Darkwater

six

Martha picked up the pile of shining coins and clicked them through her fingers. Then she dropped them back on the scrubbed boards of the table. “It’s a lot extra,” she said.

“Mmm.” Sarah blew on the spoonful of potato soup and swallowed it even though it burned her tongue. She wondered how to explain.

In the weak rushlight the page next to her chipped plate was shadowy. It was a battered dictionary, one of her father’s few possessions. She tore a chunk off the loaf, reading.

ALCHEMY: The medieval science of the Philosopher’s Stone, the search to transmute metals into gold.

Instantly, like a blow out of nowhere, the memory of her strange dream came back. She stopped eating, spoon paused in midair. The library. It was coming true. She was so amazed she almost didn’t notice Martha had sat down opposite. Martha never sat down in the mornings. There was too much to do.

The stout woman pushed back her graying hair. Then she said, “Or did his lordship give you the money?”

Alarmed, Sarah stared. “What?”

Martha sighed. “Lord, Sarah, don’t play Miss Innocent. I know Mrs. Hubbard turned you away. I heard about it at the market yesterday.”

Sarah dropped the spoon into the dish. “She didn’t turn me away. I left.”

“It’s all the same in the end.”

The baby gurgled in his crib; she gave him an anxious glance. “You’ve got your rent,” Sarah said hotly.

“Yes, but I’m worried about you. Lord Azrael . . .”

“What on earth makes you think I got it from him?”

“This.” Quickly, as if she didn’t like to touch it, Martha took a small white card from her pinafore and laid it on the table.

Sarah stared at it with cold fear. She had burned this. She’d watched it turn black and crinkle and fall into ash.

She reached out and turned it over; it felt smooth and cool. The familiar words slid over its surface. I FEEL I OWE YOUR FAMILY SOME RECOMPENSE.

For a second there was something darkly mocking in the sloping script.

“It was in the ashes when I cleaned the grate.” Martha leaned forward and caught hold of Sarah’s wrist. “What does it mean? Why does he want to make all right, after years and years?”

“It’s nothing. He’s given me a situation. In his library.”

“His library?” Martha looked puzzled. “With books? But why you? There’s learned folk would suit him better . . .”

Annoyed, Sarah pulled away. She took the soup dish to the scullery and scrubbed it fiercely in the cold greasy water. “Well, he’s asked me. He’s paying twelve shillings all found.”

“You’re to live in!”

Exasperated, Sarah turned. “All servants live in, Martha, and that’s all I’ll be. There’s a room for Papa too. It’ll be better for him than here. More like he’s used to.”

Even as she said it she saw Martha’s shock.

“But who’ll take care of him, the master? I always have! He knows me.”

“There’ll be servants.”

“Yes, and how they’ll despise him!”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Sarah snapped. “Or is it the rent you’ll really be missing?”

In the silence she knew it had been a spiteful thing to say. Martha turned and bent over the cradle; after a second Sarah crossed to the back door and opened it, feeling the wet breeze on her face, the wild cries of gulls over the plowed fields on Marazy Head. Out at sea a faint drizzle obscured the fishing fleet.

After a long breath she said, “Sorry.”

Martha had the baby out and was rocking him. Her face was flushed. “There’s talk about this Azrael,” she said obstinately. “That he spends nights in sorcery and speaking with demons. No one respectable goes near the Hall after dark. They say he’s found a way down to the caverns, and sometimes at night you can hear a roar like great engines churning underground. Ernie Marsden that lives out on the cliff says on full moon last week he looked out and saw the carriage there, and his lordship walking, at dead of night, looking over the sea. He’s a strange man, that’s for sure.”

Sarah shrugged. “Gossip. He’s a scholar. And a gentleman.”

“Indeed? They say the devil is a gentleman.”

The dry voice came from the bedroom. Sarah jerked around in alarm.

Her father stood there, supporting himself on his silver-topped cane. His face was mottled, and the black-and-gold silk dressing gown that had once been expensive fell loose around his thin body. He breathed heavily.

“You shouldn’t be up!” Martha hissed. She gave the baby to Sarah and brought a chair quickly to the fire. Then she tried to take his arm.

“Don’t fuss me, woman!” He lowered himself stiffly, chest heaving. It took him a painful minute to catch his breath; then he glared at Sarah. “So. You seriously expect me to go back to Darkwater Hall.”

“I thought . . .”

“You didn’t think!” His hands shook on the stained silver knob. “Not if you imagined that I would even cross the threshold with that . . . upstart living there. See my daughter a skivvy in her own house! Stay cooped in some attic and watch him . . . sitting in my chairs . . . eating from my table . . . taking the very food from our mouths!” His breath rattled; he spat into the fire. “What sort of Trevelyan have I bred? I’d starve here first.”

Azrael had been right, she thought grimly. This whole mess had come from pride, and it was still crippling their lives. Well, she’d be the one to end it.

“I’m going,” she said, firmly but quietly. “We need the money and he wants to make amends. If you don’t approve, Papa, then stay here. We can afford the rent.”

Martha had taken the baby into the tiny scullery. They heard him wail in dismay as he was washed.

Her father looked at her. He was so shrunken, every breath an effort. The silver cane and silk gown she had known all her life looked pathetic now, soiled bits of the past that he clung to stubbornly. His weakness frightened her. She came and crouched by the chair.

“Don’t forbid me. Because I’d have to go anyway. I know it’s hard. But would you rather me be some fishwife, stinking of herring, or go cap in hand to the workhouse? At least this is a job, something respectable.” She waited, but he didn’t answer.

They both knew she had to go, but he would never admit to it.

She stood up wearily. “I’ll get my things together. I’ll be home on my day off.”

It wasn’t until she reached the trundle bed that he put his head in his hands.

“How in God’s name did we sink to this?” he muttered.

There was little to pack—a few clothes, her mother’s cameo brooch, an old notebook, all stuffed into one of Jack’s sacks. He had come in from the fishing and was watching, uneasy. “Any trouble, Sarah,” he muttered, “and you come back. Just come back.”

“Thanks, Jack,” she said, tying the sack up. Her father had gone back to his room. She glanced at the closed curtain. “Look after him, won’t you?”

“Don’t you worry. We will.”

Outside, she walked to the stile, climbed it, and looked back at the cottage. On the doorstep, Martha was waving the baby’s tiny fist.

In the deep lane the wind died away. Between the stone walls a flock of bramblings scattered into the bare thorns of gorse. She walked quickly. There was no point looking back. And there was something inside her, she knew, that was glad, that wanted those warm, comfortable rooms, the soft carpets, the sense of being someone.

She took the shortcut over the fields and into Darkwater woods. Usually she would have avoided this track, but she felt reckless and free, and it was quicker than walking up the drive. Most of the Darkwater estate was farmland, with small wooded ravines and combes in the folds of the cliffs. Every bay and cove along this coast belonged to it, every shipwreck, all the rents of the tenantry in the tiny hamlets, Cooper’s Cross, Durrow, Mamble, even the tollgate on the road to Truro. And these woods around Darkwater Hall, an ancient wildwood hardly thinned or managed, threaded with mysterious paths.

She knew the way. But the drizzle thickened, a gray soaking mist moving in from the sea as the short afternoon waned. It hung around her like a fog. She stopped, one hand on a damp oak trunk, listening.

The wood was silent. No birds. No gulls. Only the sea mist, closing quietly.

For a moment, doubt about the whole thing overtook her. She weighed the sack, uneasy. Maybe she should go back. Maybe Martha was right. Then, just ahead, in the grayness, something loomed, and she groped toward it through the brambles and felt its cold hollows with her fingers.

Stone.

It was one of the Quoits.

She jerked her fingers back instantly. The Devil’s Quoits, everyone called them. The story was that the devil had thrown them from the cliffs, aiming at the tower of the church, but they’d fallen here, a line of three leaning stones. That was another superstition. It might suit Jack and Martha, but not her. In one of the books in the school, she’d read that stones like these were put up by people thousands of years ago. Still, she didn’t like them.

They leaned in the fog. Faint lichen grew on them, green splotches of spores, and they were scored with long grooves, as if by great claws. They barred her way. She’d go home.

Not far behind, a dog growled.

The sound made her flesh crawl. She turned and looked back.

A padding of paws rustled and pattered in the thick drifts of invisible leaves. And then, far back in the smothers of drizzle, a great black shape was running toward her, muscled and lean, tongue lolling out, eyes like tiny red coals.

She turned and fled. Breathless and gasping she struggled frantically through branches that whipped into her face, thickets of conifer and holly. All the fog seemed to be panting at her heels; behind her it thudded as if a pack of spectral hounds, dark as mist, was hunting her down, running with her, and as she ducked under a yew into darkness she stifled a scream, feeling a hot wet tongue on her neck, teeth catching her shawl. The fabric tore; yelling, she struck out at nothing with the sack, stumbling back out of branches into sudden space, a clipped hedge, a gravel walk.

At once she turned and raced along it, under the dark fog-wreathed mass of the house toward the slot of light that was opening. Yellow lamp light streamed out; it sent her shadow out behind her, stretched and flitting, and she had a sudden horror that the shadow-hound would grab it and gnaw it, but even as she turned to look the door was pulled wide and the terrace walk above the sunken garden was empty but for drifts of fog through the light.

“For Gawd’s sake,” a voice said irritably. “I’m not standing ’ere all night!”

Scrab held the lantern up, eyeing her bedraggled breathless panic. Between his feet the cat slithered in, its fur soaked.

She slid in and slammed the door. It felt solid at her back.

Scrab turned. For a moment she thought he was grinning. “Welcome ’ome” was all he said.