Which meant there was something going on. And, worse, there must be someone at Cairndale who knew about the carriage, who was helping make it happen. The thing was, Cairndale itself was such a pit of secrets, the vanishings could be nothing, or they could be everything. Komako had lived at the institute for almost ten years now and it was her home as much as anything and yet there were parts of it she’d not even guessed at.
But she knew plenty else. She knew, for instance, that the old talents at Cairndale were dying. There were eleven of them left, gray old men and women, shriveled like insects under glass, and they moved with the slowness of death. Sometimes they would take a turn about the yard, their nurses pushing their wheeled cane chairs, or themselves shuffling slowly in slippers and bathrobes. And she knew some of them went across to the glyphic at night, in the old rowboats, and that a few never came back, or came back weaker, frailer. No, not everything at Cairndale was as it seemed; but, of the many secrets that haunted it, none were sadder than Dr. Henry Berghast himself.
Oh, he was a good man, she had no doubt of that. It was Dr. Berghast, after all, who kept them all safe. Where he came from, she didn’t know. His age, his past, his family were all a mystery. He spoke with no accent at all, a curiously smoothed-out manner of speaking, as if he were from nowhere and everywhere at once. Strong-shouldered, fierce, he looked to be a man in his prime, but she knew he could not be. For there was a strain about his eyes; and his hair had all turned white. She’d heard the old talents talking: He’d been guarding the glyphic for eighty years at least, before even their memory. Seeing that the orsine stayed closed. But his obsession with the drughr was alarming. He slept little, leaving often in the night on business, no doubt in pursuit of the drughr and Jacob and what Jacob had become. Miss Davenshaw said he blamed himself for it. All Komako knew for sure was that this ancient, ageless man, this person with pale gray eyes and a deep sense of rightness inside him, this doctor, was slowly destroying himself, in his restless stalking of that monster. And it broke her heart to see it.
It was for this reason she hadn’t gone directly to him, hadn’t reported her suspicions about the disappeared, hadn’t warned him about the dark carriage. They didn’t know anything, not yet. But the three of them had taken to watching the skies for bonebirds, and creeping out to the wire loft where they roosted whenever they sighted a new arrival. Komako and Oskar would keep watch while Ribs snuck in, untied the message, read it swiftly, and then replaced it, all the while the bonebirds clicking and rustling and turning their eyeless sockets as if to see her better. So far they’d learned little, a few strange messages from Mrs. Harrogate in London, a message in garbled code from somewhere in France.
But then one morning Komako was sent as a runner to the old storeroom, Dr. Berghast’s laboratory. Standing at the beakers and distillers and weird bottled potions, Berghast had rubbed his eyes tiredly, taken the letter, dismissed her. As she turned to go she saw, stacked on his work desk, several plain brown manila folders. She knew where those files were from; and they gave her an idea.
If they wanted to trace the disappeared kids, they’d need someone who could clamber up the outside of the manor, in darkness; who could climb through Berghast’s study window; who could unlock the door from the inside. Then Ribs could get in, and bust open the big cabinet, and search through the files of all the talents who had ever been admitted to the institute until she found what she was looking for: the files of the missing kids.
In other words, they’d need Charlie Ovid.
Komako hurried through the halls of Cairndale, whistling softly to herself.
Because Charlie had just agreed to do it.
21
OTHER PEOPLE’S SECRETS
Alice Quicke found herself, as she traveled south to London, thinking of the dead.
There was Coulton, of course. She could still hear his voice, its dry reedy accent, she could see the wispy auburn sideburns he’d cultivated and the thinning hairs he’d comb across his pink scalp and the ruddy, pocked, jowly shape of his face. He’d made her crazy, true: secretive, insufferable, sarcastic half the time and smug the rest. But she’d trusted him, trusted him because he’d earned that trust and because he’d never treated her like a woman detective, just as a detective, and because above all he was a good man, and a good friend.
And yet, as she’d stalked the railway platform in Edinburgh, watching small groups of beggars fan out across the tracks, or sat unspeaking with Mrs. Harrogate in a candlelit dining car, their plates swimming with gravy and mutton and hash, it wasn’t Coulton who came to occupy her thoughts, but her mother.