MARROW CREEK

The telegram came at breakfast, on a day when Tamsin had spent forty-eight hours carefully avoiding every room that the Grand Duke of Vandermere might be expected to enter.

It was a simple strategy and it had worked reasonably well. She had taken her meals in the schoolroom. She had walked the Princess to the Winter Garden by the back stair. She had stayed in the library until it closed and in her own sitting room until she was certain that the evening seminars had ended, and she had lain awake in her narrow bed each night, staring at the ceiling, with her fingertips pressed against her mouth. She was twenty-four years old, a scholar of Ashby College, a woman who had taken a first in pharmacology while keeping a household together on a miner's widow's wages, and she had been reduced to hiding from a man in corridors like a housemaid with a secret.

The footman who brought the yellow envelope to the schoolroom did not look at her. He laid it on the desk with a small bow and withdrew, and she stood with her hand flat on the paper for a long moment before she dared to open it.

The message was only fourteen words. It had been sent from the telegraph office at Calder Junction, at four in the morning, and it was signed with the name of the village schoolmaster, who had never in his life sent a telegram that was not paid for by someone else.

JONAH VERY BAD. GRANNY SAYS COME NOW IF YOU CAN. DOCTOR GIVES NO HOPE.

She read it three times. The words did not change. The schoolroom was perfectly quiet. A sparrow was singing on the sill outside the window, and the sun fell across the globe on the desk in a long gold bar, and Lila sat very still at her little table with her pencil in her hand, watching her tutor's face.

"Miss Reed, has something happened?" said the Princess.

"I have to go home," said Tamsin. Her voice came from somewhere very far away. "My brother is ill. I'm terribly sorry, Your Highness, but I must leave at once, and I don't know when I shall be back."

…

She found the Duke in the carriage yard.

She did not remember going to find him. She remembered the stairs, and the long gallery with its portraits, and a footman saying something about his Grace's morning ride, and then the cold bright air of the yard, and the smell of horses, and Soren standing by the mounting-block in his riding coat with the reins of a tall black gelding in his gloved hand. He turned at the sound of her step. His face, which had been closed and careful for two days, opened all at once at the sight of hers.

"What has happened?" he said.

She held out the telegram. He read it without a word, and she watched the color leave his face.

"I need to be on the nine o'clock train," she said. She was surprised at the steadiness of her own voice. "I've already spoken to Mrs. Halloway about the Princess. If I leave within the hour, I can reach Calder Junction by evening and be in Marrow Creek by midnight. I came to tell you, because I felt I should, and because I'd like to ask for leave of absence. I will understand if you can't spare me."

"You will not take the nine o'clock," said Soren.

"I beg your pardon, what did you say?"

"The nine o'clock is a stopping train. It reaches Calder at six in the evening, and you would then have to hire a wagon for the climb to the Hollows, which would put you in the village at midnight if the roads are clear and later if they are not." He had already handed the reins of the gelding to a groom, and he was drawing off his glove, and his voice was brisk and clear and entirely without hesitation. "I have a private carriage at the Union Station, with a locomotive that can be fired in forty minutes. It will run direct to Calder in four hours and fifty. You will have the use of it."

"Soren, I can't."

"You can, and you will."

"I can't take a private train. It's a charity." She heard her voice rise. "I've never taken a thing in my life that I couldn't pay back, and I'm not going to begin with a locomotive. My brother is dying, and the only reason I'm able to stand here and think about it is that I know exactly what I owe to everyone who has ever helped me, and I don't intend to add you to the list."

He regarded her for a moment. A muscle moved in his cheek, and his eyes, which were so cold in public, softened with a look she had seen only at the bedside of his sister. When he spoke, it was gently.

"Then consider it a loan," he said, "against the next bad idea I have."

A laugh escaped her, short and cracked, and she pressed her hand to her mouth. He did not smile. But the corner of his mouth moved, and he held out his bare hand, palm up, like a man offering a hand to a frightened horse.

"Come," said Soren. "We shall be late."

"We are going together?"

"You cannot go alone. It is a long journey, and you are in no condition for it." He glanced down at the crumpled paper in his hand. "I shall come as a private gentleman. I will not use my own name. Pike will remain at the Hall and see to Lila, and I shall tell the household that I have gone to inspect the Prairie rail works. Does that satisfy you?"

"It will get you killed," said Tamsin.

"Very likely," said the Grand Duke of Vandermere. "But I shall be on time."

…

They traveled as Mr. and Miss Vance, which was a name he produced from nowhere and which suited him with unnerving ease.

He had exchanged his black coat for a brown tweed jacket and a plain collar, and he sat in the corner of the parlor car with his hat on his knee and his eyes on the passing country, looking like a prosperous young solicitor on his way to settle an estate. Tamsin sat opposite, with her carpetbag on her lap and her hands tightly folded. The locomotive roared. The country slid past, brown fields and gray hedges, a village with a pointed steeple, a river running silver under a leaden sky, and then, gradually, the land began to climb and roughen, and the sky grew heavy and low.

For the first two hours, neither of them spoke of what had happened in the Archive. He did not mention it, and she did not either. He had brought a basket from the Hall kitchen with sandwiches and a flask of tea and a pair of hard-boiled eggs, and he put it between them without comment, and she ate because she knew she would need strength. At noon he opened a book. At one he closed it.

"I have not changed my mind," he said, without looking at her.

She felt the blood rise to her face. "That's very kind of you to say. But I think we agreed that this isn't the moment to..."

"I only wish you to know that I am not asking for anything. I do not require you to say a word on the subject. I wanted you to know that I would not insult you by withdrawing what I said." His gaze remained on the window. "That is all. I shall hold my tongue for the rest of the journey."

He kept to his word, but she noticed, when the train swung round a long bend and the sunlight lay full across the floor of the car, that his bare hand was resting on the seat between them, palm up, a few inches from her skirt. She did not touch it. She looked at it for a long time.

…

The Hollows swallowed them at dusk.

The train stopped at Calder Junction in a smothering fog that smelled of coal smoke and wet iron, and they took a farmer's wagon up the winding track to the village, rattling over ruts, with the gas lamps of the town falling away below them like a handful of dropped sparks. The road was narrow and steep. The hills crowded in on either side, black and sullen under the mist. The air was bitterly cold, thick with the familiar sulfurous stink of burning slack, and Tamsin breathed it in with a tight, aching mixture of relief and dread. It was the smell of her whole childhood.

Marrow Creek lay in the bottom of a crooked valley, a straggle of black-roofed cottages huddled along a stream, with a tipple and a coal chute on the hill above and a thin spire of wood smoke rising from every chimney. The creek ran between the houses in its stony bed, wide and shallow and the color of dishwater. A scum of silver lay in the still places along the bank, glinting dully in the last of the light. A group of children sat on a wall by the bridge, thin and pale and coughing, and they watched the wagon pass with the dull, incurious eyes of children who had learned not to expect visitors.

Soren sat beside her on the wagon seat, in the borrowed tweed, with his hat pulled low. He said nothing. But she felt him go rigid as they crossed the bridge, and when she glanced sideways, she saw that his eyes were fixed on the water with a look of stunned recognition.

"Stop here," he said to the driver. "I will walk the rest."

He climbed down before the wagon had fully halted. She watched him cross the muddy bank, kneel at the water's edge, and strip off his right glove. He held his bare palm over the creek, flat, a few inches above the surface. A soft white radiance bloomed from it, the cold clear pearl-colored glow of Gilded Light, spreading outward across the water in a widening ring.

Where it touched the silver scum, the water turned black.

It happened as quickly as ink spreading through milk. A thick dark stain spread from the edge of the light, writhing, curling in oily tendrils across the surface of the creek, and the pale glow shrank back from it as though stung. He snatched his hand away. For a long moment he knelt there at the edge of the stream, staring at the dark patch as it drifted slowly downstream, and then he rose and walked back to the wagon with a stiff, careful stride.

"What was that?" she asked.

"I do not know," said Soren. His voice was strange. "I have never seen my light behave so."

…

Granny Odell's cottage stood at the end of the village, backed against the hill, with a leaning chimney and a garden full of dead stalks. A lamp burned in the window. When Tamsin pushed open the door, the smell of mugwort and woodsmoke and boiled linen rushed over her, and she stood on the threshold for one moment with her heart in her throat.

Her grandmother was waiting in the kitchen. She had grown smaller since the autumn, shrunken and bent in her oatmeal shawl, and the lines of her face had deepened until they seemed carved. She did not say a word of greeting. She took Tamsin by the shoulders and looked into her face with her pale fierce eyes, and then she pulled her into an embrace that smelled of herbs and old wool, and Tamsin felt the thin arms tremble.

"He's been asking for you since Sunday," said Granny roughly. "Go on in, child, for he's awake and waiting."

The little back room was lit by a single candle. Jonah lay in the narrow bed under three quilts, with his head propped on a pillow and his face the color of tallow. He had grown thinner since she left. His breath rattled in his throat. Blood had dried at the corners of his mouth, and his hands lay on the coverlet as limp as leaves. When she bent over him, he opened his eyes, which were huge and dark in the sunken face, and managed a smile.

"You came," he whispered. "I told Granny you would."

"Of course I came." She sat on the bed and gathered him into her arms. "I always come, don't I? Lie still now, because I'm going to make you better."

"You're not supposed to," Jonah breathed, as he always did, but his head fell against her shoulder.

She did not wait to see whether the Duke had entered the room. She did not care. She laid her palms against her brother's chest, closed her eyes, and let the warmth rise.

…

It took three hours.

She had never worked so hard in her life. The sickness in Jonah's lungs was not the thin film she had cleared from the boy in Ash Row. It was a thick, hard, layered rind of the same gritty salt, packed deep into the tissue and laid down over years. She had to work through it in slices, melting each layer in turn, and every one cost her something. The green light streamed down her arms and flooded the little room. The candle guttered and brightened. She felt her own strength draining out of her in a long unbroken river, and she did not stop, because there was nothing in the world except the small body under her hands and the sound of his breath.

Toward the end, she could no longer feel her fingers. The walls swam. The light dimmed, and the edge of her vision went black, and there was a high ringing in her ears. She heard Granny murmuring something close at hand, a prayer or a charm. She heard her brother take a long, deep, shuddering breath, clear to the bottom of his lungs, for the first time in two years.

It is finished, she thought, at last.

The floor tilted. She felt herself falling, and she did not care.

Someone caught her.

A pair of strong arms closed round her, warm and sure, and she felt herself lifted off the bed and laid down on something soft. A hand brushed the hair from her damp forehead. A voice said, very low and very close, "I have you, Tamsin. You may stop now. I have you."

She tried to answer, and darkness took her.

…

She woke in the middle of the night with a stiff neck and a throbbing head.

She was lying on the settle by the kitchen fire, wrapped in a quilt, with a cushion under her cheek. The fire had burned low. A kettle ticked softly on the hob. By the glow of the embers she could make out the familiar shapes of the room, the dresser with its blue plates, the bunches of drying herbs, the rocking chair with its worn cushion, and in the rocking chair, very straight and silent, a tall figure in brown tweed, with his chin sunk on his chest and one bare hand hanging over the arm.

He was asleep. She saw it at once. He had not taken off his boots, and his hat had fallen to the floor, and his black hair was in disorder over his forehead. A faint shadow of stubble darkened his jaw. He looked, in the light of the fire, younger than she had ever seen him, and tired in a way that went all the way down.

He sat up with me, she thought. He sat in a stranger's kitchen all night, in a Hollows cottage, in the clothes of a solicitor, and watched me sleep.

"He has not moved," said Granny Odell, from the chimney corner, "since you fell. I told him to go to bed, and he looked at me as though I'd asked him to cut off his hand."

Tamsin turned her head. Her grandmother sat on a low stool by the hearth, in the shadows, with a mug of tea in her hands and her shawl pulled close. The old woman was not looking at Tamsin. She was looking at the sleeping man, with an expression Tamsin had never seen on her face, a long, intent, searching stare, as though she were trying to read a page of very small print.

"Your boy's breathing fine," Granny added. "Clear as a bell. I've been in to listen four times. You did well, lass."

"Thank you, Granny."

"Don't thank me for it." Granny sipped her tea. "Who is he?"

"He told you. He's Mr. Vance, a friend from..."

"He's not Mr. Anybody." The old woman's voice was dry as a dead leaf. "He's a Gilded, and a high one, from the cut of him. Eyes like new brass. I've known a few in my day, and none of them ever sat in my kitchen." She paused for a moment. "I've known a few that looked like him, though."

The man in the rocking chair stirred. His eyelids flickered, and he drew a long breath and lifted his head, blinking in the firelight, and his pale gold gaze came to rest on the old woman by the hearth.

Granny Odell looked at him for a long, long moment. Something moved across her wrinkled face, slow and strange, and her hands tightened round the mug.

"You have your mother's mouth," she said quietly.

Soren went entirely still.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your mother's mouth, boy. The shape of it, and the way you hold it when you're trying not to say a thing." Granny set down her mug on the hearthstone. "I'd know it anywhere, because it belonged to Adeline Marsh, who sat at that table once, a long time ago, when she was no taller than this."

The fire cracked. Tamsin sat bolt upright on the settle, the quilt sliding from her shoulders, and saw the blood drain from the Duke's face until it was the color of tallow. His hand had closed on the arm of the chair. He half rose, and sat down again, as though his knees had given way.

"My mother," he said, in a voice she hardly recognized, "was here?"

"Aye, she was." Granny Odell looked at him with her ancient, pale, unflinching eyes, and her voice was very gentle. "She was born here, boy."