As Lambent's carriage took the Sunderly family back to Bull Cove, Faith tried to work up her courage. She needed to speak with her father. She needed to warn him about Miss Hunter's words, and to let him know that whatever happened, she was on his side. It was torture seeing him bear so much alone.
When at last they reached home, and Jeanne had taken their coats and hats, Uncle Miles lit a taper and fumbled for his pipe, preparing for his customary stroll and smoke.
The Reverend halted him at the door. "Miles—if you're stepping outside, stay near the house. Earlier today I had the gardener set rabbit traps."
Uncle Miles coughed out an incredulous lungful of smoke.
"Erasmus—is that wise? In the dark … if people are unaware of the danger …"
"I hardly see that allowing nocturnal intruders to prowl the grounds can be described as either 'wise' or without danger," retorted the Reverend. "Now, if you will excuse me, I must visit the Folly." He strode out into the garden.
A little while later the Reverend returned with a small, wooden box in one hand. As he came in, stamping the soil from his shoes, Faith rallied her courage.
"Father, can—"
"My dear, I wonder if I might speak with you?" Myrtle spoke at the same time, drowning out Faith's more hesitant voice. She wore the expression of careful alertness she always used when addressing delicate subjects with her husband. "There is something I need to mention to you."
"It will have to wait," the Reverend responded curtly. He stared down at the box in his hand. "Everything will have to wait. There is a matter that requires my immediate attention—all of my attention. I shall be in the library, and under no circumstances must I be disturbed." The Reverend had claimed the library as his study from the first day, and it was now sacred ground.
Faith's father had mastered the art of making his words sound gravestone-final, his decisions irrevocable. The library door closed behind him. The moment was lost.
Faith joined Howard for supper, then helped him say his prayers and put him to bed, wondering how she had become governess and nursemaid in one. Howard was sleepy but tenacious, wrapping his arms around her every time she tried to leave.
As she stroked her brother's head and lulled him to sleep, a faint sound jerked Faith from her thoughts. It was a short, sharp cry, not unlike a vixen but very like a child, and it came from the darkness outside. Doors below opened and closed. There were hushed conversations, exclamations of alarm, and hurried steps.
Faith slipped from her brother's room and hastened downstairs, finding her mother, her uncle, and Mrs. Vellet in the drawing room, in tense, hushed debate.
"Madam, we must send for a doctor …" Mrs. Vellet was insisting.
"I cannot consent to that without my husband's permission …" Myrtle cast a nervous glance in the direction of the library.
"Has he forbidden it?" asked Uncle Miles. "Does Erasmus even know that there is a maimed child on his doorstep?"
"He gave instructions—strict instructions—that he was not to be disturbed," Myrtle's tone was meaningful, and her expression seemed to take the wind from her brother's sails. Even warmed by port, Uncle Miles was not one to risk the Reverend's temper. "Miles—is there a chance that you—"
"Myrtle, if I had money for the doctor I would send for him straight away, but right now I simply do not have the funds."
"Mrs. Vellet—" Myrtle turned to the housekeeper "—if the boy is brought into the kitchen, can he not be bandaged there?"
"Yes, madam." Mrs. Vellet seemed to be having some difficulty maintaining her usual composure. "But the trap has hurt him badly, and there is only so much we can do."
All three were too caught up in their conversation to notice Faith slipping away to the library.
Father would want to know. Of course he would want to know.
She knocked. There was a silence, and then a faint sound that might have been a cleared throat, but which sounded just enough like a muffled word.
Faith turned the handle and opened the door.
The gas lamps were turned down to a mere glow, but the brass reading lamp on the desk bathed the scene in a quivering halo of light. Behind the desk sat her father, reclining back in his chair. As Faith entered he turned his head very slightly in her direction, and frowned.
Faith opened her mouth to apologize, but the words died in her mouth. Her father's posture, always ramrod-straight, was now oddly slumped. She had never seen his face so pale, so slack. Her skin tingled.
There was a clammy smell in the room, she realized, the cold scent she had noticed in the Folly. Now it ran little ice-fingers down her throat, through the nerves of her teeth, and across the backs of her eyes. The air was alive with it.
"Father?"
Her own voice sounded odd, as if a faint down of sighs clung to it. As she gingerly advanced, her footsteps were muffled in the same strange, feathery way. On every side the air seemed to be stirring itself in little mouthless breaths.
A pen trembled between her father's loose fingers, ink pooling on the paper beneath the nib. A few sentences had been scrawled in clumsy, lopsided letters, unlike the Reverend's usual handwriting.
His pupils were tiny and impenetrably black. In the lamplight it seemed that the gray of his eyes had jaded to a murky, troubled yellow. As she watched, the flecks and blotches of his irises seemed to shift and stir like waterweed …
"Father!"
The discolored eyes fixed on her, their gaze sharpening. Then his jaw set and his brow slowly creased.
"Get out." It was a whisper, but with more venom than Faith had ever heard in her father's voice. "Get out!"
Faith turned and ran from the room, heart pounding.
"Faith!" Myrtle appeared in the hallway, just in time to see Faith closing the door behind her. "Oh—has your father finished his work for the evening? Thank goodness—I must speak with him."
"No!" Faith reflexively put her back to the door.
She could not make sense of what she had just seen, but she knew he wanted to keep it a secret. Faith remembered tales of strange opiates smoked in secret, with fumes that entranced gentlemen's wills and enslaved their minds. What if her father's troubles had driven him to become an opium eater? She could not expose him. He was facing enough scorn and scandal already.
"I … I went in to tell him about the boy in the rabbit trap," Faith said quickly.
"What did he say?"
Faith hesitated. The only safe answer was to say that she had been ordered out of the room and given no answer. It was true besides.
"We should send for a doctor," she heard herself say.
Myrtle hurried away to give orders to Mrs. Vellet, relief visible on her pretty, rounded features.
Faith was flabbergasted by her own nerve. Her lie would inevitably be exposed. Her mind mouse-scampered with the agility of practice, trying to find a way out, but she could think of no excuse or explanation. She could not imagine facing her father and telling him that she had given false orders in his name.
Father has to understand, she told herself. If I had not, he might have been discovered, or blamed for letting the boy bleed. I am protecting him.
At the same time, the thought that she had claimed a tiny part in one of her father's mysterious secrets filled her with a small, quiet glow.
……
A few minutes later, Faith looked out through the window and saw Uncle Miles, the household manservant, and Mrs. Vellet helping a shorter figure toward the house. When they drew close enough for the window's light to fall on them, she could make out the face of the boy, who looked about fourteen years old. He was alarmingly pale, cheeks shiny with tears, face crumpled with pain. The cloth clumsily tied around his ankle was blotched with dark. The sight of it filled her stomach with an animal, sympathetic tingle.
Faith was not allowed into the kitchen. Sitting in the nearby dining room, however, she could easily hear the boy's high sobs of pain, and the panicky conversations within.
"… No, hold the pad steady!"
"Mrs. Vellet—it's soaked! It's leaking through my fingers!"
The manservant Prythe arrived with more makeshift bandages. As he opened the kitchen door, Faith caught a fleeting glimpse of the wounded boy lying on the hearthrug, Jeanne clamping a red-soaked cloth to his ankle. The boy was cursing through clenched teeth, his eyes tightly shut.
"I won't have language like that in my kitchen," Mrs. Vellet could be heard to declare, as the door shut. "What would you do if you bled to death right now, and got dragged down to hell for having a wicked tongue?"
Dr. Jacklers's carriage arrived within the hour. He bowed to Mrs. Sunderly and Faith, but had a businesslike frown rather than his sociable smile.
"How is the boy?" he asked immediately. "Serious, you say? Well, I would hope so—I have just left a good mug of spiced cider cooling on my dresser, and I would hate it to be wasted for nothing." He asked for a tot of laudanum to numb the patient's pain, and a hot cup of tea to help himself recover from the cold of his journey. "I never like to work with numb fingers, and a man is best warmed from the inside out."
The house became a little calmer after the doctor's arrival. After an hour he emerged, his hands washed and his bag packed once more.
"How is the poor child?" Myrtle asked meekly.
"Well, the teeth of the trap missed the bone, thank goodness, but they spiked two holes into the meat of his calf. I have washed the rust and dirt out of them as best I can, and swabbed the wounds with carbolic acid." The doctor seemed to become aware that Myrtle was blanching at his words, and changed the subject. "He is bandaged and made watertight now, so I might as well take him home—I know the Parris family."
After a moment Faith realized why the name Parris was familiar. The man she had met in the woods and had run from was called Tom Parris, according to Mrs. Vellet. The wounded boy was the right age to be his son. Perhaps the whole family liked cockling.
As the doctor's outdoor clothes were brought, he looked around and frowned, seeming slightly offended. Faith wondered whether he had been expecting her father to emerge and greet him.
"Thank you so much for coming out at such an hour!" Myrtle gave him a charming, vulnerable smile and extended a hand for him to take. Dr. Jacklers's disgruntlement evaporated like dew in the morning sun.
Much later, after the household had retired for the night, Faith quietly rose from her bed and donned her dressing gown. She slipped downstairs and peered through the keyhole of the library door. It showed her little except a bookcase and a patch of floor, but they were both still lamplit. Pressing her ear to the keyhole she could make out the furtive scratch of nib on paper, occasional mutters, and tiny noises that might be made by the shifting of a chair.
Relief washed over Faith. She had imagined her father sprawled and unmoving, or struggling for breath. Now these images melted away, and instead her mind's eye saw him still seated at his desk—alive, conscious, and busily writing.
She curled her hand around the knob, but hesitated, the metal chilling her palm. She could not forget her father's eerily shifting eyes, the whispering sickness of the room, and the venom with which he had ordered her out. Instead she crept back upstairs and slipped back into her cooling bed.
When at last she slept, her mind remained unsettled. She dreamed of scrambling through a cold garden full of frost-furred trees. At its heart she came across her father's enormous stone head, jutting above the ground as if he had been buried to the neck. His eyes were yellow-stained glass, and behind them dark shapes shifted, blotting and muting their light. His face was stifled with moss, but when she tried to claw it off, the stonework came away too.
