you see. I glimpsed his talent. He was already who he would become, not a child any longer. I just did not see it then. I taught him myself; and when he came of age, I sent him in search of unfound talents. There was one child in particular, nine years ago, a dustworker like himself, in the Japanese islands. On the return voyage, he vanished. Your Mr. Coulton was with him; he said it had been a disturbing journey, that the child’s little sister had died.” Dr. Berghast slowly brushed the potting soil from his hands, with great heaviness. “Of course, we didn’t know then that Jacob had been seduced by the drughr. The following year, not far from here, a talent was murdered. A young mother. It was Jacob. He took her newborn child, right out of her dying arms, to feed it to the drughr. But I stopped him; I was too late to save the mother, but I saved the infant. I did that much, at least.”
“Marlowe,” whispered Alice.
“The boy you call Marlowe, yes. I stood as his guardian and father. But Jacob was not satisfied; he located two children bound for our institute here, and took the little ones instead down to the banks of the Lye, and cut their throats, and fed them to the drughr. And when the drughr was strong enough, it helped Jacob break into Cairndale. They were trying to steal Marlowe back.”
“Why? Why him?”
“That, Miss Quicke, I cannot tell you.”
Alice swallowed. “That is … it’s awful.”
“It was, yes. It still is. I blame myself. You must understand, at the time I knew so little about the drughr’s appetites. I’d thought the worst stories were like fairy stories. Oh, some of the old ones here believed. But I did not. I knew only that something had got through our orsine, that something had escaped.”
“What is this … orsine?”
“A passage to the land of the dead, Miss Quicke,” said Dr. Berghast. “Or so it appears; no one is entirely certain. There are two, in fact. The Paris orsine has been inactive for centuries, but ours still has the unpleasant habit of … opening. But the worlds must be kept separate, you understand, they must be kept in balance. And so we are tasked with keeping it closed. The dead are mortal, just as we are. They wander the gray rooms slowly forgetting, until gradually, over centuries, they dissolve away into the very particles of the universe. Imagine if they wandered back over.”
“How can you know all this?”
“How does a fisherman know what lives in the sea? I have lived alongside it all my life.”
“You are talking about souls.”
Dr. Berghast frowned. “I prefer to keep religion out of it. There are no hosts of angels, singing from on high. It is a world like this one, only different. And there is no returning from it.”