Marlowe.
That was in his head. Marlowe. Over there on the island, lost. No matter how he tried not to think about it. Marlowe descending into the orsine, the spirit dead swept away before him, that fierce blue shine fading, all of it being drawn shut by Marlowe’s fists and then the explosion. Charlie lowered his head to his chest, eyes moist. He’d gone back to the island and searched the ruins for his friend but of course not found him. There was for Charlie only this world now. Later at the manor he’d picked through the rubble calling for Miss Alice or Komako or Ribs or Oskar or anyone, anyone at all, but there was no one, nothing, no sign of life, until he glimpsed Miss Davenshaw under a collapsed beam in what once had been the doorway of the east wing. She was all white with the dust, like a litch, just exactly like a litch. But if the others had got away or fallen somewhere far or were buried right under his feet he couldn’t tell and the not knowing was almost the hardest part.
It was all of it like that. He just didn’t know what to do. Whatever had happened to Jacob Marber and his litch, they were nowhere to be found. He’d dragged Miss Davenshaw clear and tried to wake her and when that didn’t work he’d looked around helplessly and then begun the long awkward climb with her held upright in his arms, up the ridge, away from the ruins, just trying to get away. There wasn’t any clear thought in his head other than that. She was clutching white-knuckled to a leather-bound journal, half of it burned away, but when he tried to take it from her he couldn’t pry her fingers from it and he gave up.
He went back down through the ruins and found in an unburned shed a planked wheelbarrow. The little panes of glass had been blown out in the explosion and he cut his hand on a shard and he stared at the blood welling up in his grimy palm and the way the blood dapped slowly on the handle of the wheelbarrow. That kind of pain didn’t matter. Not to a haelan.
At the loch he got Mrs. Harrogate’s body out of the rowboat where he’d left her and he wheeled her up to the ridge, her legs folded out over the front, her arms crossed at her chest, him not really knowing what else to do. It didn’t seem right leaving her. Miss Davenshaw still hadn’t stirred. He knew the columns of smoke would draw neighboring locals and that it wouldn’t be long—midmorning at latest—before the constables and newspapermen arrived. He wanted to be gone before then. He knew Scotland wasn’t Mississippi but still he didn’t want to be the only one left alive, a young black man, surrounded by destruction and white bodies.
But then, as the sun cleared the loch, Miss Davenshaw woke up. She raised herself groaning up on one elbow and turned her face from side to side in the red morning.
“Who’s that?” she croaked.
For a moment he couldn’t speak. “It’s me, it’s Charlie,” he said in a rush, suddenly overcome. All at once he was gulping air and sobbing, his shoulders heaving.
She was slow to reply. A quick complicated host of expressions crossed her face. “Charlie … Are we—？ Did anyone else—？”
“It’s just us, Miss D,” Charlie said. “I haven’t seen anyone else alive. It’s only just us.”
That was when he saw the smear of blood on the blind woman’s sleeve where he’d reached for her, and he lifted his palm in wonder. The cut wasn’t healing.
* * *
When he thought back on it later, he understood it must have been Berghast, at the edge of the orsine, who had done it. Somehow, with that burning grip, he’d ripped Charlie’s talent right out of him, had gutted him, left him drained and husked and ordinary, as ordinary as anyone.
He wrapped his burned wrist in a strip of torn shirt, carefully, awkwardly, and then also wrapped his bleeding hand. Almost at once a spot of blood seeped through. The pain throbbed. He was too surprised, too exhausted, too filled with sadness and anger at all that had happened to make any real sense of this new loss.
“Maybe it’ll come back?” he whispered to Miss Davenshaw, afraid.
She reached out a bloodied hand, as if to hold him. “Oh, Charlie,” she murmured.
They left Mrs. Harrogate’s body under a sheet in the courtyard at Cairndale, knowing the locals would bury the dead. That was Miss Davenshaw’s notion. But they took what they could find out of the rubble, a traveling satchel, some foodstuffs from the pantry. The closest thing to a clean change of clothes. Miss Davenshaw instructed him to go to the standing shed and in an overturned pot he found a coin purse and a stack of banknotes and these he brought to her. The bodies out in the field he stayed clear of and later when he found the little hand of a boy sticking up out of the wreckage he looked at it and then walked down off the slope and sat and he didn’t go back up.