He furrowed his brow, moved closer. His face was almost pressed to the glass. He was standing like that when he saw two men emerge from out of the east wing, carrying a long coffin-like box between them. They loaded it into the carriage on the far side and then stood talking near the horses. The driver was wrapped in black woolens with his face obscured by darkness and a rain cloak drawn over his head, his breath steaming in the cold. Something passed between the men, a small pouch. Then the driver climbed heavily up, unslung the whip. There came a jangle of harness, the squeak of ironshod wheels.
It was the passenger, though, that caught Charlie’s eye. He’d turned to climb up also and for just a moment Charlie saw him clearly, his features lit up in the faint red light. A scarred face, beardless. Hard eyes. The man looked around, then raised his eyes. He glared directly up at Charlie.
Whether he’d seen him or not, or just the shape of him there, Charlie couldn’t know. He felt a sudden deep fear. But it was then, sharply, with an unexpected force, he felt a hand on his sleeve and he stumbled and was pulled away from the window, into shadow.
He found himself staring into the face of Komako.
“What—？” he began, his blood loud in his ears.
He’d dropped the glass when he’d stumbled but Komako had somehow crouched and caught it, cleanly, just above the floor, so that only a little water had spilled and the glass hadn’t shattered and no one had awoken or come running.
She looked at him grimly and, without speaking, handed back the glass. She wasn’t wearing her gloves and he saw the skin of her hands looked blotchy and red.
The look on her face was fierce, alert, but also there was in it something else. Fear.
She raised a raw-looking finger to her lips.
“Shh,” she whispered.
And then she turned in her white nightgown and slipped silently away, back up the corridor, like a ghost, her long black braid hanging to her waist as she went, past all the other girls’ rooms, to the room she shared with Ribs. Charlie watched her go. Unbidden, Marlowe’s words came to him again, how they didn’t get to choose their lives, and all that happened was chance or fate, with no way of knowing the difference between.
* * *
It had been a strange encounter, almost like a dream. Whatever the rider and his passenger had been taking out to the dark carriage, Charlie couldn’t guess at. But Komako never spoke of it, and he knew better than to ask. And anyway, in the meantime there was daily life at Cairndale, and the whole strange world of lessons and of learning.
There were maybe fifteen boys at Cairndale. The boys’ bedrooms were all aligned along that same brief corridor with a master’s room—Mr. Smythe’s—at the far end, his door left ajar in the nights while the boys settled. Most of those boys were older, and white-skinned, though there were several Chinese and two silent brothers from the Gold Coast who kept to themselves. All of them snuck curious glances at Marlowe; even the older residents, and the teachers, would whisper and stare whenever Marlowe passed by. They’d all heard the stories; many of them had been there that night when Jacob Marber had broken into Cairndale. They seemed to think Marlowe half-miracle, half-monster, for having survived Marber’s attack. The hell with it: Charlie and Marlowe stayed in the little room they’d been given that first night; and other than Oskar, they had little to do with other boys.
It was Komako and Ribs they spent their days with. Miss Davenshaw had set the five of them up in lessons together, liking, as she said, the different abilities of each. “You will teach each other,” she said, “and learn that every one of us has our own gifts to share.” If she had other, darker reasons, she did not say.
They woke each morning to Mr. Smythe in the hall, ringing a bell, calling them to dress. Then came breakfast in the dining room, bustling, noisy, the scraping of plates and the shouting and the laughter, and then the scattering of the kids to their various lessons. Marlowe and Charlie, Komako and Ribs and Oskar: the five of them began each morning in the book-lined schoolroom of stern Miss Davenshaw, under her unseeing gaze.
It was probably the most normal of all that they’d learn there, though Charlie couldn’t know that at the time. Miss Davenshaw would stand rigidly at the front of the schoolroom and assign readings and tasks to each of them in turn, and they’d line up and take from her hands their assignments and sit back down and begin to learn. Charlie didn’t mind it, liked it even, going through his letters and learning to read more quickly, more smoothly. Then came geography, the acquisitions of the British Empire, the countries of the east, and an endless litany of cities and nations and languages. After that, the history of the British Isles, a list of kings and queens and dates of battles. And last of all they’d go through their arithmetic on the chalkboard in the corner, while Miss Davenshaw, though blind, followed along their work and tsked at each error, and the pale morning light slowly filled the high windows and fell across the bookshelves and crept, gradually, down to the carpeted floor.