than to stay at home.
The heavy knot in my middle pulled painfully tight, the silver swan warming to the heat of my hand. There were twenty-three hours until Mr. Wickersham came.
5
The family cemetery was on a rise beyond the upper end of Stranwyne, surrounded by a crumbling stone wall with a wrought-iron railing rusting along its top. I did not come here often. Leaning slabs of weather-washed stone rose irregularly from the ground, while in some places nothing but a rectangular depression in the grass marked the resting place of an ancestor. The monument to my grandmother, Marianna Louise Tulman, rose tall near one corner of the enclosure, but I felt no real affinity with a granite obelisk, or even the ground that held my grandmother’s bones. It was her room, her furniture, her clothes — the things of her life — that made her real to me, and today I was leaving them. The wind on the high ground whipped violently, as if it had taken a fancy to steal my black veil, and the trogwynd sang low, a lament to my uncle. I put up a gloved hand and held on to my bonnet.
“… we commit his body to the ground …” said Parson Lowe.
Mrs. Cooper cried noisily beside me, and I took her hand in my free one, wishing for comfort as much as I wanted to give it.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes …”
I met Mary’s eyes over the hole in the ground. She was crying as well, though for different reasons, I knew, than Mrs. Cooper, and I was suddenly struck by the sight of her. She was the same Mary as always: large-eyed, freckled, with her upturned nose and wide mouth capable of speech in speeds and quantities that one could scarcely credit. And yet, in that sober dark dress with the fitted bodice, and with her hair tamed and twisted into a knot beneath her bonnet, she was not the gawking girl I had met when I first came to Stranwyne. She was, most assuredly, a young woman, one who would expertly assist in my most wild of schemes, and even, evidently, wield a hammer for my sake.
The parson nodded and the coffin hit the bottom of the grave hole with a hateful
I looked away from the coffin, past Mary and down the slope to Stranwyne Keep, the jumble of brown stone and chimneys and roof tiles that was my home. And then I saw the carriage, just emerging from the tunnel through the moor hills, making its way at high and silent speed around the circular drive, the trogwynd snatching away the sound of its wheels. I turned my face back to the shovelers.
“Faster, please,” I said crisply, causing both Mrs. Cooper and Parson Lowe to look at me and frown. But the effort to fill my uncle’s grave was quickened. I saw Mary staring down the slope, her lips pressing tight.
Mr. Wickersham had arrived. Three hours and forty-two minutes early.
And he was in the drawing room when I entered it, his scribbling man perched on the settee, an ink pot and spare nibs spread out on the table. I gave them both a small curtsy. I had slept perhaps four of the past forty-eight hours, and my body felt the loss like a missing limb. But I smiled, laid the veiled bonnet carefully on the table, and prepared to do battle from the edge of a damask chair.
“Do sit, Mr. Wickersham. I’m so glad you did not stand on formality, and just let yourself in.”
He did not sit. “Where is your uncle, Miss Tulman?”
“I … we …” My eyes filled, wetting my lashes. Tears were so close to the surface these days that they were extraordinarily easy to summon. “Have you had no letter, Mr. Wickersham? Mr. Babcock assured me that he would —”
“Yes, yes. I got the bloody letter. Caught me in Milton only just this morning.” I thought I heard him grit his teeth. “I was not aware that your uncle suffered from any ‘ailment of the heart.’”
“I’m afraid we were not aware of it either, Mr. Wickersham,” I replied.
Mr. Wickersham thrust his hands in his pockets, blustering about the room while the inevitable pen scratched, cursing circumstance and lack of luck beneath his breath. My eyes narrowed.
“Your compassion and concern during this difficult time are truly admirable, Mr. Wickersham. I am very much comforted.”
He stopped his pacing to look at me, my loss of temper somehow making his own relax. He smiled and sat down abruptly.
“Where is the body, Miss Tulman?”
“My uncle was laid to rest just a short time ago. Beside his mother.”
“Quick work,” he commented.
“It was not … convenient to wait longer. We have no undertaker here.”
There was a small silence. “This will be a disappointment for Her Majesty’s government,” Mr. Wickersham continued. “The loss of Frederick Tulman is rather a blow to our plans. A sad loss for our plans.” He leaned back in his chair, still grinning at me, a posture that was nothing like that of a gentleman. “Of course, you do understand, Miss Tulman, that you will still be required to accompany me to London.”
I looked back at him steadily. “I certainly shall not.”
“Oh, yes. You certainly shall.”
“To what purpose?”
The pen wrote furiously. “To explain all and anything you might know about the workings of your uncle’s inventions, of course, and their —”
“Mr. Wickersham,” I interrupted, “do you truly believe that I can answer some riddle of genius that your scientific men are currently incapable of solving? Are you really so desperate that you would present to these men as a solution to their problems a mere girl, one whose entire qualifications rest on having once seen the invention in question? They will laugh in your face.”
I was laying it on a bit thick, I thought, but it seemed to be working. The scribbling man’s brows had gone up while Mr. Wickersham’s went down. I moderated my tone.
“Mr. Wickersham, I am a person of independent means with no pressing responsibilities.” How I wished that were true. “And there are memories in this house that I find very painful. I plan to leave this afternoon, in less than an hour — thirty-eight minutes, as a matter of fact — and will travel until such a time as I choose to come back again. Most of my trunks have already gone.”
Mr. Wickersham stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “I can easily have you taken to London, Miss Tulman, whether you choose it or no.”
“And I can be extremely troublesome, and with the help of my solicitor, can promise to both legally and physically kick up such a fuss as you’ve never seen. Do you think me incapable of it?” We locked eyes, and after a moment I said, “Mr. Wickersham, I know nothing of my uncle’s inventions. I have no idea how they worked or even what parts went together to make them. My uncle created nothing resembling his fish since the flood that destroyed his workshop two years ago. And as for his more recent workshop upstairs …” The man’s gaze shot toward the ceiling. “… everything there has been removed to the foundry and melted.”
I broke our gaze, dabbing again at my eyes. “I loved my uncle dearly and, as I said, the memories here are very painful.”
The pen caught up to my last words with the result that I could hear the trogwynd howling very softly in the chimney. I looked up to see Mr. Wickersham giving me another smile.
“It seems you have thought of everything, Miss Tulman. Please accept my most sincere condolences. When do you sail?”
