The children would arrive. They always did. If not tonight, then in the morning.
The dining hall was quiet, dark. It had been cleared hours ago. She had no appetite but perhaps a pot of tea would calm her nerves, allow her to sleep. She had asked to have something put aside for the children when they arrived but though she called out, no one answered. She made her way through to the back kitchens. They had all gone.
But as she was turning to leave she felt something, a faint chilled breeze, coming from the cellar. She thought at first a door or a window had been opened or broken. But the air smelled strange, damp and sour, like an emptied grave.
She made her way down the stairs, into the cellar. She did not know this storeroom well, and went with care, feeling her way along the shelves, following the breeze. And then she came to a shelf that had been clearly moved aside, and felt the cold edges of the tunnel entrance, and understood.
She’d been at Cairndale long enough to have heard the stories of tunnels under the manor. She knew Dr. Berghast had an underground passage leading from his study across to the island, to the orsine there. But she’d not heard of a tunnel here.
She withdrew slowly, thinking about it. And then she made her way back up to the kitchens. A serving girl, Mary, exclaimed in surprise at Abigail’s emerging from the cellars, but Abigail had little patience for it.
“Send for Mr. Smythe,” she said sharply. “And Mrs. Harrogate, if you can find her. Tell them to bring lanterns. There is something in the cellars that must be seen to. Hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl, catching the tone in her voice.
Abigail Davenshaw listened to the girl’s shoes clatter away across the floor. What she was thinking was that some of the children, the young talents, must have descended into the tunnels on a lark. But it would be dangerous, she knew, and if they became lost …
It did not occur to her—not in that moment, at least—that the tunnel mouth had been opened for the very opposite reason: because something had come in.
* * *
Quickly, now.
Jacob hurried up the stairs, through the kitchens, along the back passages to the servants’ stairs, up two more flights to the rooms at the top of the east wing. It felt strange, being back. He knew these halls, these rooms, the very shape of the manor as if he had always lived in it and never been away, even now, even with its differences, a strange shelf, a new wallpaper, a framed watercolor over a bureau that had not been there before.
He was surprised at how angry it made him. But surprised, too, by the longing that came over him as he crept through the dim halls. He saw no one. But he could feel through the walls the sleeping talents, the young ones dreaming of their unlived lives, and the old ones, nearly dead now, dry and thin as paper. They meant nothing to him. They had done nothing to help him, to bring him back from that other world, to offer him refuge when he’d glimpsed the true nature of the drughr and recoiled in fear. Somewhere ahead he could hear Walter, moving with a surprising stealth, his lantern shuttered now, stifling a cough now and then. Perhaps the man was not as useless as he seemed. Jacob himself walked calmly, with long slow strides, as if these rooms and this manor were his own.
But he was not calm, not really. He was listening with all his powers for a particular footfall. For somewhere among all of it, he knew, stalked Henry Berghast, restless, fierce, suspicious.
He’d known men like him, even as a boy, even on the streets of Vienna. Men who wanted what they wanted and let nothing get in the way, neither pity nor scorn nor human frailty. His brother, Bertolt, had fallen prey to such a man. Herr Gould, their sweep boss, had a huge round belly like a drum, and a red face, and hands the size of shovel blades. When he heard Bertolt had got stuck in a chimney across the city, he’d come and tied ropes around the boy and dragged him clear, despite his screams of pain. Jacob had tried to get up to stop it but he couldn’t, he was too little, there were men in the gathering crowd who held him back, and it was raining that day and his talent just wasn’t strong enough to do anything. Bertolt came out dead, his head turned backward. And Herr Gould had carted his twin brother away and dumped him in an alley among the trash when no one was watching, no one who mattered, that is, because Jacob and the other sweeps were there to see it. Jacob had sat with his brother’s body among the filth for hours, while night fell around him, and when he rose at last he wasn’t the same boy.
That’s how he thought of it, remembered it, now. If it was the truth or not, who could say. But in his mind it was his brother’s death that changed him, that opened him, in time, to the drughr.