These rooms had been her parents’ once, and then her brother’s, and they enveloped her in a feeling she couldn’t work out. All she knew was that the memories she’d seen in the void couldn’t reach her here, that nothing the likes of Pyval Crespo did could hurt.
So she pulled back the covers, climbed into bed, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
21
For several days, the incident during Ilsa’s lesson haunted her. Spikes of panic would creep up when she least expected them; flashes of being back in that void.
But Ilsa hadn’t survived the traumas of her childhood just for a reminder of them to bring her to her knees, and she had found a way to quash the panic. She would go to the master chamber, the room that belonged to her brother, and lie on the four-poster bed, and let the scents of furniture polish and gardenias fill her nostrils.
Without deciding to, she had started treating the rooms as her own. Cassia had refused to step foot in them since Gedeon had vanished – which explained why she had stood stiffly beyond the door the day Aelius showed Ilsa around – so after the first night that she’d slept there without anyone stopping her, Ilsa gathered a few belongings from her chamber – Bill’s scarf; the tattered velvet bag she found herself unable to throw away; and her folding knife and playing cards from inside – and arranged them on top of Gedeon’s dresser. She scooped up the small stack of books she had pilfered from the library and put them next to the four-poster, in easy reach when she was lying there at night.
At first, she resisted the urge to open drawers and peruse shelves, but by the second day, she had talked herself out of such restraint. She had heard so much about her brother, but the space where he lived; it would be like hearing about him in his own words. More importantly, it might even hold some clues.
She began in his study. If there was anything in the rooms that would help her track her brother, this struck Ilsa as the best bet, so she went straight to the desk, where a number of letters, receipts, and a heavy ledger still lay. As she rifled through them, Ilsa imagined Gedeon sitting where she sat, and going about his duties thinking she was dead. Cassia had said it was an unbearable sorrow to him, and even as she upturned nothing useful at his desk, she found renewed purpose in her mission; she was on the trail of what she’d been missing, but Gedeon still didn’t know it yet. She had to find him for his sake as much as her own.
When she was certain there were no clues at the desk, she poked through the bookshelves, pulling each volume out by the spine to see if anything fell from the secret spaces between, or from inside the pages. When she had exhausted that possibility, she went through the drawers of his bedside table – he slept on the left – then the liquor cabinet – he favoured an imported rye – then the shelves of his wardrobe. She dipped her hands into the pockets of his jackets – noting the lingering scent of grass and apples, of him – and though she learned a great deal, she found nothing.
Nothing, until she lifted the lid of a chest beside the bed. Its contents were a mess of unremarkable bric-a-brac, but on top was an object Ilsa felt rather than saw; a wooden toy in the shape of a wolf.
It had been eight years since Ilsa had seen her toy wolf, but she recalled it clearly enough to know that this one was identical. Had Gedeon known, perhaps, that she had one like it? Reverently, she tipped Gedeon’s wolf upside down to hear that familiar rattle – but there was no sound. The wolves weren’t quite identical: Gedeon’s didn’t appear to be hollow. She imagined a scene: matching toys presented to the little prince and his newborn sister. One for a growing boy, one to make appealing noises for a baby.
Someone who had loved her before she was born had dreamed of such a thing. They probably didn’t imagine their gifts would be received in a shop cellar, or that everyone present would soon be dead or fleeing for their lives; that the twin wolves would be in different worlds before the day was out. Ilsa shook her head to scatter the thoughts and gently placed the wolf back on top of the clutter, closing the lid.
Such sentimentality would get her nowhere. She stood in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips. “We all got secrets, Gedeon,” she murmured. “Where d’you hide yours?”
When she had lived with Mrs Holmes, Blume’s landlady, the woman had made the mistake of teaching Ilsa how to read. She was forever after pinching volumes from Mrs Holmes’s small collection of fiction and reading them by candlelight when she was meant to be asleep. She couldn’t disguise the scent of a candle just extinguished, but she stopped the books from being confiscated by stashing them hastily beneath the mattress. So, with dwindling hope, she got down on her knees and sank her arms as far as they would go between the mattress and the bedframe.
She swept her arms back and forth, feeling for something, anything, and thought she must be imagining things the first time her fingertips brushed a single sheet of thin paper. Gedeon was no doubt taller than her, with longer arms, and she had to reach to close her fingertips around the paper, but she managed it.
It was a page torn from a notebook, stained with blotches of ink and folded in half. On the inside, a diagram had been untidily scrawled.
Ilsa’s hands shook and she fought to tamp down the surge of excitement.
How could
