The Iron Thorn

“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.”

12 The Chambermaid’s Tale

EVEN AS CAL worked to rekindle the kitchen fire, Bethina shivered. “This place … it was never a good place, miss, even before Mr. Conrad went missing.”

I paced from the table to the basin and back. I couldn’t seem to sit still. Bethina had seen my brother, spoken with him, held a rational-enough conversation to learn his name. His letter to me hadn’t been a fancy. “If you’re expecting me to believe in some far-fetched curse on this place, or some ridiculous heretic story …”

Bethina shook her head. “No, miss! It’s the Master Builder’s own truth. Graystone is built on burying ground, and that’s a fact. Puritans, I think Mr. Grayson said. The first Grayson here dug up the gravestones and planted them out in the oak grove, but they didn’t find all of the bodies. I know I ain’t supposed to believe in Spiritualism and things like that, but it’s a foul business. And during the heretic troubles some-odd decades ago, bootleggers dug passages in the cellars. There’s limestone caves about a mile on, down at the river. They left casks of money and liquor down there when the Revenue chased them out. And Mr. Grayson said the folks in Arkham have seen nightjars in the tunnels, too, and revenants—those glowing ghostish things that lead you off the path to drown in the underground pools.”

“What does this have to do with my brother?” I demanded. “Did he try to go into the caves?” The thought of Conrad trapped underground in some damp stony place, unable to call for help, seized me right about the heart.

Dean poured Ovaltine into a pair of chipped mugs with the flourish of a soda jerk. “Bethina.” He handed her a mug covered in ducks wearing glasses and smoking cigars. “Miss Aoife.” My mug was plain and blue, and Dean’s fingers whispered against mine.

Cal’s mouth turned down. “Where’s mine?”

“Only enough for two, and I think the girls need something to calm their nerves more than you do, cowboy.” Dean settled himself at the table again and lit a Lucky Strike, looking for all the world like he belonged in my father’s kitchen.

Cal stole Bethina’s chair by the fire and put his foot on the hob, grumbling. His ankle was returning to its normal size. At least that deceitful Alouette had been good for something.

Bethina blew on her mug. “Mr. Archibald hired my mother on when I was just a kid. I used to play in the front hall ’cause it had the slickest floors and I loved roller-skating. He was a nice man. Not cruel, but he had … strange habits.”

“I suppose wealthy folk often do,” I said curtly. I didn’t know why the urge to defend Archibald rushed words to my lips, but it felt right.

She puffed up like a banty hen. “I wouldn’t dream of questioning him. But all the same, miss, there was something not right about this house. I’d wake up from bad dreams and I’d have the most awful feeling that something was watching me, from the back gardens, staring up at my window.” She sipped her Ovaltine and made a face. “This milk is gone.”

“Working with what I have.” Dean waved his flask. “I think there’s a sip or two left, if you’d care to sweeten that.”

“Certainly not,” Bethina said primly, setting the mug down with a clack, as if the very idea of liquor were offensive.

“Someone watching you,” I prompted her to continue. I kept my irritation in check by tapping my bare foot against the tile floor. “Who was it?”

“I’d get out of bed to check that the window was locked up in the garret,” Bethina said. “And … I’d see them, out in the moonlight.”

“The mysterious Them. I got chills.” Dean had already polished off his cigarette and was up digging in cabinets. All he unearthed was an ancient packet of TreacleTarts, the pudding inside the pastry shell gone rock- hard from age.

“I call them the tall men,” Bethina said, her voice no bigger than the child with nightmares she described. “They were pale, too. Cold eyes. They came from the woods, single file. Every full moon, they came. I heard Mr. Grayson on those nights, pacing in the library.” She reached out and clapped her hand over mine and I started. Her palm was hot from the Ovaltine, while I’d gone cold. “I didn’t mean to snoop,” Bethina whispered. “I didn’t mean to be trouble.”

I wriggled my hand free. Hers was slick. “Bethina, what did the tall men want with my father?”