By the time the long shadows had retreated halfway back across the loch they were already walking. Charlie could see riders on horseback approaching even as he and Miss Davenshaw left the grounds for good, clambering over the low stone wall of the perimeter, the columns of smoke still rising slowly from two of the outbuildings behind them.
Later in the morning they were picked up by a market wagon and rode the rest of the way into Edinburgh and when they got to Princes Street they went at once to the railway station and bought a ticket direct to King’s Cross, in London. “We can disappear there,” Miss Davenshaw explained. He didn’t ask why, or from whom, or for how long. He just kept touching his bandages, feeling the prickle of a pain that would not leave him. She told him they’d go south to an address that had belonged to the institute and stay there for a time while they decided what to do next.
She meant, of course, the building at Nickel Street West.
* * *
Gradually he got used to the idea of what he was now, an exile, a lost talent. He was what his father had been before him. If he did not heal, he was no different than Alice, or his mama, and he had loved and admired them both. Nevertheless it amazed him that he wasn’t more devastated by the change. Each morning he awoke, and felt the dark London air on his skin, and laced his boots, and felt the heat of his blood in his fingers, and thought of Marlowe alone in the land of the dead. His own misfortunes diminished at such times. Instead he’d remember a destitute boy, sentenced to death in Natchez, confused by his talent and frightened of it and thinking himself alone in all the world. That boy felt almost like a different person, someone he wished he could find, and talk to, tell him: It’s not okay, but it’ll get better.
Because it had. He saw that now. Even after everything. After meeting Mar and Ko and Ribs and Oskar, after learning about his father, after entering the orsine and walking through a dead world. His first life seemed like a dream. What he’d seen since was the more real. He’d witnessed the spirit dead rise up out of the orsine, had felt the icy swarm of them scrabbling for the glyphic’s heart. He’d seen a drughr drained of its power, and he’d watched his best friend descend down into that other world, sealing it up behind him. There was a new quiet sadness inside him now. Not just his own loss. Charlie’s only refuge in all the world had burned down around him. His friends were lost, likely dead. Whatever he was now, whoever he was becoming, it was nothing like the boy he once had been.
For several weeks they stayed at Mrs. Harrogate’s old lodgings, eerie though it was for Charlie, haunted by the crooked shadow of what had happened there, the litch scrabbling across the walls, its claws at his throat. He remembered too the strange not-London of the other world, the foyer of that watery building, and had to suppress a shudder every time he went out. But they went out only for food and necessaries. They’d had to break the lock to get in, and though Charlie did his best to repair the gate, it still would not close properly, and they were both of them wary. Miss Davenshaw was quiet, brooding, obsessed with the burned journal she had carried out of Cairndale. Charlie would read passages to her for long hours at a time, the gas lamps turned high, a candle sometimes lit in the sconce beside the sofa.
As for him, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Marlowe was not gone, was not dead, that he was somewhere inside the orsine, on the far side, still alive. He had no reason to think it and every reason to think its opposite, except for his friend’s parting words, and the feeling he had. One night he told Miss Davenshaw what he felt, about how maybe Mar wasn’t dead. Miss Davenshaw only pulled him close, and held him.
* * *
The journal he read from each night had belonged to Dr. Berghast. It was charred and there were pages missing and the entire back cover had been ripped off and the papers smelled of smoke and oil and dead things, and when he rubbed his fingers together they smelled of it too. Sometimes he would have to put the journal aside. It felt like a relic from that terrible night. Little in its pages made sense to him. There were columns of numbers, or dates, and half-legible scrawls observing colors and times of day, all of them records of some kind of experiment. All this he dutifully read aloud. There was an entry recording three names, with described locations, which Miss Davenshaw asked him to reread several times while she sat with her face turned aside and her brow furrowed.
“They are from the glyphic,” she breathed at last. “Mr. Thorpe’s last findings. Children. Talents. They’re still out there, somewhere.”