Something in the narrow darkness of the tunnels made him think, for the first time in years, of those early happy days when he and his twin brother, Bertolt, had worked as sweeps in the chimneys of Vienna. They’d felt free. The orphanage was finished with. The crew of street kids they’d found was quick, and efficient, and well-fed.
It was autumn still, the weather not yet bitingly cold, and they’d slept tiredly together in a disused cellar among old casks, needing neither blanket nor fire. The other kids, the ones they’d joined, lay sprawled all around them each night, and each morning the sweep boss would meet with them in the alley and give out the brooms and pans and addresses for the day’s work.
They were nine years old. It was the first time Jacob had noticed how beautiful the city was, the tramcars and the ladies in their finery and the smells of the vending carts in the parks. Bertolt showed him everything, as if somehow he knew the city, knew the world in ways Jacob didn’t. He’d always been the bold one, of course, the clever one, Bertolt had, the one who made things happen. “Because you’re special, Jake,” Bertolt would say, “because you need someone to watch out for you. That’s why. I can’t do what you can do. I’m not special.” He’d always talked like that, whispering it at night, his face on the orphanage pillow, while the nuns patrolled the hallways in grim darkness. He always made Jacob feel like living was worth it, like you didn’t give up, no matter how hard it got. But Jacob knew it wasn’t true too, what Bertolt said—his brother was special, he had a goodness and a cleverness that no one else had, especially not Jacob himself. All through his earliest years Jacob admired him and wished he was more like him and loved him more than life itself.
There came a sound from the tunnel behind him. Jacob paused, listening. A dap of water on stone. He wasn’t the only creature down here, moving through the darkness, with purpose.
The sound didn’t come again. The tunnel was impossibly black only a few feet in either direction. He stood in the dirty halo of candlelight, looking back and forth in both directions, feeling small and alone.
Maybe Henry Berghast knew he was coming. The thought came to him in a flash. But then he disregarded it; it could not be so. Anyway, there was no turning back now.
He crept on, his blood loud in his ears. The darkness parted to let him pass and when he had passed that same darkness closed in behind him, absolute.
* * *
After Dr. Berghast had left, Susan Crowley rose swiftly and threw on a shawl and lit a candle and went to the door. She listened. He was gone.
So. He wanted to send the baby away.
The wrongness of it startled her, angered her. She wasn’t used to feeling angry, it wasn’t an emotion that came easily to her, she’d lived all her life being told what to do and where to go and how to get there, and the right to be angry wasn’t something she knew much about. But this filled her with a quick surprising heat. What did Dr. Berghast know of babies and their needs, their safety? He refused even to hold the child. She was blinking sharply, trying to think it through.
It’s not like she hadn’t imagined it, sometimes, fleeing with the baby into the night, away from Cairndale, away from Dr. Berghast. But always the baby was older, less delicate, hardier. And she knew, too, that her fantasies were only just that: fantasies.
She went quickly over to the cradle and checked that he was sleeping safely and then she went out into the hall. She was looking for Miss Davenshaw, not sure just what it was she’d say, but sure that the older woman would have something worth the saying. She knew Miss Davenshaw had her own misgivings about Dr. Berghast, and the way Cairndale was run. Oh, it was nothing the blind woman had said out loud—she was far too discreet for that—but rather the silences, the disapproving frowns.
But Miss Davenshaw was not in her rooms. Susan passed two girls, talents she did not know by name, hurrying down the hall, both in their nightdresses and looking guilty. She gave them a weak smile. They blushed, hurried on.
She knew that feeling, that fear of getting caught, whatever it was. Strange to think she was only a few years older than they.
On the landing she caught a glimpse of a woman in black, her face veiled. It was that grim woman up from London. Susan nodded politely, hurried past. That woman frightened her. She was a confidante of Dr. Berghast and did his bidding in the capital and was not to be trusted.
In the foyer, Susan found Miss Davenshaw seated on the long sofa, in front of the fire, her hands clasped in her lap. She might have been waiting for Susan, so quiet and patient did she appear.