ALBANY CHANDLERS, Purveyor of Fine Candles Wicks Lanterns Preserving Fats & Oils of All Kinds. Edward Albany, Proprietor. Est. 1838.
A faded red awning with holes punched in it dripped over the stoop. A lidless barrel held God only knows what sort of effluent. There was a dead rat lying directly in the middle of the steps, left there by some enterprising cat. That, or poisoned. The shop looked dark, deserted, unwelcoming. But as they watched, the sign in the window flipped to OPEN. A pale face materialized in the glass, peering out at the street, then vanished.
Ribs grinned. She drew her hood up over her hair and affected her upper-class accent. “Well, my dearies. Do let’s go pay good Mr. Edward a visit, shall we?”
Oskar made a face.
“She’s not going to do it like that again, is she?” he whispered.
“Ribs—” said Komako. “Just … be careful. You don’t know what’s in there.”
“I’m always careful.” She grinned.
“If you see any sign of Brendan or any of the missing kids, you come right back. Okay?”
Ribs winked. Then she turned with a flourish, so that her cloak billowed out around her, and started across.
* * *
That same morning, at precisely five minutes past nine, Abigail Davenshaw rose smoothly from behind her desk and, running her hands over her skirts, crossed the quiet schoolroom to the hall. The manor was cool, filled with a scent of wet grass coming in through the opened windows. A coal fire burned behind her in the grate.
She’d seen no sign of the young talents all that morning, neither Komako nor Charlie Ovid nor anyone. Not at breakfast or in the corridors or in the yard. “Seen” being, perhaps, a strange word to use. For Abigail Davenshaw was, of course, blind; had been born thus, without sight; but because she had never known seeing, it was not a thing she missed, and she’d learned ways of navigating the darkness of her world with a swiftness and clarity that rivaled others’ sight. She was fastidious with her appearance, wearing her hair off her neck and not a strand astray. She had learned the importance of this early in life. She was the illegitimate daughter of the housekeeper of an estate in the Midlands, and the reclusive lord who had retreated there had taken it upon himself to cultivate her intelligence. Why, she would never know. Kindness or charity, an experiment or something else entirely. When she was little, he’d read to her from the classics, Shakespeare and Dante and Homer, and later from the modern sciences, later still from the philosophers and modern poets. She’d learned the theories of light and of matter and the new laws of thermodynamics. She’d learned languages and music and dancing and even, strangely, the arts of fencing and boxing.
“It’s not about seeing with the eyes, child,” he would say to her, “but about listening with the ears and with your skin and using all the good Lord saw fit to give you.”
She had a remarkable memory, and would quote back to him long passages word for word, and this, too, encouraged him in his education of her and in this way she grew, slowly, into a formidable young woman. How Dr. Berghast had found her, she’d never know. He’d written to her without introduction six weeks after her benefactor had died, and her mother, old by then, haltingly, had read out the letter in surprise. It seemed the Cairndale Institute had heard tell of her remarkable education and wished to employ her, in turn, in the education and guidance of their own rather unusual children.
She went now quickly along the corridor, tracing her fingers lightly over the wall, the familiar bumps and grooves that told her where the turnings came. She could feel the shifts in the air pressure, in the temperature, that warned her when a door was opened, when a person was approaching. In her rooms she kept a long switch of birch, very smooth, used by many with her impairment to scan their surroundings for obstacles. But she herself used it only rarely, only when she was going into unfamiliar territory.
She retrieved it, now.
The first place she went was to the girls’ dormitory. There she stood in the doorway of the empty room, with her chin lifted, listening. The place was empty, she could sense it in the particular kind of silence and in the way the air moved around her. Drawing the switch back and forth through the air, tapping her way forward, she felt around Komako Onoe’s bed, and then the rumpled poorly made bed of Eleanor Ribbon. Neither had slept there that night; she would swear to it. She sat very lightly on the edge of Komako’s bed and felt around under the pillow. Nothing.
So. The girls had been gone since late the previous night.