She nodded mutely.
“I’m speaking of the river, the wall, the curtain, the shroud, Mrs. Harrogate. I’m speaking of the passing from this world to the next. Death, madam. Of which we know more than we realize.” He leaned in close, his voice lowering. She caught the scent of peppermint, of pipe smoke. “We need the dead more than the dead need us. But the human body is made up of nearly as much dead tissue, as living. Think of that. We carry our own deaths inside us. And who is to say, in death, that the proportions are not reversed? The chemistry of death, the physics of dying, the mathematics of the realm of the dead, these are the mysteries science hasn’t yet begun to approach.”
He blinked softly, liquidly. He wet his lips. He was handsome, and frightening.
“There are some few among us, Mrs. Harrogate, old now, who were gifted once, who were born with certain ineradicable … talents.” He searched her face carefully. “The talent to manipulate dead cells, for instance. You’ve seen it, perhaps, in your husband’s work. No? It can appear in many strange forms. It can appear to heal, or to destroy, to suspend life or to resurrect it. It’s never the living tissue that is interfered with. These men and women have lived at Cairndale a long, long time. Since I was a child. Before that, even.”
“Cairndale’s a kind of … hospital?”
“A private clinic, you might call it. Most private.”
Margaret Harrogate, in her widow’s weeds, had stared hard at her visitor, thinking. “You are offering me his job,” she said, confused. “My Mr. Harrogate’s job.”
“Your husband had great faith in you. It was his own wish.”
Dr. Berghast got up to go. She saw the ferns arranged at the windows had not been watered, not in at least a week. From his satchel her visitor produced a thick ream of correspondence between her late husband and himself, tied with twine, and he laid it on the banquette.
“I am trusting in your discretion,” he said at the hat stand. “Whatever you decide.”
She read it slowly by candlelight over the following weeks. The institute, it seemed, occupied a manor house that had been built in the seventeenth century, on the edge of a loch, absorbing the property of an old monastery, all of it some distance northwest of Edinburgh. Dr. Berghast had been raised on its grounds, the son of the old director, of the same name, until he had taken on the role himself. There was much talk in her husband’s letters that she didn’t then understand, talk about an orsine, whatever that was, and the institute’s guests. In time she would come to know more of such matters than she wished. But at that time, as she read, she realized only that she’d seen it once, at a distance, that first summer of her marriage, walking the length of a low crumbling wall that encircled its grounds, arm in arm with her husband. Sunlight, a sky so blue it was nearly black. That was high on a cliff of strange red clay, overlooking a dark loch, and an island beyond, the stone ribs of an ancient monastery just visible on it, and a golden-leaved tree rising up out of the ruins. There was a fine manor house on the landside shore, beyond. A stand of dwarf pines swayed darkly in the wind below. In the stone perimeter stood an archway, built maybe in the fourteenth century, green with moss, etched with strange markings, gated now with a black gate with the Cairndale crest prominent upon it, and it was there she and her young husband had stood, peering through the bars, going no further.
So it had been.
Intrigued, at a loss, she had written to Dr. Berghast that she would indeed be pleased to take on her late husband’s duties. And her strange second life had begun, her life as it had been for nearly thirty years now, her life of secrets and darkness.
Her work did not often take her north, to the institute. On the rare occasions that it did, she would halt the carriage sometimes at the gate, remembering her husband, wondering at the life she might have had. The years passed; she grew old.
Then a new thing appeared, something awful. Dr. Berghast called it a drughr, a creature of shadow, neither dead nor living. She’d already heard rumors by then, of course, hints of strange goings-on at Cairndale, whispers of Dr. Berghast’s experiments. She’d tried to stopper her ears against them. But she herself had glimpsed, on her occasional treks north, how he was changing: she knew he was afraid of something, something unnatural. And so, when he wrote to her about the drughr, warning that it was stalking the young talents, the unfound children, she too was afraid.
Which is how it all started, ten years ago: the findings. Dr. Berghast sent two men to 23 Nickel Street West to work under her instruction. They would locate the children, orphans all. Both were capable men, quiet, grim. And they would bring the orphans to her, squirming in burlap sacks if need be. Their names were Frank Coulton, whom she had met before; and Jacob Marber.