Jacob: there was a time she’d almost pitied him. Found by Dr. Berghast himself on the grim streets of Vienna, plucked out of poverty, gifted a better life. But no one had seen him in more than seven years, not since that terrible night when he’d attacked Cairndale itself. That was when it all went wrong, when he turned against the institute and slaughtered those two children on the banks of the Lye, starting in on those awful unnatural acts, what he did, what he swore he’d do, those acts from which there’s no way back, not when a darkness gets into you and corrodes what you are and leaves you turned inside out, the seams showing. After that he’d vanished, stolen away off the face of the earth. Some said he’d been devoured by the drughr. But Margaret knew otherwise: she knew he’d been seduced away by it, had fallen under its sway, and that he was out there still, stalking the children, like a monster from bedtime stories.
Oh, few things frightened Margaret Harrogate. But Jacob Marber did.
* * *
All this was in Margaret Harrogate’s thoughts as she wrestled Walter out of the hansom, and through the locked iron gate at 23 Nickel Street West, and up the four flights of gloomy stairs to the room she had prepared. She’d employed neither servants nor cooks since the death of her husband on account of privacy and her own solitary nature. Hard work never bothered her, even when she was a girl. But she could not abide gossip nor the superstitions of servants.
She left Walter unconscious, tied at the wrists and ankles to the strong oak posts of the undressed bed, and went back down for the glass specimen jar, and placed it, after some uncertainty, on the parlor table under the window. She took down the potted ferns, one by one, put them on the landing.
When she returned upstairs, Walter was awake, staring at her with a mix of fear and deviousness. He had somehow lost his shoes. She went to the wardrobe in the corner and took from the top shelf a pipe and a little chipped dish and a tin canister the size of an ointment jar. She unscrewed the lid and took out, with care, the small black gum of opium, and she cut off a little twist of it and smeared it in the dish. Then she untied one wrist. Walter rose up weakly onto his elbow and took the pipe without speaking, and she went out and came back with a candle and she passed the flame back and forth under the dish until the black gum began to bubble and smoke. He breathed the fumes in through the pipe, long deep drafts. Fell back in the bedsheets with a sigh.
Her usual method did not involve opium, of course. She kept a powder in small brown-paper packets in a locked drawer of her desk, a powder that encouraged the more recalcitrant of her visitors to share their truths. It got them talking. But Walter would need something stronger.
Margaret Harrogate set down the dish and blew out the candle and took the pipe from Walter’s damp fingers. Then she lowered her face so that her lips were next to the shell of his ear. She knew many things already. She knew Jacob Marber had left Walter here, in the filth of London, to hunt down the keywrasse. She knew it was a weapon of such power it could destroy even what Jacob had become. She knew he feared it; and she knew he must never find it.
Slowly Walter’s chin lifted. His eyelids were fluttering, translucent, as the drug took hold.
“Walter, Walter,” she said softly, “go on now, tell us. Tell us about Jacob. Was he here in London with you? You must try to remember.”
Walter’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Jacob … Jacob was here.…”
“Yes, yes, good.” She stroked his bald head gently, like a mother. “But he went away?”
“Jacob … he left me.…”
“Yes, he did, Walter,” she murmured. “But where? Where is Jacob Marber now?”
5
AND BRIGHTER STILL
The stranger came down through the dust and the swale with a sinister long-legged stride and he cut up onto the road and without slowing he turned west, into town. He seemed to cast no shadow. When he passed the old Skinner place with its broken-backed barn the sun slid behind a cloud, the afternoon itself darkened. He came striding on. He wore a black coat spotted pale with road dust and a high black hat drawn low over his eyes, and a black scarf hid his face, and he seemed not to tire at all as he walked.
The blacksmith watched his approach with a feeling of foreboding and when the stranger stopped the smith straightened at his forge. His sleeves were rolled for the heat and his shirtfront was sticky at his chest. He could not explain it but he felt a deep uneasiness.
In the doorway the stranger paused, the daylight casting him into darkness.
The smith was used to travelers in distress but when his visitor didn’t speak he cleared his throat and prompted, “You get into some trouble back up the road, mister? What can I help you with?”