The Iron Thorn

11 A Clockwork Heart

MY CREEPING FOOTSTEPS kept time with the invisible pendulum. The lamp in my hand gave off a buttery glow, older and more secretive than the crisp blue of aether globes.

Graystone sprawled like a spiderweb, and the hallway twisted and turned back on itself. Soon enough, I was walking an unfamiliar hall and could only go forward until I reached a landing. The sound came from below me, in the empty space where the stairs and their threadbare carpet vanished into shadow.

Nobody showed themselves. The dust floated in the lamplight like ghostly fireflies, and my only companion was the sound.

I descended the stairs and found myself in a back hallway, which in turn lead to a back parlor. All of Graystone’s furniture sat swathed in dust catchers, lion feet peeking out from under their white skirts. The only uncovered thing in the room was an old-style wireless box, its aether tubes cloudy and dim with disuse.

I left the parlor and found another faceless hallway, where portraits of Graysons past watched me with dour frowns, cobwebs trailing from their frames. I stopped and raised the lamp, gazing at each face in turn, trying to find some clue to myself. There were precious few who looked anything like me among the starched clothes and serious eyes. The mossy green color of those eyes, though, was the same as mine. I turned away and tried a few doors, iron handles cold to my touch. Each was locked, and I left them that way. I wasn’t a sneak, but my father didn’t know that. I could only imagine being caught breaking into Graystone and snooping around. I wanted him to meet me on good terms, and approve of me, and nod in acknowledgment that I was his daughter. My heart sank, though, as I wandered farther and farther afield, each turn of the hall yielding nothing but dust and desolation. And the sound, always. Graystone was dead, hollowed out like the carcass of a beast. My father—or anyone, for that matter—hadn’t been here in a long time.

I turned into what I recognized from my fevered state as the front entry hall, and the marble chilled my stockinged feet. I’d been re-dressed in my bloodied sweater and ripped blouse, but they weren’t much good for keeping out the cold.

Across from the grand staircase to the second floor, I confronted a pair of pocket doors carved with a peculiar forest scene. Creatures cavorted under fruit-heavy trees, but they weren’t creatures I’d ever encountered. These were half men, half goat. I reached out a hand and touched them. They felt delicate under my fingers, wrought by an artist who had the finest touch with his chisel. They were beautiful. Strange. Certainly forbidden by the Proctors, I felt sure.

I pulled my hand away. From behind the doors, springs wound and weights swung. Tick. Thock. Tick. Tick. Thock. I hadn’t managed to find Conrad or my father, but at least I’d found the source of the sound.

I tugged at the brass pulls, made in the shapes of the north and east wind, great billowy brass clouds for hair and sharp lightning-bolt noses, rings caught in their teeth.

I stuck my finger in the east wind’s mouth, then yanked it back again like the thing might really bite me. I let out a nervous giggle.

Tick. Thock. The sound was louder, or perhaps I was just nervy from the dark house and the knowledge that even if my father had locked the place up and gone somewhere less dank and forbidding, I was trespassing here.

When I at last tugged on the handles, the doors were locked and I virtually collapsed from relief. I didn’t need to be the lone adventurer any longer. I could creep back upstairs and be in bed before Dean realized I’d ever been out of it.

Still, I wished I’d seen what kind of clock could reverberate its gears through brick and wood, to the ears of sleepers rooms away. I touched the doors once more and gave them a last, experimental tug.

To my surprise, a heavy clacking arose, and the locks opened. The doors themselves slid backward on some kind of self-propelled mechanism, and a puff of stale air kissed my face as they settled open with a clank.

Spinning, I looked behind me to see what might have triggered the doors. My thoughts didn’t jump to viral creatures, but rather to an angry Archibald Grayson discovering a thief or my mad brother playing one of his tricks. Shadows leaped with the jostling of my lamp, painting the shadow of man and phantom on the walls of the entryway.

I was alone, though, and when I realized the fact, a little fear got in with it. The walls of the Academy and of Lovecraft were behind me. Here, there was nothing between me and things lurking in the dark, feasting on blood and sanity.

Deciding that I was safer in a closed room than out in the open, I hurried through the doors, which rolled shut behind me. I jumped at the sound, but what was before me was mesmerizing. My lamp showed gold-stamped spines in jolting shadow, mellowed wood and well-used leather chairs. A closer inspection revealed I was in Graystone’s library, and my feet sank into rich carpet with a whisper of welcome.

It was truly a glorious library, twice the size of the Academy’s. Impressive, I’d wager, by even New Amsterdam’s standards. The shelves ascended to the ceiling, and the volumes went on for what looked like miles.

I spun in a slow circle, like another sort of girl might do in a dress shop full of the latest confections for the sort of girls who got asked on dates and to dances. The library was not dusty or dead like the rest of Graystone. It looked loved and lived-in and used. A writing desk sat shoved to one side near a pair of worn leather armchairs. There was nothing on the walls, none of the ornate accoutrements the rest of the house boasted. This was a library, and my father clearly wanted all of the attention on his books.

But, in the golden light of my lamp, I saw there was one object in the room besides the copious volumes.

On the opposite side of the long narrow room was a leviathan clock—a full-bodied, intricate machine, much different than a pocket chronometer. As I watched, the hands swung in a parabolic arc, their wicked spiked finials grinding to a halt at twelve midnight. The chimes let out a discordant, muffled bong.

The hands swung again, and I stepped closer, watching them trail across the clock face like compass needles that had lost north, the unearthly ticking echoing loud enough to vibrate my skull. Each numeral was actually a tiny painting, wrought in delicate ink. A naked girl lying sleeping on a stone. A great goat with the body of a man sitting on a throne. A circle of figures in a dark forest who wore the sign of Hastur, the heretical Yellow King, whom cultists worshipped before the necrovirus. According to Professor Swan, and who knew where he got his stories from?

Looking at the clock for too long, at the silver gears beneath the face that spun like saw blades in the bloodred cherrywood case, made me dizzy around the edges. The shoggoth’s bite began to throb, sending needles up and down my arm, and I put out a hand to steady myself against the shelves. Brushing the leather and the wood settled my head, but only a bit. Friendly as the library was, the clock was a monstrous thing, a machine of bloody teeth. It didn’t scare me—it was a clock, after all—but it transfixed me, started a tremor of unease. I felt the urge to bolt, clear back to my bedroom.

I had to stop thinking of it as my bedroom. My father had made it clear by his fifteen-year silence—Conrad and I were Nerissa’s children. We had only a mother.

The hands of the clock reached midnight again and another bong vibrated my skull. The chimes were dulled, as if stuffed with cotton wool.

As if something was inside the case, muffling them.

I hesitated a moment, the aura of the clock pulsating around me, and then decided I was being a silly child. I tugged at the case until it sprang open, varnish coming off sticky under my hand. Touching the clock made me dizzy again, but I peered into the whirling gears and swinging weights and caught the edge of a vellum scrap stuffed between the black glass chimes. Whoever had broken the clock had left a note.

My small hands, the bane of my mechanical engineering instructor, Professor Dubbins, fit neatly into the thin space. I touched the paper and pulled it free, but I was careless. A gear bit into my thumb and a fat blood droplet welled on the pad.

I hissed, and sucked at the digit. The bleeding didn’t stop—the puncture was deeper than I first thought—and when I examined the spot, my blood soaked the corner of the vellum. I let it drop by my feet and wrapped my thumb up in the tail of my ruined blouse, tightening the linen around it for pressure. A little more blood wouldn’t matter.

The clock whirred faster, the hands only a blur as they spun. A rattlebone chorus of ticking grew inside my skull, and I scrubbed at my forehead with my free hand. The shoggoth’s poison was undoubtedly still in me. I shouldn’t have slipped out of bed. It was the poison, I told myself, not anything else. Not what had been in my blood to start.

I grabbed up the vellum scrap and retreated to the far side of the library, hoping that distance would take away some of the looming malignancy that the clock had set in my mind.

Near the doors, I stopped and unfolded the scrap, holding it close to the lamp globe. What I expected, I can’t say. A coded message from a Crimson Guard spy, perhaps, or a warrant issued by the Proctors. A love letter from my mother.

Instead, Conrad’s handwriting grabbed me like fingers around the throat.

AOIFE

More ghost ink. More secrets for only my eyes. Conrad had put a note here. He’d made it to Arkham after all. Conrad might still be alive.

Conrad might still be sane.

My hand shaking so hard the paper looked like moth wings in the oily light, I held the vellum over the flame. It curled, crackled, and my fingers singed because the scrap was much, much smaller than my brother’s last letter, but I held on.

The ink burned, turned, twisted and, with a huff of smoke, gave up its secret.

Fix it.

“Fix what?” I demanded of the acrid cloud. “What, Conrad?”

Sharp needles of heat in my fingertips warned me, and I dropped the paper on the carpet just as it burst into flames and gave a whip-crack snap of yellow powder as the chemical of the ghost ink combusted. I stomped on the flames until they went out, leaving a burn hole in the carpet.

That was simply terrific. If my father did return to Graystone, he was going to tan my hide.

A floorboard croaked in the hallway and I froze, mind and muscle. I’d watched a lanternreel about feudal Japan in history during my first year. The emperors of centuries past had fabulous peak-roofed palaces, and in the palaces, nightingale floors. Wood that sang, and announced the presence of the enemy, that warned the feudal lords when assassins were close.

My heart became a stone. My hand itched for Dean’s switchblade.

A long thin shadow crawled through the open doors of the library, echoes of long thin footsteps following.

I blew out the lamp and inched back against the books, their soft spines flexing under my weight.

The figure in the door was long-legged and loping, and tangled its feet in the carpet. One pale hand with pale wormy fingers reached out and felt its way along the books, coming close. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed in time with my heart, and I shrank back, but too slowly. The fingers brushed my hand, leaving contrails of cold.

Terror fired me, and I struck, balling up my fist with my thumb tucked outside and under like Conrad taught me and carrying my blow with the weight of my shoulder behind it. My knuckles glanced off jawbone and it felt like broken glass had buried itself in my hand. The long shadow and I both yelped.

“Cal?” My heart could have outpaced a jitney.

“Eyes of the Old Ones!” Gears chattered from an unseen device and then a thin, wavering line of blue lit up the space between me and Cal. Cal carried an aether lantern with a crank handle, the bubbly glass filmed over from age.

“I’m sorry …” I tried to touch the rising welt on his jaw, but he jerked his head away. “I thought you were something else.”

“What else would I be?” Cal cranked the lantern again, to little effect. The aether inside the globe was ancient and nearly white.

“I thought …” A living shadow, a cold thing from the primordial pool of the necrovirus, something from under the ground looking for a feast. “I guess I don’t know,” I finished, looking at my hands—anywhere but Cal’s face.

Cal put a finger under my chin and lifted my gaze to his own. “Are you seeing things, Aoife? We can go home right now, petition the city for quarantine. You’re a girl. They won’t send you to the Catacombs. Probably won’t,” he amended. “You are a runaway.”

“I saw something in the dark and I didn’t want to get digested by a nasty, slobbering viral creature for the second time today.” The knuckles on my left hand were skinned and turning purple. Cal always assumed the worst. He didn’t realize that sometimes a girl just got irritable.

“We could still go back, you know,” Cal said, taking my injured hand in his and producing his handkerchief. He wrapped my hand once, twice. My blood made small blooms on the snowy fabric and he stared at them, his throat working. “You’d have to be in quarantine for six months, but there’s always a chance they’d let you out if you didn’t … you know.”

I yanked my hand out of his. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground and he snatched it up. “You’re so sure I’m going mad, Cal, then why are you still here? I’m sure if you ran home now and licked the headmaster’s boots he’d be overjoyed to readmit you.” It was bad enough thinking that madness was encroaching. I didn’t need my best friend accusing me as well.

Cal’s lips disappeared into a thin line. “That was cruel, Aoife.”

“Well,” I blustered, “you want me in quarantine.” Quarantine meant a hospital on the river, outside the city limits. A place full of sterile white halls and sterile aether lamps burning night and day. Far from the madhouse, where the doctors had given up on the patients. In quarantine, the doctors tried to beat the advance of the necrovirus. To shock, burn and drown the heresy out of a human body.

When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man’s pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.

They decided to skip quarantine after that.

“Sometimes, madness isn’t the worst of life,” Conrad told me afterward. We sat on the steps even though it was raining, looking down from the courthouse at the dense brick-lined veins of Lovecraft, where normal, usual, uninfected people lived. “Sometimes, it’s the belief that madness has a cure.”

Every time I passed the Danvers State Viral Hospital after Nerissa’s commitment hearing, fingers of ice played notes up and down my spine.

“I’m just trying to help you,” Cal said. “Cram it, Aoife, can’t you see that?”

I held out my hand again, offering it to his ministrations. “I suppose. I’m sorry.”

Cal rewrapped my hand. “Me too.” He looked gamely at the books. “This isn’t so bad. Kind of stuffy. You know, I hear that you can still go to school in quarantine … maybe not to be an engineer, but a teacher or a personal secretary for sure. You’re bright enough—”

“Cal. Don’t try to help me, like I’m some dame in one of your dumb aether plays,” I said. “Don’t try to be my hero. Just be Cal.” I stood on tiptoe so I could move the straw stalks of hair away from his eyes. “I like just Cal.”

Cal shuffled his feet in the dust coating the broad boards of the library floor, but at least he’d stopped talking about quarantine for the time being. I looked at my feet, too. The spectral glow of the lantern made everything sharp, the tear in my stocking and my footprints in the dust. Beneath them, I discerned an older set, smaller than my feet, heel and toe, period and question mark.

“Look.” The footprints crossed the library in a careful, unhurried line and disappeared at the bookshelves on the far wall. I grabbed Cal’s arm. “Somebody else was here.”

Cal’s arm went rigid under my grip, and I watched his throat twitch painfully as he swallowed. “Your father must have had a lady visitor.”

“A lady visitor who can evaporate through the walls?” I started for the spot and Cal attempted to pull me back.

“Aoife, you don’t know what’s going on here.”

I shrugged free of his bony grip. “The dust is settled over her prints. She’s long gone. And since my father never married, I’m doubting she has any business in this house.”

“Never remarried,” Cal corrected me, holding up the lantern for a pale imitation of light as I ran my fingers over the shelf. A hidden door would be simple enough, and a fine carpenter could make a hinge invisible with ease.

“No,” I said, brushing over the spines. Emerson, Thoreau, Kant. Not heretical texts, but not the sort of thing upstanding rational folk read on Sunday afternoon, certainly. The old ways of superstition and belief, the search for a human soul, were like Nancy Granger. Nancy Granger snuck off to the Rustworks and met a boy at the jitney track. Nancy Granger had gotten in the family way. No one at the Academy talked about Nancy Granger after she went back to Minnesota.

“No?” Cal frowned. “What d’you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean he never married,” I said. “Not my mother or anyone else.”

Cal’s mouth opened, and then he shut it again. I knew his thoughts by heart even though he avoided my eyes. Nice girls aren’t bastards. Nice girls have fathers who come home and take off their ties and have a cocktail with the evening paper.

At least Cal knew me well enough to keep his thoughts as thoughts. The only fight I’d ever seen Conrad lose was to a bully over nearly the same words.

It mattered very little. I was already an orphan, a potential madwoman and possibly a heretic. What difference would Archibald and Nerissa having rings on their fingers when I was born really make?

It had bothered Conrad more. He felt like Archibald had denied him and set him up to fail. Without a recommendation from his father, a boy couldn’t hope to pluck a prime job as a Maintainer in the Engineworks. He might as well be stuck in the pit next to the steam ventors or doing menial tasks like sweeping or greasing.

Had Conrad and Archibald finally spoken? Or had Conrad found the same deserted corpse of a house I had? For that matter, where was he if not at Graystone?

Too many problems. My mind was starting to become disorderly again, like during the one memorable and horrific occasion when I’d tried to take Fanciful Maths. Numbers outside of engineering work were messy, imprecise, theoretical as fairy stories. Only mechanics made sense.

I turned to the single problem I could solve—the footprints. The shelves were solid, and the books were books, not disguised springs and levers that would show me Graystone’s secret places.

I chewed on my lip. “There’s got to be something behind this wall. People don’t just disappear.”

“People,” Cal agreed. I quirked an eyebrow.

“Surely Cal Daulton, most rational of all the Master Builder’s faithful, doesn’t cotton with spirits and vapors.”

Cal huffed through his nose. “Yeah. Rational as the day is long, me.”

I got down on my knees, dust tickling my nostrils, and ran my hands over the aged, rippled boards. The floor was solid and heavy with wax, but my fingers picked out an impression the size of my foot.

I put my hand over the spot and pressed down.

The door in the wall opened bereft of any trappings. No shrieking hinges, no breath of tombstone air chill on my face, not even a solitary cobweb. The section of the bookshelves rolled back on soundless hinges, a brass wheel-and-arm assembly pulling the philosopher’s books into a hidden pocket of wall. I nudged Cal until he raised the lamp, and peered cautiously into the space.

Within sat a passage made of raw boards and beams, and a warped staircase leading down. I beckoned to Cal. “Come on.”

“Are you nuts?” He backed up. “You don’t know what’s down there. This whole gear-forsaken mountain is overrun with viral critters and you want to go down some hidey-hole?”

With two years of our friendship at my back, I knew how to work on Cal. I put my hands on my hips. “Why, I’d say you’re scared.”

His forehead furrowed. “I’m not.”

“Fearless adventurer Cal, scared of a little dark and dank. What will the guys at the School ever say about this?” Without another word, I turned and walked ahead, leaving him to follow or be left alone in the library, with the eerie, intermittent heartbeat of that awful clock.

After three steps, Cal rushed after me, sticking to my shoulder like a burr. “And who would be there to look after you if I stayed behind?”

“Dean?” I suggested. Cal made a rude noise.

“The less said about that greaser, the better. He’s no kind of gentleman.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m no kind of lady.” We came to the bottom of the stairs and another inconspicuous door. This door wasn’t hidden or locked, and opened at my approach, like the doors of the library. I theorized about the mechanism that allowed such a slick illusion—some kind of weight-sensitive plate, rigged to a pulley system, or a motion-sensing system that triggered when our shadows passed in front of the pinhole in the wall.

We stood in the doorway, an invitation into yet another expanse of blackness. As before, I stepped forward into the dark, and someone screamed.

“Cal!” I thumped him on the arm in reflexive alarm. “Shine the lantern!”

“You’re trespassers!” the voice shrieked. A projectile from the darkness—a woman’s shoe—narrowly missed Cal’s head. “I’m not infected! Get out!”

“Whoa there, miss!” he shouted. “There’s no call to get violent!”

The other shoe flew and I ducked. “Hey!” I snapped at the voice. “Cut that out!”

Silence while the ghostly lantern beam swept the dark room beyond the door. The aether glow picked up stone floors, a vast porcelain sink and pump, an icebox of polished mahogany.

“What’s your name?” I said to the shadows. I felt confident doing so, sure that viral creatures most likely wouldn’t resort to throwing scuffed-up leather pumps at us.

“None of your beeswax!”

Considering it was my father’s house, I privately thought it was very much my beeswax, but I wasn’t about to argue with a stranger hiding in a kitchen, pelting me with footwear.

I gave the rest of the room a cursory glance while trying to discern the voice’s source. A dead fire gave its last gasp in the grate, shooting embers to leave black streaks on the hearth. A single chair sat before it, a book draped over the arm. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A banned text. A text on the Bonfire List, the compilation of all books the Proctors thought rated burning. I’d choked on the smoke as a little girl, while Conrad held my hand to keep us well clear of the mob standing around the conflagration in Banishment Square.

“Is that your book?” I said. There was a shuffle and a sniffle. I fixed on the sound—beyond the sink and before the icebox.

“You can’t pin nothing on me. That there was in the library when I came. I never read a word of it. Just like the pictures.”

I picked up my first real live heretical book and turned it over. A crocheted bookmark, the kind of thing I’d had to waste hours on in Home Life classes, nestled thick in the pages.

The book looked very ordinary—it was a cheap edition, bound in scratchy paper, and a little ink came away on my fingers when I traced the first line of the page. “ ‘The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” ’ ”

“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” I asked the shadow voice.

“It’s a mad tea party,” said the shadow. “Riddles without answer, ’less you’re a mad one too.” A pause, and the voice dipped, like it was shy of quoting the text. “The Cheshire Cat says it—‘We’re all mad here.’ ”

While she rambled, I let her voice guide me, and locked my fingers around the plump arm of the voice’s owner. The girl in my grip squealed. She didn’t sound a day over graduation age at the Academy, and terrified.

“Take your hands off! That ain’t ladylike!”

I gave her a shake. “That’s quite enough of that. Who are you?”

Copper-pot curls bounced and her chubby face flushed. “The nerve of you, playing handsy with me! Think you’d never had a lesson in manners in all your life!”

“Okay, okay,” Cal said, training the lantern on us. “Settle down, the both of you.”

“Who are you?” I ignored Cal. “Why are you in my father’s house?” My words came out with more ice coating them than I’d intended. Perhaps it was the shadows, or the book, or my throbbing shoulder. Perhaps I was simply wrung out of patience for foolish girls and their foolish games.

“I work here, don’t I!” the girl snapped. “I’m the chambermaid. Who in blue heaven are you?”

That stopped my indignation cold. Of course such a great house would have servants. Of course I seemed like a trespasser to this girl.

“Aoife Grayson,” I managed. My own flush crept up my face. “I’m Mr. Grayson’s daughter.”

The chambermaid screwed up a frown. “Well, I’ve never heard of you.”

I let go of her arm and stepped away. Of course she hadn’t. My father had no use for me.

“Where has everyone gone?” Cal said. “The other servants? Mr. Grayson?”

“They …” The chambermaid shuddered. Her round face went paler than dead under Cal’s lantern. “They …”

“What’s your name?” I amended, as shivers racked her frame.

“Bethina,” she quavered. “Bethina Constance Perivale.”

“I’m Aoife,” I said again. “This is Cal, and we and our friend are searching for my brother, Conrad. He’d be a bit older than me, and taller. Black hair and blue eyes. He was here … have you seen him?”

Bethina’s eyes, the shade of a Coca-Cola bottle shot through with sun, went wide. “Mr. Conrad? You’re his sister?”

“Yes. And I desperately need to find him, Bethina. Can you help me?”

Bethina’s face crumbled, moisture shine rising like dew on her cheeks as her eyes filled. “It were a terrible thing. Terrible, terrible thing what happened to Mr. Conrad.”

Even though my throat tightened with dread, I felt through my pockets for a handkerchief and held it out. The small dingy flag dangled limply between us before Bethina snatched it and gave a great heaving snort into its folds.

“Bethina,” I said gently. “Don’t cry.” That only made her louder. “Bethina!” I said, trying to sound like Marcos Langostrian, entitled to boss her. “Is that any way to behave in front of your, er, your betters?”

“I’m … I’m … s-sorry, miss,” she gulped. “I just … I’ve been here for days. Days, alone in the cold. When it gets dark …” She dissolved again and soaked my handkerchief with a fresh flood of tears.

A shuffling came from the darkness, the click of flint, and a small flame sprang to life. “You two could wake up a dead thing and get it dancing,” Dean said, hiding a yawn. “What’s the racket?”

Bethina gasped. “Who is that?”

“Dean,” I said. “This is Bethina. She worked … works for my father.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, darlin’,” Dean said. He lofted his lighter and illuminated an oil lamp hanging over the butcher block in the middle of the kitchen. Dean blew on the flame and after a breath the lamp sprang to life in sympathy, without the aid of the flame.

“Old Ones return!” Bethina gibbered. “You didn’t touch that lamp! That’s regular witchcraft!”

“Witches aren’t real,” I said automatically. “They’re stories for fools.” Conrad’s words. He always knew the right ones.

“Stories usually start true, Miss Aoife,” Dean said. “A touch of truth makes a lie worth believing.” He sat himself at the battered kitchen table and looked about. “Got any food in this dump, Bethina? I’d murder something for a sandwich.”

“I don’t want you here,” Bethina blubbered. “Any of you! You’ll let them in. The cold things and the creeping shadows. They’ll steal me away.…”

I glanced at Dean. “Can’t you do something?”

Dean grimaced. “Waterworks ain’t really my department, Miss Aoife.”

“Conrad was here,” I grated, feeling control slip. “She saw him. Talked to him.” My own tears, hot and thin and angry as Bethina’s were fat and hysteria-laden, threatened to boil over and betray me. “She has to tell me where he went. What she saw.” I took Bethina by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Stop that infernal noise and tell me where my brother is!”

“Aoife, calm down,” Cal said. “You’re getting shrill.”

“You’re damn right I’m shrill!” I shouted. “My brother is missing and my father is gone and my shoulder aches, so forgive me if I’m not dropping a curtsy!”

Dean clapped his hands sharply. “Everybody simmer down.” He got up, moved me to the side and lifted Bethina’s chin with one finger. “Now you listen, Miss Bethina. You’re gonna leave off the fussing and talk with Miss Aoife, and I’m going to make you up something hot for your nerves. You got any coffee?”

Bethina swallowed and shook her head, her poodle cut bobbing like soap bubbles on air. “Just hot chocolate. In the cabinet by the basin. Milk in the icebox, if it hasn’t turned. Milkman hasn’t come since … well. Not in weeks.”

Dean pulled down a tin of Ovaltine and a saucepan, while Cal helped Bethina to her chair by the fire. In the warm hearth glow of the oil lamp, I saw empty tins and boxes of food stacked on the drain board, dirty plates and mud-spattered petticoats laid across every surface of the kitchen.

“How long have you been living like this?” I said.

Bethina looked at her hands, twisted my handkerchief in a stranglehold. “Since they took your brother away.”

I felt the fear crawl back into my chest. “ ‘They,’ ” I said heavily. “Proctors? The Bureau of Heresy?”

Bethina looked at me mournfully. “Worse,” she said. “So much worse.”