The drughr knew none of that. And so Jacob was afraid, afraid the drughr would find out what he really intended, his betrayal, and afraid too that he’d fail, and what that would mean for the baby, and for himself.
For he didn’t plan to bring the baby to her at all. He would steal the shining boy away, far away, to some place where no one could hurt him, not Berghast, not the drughr, not anyone at all.
The sky darkened. The hour drew near. In the dusk the drughr turned toward the children. They were huddled together, staring at her in terror. They had already shouted themselves hoarse.
Go now, she said to Jacob, dismissing him. I will interrupt the wards as long as I can.
He went.
There were no screams, no cries from the two children. But as he climbed away from the river, making for Cairndale and the baby there, Jacob heard the wet ripping sounds of the drughr, feeding.
* * *
In a large well-appointed room, overlooking the deep loch, in the upper east wing of Cairndale Manor, there came a knocking at the door. The nursemaid rose from the window seat and from the cradle she was rocking. She was still a girl herself, in most ways. She buttoned her blouse. Her breasts ached, heavy with milk, and she hesitated tiredly and tucked her black hair up under her bonnet. It had been the envy of the village girls until recently. She knew the baby would sleep now until she slept and then he’d awake and cry and only settle when she walked the length of the room again, crooning to him. Yet he was a dear and sweet thing all the same. She drew the curtains around the crib, around the baby sleeping warm within. Her name was Susan Crowley, and she’d worked in the kitchens at Cairndale until a year ago when she was herself with child. That was because of a dairyman’s apprentice down in the valley, who was himself married; and though she’d done what she could to rid herself of the pregnancy in the French manner, nothing had worked, and she’d carried the baby to term. And then she’d given birth, and fallen at once in love with her tiny daughter and sure enough, that was when she was taken from her, taken by the good Lord like a kind of punishment. For that wee girl slept now in a churchyard in Aberdeen, dead of fever nine months ago, and Susan had cried herself sore every night after and still did sometimes, though she’d been engaged again here, and lucky enough for it, engaged for seven months now as a wet nurse to a foundling boy.
A boy unlike any other.
Oh, she’d seen him shine that strange beautiful blue shine, of course. She didn’t know its meaning or its cause. There’d been no harm in it, no danger that she ever saw. Only beauty. But she’d seen how Dr. Berghast looked at the baby, the fear and the fascination flickering in his eyes, and she’d known: the child was special.
The knocking at the door repeated, soft.
It was Dr. Berghast. He stood in the hall, the sconces casting his craggy face in shadow. For a long moment he only looked at her. She didn’t like the man, never had. It wasn’t only his gray eyes, the firelight twinned within them or the eerie way they followed you around a room. It was something else too, some indistinguishable part of him, like a scent, a scent of dark suspicion.
She stood aside as he came in, taking his hat from his outstretched hand.
“He is sleeping, then,” said Berghast, running a palm along his white beard, smoothing his whiskers.
“Yes, sir,” said Susan, dipping.
He swept past. Henry Berghast was tall, powerfully built, immaculate in his dress. He wore his snow-white whiskers long and his hair long over his collar in an old-fashioned style Susan had sometimes seen as a girl on her grandfather and his associates. She knew he was old, far older than he looked, though she did not know his exact age. He was a man of science, it was true; a doctor, no less; but he was also a man of dark proclivities with a sensitivity to the impossible, like everyone at Cairndale. You couldn’t live at the institute without seeing what shouldn’t be seen and understanding the nature of what went on.
Where, exactly, the baby had come from, Berghast did not say. But she had heard rumors, bits of stories, and knew it had something to do with the dustworker no one spoke of, the one named Marber, who frightened the old talents. There were no other babies at Cairndale, never had been; the next youngest talent was nine years old and cut her own meat and changed her own bedding.
Dr. Berghast slowly drew aside the curtain and stood over the crib. He looked at the baby, sleeping there. He had given the boy his own name—Henry—but he never called him by it and neither did she, if only because she thought it didn’t suit him, being the name of a man of ego and severity, and more like a stamp of ownership than a person’s name.