“Here!” cried Mr. Babcock.
We both turned. He was reaching below a shelf, a shade lower than the height of my waist. A latch clicked, and the shelf swung out and into the storeroom, creaking a bit on its hinges. It was just a door, I saw, half my height, a thin layer of plaster spread over its wood and with shelves built across it, matching the other sections in the room. The whole thing was so simple it made me nervous, though I supposed there would be no reason to think that what lay beyond the wall of shelves did not belong to the next house. Still, I was glad I’d told Mrs. DuPont this room would be mine. The storeroom door would have to stay locked.
Mr. Babcock stuck his head through the resulting doorway, and then crawled through. Mary went next and I bent down and followed, surprised when I needed to step upward once; the wall between the rooms was much thicker than I would have anticipated. I got through the door and straightened, straining to fill my eyes with everything at once.
It was a very comfortable room, not large, but airy in its sense of space. The ceiling was high, with the same slope as the storeroom’s, but instead of one small window and the resulting corner shadows, here the roof was cut by a row of five of them, tilted to the sky, sending a bright swath of light through the air to the carpeted floor. A long roll of pink cloth was set along the top of the windows, a system of crank, pulleys, and thin rope ready to let the cloth down or roll it back up again, to block the sun as wanted.
I left Mary and Mr. Babcock to explore and went to the back wall, past a little stove tapped into a chimney of bricks, and through another door. Behind it was a tiny bedroom, windowless, with a cot and a door on either end. The first door was locked, bolted, and painted shut, but the second opened easily. I shook my head, surprised, and yet not surprised. It was a bathing room. The convenience was not as modern as the one my grandmother had put beside her bedchamber in Stranwyne, but there were pipes connected, a copper tub, and a faucet hanging over a large shallow bowl. I turned a tap, and watched the water run.
“Look, Miss!” I heard Mary calling. I came out of the little bedchamber to see her standing beside a workbench — though I’d hardly recognized it as such, it being so clean — searching noisily through a box of tools. There was a box of metal parts, I saw, and a few dingy tin toys. Other trunks and boxes lined the walls, which instead of being painted or papered were covered in a pale pink cloth.
“There’s most everything Mr. Tully would be needing in here,” Mary was saying excitedly, “though I’m not seeing his hot pen, Miss, what he uses for making them bits of metal stick together. Did we bring this with us? I’m thinking we did but everything was done in such a tearing hurry, I can’t be sure. …”
“Mr. Babcock,” I said, “is all well?” He was standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind his back, staring up at nothing, his belly when left in that position looking amazingly close to the shape of his head. He smiled.
“Oh, yes, my dear. It’s just your grandmother … she did a rather good job of it, didn’t she?”
I knew what he meant. I’d felt it, too, the same presence as in my bedchamber at Stranwyne, one that I suspected my uncle also sensed in places like his clock room. My grandmother’s stamp was indelible, and the thought made me long for home. But I only replied, “And she’s managed to get water and pipes up here, too, though I can’t imagine how.”
Mr. Babcock smiled again, and then we both jumped violently at a sudden crash, as if every pane of glass above us had burst into a thousand shards. I spun on my heel to see Mary, wide-eyed at the workbench, holding the ripped lace of her sleeve, the full box of tools now a scattered mess on the floor. “I’m sorry, Miss, I —”
“Shhh!” said Mr. Babcock, holding up a hand.
We waited in silence, listening to three sets of breath. I hadn’t had time to think of it yet, but I realized that what had to be below us was the house next door. The house, it came to me suddenly, where Mrs. Hardcastle was living. I held my breath and heard nothing, not even the noises from the street, and then I understood the raised, carpeted floor, and the thick, cloth-covered walls. The sound in this room had been deliberately deadened. But how much so? If my uncle woke frightened, unable to find the familiar, could this room possibly conceal one of his tantrums from whomever might be directly below?
When the silence continued, Mr. Babcock slowly lowered his hand, closing his eyes for a moment in relief. But I could not be certain that relief had a foundation. How quickly would rumors of strange noises in the house next door get from Mrs. Reynolds to Mr. Wickersham? Or even to the French? We could not allow my uncle to stay here without knowing. I would not. I ran a hand along the side of my head, smoothing the curls that were springing their way out in the warm attic air. I felt infinitely weary.
“What time is it, Mary?”
She snatched up the pocket watch hanging on its chain, and then paused, nose wrinkled. “But I said I’ve already been giving Mr. Tully his —”
“What time?”
“Not quite a quarter past one, Miss. Why?”
“Because I think we must hurry. We need to unload Uncle Tully’s things, have this room ready as quickly as possible, and get him out of his trunk before I have to go.”
“Go? But where do you have to be going, Miss?”
“Dinner,” I said. “With Mrs. Hardcastle.”
If I had exchanged the words
10
By a quarter past eight I was ready, or as ready as I was going to be. The three of us had worked feverishly, dragging the cases and trunks up the stairs and into the storeroom, handing through the hidden door my uncle’s floor pillows, his teacups, a smattering of clocks, and the tools, pieces, parts, and half- finished automatons from the workshop at Stranwyne, all his comfortable familiarities I’d told Mr. Wickersham had been melted. I pronounced the mattress on the cot in the bedroom unusable, so Mr. Babcock ransacked the house to find another while Mary warmed water, scrubbed, swept away mice droppings, and brought out the linens.
Then carefully, and with a struggle, we brought my sleeping uncle out of the trunk and got him through the little door. We laid Uncle Tully out on the floor and cleaned him — no time for modesty — dressing him in his usual nightshirt before putting him on the bed with a new mattress and fresh coverings. He was thrashing some now, groaning and speaking the nonsense of dreams, not asleep but never truly awake either. Dr. Pruitt had told us to expect this, a certain time of grogginess and weakness after the prolonged anesthetic, and that my uncle would become himself again given time. But it hurt me to see it. Uncle Tully drank half a glass of water, eyes closed, before I laid him back on his pillow.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I’d asked Mary in a whisper, helping her tighten the blankets around his kicking legs. Lane had discovered this, cocooning Uncle Tully in a blanket when he was upset, a trick that had always seemed to give my uncle security. It was doing nothing for him now, and the guilt of leaving him was nearly intolerable. But for his own safety this task had to be done, the quicker the better. And short of burglary, I could not see how it was a task that could be performed by anyone but myself.
“We’ll be just fine, Miss,” Mary said softly. “I’ll be taking care of Mr. Tully; he’s used to finding me with him. It’s Mr. Babcock that’ll have to be staying away, but I’ve sent him off to be getting us a bit of bread and honey for toast, as I’ve already got Mr. Tully’s tea. I’ll be keeping Mr. Tully wrapped up tight, but if he’s waking up proper while you’re gone, then I’m thinking I should be giving him a time for your coming, Miss, so he can look at my watch. And I’ll explain how we’ve all been doing just as Miss Marianna said, and let him wind up the clocks.”
I considered. “No, I think perhaps have the clocks wound already, if you can possibly manage it, Mary. Seeing them stopped will make him upset. Though I daresay he’s going to throw a tantrum once he understands his surroundings, no matter what we do.”
“But, Miss, if Mr. Tully does shout his head off, and if you can be hearing it from next door, and the others can be hearing him, too, what are you going to do, then, Miss?”
What we would do, I thought, was pack our things again and take my uncle out of this place. I had not the
