CHAPTER EIGHT
Emily unbolted the front door of the parsonage and stepped outside.
Her long walks on the moors had not led her out to the grim monument of Ponden Kirk since the morning she had found Alcuin Curzon there, six months ago, though it often figured in her dreams. The dreams were nearly always just views of the black edifice from far off, but last night she had found herself reliving the day when three children had hiked there and left blood in the fairy cave at its foot.
As she closed the parsonage door behind her and started down the steps toward the lane that led past the narrow cemetery to the church, she took deep breaths of the cold morning air, and shook her head to dispel the clinging fragments of the dream—young Branwell with his pocketknife, her own voice saying They look like Roman foundations, and Anne’s remark: This wasn’t a game at all, was it? And it never had anything to do with Maria.
Branwell would certainly sleep till noon today. It was just as well.
Keeper trotted beside Emily on the still-damp paving stones, his massive shoulders rippling under his short tan fur. The right side of Emily’s coat swung heavily with the weight of her father’s pistol, which she had fired over the churchyard an hour ago.
For these past two weeks Charlotte and their father had been thirty miles away in Manchester, where her father had undergone an operation to remove the cataracts from his eyes and restore his vision. The oculist who had performed the operation had declared it a success, but their father had to remain in bed in a dark room for four weeks afterward, and Charlotte had rented rooms in Manchester for the duration.
And so Emily had taken on some of her father’s more obscure duties, and on this Wednesday morning she had a matter to attend to in the church.
The substitute curate that the Vicar of Bradford had sent to the Haworth church had, not surprisingly, recited the Lord’s Prayer in English during his Sunday services, and omitted the Latin phrase that the Reverend Grimshaw had begun using in the last century. And of course he had not rung the triangle that Emily’s father always struck at the end of the prayer—chiseled from the bell that had rung at Welsh’s funeral in 1771.
The villagers understood that her father would be back soon, and at the last two Sunday services several of them had smiled at Emily and nodded, evidently aware that she was doing what she could to maintain the sensible forms. There was no necessity for a donkey in the church with a backward-facing rider wearing twenty hats.
At the side door of the church she turned and looked back at the parsonage, across the flat and standing gravestones. If their father were to die of an infection down there in Manchester, she and her sisters and Branwell would be turned out of the place, for the building belonged to the Leeds Diocese of the Church of England, and would house their father’s replacement and his family.
Emily and her sisters had some experience as teachers and governesses, but any such jobs as they might find would hardly be likely to be at all close to one another. And of course Branwell would die in an asylum.
The sisters had completed the novels they had begun in the late winter, and Charlotte’s The Professor, Anne’s Agnes Grey, and Emily’s Wuthering Heights had been submitted—fruitlessly—to several London publishers; and only yesterday Emily had received a letter stating that all three novels had once again been rejected.
The London firm of Aylott & Jones had published their book of poems three months ago. Two copies had sold.
Emily shivered and pulled open the church door. The tall stained glass windows in the north and south walls threw a dim radiance over the empty pews, but she didn’t step inside until Keeper had sniffed the cold air and led the way in. She followed the big bullmastiff along the side aisle to the altar, and from the way Keeper swung his head to look ahead and behind, she guessed that he would always remember shaking the half-human skull to pieces six months ago. And she recalled that the following morning she had gone through the pockets of Branwell’s clothes and found a piece of that skull. She had buried it miles away from the church . . . far from the grooved ledger stone in the floor.
She glanced at that section of the main aisle now, and could just discern the outline of that stone in the shadows—only a few yards from the stone that covered the Brontë vault, where lay her mother and her sisters Elizabeth and Maria.
Her footsteps echoed among the side arches as she crossed the wide raised floor and mounted the spiral steps to the high pulpit. The substitute curate had not found the makeshift iron triangle at the back of a shelf below the lectern, and she reached in and pulled it out.
Projecting her voice to reach and ideally shake the ledger stone, she began, “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum . . .”
While she was saying the prayer, a streak of daylight split the central aisle as one of the tall front doors of the church opened. From the angle of the pulpit she couldn’t see who had opened the door, or if they had entered the church, but she finished the prayer, including Grimshaw’s five syllables—brachiun enim—and struck the triangle against the pillar to her right. The note rang out over the pews.
For several seconds there was no further sound; then boots were knocking on the stone floor and a deep voice called, “Miss Brontë?”
Emily didn’t descend from the pulpit, but waited while the man walked up the aisle. And when he stood in the light from the stained glass window behind her she recognized the forehead and cheekbones under the mane of black hair. The eyepatch again covered the left eye.
On the raised floor below the pulpit, Keeper stood up, watching the newcomer but not growling yet.
“Mr. Curzon,” said Emily, concealing her uneasiness. “You should not speak so loudly in a Christian church.”
“It’s Miss Emily,” he said, stopping below the pulpit and squinting up at her. “Of course it wouldn’t be you that fled.” He glanced cautiously at Keeper, then added, “That was hardly a Christian command that you inserted into the Pater Noster.” He shrugged and nodded. “But it is a Protestant church.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Did you bring your knife? Are you here to kill me at last?”
“Why haven’t you all followed your father and your sister? It was the wisest course.”
A breeze from the open doorway behind Curzon tossed the tails of his coat and flicked at Emily’s hair.
“They didn’t flee,” Emily snapped. “They’ll return in two weeks. My father needed an operation to restore his vision.” She slid the triangle back onto its shelf. “And there are things that need regular attention here.”
“Shooting at ghosts every morning.” Curzon nodded. “If his vision should be fully restored, he’d be wise to take the poisonous lot of you to somewhere across the nullifying sea, and leave this war to those who know how to wage it.”
Keeper was still not growling, and Emily turned away and walked down the steps to the altar-level floor. Facing Curzon, she said, “You? Where were you six months ago when a woman tried to reunite the skull to the body of Welsh’s twin?”
Curzon stepped back, and flipped up the eyepatch to stare at her with both eyes.
“This happened? Where is the skull now?”
She pulled the pistol from her coat pocket and held it up. “I shot a hole in it, and then my dog shook it to pieces.” Curzon didn’t speak, so she went on, “I buried the pieces, widely separated, far out on the moors. Nowhere near Ponden Kirk.”
“Did the woman have a name?”
“She called herself Mrs. Flensing.”
Curzon nodded and rubbed his chin. He started to speak, then shook his head. Finally he said, “And the body of the twin? Do you know where that is?”
“You’re standing on it.”
He stared at her for several more seconds, then slowly lowered his gaze to his boots. He crouched and traced one of the grooves with a finger.
“Ogham,” he said quietly, straightening up. “I can’t read it. But that phrase you added to the Pater Noster was old Irish—Lie nameless.”
“The ogham symbols spell out its name,” said Emily, and she repeated her father’s words: “with a negating branch of lines which contradict the name.”
Curzon quickly readjusted the eyepatch over his left eye. Brusquely he said, “You must tell me everything you know.”
“I’ve told you enough. It’s good that you killed some kind of . . . werewolf king, back in March, but you have no claim on me.”
“Your gun has been fired and not reloaded.” He waved at it. “The pan cover is up. But—I respect your dog.”
“He’d shake your skull to pieces,” Emily assured him.
Keeper was in fact staring at Curzon, and Emily saw watchful caution in the dog’s tensed ears.
“He’s my keeper,” she added.
Curzon shook his head in angry bafflement. “You can’t accomplish anything,” he said. “Fire your gun, ring your bell, pronounce your syllables—while more devils roam Yorkshire every night!”
Emily bit her lip. In the last couple of months, Tabby had told her and Anne stories she’d heard in the village from farmers and sheepherders. Always in a portentously lowered voice, the old housekeeper had relayed accounts of unnatural animals seen loping across the moonlit hills, voices singing out of the deep sinkholes known as pots, and ignis fatui lights dancing over bogs on moonless nights. Several children, she’d said, had disappeared from remote farmhouses—no one could say if they’d been kidnapped, killed, or lured away by the creatures known locally as boggarts and gytrashes.
“Any scraps you may know,” Curzon went on, “you can’t possibly understand. Tell me how you and your dog came to break the skull.”
Thinking of Branwell’s unadmirable part in that whole episode, Emily said, “I won’t.”
Curzon bared his teeth. “Ignorant peasant fool!” he burst out; then held up his hands. “Very well. You may rely on it that I know things you’d like to know. We can trade—a fact for a fact. I’ll even be the first to push one forward.”
Emily took a breath to give him a scornful answer—ignorant peasant fool indeed!—but she glanced at the ledger stone at his feet, and hesitated. During these last two weeks she was sure she had heard faint grating from it, and on one cold morning when the flagstone floor had been visibly damp, that stone had been dry, as if it had been warmer. She had not dared to walk over and touch it. And there were Tabby’s stories.
Curzon did have knowledge about all this: the two-bladed knife, Welsh, the unknown thing under the stone that lay between Curzon and herself as they spoke.
“Not here,” she said. “I’ve said too much already, here.”
“You think it listens? With no head?” His tone was light, but he took two steps back, off the stone. “But I’ll humor you. Can we speak privately at that inn next door?”
Emily thought of the back room of the Black Bull, and the table that probably still showed the groove of her gunshot; and she shivered at the thought that some powdered bone from the skull might be imbedded in the wood.
“Certainly not,” she said, with an air of primness.
“Cling to propriety. The churchyard?”
“Just as bad.”
“Really! The middle of the street?”
Emily recalled the buckets of holy water in every room and hall of the parsonage. Papist superstition, but still . . .
“Our kitchen,” she said, stepping down to the main floor, closely flanked by Keeper. Anne should be present for this, she thought, and even Tabby might have insights.
Curzon gave her a tired nod, as if to say, Your accustomed domain.
Emily scowled, but she and Keeper followed Curzon down the side aisle, past the door through which they had entered, and out through the front door into bright daylight.
A stout, four-foot walking stick leaned against one of the stone columns, and Curzon took it as he walked to the steps. Emily saw now that he was wearing a woolen jacket and worn corduroy trousers, and as he stepped to the walkway he flipped a battered gray cap onto his shaggy head. His boots were scuffed brown leather.
He stepped along briskly, and Emily wondered again at his recovery from what had seemed to be a near-mortal injury in March. As the three of them rounded the corner of the building, and the churchyard and the parsonage swung into view, Emily asked, “Why were you in the church?”
“I’m on a . . . a walking tour, and Haworth is more or less on the way. At that inn they told me that one of the curate’s daughters still fired the old man’s gun every morning, and was in the church. I assumed it would be the eldest.” He sniffed the air and remarked, “I imagine few children live to adulthood here.”
“More than half,” said Emily defensively. “And it’s not devils taking the ones that die.”
“No, I’m sure it’s the cholera. Are all the town’s pumps downhill from the cemetery?”
Emily lifted her chin. “My father has sent several petitions to the General Board of Health in London, demanding improvements in sanitation.”
“Wonders, that’ll do. Like shooting a gun over the graves.”
Emily glanced past Curzon at the cemetery, and said quietly, “He’s not a fool. It’s not loaded with an ordinary pistol ball.”
“Silver?” Curzon startled Emily by spitting onto the pavement. The man’s manners were appalling. “That’s fairy-tale stuff. Better he should stop fooling about with things he doesn’t understand, and use the money to pipe water in from high ground.”
“They’re not silver. Be quiet.”
The churchyard was behind them now, and Emily hoped Curzon wouldn’t ask why there was always the clinking of a chisel from the stonecutter’s yard to their right. It’s not devils taking the ones that die, she thought. She led Curzon and Keeper past the little garden to the south side of the parsonage, past the peat room and around the corner to the kitchen door. She pulled it open, and whatever Curzon might think of her accustomed domain, she was heartened by the warm air and the homely smells of onions and bacon. Curzon leaned his stick against the doorframe.
Old Tabby looked up from a bowl of peeled potatoes when Emily and Keeper entered; and her eyebrows rose when Curzon followed them in, ducking under a string of drying washcloths.
“It’s the Papist gentleman, I think?” she said doubtfully as she noted Curzon’s common-laborer clothing and the cap he was now holding.
“Yes. Mrs. Ayckroyd, this is Mr. Curzon.”
Tabby seemed taken aback by the introduction and the use of her surname; she wiped her hands on her apron and essayed a sort of uncertain curtsy. “Shall I bring tea into the dining room?”
The windows of the dining room overlooked the close churchyard, which was probably why Emily had thought of the kitchen. “We’ll have our tea in here, I believe,” she said. “And stay and join us, Tabby. You were there too, when Crow Hill exploded twenty years ago.”
“Ah?” said the old housekeeper. “Like that, are we? Twenty-two years ago it was. You were only six years old.” She filled a pot with cold water and set it on the black-iron range that stood against the wall opposite the hallway door.
Anne stood now in the doorway, looking younger than her twenty-six years in a plain linen dress with her chestnut hair parted in the middle and curling around her cheeks. “I was four,” she said, “but I remember the boulders hurtling through the air, and the flood, and the storm.”
“And we all ran through the rain to Ponden House,” said Tabby.
Seeing Curzon’s eyes widen, Emily said, “It’s a mile and a half from Ponden Kirk, no connection. ‘Ponden’ is pond-dene, it means a cleft in a marshy pond.”
Emily sat down at the table and waved at the other chairs. The other three joined her, Tabby with some hesitation.
“Where is Crow Hill?” Curzon asked, “and what happened there in 1824?” He laid down his cap and spread his hands. “Boulders?”
Anne and Tabby looked to Emily, who shook her head. To Curzon, she said, “You’re to push out the first fact.”
“For God’s sake. Very well—the undead thing under the stone in your father’s church was killed, for the most part, in 1771.”
Emily nodded. “That’s when our great-great-grandfather adopted Welsh, its twin, in Ireland.” She cocked an eyebrow at Curzon. “Welsh had a human appearance. The thing whose skull I saw could not have.”
Tabby was listening eagerly, and seemed to be repressing questions of her own. Emily reflected that the old woman had always loved spooky stories, especially if they might be true.
Curzon shifted in his chair. “Welsh took after the mother, while the other was much more like the, er, father. Your double-great-grandfather found Welsh on a boat, of course.”
“Yes,” said Anne. “Why ‘of course’?”
Curzon gave her an incurious look, then spoke to Emily. “You owe me one. My great-grandmother, who was given the task of killing both of the twins, did mostly kill the monstrous one, the one that’s in your church, though the thing’s head was lost. But the other one—she couldn’t bear to kill what seemed to be a small boy. So she hid him on a packet boat in Liverpool, bound for Warrenpoint in County Down, across the Irish Sea. She believed that three hundred miles of open ocean would be enough separation to sever Welsh from his twin, and break the . . . shadow, the quickening influence the two of them, paired, would have imposed in northern England.”
Emily started to speak, but Curzon went on angrily, “And it would have been enough, if your father hadn’t brought Welsh back.”
Emily nodded. “Or if your grandmother had killed the boy, and not shirked her duty.”
Anne gave her sister a surprised look.
Curzon sat back and made his face relax. “We can perhaps excuse our forebears their errors. Tell me about Crow Hill.”
Emily started to object, but Tabby was already speaking. “It was fair weather,” Tabby said, getting up and shuffling to the range, “when we started out for a walk on the moors—Emily, Anne, Branwell and me. But the clouds did gather very dark when we were out as far as the Lad Stone—”
Seeing Curzon’s blank scowl, Tabby explained, “That’s a marker of the Lancashire border, at the top of Crow Hill. They put it up last century at the spot where there was a cairn before. We were only a hundred yards from the hill when—”
Anne shivered. “It exploded!”
“Did it not!” agreed Tabby. “Flying boulders and mud, and thunder and rain too! The whole hillside to the east just tumbled down into the valley in a great roaring flood of muddy water. We all ran north through the storm to Ponden House, where the Heatons kindly gave us blankets and tea and sent a rider to tell your father that you were all safe.”
Curzon rocked his head back and stared past the hanging washcloths at the high ceiling. “You lot just couldn’t ever resist raising devils here, could you? A male Brunty descendant approached its cairn—what did you imagine its response would be?”
“I didn’t know until this moment,” Emily protested, “that a cairn was there before the Lad Stone boundary marker! What is it?”
“It must have been the head, damn it, the skull you shot! We searched for it, but the tribe must have buried it there.”
For several seconds none of them spoke.
“Well,” said Anne, “Emily and Keeper destroyed it, so the quickening influence must be damped now, mustn’t it?—if not extinguished outright.”
Tabby clicked her tongue and muttered, “That’s not the word in the hills beyond the village.” She had poured hot water into their aunt’s teapot, and now, hardly watching what she was doing, stirred in four teaspoons of tea leaves. “Lately the bad night folk are said to be lively as ever—fires by the standing stones on the hills west of the Lad Stone, marsh lights calling to late travelers, two more childer gone missing up toward Cowling.”
Clumping footsteps sounded on the stairs then, and Emily raised a hand. In a conversational tone she said to Curzon, “Do you have family in Yorkshire, sir?”
The question had been meant as an innocuous change of topic, but to Emily’s surprise Curzon winced and half-raised a hand. “I—waste my time here.” He pushed back his chair.
Branwell leaned in the hall doorway, and blinked in surprise at the dark man with the eyepatch who was sitting with the housekeeper and his sisters at the kitchen table. His curly ginger hair stuck out in all directions.
“Bad dream,” he muttered. “I beg your pardon—hello, sir—have we met?”
He was wearing the white linen shirt and woolen trousers that he’d been wearing yesterday, and had undoubtedly slept in.
Curzon stood up, and Emily said, wearily, “Mr. Curzon, our brother, Branwell.”
Curzon stared at the young man, and though his swarthy face showed no expression, Emily saw his jaw muscles tighten.
He nodded, and Branwell did too, jerkily.
Branwell turned to Tabby and waved at the teapot. “Do you have another cup?”
Curzon gave Emily a look she thought of as smoldering, and said, “I can’t stay.”
With no further comment he picked up his cap and strode out of the kitchen into the yard, snatching his stick from beside the door as he went. Emily got up and quickly put on her coat, and Curzon was already on the path that led out onto the moors by the time she and Keeper caught up with him.
Keeper loped ahead of Curzon and turned to look back at him.
As the man glanced at the dog and then stopped, Emily reflected that Keeper’s attitude toward Curzon had always been a sort of watchful caution, neither hostility nor full acceptance.
When she had found Curzon below Ponden Kirk six months ago, wounded and temporarily unable to walk, Keeper had growled—at the bloody knife that Curzon dropped; and the dog had growled again, and set his paws on Curzon’s chest, when the man had caught Emily’s hand as she had tried to examine his wound, but Keeper had stood back when Curzon released her; and when Curzon had rudely pushed Emily aside in walking out of her father’s study later that day, all Keeper had done was to tear the man’s trousers with his teeth—no more than a reminder of manners, really. If a stranger had treated Emily that way, the dog would have been at the stranger’s throat.
Not for the first time, she wished her dog could talk.
Curzon didn’t turn around on the path, but Emily saw his shoulder rise and fall in a sigh.
“Miss Emily,” he said, and turned to face her. “What, did I short you on the fact exchange?”
“Probably,” she said as Keeper trotted back to stand beside her. “I wasn’t keeping track. What does this walking tour of yours have to do with the business we were discussing?”
“You assume I have no concerns in life other than the travails of your ill-fated family?”
“Your memory is deficient, sir. We were talking about the ill-fated land.”
“Yes,” he admitted. He thumped the base of his stick in the dirt. “And yes of course my journey today has to do with that business! Now go home, importunate child! It would do you no good to know more.”
“Now that I think of it, you do owe me one more fact.” She waved out at the infinity of sunlit green grass and purple heather rippling in the wind that swept across the hills. “What’s your destination?”
“A place far from here.”
He turned his broad back on her and resumed walking. She and Keeper fell into step beside him.
“It’s many miles,” Curzon said without looking at her, “and I have a long stride.”
Emily didn’t reply, but kept walking. His warning didn’t impress her—she and Keeper often hiked all day, fording nameless becks, skirting deep ravines, and following remote sheep paths that were probably older than the Roman roads.
Curzon didn’t speak, but he soon turned north on a narrow trail that wound between low hills well known to Emily, and the three of them walked for a while in silence. Keeper sometimes rambled ahead or paused to sniff at wayside stones and clumps of grass.
When they came to the narrow River Worth, they walked west along the bank and then crossed it by an old stone bridge.
On the far side of it, Curzon stopped, and with his one exposed eye he stared at Emily in angry exasperation. “Go back. You’ll exhaust yourself on these pathless northern moors, and I can’t waste the day carrying you to some farmhouse.”
Emily thought he probably could carry her quite a distance now—unlike the morning when she had practically carried him away from Ponden Kirk—but she was confident that she and Keeper could outlast him, and she just returned his stare.
“Very well,” he said, turning away, “die out there. I won’t stop.”
He waited several moments, then muttered what was probably a curse and strode forward, away from the river.
Emily and Keeper again fell into step beside him.
“You’re the Brontë boy, aren’t you?”
Branwell had been standing on the flagstones just past the churchyard wall, halfway between the Black Bull and the sexton John Brown’s stonecutting yard, and he had just nerved himself to ignore the ominous chipping of new gravestones and go ask the sexton for a few shillings to be added to his already sizeable debt.
He looked up, squinting in the oppressive daylight, and recognized a sheepherder who sometimes walked to town to attend old Patrick’s Sunday services, though his stone house was even farther away than the Sunderlands’ Top Withens. Robson? No, Wright, Adam Wright. The man was walking up the street from the village shops, and stopped in front of Branwell.
“Yes sir,” Branwell said diffidently, knowing that he looked pale and sickly in his slept-in clothes. Why had he got up so damned early? He could almost feel himself wilting in Wright’s tanned, clean-shaven, hearty proximity.
“We heard your father is gone to Manchester to get the eyes mended,” Wright said, “and my daughter was asking if you’ve taken over conducting the services.”
Branwell bobbed his head. “No no, I’m no public speaker—”
“Nonsense, lad! I recall you standing up on the hustings right here in front of the Bull before the General Election in ’37, telling the crowd that if they wouldn’t let your father speak, you wouldn’t let them speak either!”
Branwell found himself nodding, even nearly smiling. He had been nineteen years old, nearly a year past his humiliating trip to London, and politics had begun to interest him. His family had been stoutly Tory in their support for the conservative Robert Peel, while most of the village was Whig, favoring Lord Melbourne. Old Patrick had stood up right here to make an impassioned plea for Peel and the Tory cause, and when the crowd began jeering at him, Branwell had stood up too, and denounced them all just as Wright said.
—And a day later the villagers had carried down the street an effigy of Branwell, a caricature made of burlap and wood, its crude hands gripping a herring and a potato—a disrespectful reference to his family’s Irish background.
Branwell shrugged. It was all a long time ago, and he had been a different young man.
Wright nodded. “That capped me, though I’m a Whig myself! Hark now, I’ve been up since before dawn with the livestock, and I was just going to have a pint and a bite.” He waved toward the pub’s front door. “Are you free?”
Branwell stood up straighter, ran his fingers through his disordered hair and sparse chin-beard, and pulled his coat more snugly around his narrow shoulders.
Summoning his most distinct tones, he said, “I am, sir, as a matter of fact.”
Wright led the way and held open the door, and when he had paid for two mugs of stout and asked for a couple of mutton pasties, he and Branwell sat down at a table by the street window. The low-ceilinged room smelled familiarly of old beer and tobacco smoke, but Wright seemed to bring in with him a breeze spiced with earth and iron and sun-heated stone.
“Drink up, lad,” Wright said. “You look like you had a flaysome night.”
Branwell managed a smile, and took a couple of deep swallows of the stout. He wiped his mouth and said, “I suppose I did.” In this very room, he thought, remembering a jovial group and a succession of free whiskies.
“Ah.” Wright gave Branwell an amused, assessing look. “We’ve met before, you know.”
“Several times,” agreed Branwell, “at church.”
“Aye, there too. But I was thinking of a latelier time.”
Wright paused, and after a few seconds Branwell raised his eyebrows.
“A midnight in early March,” Wright said, “below Ponden Kirk, at a funeral pyre. We shook hands, if you recall.”
Branwell’s face was suddenly cold, and his legs tensed in readiness to run out of the inn.
But Wright caught his forearm in one big browned hand. Branwell tugged, and only managed to splash some stout onto the table. “Easy, fellow!” said Wright with quiet urgency. “You’re one of us!”
“I almost was!” said Branwell, nearly in tears. “That boy took my body, put me in his!”
“Yes, and you ran off before we could make things clear to you. We dinna chase you, did we?” Branwell relaxed slightly, and Wright released his arm. “I was in a different form than this,” Wright said, “wasn’t I? You were in another form too, for a moment. Folk like us aren’t stuck forever in one sort of body, see. Those die after a while.”
Branwell thought of the death of his mother, and then of his sisters Elizabeth and Maria—especially Maria, who until her death at the age of eleven had practically been a replacement mother to him and his sisters. Gone forever.
“Sooner than we’d like,” Branwell whispered.
“There’s a sturdier family, and you’re the prodigal son. Come home.”
Branwell tore his gaze away from Wright’s. Across the room was the door to the snug, where Emily had put a pistol ball through the malformed skull six month ago. And when Mrs. Flensing had partly reassembled it in the church, Emily’s damned dog had wrecked it for good; and then Emily—it must have been—stole the piece of it that he had saved.
“You—” Branwell began, then shivered, remembering Wright’s appearance that night. He took a fresh breath and went on, “You poured oil on an animal’s body, and burned it. Was that a member of the family? Had someone moved on, from that body?”
Wright sat back and sighed. “No, lad. That great person was killed outright, and a big loss his death was to us all. I hailed you this morning because his murderer has come back into the area, and may well have more such murders in mind.”
Something Mrs. Flensing had once said to him now belatedly surfaced in Branwell’s mind. “The,” he said excitedly, “yes, the one-eyed Catholic!” Wright started to speak, but Branwell interrupted him. “He’s in our kitchen! Or was, an hour ago. His name is . . . Curzon.”
“In the parsonage?” In one swift movement Wright was on his feet. “Take me there straightaway.”
“He’s gone, he walked out, angry.” And apparently despising me, Branwell thought. “My sister Emily went after him, they’re an hour gone. She’s—” Branwell paused; Emily was the only member of his family who both understood him and wished him well. But he met Wright’s compelling eyes, and remembered his own Northangerland alter ego. “She’s the one who destroyed the skull that Mrs. Flensing wanted to hide in the church.”
“A bad girl,” stated Wright, pulling Branwell up from his chair. “And that Curzon fellow murdered his fiancée a few months back. Which way did they go?”
“West—across the moors.”
“Come on, lad, quick! I’ll need you to help send a call.”
“A call—to whom?”
Wright didn’t answer, and a moment later Branwell found that he had been hustled outside, and that Wright was pulling him toward the church and the cemetery.
Look, he told himself—I have no choice.
+ + +
In the wilder country north of the River Worth, Curzon tended to leave the broad heaths and make his way down into stony ravines, out of the cold wind, and when those sooner or later bent away from his evident course and he climbed back up to level or rising ground, he squinted at the clouding sky and the lonely trees and the occasional stone house visible on remote hilltops.
“People live in places like that?” he said finally, pushing back his cap and nodding toward a bleak gray rectangle a couple of miles away.
Emily and Keeper both looked at him curiously as they strode through tall grass beside an ancient waist-high dry-stone wall. “Not much anymore,” Emily said. “Most of the time when you hike to one, you find it’s just four roofless walls. We took shelter in one like that on the night Crow Hill exploded.”
“In a rainstorm? Not much shelter.”
“They block the wind. And—”
“And you’re out of sight.” He nodded. “There’s value in that.”
“And in walking down in gorges instead of up here on open tracks.”
“Yes.”
Ragged sheets of gray cloud had crept across the sky during the last hour of their walk, and patches of shadow that had at first darkened individual slopes or hilltops had now merged in an overall gloom. Emily wished she had brought a satchel with food for herself and Keeper.
Soon the old stone wall they had been following ended at a low green field furry with bracken and reeds.
“Catch that froggy smell?” asked Emily. “That’s a marsh. I know the way around it.”
“Do as you please.” Curzon started forward, and after a few paces his boots had sunk to the ankles in black mud.
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Emily, “what do you think your walking stick is for? Poke the mud to see how deep it is. And step on the clumps of reeds. Look at Keeper.”
The big bullmastiff was taking long strides, sometimes leaping from one raised cluster of waving fronds to another; but even as Emily spoke, the dog paused, staring ahead.
A faint spot of colorless light bobbed over the marsh a hundred feet away, not far from a twisted willow and a cluster of hawthorn bushes. Curzon was staring in another direction, and Emily saw that he had noticed a second dim light. Soon there were three, moving together by the willow. Keeper loped back to stand by Emily.
“Ignis fatui,” she said, just loudly enough to be heard over the wind. “Hill folk say they trap you in the bogs with hallucinations.”
“I know what they are.”
“I’ve never seen them out before dark.”
Curzon waved at the now thickly overcast sky. “It is dark.”
The luminous spots were so faint that it took a moment for Emily to realize it when they disappeared.
“There,” said Curzon, moving forward again, “you’re right, they’re shy in the daytime.”
But Keeper growled and Emily hung back. “Wait,” she said. “If they come again—”
The lights didn’t reappear, but the hawthorn bushes shook, and separated into three hunched shapes; leaves flattened and branches twisted in, and when a wriggling, rocking clump was raised at the top of each, these settled and became recognizable as wizened faces with tangled gray hair streaming on the wind. Now there were three old women hunched beside the willow, in robes made of haphazardly woven twigs.
Emily took an involuntary step back, sinking her boot. She had heard of ignis fatui leading lost travelers over cliffs or into bogs or sinkholes at night, but the stories had never hinted that the things might take even this approximately human form.
The three old women out there by the tree swayed together, and ragged mouths opened in the clay-colored faces as they began chanting in birdlike voices. Emily couldn’t make out the words, but her hand on Keeper’s collar was pulled sideways, away from the things.
Curzon was already moving in that direction, and Emily followed Keeper. She kept looking back over her shoulder, but the figures didn’t move away from the willow, and within a minute they had subsided back to ordinary-looking hawthorn bushes.
Emily took a deep breath as she plodded along. “Keeper and I have crossed this marsh before. And we’ve been out at night often enough to have seen ignis fatui aplenty.”
“The two of you should turn back,” Curzon said without looking at her. “Rain is looking likely.”
“They never turned into old women before.”
Curzon didn’t comment.
The ground rose ahead, and soon the three of them were able to follow a north-slanting path for at least a while. Emily looked at the big figure of Curzon striding steadily along, and asked him, “Your wound is quite healed?”
“Wound? Oh, when we met! Yes, entirely.”
“What are you, exactly?”
In this gray light the lines of his face seemed more like weathered stone than flesh, as if he, in common with the ignis fatui, wore the aspect of humanity only conditionally.
He didn’t answer.
“I would have thought,” she went on, “that it was impossible for a person with a wound like that to be up and walking about only an hour or so later.”
“Keep silent when you know nothing, girl.”
She was wary of pushing this brooding stranger too far. The two-bladed knife that she had picked up below Ponden Kirk six months ago was in a dresser drawer in her room back at the parsonage. She wished she had it now; and she stepped wide of Curzon as she repeated the question she had asked him in the kitchen two hours ago. “Do you have family in Yorkshire?”
Suddenly he stopped and was facing her. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his walking stick shook in his right hand. The fingers of his left hand were spread in an apparent effort to keep them from clenching into a fist.
Emily didn’t flinch, and Keeper only stood close, and after a few tense seconds Curzon grated, “Go to Hell,” and spun away from her. He resumed walking north, lengthening his stride to leave her behind.
Emily and Keeper followed, steadily staying several yards behind him.
Soon the divided trio was climbing another hill, their boots thrashing through tall grass. As they neared the crest, Emily saw the top of a rough, upright column of granite, and when she and Keeper scrambled up to it she saw that another stone column stood behind the one she had seen from below, and that Curzon was standing by the farther one, panting from the climb and squinting north with his one exposed eye.
“The River Aire is about a mile that way,” Emily said, breathing easily.
Ignoring her, Curzon was looking down the steeper slope on the other side. He opened his mouth and, after a moment’s hesitation, called a dozen syllables of a language Emily didn’t recognize, though there was no sign of anyone else who might hear him.
Keeper turned and looked the other way; and when Emily pushed back her windblown hair and looked in that direction she saw distant black spots against the dark gray sky.
“Crows,” she said, “behind us.”
Curzon looked over his shoulder at her, and at the sky beyond her. He shrugged irritably. “And hedgehogs in front of us, I daresay. Be quiet.” It occurred to Emily that he was frightened by whatever it was he meant to do here.
Keeper stood watching the distant crows, but Emily walked to the north side of the hilltop and stood a few yards to Curzon’s left. Below them spread a mile-wide heath between rocky promontories, and a hundred feet from the foot of their hill she could make out lines of stones among the patches of gorse and heather. She looked more carefully: allowing for interruptions, and gaps where a new beck had cut through them, the lines traced a square perhaps fifty feet on a side; and now she could see stones indicating a smaller square that lay in the middle of it.
Keeper barked, and Emily looked back past him at the southern sky. The crows were closer, more distinctly visible; and they were clearly flying toward this hill.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said.
Curzon turned impatiently, opening his mouth to say something, but he paused when he looked past her pointing finger.
He stared for several seconds, then said, “Get away from here. It’s me he’s after.”
He turned back to the slope and began hastily sliding down it, half squatting and half sitting, his boots digging grooves among the grass and sending pebbles rolling ahead of him.
Emily followed in a hopping crouch, and Keeper went bounding down after them. Curzon snagged on a rock and tumbled to the level ground, but quickly got to his feet and began running toward the nearest line of stones. Keeper had paused near the foot of the incline and was looking up the slope, past Emily, and as she caught up with him he ran beside her after Curzon.
All three leaped simultaneously across the first line of stones—and abruptly Emily was thrown off her feet as the ground shifted, and when she sat up she was blinking back at the hill in jarringly bright daylight; she squinted against the sudden glare and got up on one knee—and then she was in darkness, though she could still feel crushed grass under her hands.
“Keeper!” she called, and then Keeper’s cold nose was reassuringly in her face. Looking up, she saw a crescent moon in a clear night sky. A moment later another dog was shouldering up to Keeper.
Bright daylight sprang up again, and the hill they had just descended, or one very like it, was clearly visible against a stark blue unclouded sky. No crows were visible. Keeper and the other dog, a bullmastiff like him, stood beside where Emily knelt.
“Your dog,” came Curzon’s strained voice from behind her, “is two dogs.”
She turned around, and gasped and instinctively clawed the turf for steadiness when she saw that Curzon was standing in the open doorway of a low stone house with a high, conical thatched roof. Its walls, she was sure, were where the stone lines of the inner square had been.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Curzon. “How is it that you are?”
Emily stood up, and didn’t have to shift her feet to keep her balance. She tossed her hair back.
“We jumped over the outer line same as you did,” she said. The dogs still stood on either side of her, and she touched the stranger’s wide head; he was as solidly present as Keeper, and licked her hand.
“Is the curate’s daughter some pagan priestess?” asked Curzon.
Emily raised her chin, looking past him. Her heart was thudding in her chest, but she kept her voice level: “Is this place intruding in our time, or are we intruding in its?”
Curzon waved at the wooden lintel-beam over his head. “I don’t know. We’re not precisely in any time, here.” He leaned his stick against the irregular stones of the wall, and then Emily was surprised to see him draw a double-bladed knife from under his coat. He raised it in both hands, laid across his open palms like an offering. He took a deep breath, turned, and stepped across the threshold.
Emily shivered, sure that she could almost hear the distant music she sometimes imagined out on the moors—repetitive and atonal, older than humanity. She hesitated only a moment before following Curzon into the small stone chamber, accompanied by the two dogs.
A foot-wide opening in the far wall provided the only light away from the doorway, and it wasn’t until Emily’s eyes adjusted to the dimness that she noticed the wicker figure on a stone block below the opening.
She shuffled forward to look at it more closely, though Curzon looked away from his upraised knife and hissed at her to stop. She waved without looking back at him.
The figure on the block was an exaggerated representation of a woman, about four feet tall. It was made of twigs that had clearly been bent into shape when they had still been green and pliable, for the rounded head, breasts, and wide hips almost looked naturally formed. Its arms were less carefully made: simple bundles of straw, spread at the ends to resemble clusters of fingers.
She turned to Curzon. “Who is this?” she asked.
He exhaled and closed one hand on the grip of the knife. With his free hand he took hold of her wrist and pulled her back to the doorway. Keeper followed her, and the other dog was sniffing the wicker figure.
“At the moment,” he whispered tersely, “it’s not anyone, it’s an effigy.”
Emily rocked her head. “So I supposed. An effigy of whom?”
“A goddess. This is a temple.”
“What—” Emily began.
“Stand here, will you?” Curzon interrupted. “Don’t move till I come out.”
Emily leaned against the stones of the doorway and Keeper sat down. Curzon hesitated, frowning, then elevated the knife in both hands again and turned and stepped back inside. After a harsh syllable from him the other dog came out and sat beside Keeper.
Emily looked in and saw that Curzon had laid the knife aside and was kneeling on the dirt floor near the image. As she watched, he tossed a handful of what might have been bird bones out in front of him. He stared at them for a moment, then gathered them up and threw them again.
She watched as he cast the bones, studied them, and scooped them up, over and over again, with evident dissatisfaction—but all at once he reared back with a gasp and sat down. Emily looked past him, and her face went cold when she saw that the wicker figure’s straw right arm was moving—bending and lifting.
Curzon had scrambled to his feet and now stood closer to the doorway.
The crude arm straightened.
Curzon looked over his shoulder at Emily. “It’s . . . pointing at you.”
Emily’s head was ringing and she was dizzy, and her first impulse was to grab Keeper and run away from this place, back to their home; but she sensed that this place and this effigy were no part of the power represented by Mrs. Flensing, and she knew she would be forever haunted by the memory of this uncanny greeting, if she were to flee.
She stepped forward again, reaching out with her scarred right hand. Her fingers brushed the spread strands of straw at the end of the token arm, and it fell back to hang as it had been.
She had felt nothing distinct in that moment of contact, just a comprehension of this stone temple and the two standing stones on the hilltop—and an impression of balance maintained, equilibrium.
Natural law, she thought. Law of some kind, at any rate.
Curzon was watching her closely, and he spread his empty hands.
Emily waved toward the litter of tiny bones on the dirt; and she was grateful that he understood without her having to try her voice just yet.
He crouched again, gathered the bones and tossed them.
This time Emily could see that their arrangement on the dirt was not random. They formed a shape that might have been a letter or symbol, albeit one she had never seen.
He quickly picked up the bones and flipped them out of his hand, and they took another symbol-like form.
He did it six more times, with similar results, whispering to himself as if to remember each symbol; then he picked up the knife and got to his feet, leaving the last shape as it lay.
He blundered past Emily out into the sunshine, and after tucking the knife away and hastily making the Catholic sign of the cross he leaned forward, bracing his hands on his knees.
Emily looked at the motionless wicker figure, then walked out to stand beside Curzon. “Who,” she said carefully, “is she?”
Curzon squinted up at her for several seconds, considering. Finally he said, “She was known to the Celts down around Bath as Sulis, and the druids in these northern parts called her Brigantia.” He straightened up and glanced at the two dogs. “There’s the remains of a Roman road up by Skipton, and the Romans used to come down here to consult her. They knew her as Minerva.”
Minerva, thought Emily; and she shivered with the same sense of liberating excitement she had felt when her father had described his first action upon arrival in England—I went directly to Chester . . . there’s an ancient shrine to Minerva there. When I should have put my trust in our Lord, in my fright I sought armor from a pagan goddess.
Curzon walked in a circle, alternately staring at the ground and the blue sky, then faced Emily.
“How is it,” he asked hoarsely, “that she knew you?”
Emily thought of several answers, then shrugged. “She and my father go way back.”
“What? What the Hell are you Bruntys? Not Christians, it’s clear—”
“Says a statue-worshipping Papist!” Emily retorted hotly, “who performs pagan divination with bird bones! What right—”
He was just staring at her.
After several seconds she took a deep breath and let it out. “When my father first arrived in England,” she said, “and realized that Welsh’s spirit had come back across the Irish Sea with him, he—went to an old Roman shrine to Minerva near Liverpool, and asked the goddess for the protection of her armor. He knew it was wrong, but—”
She was interrupted by the sudden howling of both dogs and a piercing high-pitched voice from behind her that cried, “Bruntys and Curzons, murderers, both!”
Emily had spun around as the voice was cutting the air. Several yards away across the sunlit grass and heather, beyond the outer line of stones, a swarthy, black-haired little boy was smiling at her and Curzon. He was barefoot, draped in a ragged white shirt and trousers, and Emily found it hard to focus on him, as if the air around him were rippling.
Curzon stared at him for a moment, then glanced back at the stone temple before facing the boy again. “You can follow us?” he asked hoarsely. “Here?”
The dogs quickly advanced to the row of boundary stones, and their howls had wailed away now to rumbling snarls.
The boy walked forward and pointed at the mastiff who stood beside Keeper. “That dog and I,” he said, “killed each other in the same tick of a clock—we share that death, he can’t hide from me.” The boy pursed his lips and whistled three descending notes. “And I’ll choose where here is.”
The daylight had faded by stages as he whistled, and the sky was once again darkly overcast. Emily glanced behind, and saw that the little temple was gone—only the lines of stones among the grasses showed where it had been.
The boy whistled again, and with a rumbling jolt a six-foot patch of ground in front of Emily imploded and fell away into subterranean darkness. She stepped back from the new sinkhole and looked toward Curzon; a hole had opened in the dirt behind him, and even as she watched, a gaping fissure broke into view between the dogs and the boy.
Curzon was holding the double-bladed knife, and he took several steps across the grass toward the boy, but when two more whistled notes shivered the air he rocked to a halt, for a woman now stood between him and the boy.
Emily crouched with her arms spread, breathing quickly and ready to jump if the turf under her boots should move, and she blinked in surprise at the woman who faced Curzon. The woman was somehow in deeper shadow than Curzon, and her blonde hair hung in ringlets above a long black gown and an embroidered shawl.
The two mastiffs had bounded around the gap in front of them and now leaped at the boy—and landed on the heather behind him, as if he had not been there. They spun around, and the smaller mastiff again jumped uselessly through the apparition—while Keeper’s attention was caught by something a few yards to the side.
“Madeline?” croaked Curzon; and then the woman’s face opened in a jaw-stretching scream and she raced toward him. Curzon stumbled back two paces—and toppled away out of sight into the sinkhole behind him.
Emily gasped and started toward the hole, but the little boy had leaped over the fissure and was now only a couple of yards in front of her. His ragged garments, and even his small body, rippled in the cold wind, and his eyes were holes in the tight skin of his face. Below the eyes the mouth opened in a frothy spray, and the child’s voice said, “For your father’s sake, surrender now and be mine.”
Emily looked desperately toward Keeper. The dog was advancing on what appeared to be an unoccupied expanse of dirt; but her view of the hill wavered there, as if it were seen through nearly still clear water.
The apparition of the boy was closer to her, and its voice repeated, “Surrender—”
Then Keeper sprang, and for an instant Emily saw the boy over there, falling back from the dog’s claws and teeth—and in the next instant it wasn’t a boy, but just a flock of cawing crows flapping wildly away in all directions. One crow didn’t fly away, but dangled bloodily from Keeper’s big jaws as the dog turned around.
The apparition of the boy was gone from in front of her, and the woman in the black gown took two more running steps and then simply vanished like a reflection in a swiftly rotated mirror.
Bursts of fog were now billowing out of the new holes and fissures in the ground and fragmenting away in the wind; Emily could see no one at all now besides herself and Keeper—the other mastiff was nowhere to be seen—and she hurried to the wide hole Curzon had fallen into.
She crouched at the edge of it, gripping the grass on the rim, and squinted against the cold vapor blowing into her face. She could see nothing down there.
“Curzon!” she shouted.
From an unguessable distance below, his voice shook the fog: “Leave me, you fool!”
“The boy is gone,” Emily called, “the woman is gone. Climb up—I believe the holes are filling.”
After a pause, his voice came again from the depths: “I deserve to be buried among these. Go.”
Emily frowned, then tried, “Will you leave me out here, lost?” And it occurred to her to add, “On top of everything else?”
Now she heard grunts of effort, and muttered curses, and the thumps of clods of earth tumbling. She peered uselessly in the bursts of rushing fog, and then started back when a grimy right hand suddenly appeared below her.
But she recognized the cuff of Curzon’s coat, and she lay flat on the grass and reached down and gripped the wrist strongly; and the fingers of the hand closed on her own wrist.
Her chin was over the edge of the hole. “Climb up me,” she said.
“I’ll pull you in.”
The edge of the hole was crumbling, and Emily heard soil cascading below her; but she felt a tug on the back of her coat, and when she turned her head to peer back past her shoulder she saw Keeper standing braced beside her, gripping her coat between his jaws.
“Impossible,” she called to Curzon.
“I’m weak,” came his voice, but his other hand came lashing up out of the fog and gripped her forearm; his right hand now released hers and she heard his boots scrabbling for some purchase and he lunged upward, reaching—and then his fingers were digging into the dirt of the hole’s rim beside Emily’s face.
With a muscular effort that wrenched at her shoulder, he swung his left leg up onto the rim, and Emily was able to push herself back. A moment later he had rolled up onto the grass and braced himself on his elbows, panting and blinking around at the lonely landscape. Emily rolled over and sat up.
Fog still blew out of the holes, but there was less of it. Keeper walked up and dropped the dead crow on the grass; he sniffed at the hole, swung his head to look around, and then lay down beside Emily. She flexed her right hand and arm, forcing herself not to wince, while with her left hand she brushed twigs and bits of dirt from the front of her coat. Her face was damp with sweat, and cold in the wind.
The fog abruptly stopped billowing up, and when she looked at the hole she saw that it was filled to the top with freshly turned soil. A glance around showed her that the other holes and fissures had also stopped emitting vapor.
Curzon got stiffly to his feet. His coat and trousers and boots were caked with black mud, and his cap was gone. He waved toward the torn body of the crow. “Your dog actually damaged Welsh.”
Emily nodded. She sighed and stood up.
“He’s just one dog now,” Curzon observed.
Emily nodded again.
“Let’s rest at the top of the hill,” said Curzon, “between the stones.”
They walked to the foot of the hill and slowly made their way back up the slope down which they had slid and tumbled some time before. Keeper climbed along beside Emily.
At the top, Curzon sat down across from one of the tall upright stones and waved toward it so that Emily could sit on its lee side, somewhat out of the wind.
“I should be grateful that you saved my life,” he said as she sat with her back against the stone.
“True, you should.” Keeper laid his massive head in her lap, and she scratched behind his ears. “When you were down in the pot—” Seeing his raised eyebrows, she explained, “Hole, pit, sinkhole. You said, ‘I deserve to be buried among these.’ Among what?”
Curzon exhaled through pursed lips. “The old restless dead, lost in their bad dreams. They began to . . . greet me.”
“I’ve disappointed them, then. I’ll be sure to apologize when I’m among them myself.”
“They won’t listen. But then, you won’t remember.”
As if anticipating Emily’s next question, Keeper raised his head and looked at Curzon.
Emily glanced away, out across the moors, and asked, “Who was that woman?” When he didn’t immediately answer, she looked at him and added, “In the black gown, down there?”
“That woman.” Curzon leaned back on his hands and looked at the top of the stone Emily leaned on. In the gray daylight the lines in his dark face seemed deeper. “That,” he said flatly, “was the ghost of Miss Madeline Atha, my onetime fiancée. She—fell to her death from the turret of her family home in Allerton, on the third of March.”
Emily recalled that she had found Curzon wounded below Ponden Kirk on the morning of the fourth; and from the defiance in his tone she suspected that he was daring her to remark on the connection.
For a full minute neither of them spoke, and the wind stirred the hilltop grass around their boots.
“So you see,” he concluded, “I might have had family in Yorkshire.”
The words I’m sorry formed in Emily’s mind, but she didn’t voice the phrase. In spite of having saved the man from a living burial—and a welcome among the old restless dead!—saying it would seem to imply some minimal regard between them that didn’t exist.
She scanned the leaden sky and saw no birds at all. She stood up and clicked her tongue at Keeper. “A longer walk home,” she said, “as it’d be wise to take a different route than the one that led us here. East to Cononley, I think, and then the Keighley Road south.”
Curzon got laboriously to his feet, not looking at her. “Oh, you’re a cool one, Miss Emily Brunty.” He stretched and looked south. “My walking stick went with that druid temple,” he said, and his voice was a controlled monotone, “but I think I’ll retrace the direct route.”
Emily was disconcerted. “There’s that marsh.”
“And our footprints, still, probably.”
“And the . . . the ignis fatui—the three old women?”
“I can outrun them, if need be.”
She reached for the taut shoulder of his coat, then closed her hand in air and let it fall to her side. “But—there are things you should know!”
“I know your dog carries the ghost of a dog that killed Welsh in 1771. Keep him by you.”
Curzon began walking away down the south side of the hill, not looking back.
“But,” Emily called after him, “what did the goddess spell out for you?”
“In bird bones?” He stopped and faced her. “She said the dead sister remains dead under stone, but the dead brother is up and taking the pledged host.” His deep-set eyes were in shadow. “Thank you for saving my life.”
Then all she saw was his windblown black hair and his receding back.
Emily watched him until he reached the foot of the slope and struck out across the heath.
“Wait, you fool!” Emily began running down the south slope of the hill, while Keeper bounded on ahead of her.
Curzon didn’t turn or slow down, but Emily and Keeper quickly caught up with him.
“You need a guide who knows these hills and valleys and bogs,” Emily said when she was once again striding along beside Curzon.
“I don’t want your company,” he said.
“You never did.”
After ten minutes of walking in silence, he gave her a wary sidelong look. “I don’t plan on meeting any more pagan goddesses, you know.”
“God only knows what you’ll meet. But you’d better have my dog—my dogs—along to save you from it.”
They reached a path, but Emily shook her head and led the way out across a grassy heath.
Curzon opened his mouth several times as if to speak, and finally said, “And you, I suppose, to pull me out of any more pots that I might fall into.”
“That too.”
“In all honesty, girl, you’d be wise to leave me in the next one. It was weakness on my part that made me cooperate in my rescue.”
“‘Girl.’” Emily shrugged. “I’m always rescuing animals in trouble.” They strode on through the tall grass. “Even repellent ones.”
She felt a tap on her hair, and then several cold drops streaked her face. Within moments rain was falling steadily.
And rain was falling on London. Though it was only early afternoon, warehouse and dockside lanterns shone like dim, flickering stars along the Thames shore by the entrance to the Limehouse Basin and West India Dock, and the veils of rain muffled the boom and clatter of cranes working in the trainyards. The few saloon steamers out on the river had been left behind on the upriver side of London Bridge, and the vessels visible from the little rowboat now were the big flat-bottomed barges moving with the tide.
Mrs. Flensing huddled under a hooded Macintosh cape in the bow. She understood the necessity of what was going to be done next, but wished it weren’t to happen so very soon. She had been unhappy when the boatman easily shot London Bridge through one of the new wider arches, for it was on this side, here among the commercial craft in this bend of the river, that they were to meet the old purl-man’s skiff. Under the rubberized fabric, she flexed the two new fingers of her right hand—spider-leg thin, and twice as long as the corresponding fingers of her left hand.
Aside from the laconic boatman at the oars, the only other person on the boat was Evan Saltmeric, a chubby young street magician who embellished his meager sleight-of-hand skills with flickers of genuine supernatural effects; but these had been waning in the last six months, and he was willing to assist in anything that would deepen the reality-distortion that was generated up in Yorkshire.
The man Mrs. Flensing was resolved to meet was known as Napper Tooney, and he plied a skiff up and down the double bend in the river from St. Katharine Docks below the Tower of London to the Millwall Dock on the Isle of Dogs. His primary business was selling purl—hot, gin-fortified beer—to sailors and riggers and ballast-heavers on the mercantile vessels that crowded the waterway.
Mrs. Flensing had been told that he was very old, and that he restocked his wares from various barges along the river but never went ashore. Ghosts lost their frail coherence if they tried to venture across running water, and the story was that many vengeful ghosts haunted the Thames banks waiting for the day when Napper Tooney might incautiously step onto dry land.
Mrs. Flensing peered ahead from under the hood of her cloak, trying to distinguish the skiff that had been described to her. It would be equipped with the necessities of the man’s trade, casks and tin jugs and an iron stove, but she had been told that under the rower’s thwart was a lidded tub whose use was only possible in Tooney’s perpetually unmoored waterborne situation.
From somewhere ahead of the rowboat a bell clanged through the rain, and the boatman relaxed on his oars to cock his head, listening.
“That’s Tooney’s bell,” the boatman growled, “hailing one of the coal boats from the Limehouse Basin.” Peering ahead, Mrs. Flensing saw the light of a bobbing lantern against the dim silhouettes of boats and shorefront buildings. The boatman lifted a whistle that hung on a string around his neck and blew three shrill blasts. “That’ll bring him here. Your sort of trade is heftier than selling beer.”
The bell clanged again, closer, and again the boatman blew his whistle, and soon Mrs. Flensing could see a broad skiff rocking toward them over the low waves. The boatman lifted the starboard oar out of its lock and laid it along the gunwale so that the skiff could come alongside.
When the two boats were bumping against each other, Mrs. Flensing squinted across at Napper Tooney. All she could see of him under the brim of his leather hat was a hooked nose, prominent cheekbones, and a short clay pipe sticking out of a shaggy white beard.
“Over you go,” said Mrs. Flensing’s boatman, and she stood up unsteadily and, waving her arms in the rain for balance, stepped over the shifting gunwales into the purl-seller’s skiff; she immediately sat down on a thwart, shifting the skiff so that Tooney had to reach across and pull the boats together again. Evan Saltmeric came across more easily but with less dignity on all fours.
The man in the boat they had left used his oar to push away from the purl-seller’s skiff, and soon his boat was just a receding shape in the dimness.
Tooney’s voice was harsh around the stem of his pipe: “You’ve brought a part of somebody?” When Mrs. Flensing nodded he went on, “Is it fresh? You’re wasting your money otherwise. With a stale bit I can grow a head, but it’ll just blink at you for a day or two and then rot.”
“This will be fresh.”
He tipped back his dripping hat to peer at her from narrowed eyes. “Will be?” He looked speculatively past her at Saltmeric, who was huddled in the stern beside a rack holding the casks and metal jugs. “I don’t do murders.”
Saltmeric laughed nervously.
Mrs. Flensing pulled her right hand from under the cape, and flexed the two thin, grotesquely extended fingers. “Take another finger.”
Tooney nodded slowly. “Your sort is one of the reasons I stay on the water. Hah.” He spat over the side. “You want me to cut off one of your normal fingers, and grow a head from it, am I hearing you right?”
“Yes. I was told it would take a week or so for it to be ready to decant.”
He nodded toward her two malformed fingers and then looked at her face. “It might not be exactly like . . . the way you look right now . . .”
Mrs. Flensing nodded impatiently. “I expect it will take the more primitive form, yes. And it must be big, with a high cranial dome. You can do that, I’m very sure.”
Toomey raised his white eyebrows. He slapped the thwart he sat on and said, “I can make it as big as my incubator tub will fit, and I can stretch the brain case molding it by hand as I go, and adding more fish paste to the brew.” He rubbed a gnarled hand across his mouth. “This won’t be a small expense.”
“I should hope not.”
“And you pay in advance. Forty gold sovereigns.”
Mrs. Flensing had been told that Napper Tooney ordinarily charged ten sovereigns to grow a somewhat living head from a piece of a fresh corpse, but she had expected to pay more for this. She looked over her shoulder and held out her good hand, and Saltmeric dug a purse from his pocket and counted out forty coins.
When she had handed them to Tooney, he hefted them but didn’t put them away. “My knife is for cutting ropes. It’ll hurt.”
“I’ll heal, after a fashion.”
“You’re not dead—it’ll just be a head, it won’t have a ghost to animate it, keep it from decaying.”
“There’s a ghost destined for it, one presently under stone. But I’ll get a new one quick, to keep it fresh until then.”
“Bad news for somebody, sounds like.”
Mrs. Flensing sat back, and she managed a smile in spite of the prospect of this man cutting off one of her fingers.
“It’s only fair,” she said. After all, she added to herself, she’s the one who destroyed the original. Her and her dog.
Branwell sat down on another flat, puddled gravestone and pushed his oiled spectacles back up on his nose to watch the ghosts. The wispy figures were still clustered like columns of smoke and thistledown around the last stone he’d been sitting on out here in the rain, and he waited for them to notice that he had moved.
Adam Wright had left hours ago, and by now Emily might be a cooling corpse rolling downstream in the rushing rain-deepened waters of some remote beck.
A bad girl, Wright had pronounced her.
She had walked away across the moors with the Curzon fellow, and Branwell had helped Wright call something or someone to . . . go after the two of them, with some purpose.
When Wright had dragged Branwell from the Black Bull to the parsonage kitchen, he had demanded that Branwell give him something of Emily’s, some object that expressed her personality. Branwell had hurried to the parlor and opened her folding writing desk; in it was a stack of handwritten pages and a pencil sketch of her damned dog. The sketch looked very preliminary, with the dog both head-on and in profile at the same time, but he had taken the drawing and hurried back to the kitchen.
He had begun to speak: “I won’t stand for any actual harm coming to—”
But Wright had snatched it from him and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out onto the road that led west to the moors—and Wright had set a strenuous pace. After a mile he had stopped beside the standing stone known as Boggarts Green, and he had twisted Branwell’s arm so sharply that he had cried out. And simultaneous with Branwell’s cry, the man had whistled one piercing note into the cold wind.
They had stood there for a good five minutes in the shadow of the tall stone, Branwell shivering and Wright turning his head to scan all quarters of the gray sky. Branwell had begun dreading another arm-twist and whistle, when Wright had tensed, staring west—and when Branwell had looked in that direction he’d seen bobbing black dots that he had known were birds. Crows.
The ghosts were drifting among the tombstones in the rain now, waving indistinct arms and rotating their foolish bag heads. Branwell lifted his spectacles, and saw only the flat or vertical stones and the dripping trees and, vaguely through the falling rain, the black bulk of his father’s church. He lowered the spectacles, and again the ghosts were visible.
They had located him now, and came curdling up to the stone he sat on. When they surrounded him their funnel mouths gaped open and began sucking air, and breath rushed from Branwell’s lungs for a couple of seconds until he stopped the theft by firmly closing his throat. He stood up, his wet clothes heavy on his shoulders and legs, and plodded through the mud and wet leaves to another flat stone, several yards away. He sat down on it and breathed deeply.
A few weeks ago he had come out here smoking a cigar, and he had touched an insistent ghost with the lit end of it. The thing had disappeared in a flash of flame that had singed Branwell’s eyebrows and knocked the cigar out of his hand. But he had no cigar today, and in any case the rain would have put it out.
He thought the things seemed baffled that they were not able to cling to him and steal his breath, and in fact he was baffled too. According to local folklore, ghosts were the actual cause of many deaths that were officially attributed to consumption, but he seemed to have some inherent protection from their lethal ministrations.
He slid his hands over the surface of this flat, puddled gravestone, briefly wondering if the name the sexton had chiseled into it corresponded to one of the wraiths still huddled around the stone he had just vacated.
He shivered, remembering how the crows had winged closer and closer across the gray landscape and had finally flown in a tight, flapping circle around the heads of himself and Wright. Then they had landed in a group on the wet grass—and for a moment the crows disappeared and a middle-aged man in a cloak had seemed to be standing and staring into Branwell’s eyes; a moment later the figure was gone and the crows were again hopping in the grass.
Wright had seemed disconcerted. “Never seen him before,” he’d muttered. “Have you?”
Branwell had just shaken his head, though in fact he had seen the brief apparition’s face before.
Wright had shrugged and wadded up Emily’s drawing and tossed it into the group of crows, who quickly pecked it to shreds and then took wing again, this time flying away to the north.
“Barring interference on her part,” Wright had said, finally releasing Branwell, “she stands today in no great peril.”
Branwell had tried to imagine Emily refraining from interfering in anything she perceived as wrong. It had been too late for him to stop whatever chain of events Wright had set in motion, and to stave off his sudden dismay, he had tried to assume the cynical detachment of Northangerland—but that imaginary identity eluded him. He was just Emily’s brother Branwell, miserable and scared.
The last thing Wright had said before turning away and starting west across the moors was, “I’ll be seeing you.”
The rain was coming down harder now, thrashing in the bending branches of the churchyard trees, and it was difficult for Branwell to see the ghosts, even through the oiled spectacles. But he did see a solid figure hurrying down the parsonage steps and splashing through Anne and Emily’s little garden.
He recognized the figure’s height and stride, and he leaped up even before she had clambered over the low wall. Confirming her identity, Keeper leaped over the wall right behind her.
“Emily!” Branwell cried, and stumbled around the graves to meet her. Her wet hair clung in strands across her forehead and her clothes were as soaked as his.
“Thank God!” he said, and his exhalation was a sigh of profound relief, not a theft by the ghosts. “What happened?” He blinked past her at the parsonage, suddenly aware that he was very cold. “Get inside, we’re both drenched to the bone.” He had an impulse to hug her, but the family never did that, and with all their layers of wet clothing it would almost have been as if another person stood between them.
“We’re already as soaked as we can be,” she said, “and I’d rather keep this from Anne and Tabby for now.”
The ghosts, Branwell saw, had finally followed him to this gravestone, and evidently saw Emily as a more vulnerable target, for they clustered around her, curling their limbs and extending their heads.
And Emily exhaled sharply—but caught her breath with an impatient shake of her head. “The air here is always bad,” she said.
Branwell jumped when Keeper bayed, and the ghosts retreated. Emily of course had not seen them, not having Branwell’s oiled glasses—but in the moments before Keeper had barked, she too had seemed able to resist their breath-stealing.
Now she looked around suspiciously at the graves. “We’ll talk on the steps,” she said, and led the way back to the wall. She had to help Branwell over it. Keeper cleared it in one bound.
When they had sat down on the wet parsonage steps, Emily said, just loudly enough for Branwell to hear her over the drumming of the rain, “You saw that skull, in the church, six months ago.”
Branwell was staring down at his boots. “I saw your dog break something up.”
“You saw it before Keeper destroyed it, before I shot it. You saw it the day before, when that woman showed it to you in the Black Bull.” She smiled at him through the strands of her wet hair. “I know you! I know you did.”
He shrugged and looked away, toward the street.
“She told you that bringing it into the church would . . . have an effect on the thing under the stone. And she asked you to bring me to her.” Emily simply sounded curious, and she didn’t ask him why he had then done as the woman had asked.
Branwell was glad of the cold rain on his face. He couldn’t even meet the dog’s gaze.
At last he stood up and waved at the parsonage and the church and the village rooftops beyond it, all dark in the rain. “This doesn’t—contain me!” he yelled. “I—shrivel, here!”
Before she could speak he went on, “I think it doesn’t contain you either, Emily! I looked in your writing desk today—you’re writing a novel! I’m sure it’s wonderful, but it’ll wind up in a publisher’s fire, unread, you know it will!” He could feel the Northangerland identity creeping up in him. “That’s not the way to . . . power, respect, dominance.”
She leaned back on her elbows, smiling as she blinked up at him in the rain. “What did you want to see in my desk?”
He sagged, and almost threw himself at her feet and blurted, Forgive me, I used your drawing to set devils on your track—but his laggard Northangerland persona finally took over, just in time.
“I wanted to see your work, see if you showed strength.” Of course he hadn’t read a word of her manuscript, so he went on quickly, “And you do—you can make amends—I know they’ll forgive you, if you’re with me!”
They might, he thought. His forehead was hot, and he knew that sweat was mingling with the rainwater on his face.
“Amends,” she said, and she stood up. “They.” Keeper scrambled to his feet too, and shook himself. “When Keeper broke up that werewolf skull—yes, don’t gape like a fish, you know that’s what it was—you were only a few yards away, and you had some kind of fit. Are you finding power, respect, dominance?” She wasn’t smiling now. “Who is ‘they’?”
“I—can’t tell you. You refused to let Mrs. Flensing baptize you.”
“Baptize me?” She cocked her head. “Do you mean poking my hand with that knife? Baptism into what? Not the Anglican Church.”
“Into something real!” Branwell pushed back his sopping hair to stare up at her. “What if its glamor is dark? Can you honestly oppose it, with allies like that one-eyed Catholic, that Curzon, who murdered his own fiancée?”
Emily stepped back. “Who says so?”
With a choked, wordless yell, Branwell pushed past her and opened the front door, and he hurried down the hall to the stairs. A few moments later he was upstairs in his room with the door closed, shivering and stripping off his sodden clothes.
He heard Emily pad past his door, and then the door of her own room opening and closing. She would have left Keeper down in the kitchen to keep him from jumping onto her bed.
“‘Anglican Church,’” he muttered. “You nearly never go to church anyway—your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is—I don’t know what. The wind.”
In dry trousers and shirt and stockings, he paused before putting on his shoes, and he stared at a painting that hung framed on the wall.
It was a portrait of himself and his three sisters that he had done when he was seventeen, twelve years ago—ten years after the Crow Hill explosion and nine years after he had been bitten by the thing that had seemed to be a misshapen dog.
He had effectively caught his sisters’ likenesses with his brush: Anne shy and watchful, Emily blankly defiant, and Charlotte chubby and distracted. But the figure that was supposed to be a self-portrait, standing between Emily and Charlotte, didn’t look like Branwell at all, in spite of much scraping and repainting at the time. He had grown so tired of his sisters pointing this out that he had taken the painting down from the parlor wall and hung it here.
The figure between Emily and Charlotte was a young man, certainly, of about the correct age of seventeen, but the face was detectably too broad, and in spite of the colors he had mixed and remixed on his palette, the hair had turned out far too dark, and the skin was almost swarthy.
His hands clenched into fists as he stared at the picture, for he realized now that he should not have resisted the remembered impulse to paint the hair coal black.
When the crows had come to Wright’s whistle this morning, and landed in a cluster on the grass, both Branwell and Wright had for a moment glimpsed the figure of a middle-aged man; and when it had vanished, leaving only the crows, Wright had asked Branwell if he had ever seen the man before. Branwell had shaken his head—but in fact he had recognized him.
The man had clearly been the adult version of the young man in the painting; who, in turn, Branwell now realized, was the adolescent stage of the dark little boy who had for a few moments possessed his body at Ponden Kirk six months ago.
Branwell shuddered now with a mixture of panic and fascination. Little boy, adolescent, and grown man—I’ve now “seen” this person at three stages of his life.
And he occupies my place in my painting.
Of the painted faces, only the stranger’s appeared to be looking directly at the viewer, and after a pause Branwell met the gaze of the painted eyes.
He gasped—
—and took a step to catch his balance—
His feet were icy cold and he was soaked, shaking in frigid wind in gray daylight. He was outdoors, in—he blinked around wildly—in the kitchen yard, standing in cold mud in his stocking feet, and his wet shirt clinging to him was worse than no shirt at all. He clasped his arms across his chest, and nearly cut his face with a knife clutched in his right hand; he let go of it, and when it splashed in the mud he saw that it was one of Tabby’s carving knives.
He turned back toward the house. The kitchen door was open, and he stumbled to it and slammed it behind him when he had got inside.
Tabby was standing by the big black-iron range and staring at him in alarm.
“Some villain is out there?” she asked.
“Uh . . . no.”
She sat down at the table. “Nowt but more of your alarms, then, and your feet all mucky? And my knife?”
“I’ll,” said Branwell through chattering teeth, “get it—later.”
“And Keeper?” Seeing his blank look, she went on, “He went out with you.”
“Oh—ch-chasing a hare.” It occurred to him to ask how long he had been outside, but Tabby was already staring at him as if he were suffering from delirium tremens.
He hurried to the hall and ran up the stairs, glad to see that Emily’s door was shut. In his own room with the door closed, he sat down on the bed and clutched his wet hair, breathing in short gasps.
“I didn’t even see through his eyes, this time,” he whispered shrilly. He didn’t look at the painting, and he was afraid even to voice the loud question in his head: Who—what—are you?
The dark little boy—the adolescent in the painting, the man who had for a moment replaced the crows on the grass—had taken his body again, just as it had done on that night six months ago below Ponden Kirk. It had only been for a moment, that time. How long had the stranger occupied him this time?
He had apparently said something to Tabby about villains in the yard and had taken a knife outside; and Keeper had gone out with him. What had been the stranger’s purpose, interrupted by Branwell’s return to awareness and control?
How long would the stranger occupy his body next time?
Adam Wright had told him, Folk like us aren’t stuck forever in one sort of body. No, not when there were dupes like the Brontë boy ready to hand!
This big, yes, darkly glamorous world into which he had stumbled—like the worlds of literary or artistic fame—was clearly going to go on without him. Not without his physical form, it seemed, but without him.
How can I ever sleep in this room, he wondered, with that face staring at me from the painting? Perhaps if I’m careful always to be incapacitatedly drunk . . . no, that would probably only clear the way for his intrusion! And even if I sleep in my father’s room, away from the painting . . . can I be sure the stranger can’t follow me now, having worn this body twice?
Branwell leaped up, still in his wet clothes, and hurried to the dresser. He pulled open the bottom drawer and tossed aside some heavy winter shirts, and came up with his paint box and a ruler. He set the box on the dresser and opened it, and shuddered at the smell of linseed oil; but he pawed through the jumbled contents and found several glass jars of paints that he had mixed for some unfinished project last year, together with a palette knife and a lot of pencil stubs and variously-sized brushes. He snatched up a pencil and the ruler and turned toward the painting.
With his eyes unfocused and half-closed, he drew two vertical pencil lines on the canvas, extending down from the top edge, one ending at the right side of Emily’s face, the other at the left side of Charlotte’s—bracketing the figure of the stranger.
He tossed the pencil and ruler aside and returned to his paint box. Some of the jars had leaked and dried out, but he found an intact jar of ochre and one of sienna, and twisted off the lids. He had no idea where his palette might be, so he tapped a blob of each color onto the dresser surface and used the palette knife to mix a dab of the brown sienna into the butterscotch-yellow ochre, then dipped into it one of the still-pliable brushes.
He took a deep breath, then faced the painting again and extended the brush toward the peripherally glimpsed face of the figure between Emily and Charlotte; and the brush stopped an inch from the canvas. He bared his teeth in panic and pushed, and the brush jerked forward and smeared paint across the figure’s eyes.
There was no further resistance, and in minutes he had covered the pencil-bordered area with fresh paint, obliterating the alien figure, so that now a featureless pillar stood between and behind his two sisters. Beginning to relax, he mixed more of the sienna into the ochre and added some perfunctory shading to the pillar, though in his haste he deprived both sisters of some of their hair.
He dropped the brush. There, he thought, that might—
He jumped in surprise, for suddenly he was in total darkness.
He collided with a waist-high wooden partition, and his quickly groping hands slid across a polished wooden surface. His clothes were wet, again or still, but he was indoors; shoes on his feet knocked against a dry wooden floor. His throat stung, as if he’d just been shouting.
In what felt like a contrastingly low, timorous voice, he called, “Is anyone there?” The echoes were familiar—he was in his father’s church, in fact standing in the elevated pulpit.
A sound like a heavy door slamming shook the church, and he ran down the pulpit steps to the raised altar floor and hurried across it with his hands extended in front of him. Remembering the skull that Keeper had shaken to fragments right on this spot, he moaned as he ran on through the sacristy and pulled open the back door.
The rain had stopped, but the wind from across the churchyard shook his legs and hunched his shoulders, and through tears he saw that the sky behind the parsonage was several shades darker than it had been when he’d been in his room—subjectively only a few moments ago.
Something had closed or dropped heavily in the church nave behind him. Someone must be back there, in the darkness.
His breath came in jolting sobs as he ran up the walk past the churchyard to the parsonage steps, and he knew it was not yet eight o’clock because the front door opened when he turned the knob and tugged at it. But his father was the one who always bolted it, and his father was in Manchester having his eyes treated—would his sisters have remembered?
He might have gone to his father for help, if he had been here, but in any case Branwell had no reason to believe that his father would know what to do in this awful occult predicament.
Without a pause he went pounding up the stairs and knocked loudly on Emily’s bedroom door.