“What’s the matter with him? Is he sick?”
“Not sick, Charles,” said Mrs. Harrogate. She swept into the room in her black skirts. “Dead.”
Coulton looked over at her. “You never said you found him.”
“Well. You only just arrived, Mr. Coulton.”
Charlie was afraid they’d be angry he’d strayed from his room but neither appeared so. This surprised him. Mrs. Harrogate went to the window and parted the drapes with two fingers and watched the rain against the warped glass.
“He is a litch, Charles,” she said. “He is both dead and not dead.” She turned. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You yourself know something of what is and isn’t possible, I think. We were led to believe Mr. Laster died of consumption, oh, what was it, seven years ago, Mr. Coulton? Yet it seems someone has found a way to preserve him.”
Charlie stared at her, bewildered. “Preserve him—？”
But no one explained more.
“It’s him, isn’t it, Margaret?” said Coulton. “It’s Jacob. It’s got to be.”
Mrs. Harrogate nodded.
And then Mr. Coulton stepped forward, reeking of pipe smoke and ash. He leaned over the sick man on the bed, the sick whatever-it-was, the litch. He laid a wary hand on the creature’s forehead, took it away in wonder. “Did you know Jacob could do this?”
Mrs. Harrogate frowned.
“He’s gotten strong,” she murmured.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate left Coulton and the boy settled in the parlor and went up to the fifth floor, to the attic, drawing a shawl over her shoulders, pulling on her kidskin gloves. It was cold, this high in the house. She did not affix her veil. She unlocked a little iron grate at the top of the stairs and dragged it rattling open, and then went into the drafty stinking loft. The rain was still coming down, steadily, miserably, drumming on the roof. Beyond the little watch balcony, through the glass doors, she could see the cold brown haze of the city. One door stood always open. The tar paper was sticky and pooling under it.
As she neared the big wood-and-wire loft, she could see, behind the landing board, the dark shapes of the bonebirds, silent, unmoving, little fists of stillness on their staggered perches. A newly arrived one waited in the trap.
Carefully, she unlatched the door, stepped inside. She pulled the thick leather hawk glove onto her left hand and regarded the creatures. They were delicate, pale constructions of bone and feather, their hollowed eye sockets dark, their skulls tilting side to side. Gruesome, really. But they needed neither sleep nor sustenance, nor did they ever get lost. Dr. Berghast had built a strange clockwork breast piece to hold their ribs and breastbone in place, and the curious gears and armor enclosed their vertebrae and the soft backs of their skulls.
She took out the message from the bonebird’s leg, tied with black thread, and unscrolled it. It read, simply:
Do not examine the M. child. Bring him north at once. Proceed with C. Ovid as usual. —B.
At the standing table she took out a small paper from the drawer and licked the stub of the pencil and wrote out a brief reply. She paused before adding that the second child, this Marlowe, was still en route. Then she rolled the paper tightly and tied it with a red string and slipped it into the little leather pouch on the nearest bonebird’s leg.
Slowly, so as not to disturb the creature, she carried it out into the rain and threw it into the air. Soundlessly it rose, flapping, circled the roof twice, and was gone.
It was not like Henry Berghast to take an interest in the unfound talents, let alone to be agitated about any particular one. But this last boy, Marlowe, from the Illinois circus. The name was unfamiliar, but Margaret knew him all the same. She remembered the terror of that night, seven years ago, prowling the dark grounds of Cairndale with lanterns, dredging the loch, raking the underbrush with poles while Jacob Marber howled out there in the highland dark. The cradle stilled in the nursery, the nursemaid’s bed empty. It was why Berghast wrote every few days, driven, furious, why he sent bonebirds south at speed, demanding updates: Had they yet arrived, and in what condition, and had she noticed anything peculiar? Oh, she understood.
Had her life been different, had her dear husband not been taken from her so soon, had they been blessed in that way—why, she too would’ve stopped at nothing to get her own child back.
* * *
When she’d seen the bonebird off, Margaret put on her veil and descended the rear servant stairs and went out into the city. On Thorne Street a cab went clattering past, very near, the horse’s hooves splashing in the puddles, the smell of wet horsehair and iron in her nostrils. The streets were full despite the weather. She walked two blocks east and then turned north, away from the river, passing a tea shop and Wyndleman’s Bank. She bought three beef-and-onion pies at a seller’s wagon at the edge of the park and then trudged back through the puddles, the hot greasy papers folded up under her arm.