Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kendrick lifted the pile of timbers and carried them down the tunnel.
He had taken on responsibility for the maintenance of the Ossuary, which had badly declined in the last few decades.
After recruiting groups of cleaners and teams of builders who knew their architecture and masonry, he had sought out cartographers who could map exactly what was above certain portions of the Ossuary and say whether or not expansion was possible.
This night, he was engaged in shoring up sections of the Ossuary, and this section in particular needed fortification because it was not stone or clay bricks, but plain earth.
It had been a late addition to the Ossuary and expanded without much of the proper safety measures.
Comparatively short, it connected two of the main stone tunnels and was regularly used as a shortcut.
Now it frequently grew damp when it rained. Somewhere, moisture was getting in.
Kendrick and his volunteer workers waited while Marshall Cutter, who turned out to have an architecture background, examined the earthworks.
“We’ll start here,” Marshall finally decided, indicating the section, and he went on to explain the process to set the timbers and wood planks in place to support the tunnel walls and roof.
“Wood first, temporarily. But stone is best.”
“We’ll have stone. Let’s just make sure we don’t have this come down on our heads first,” Kendrick said.
The men and women set to work under Marshall’s direction, hammering timbers into place and lifting beams. They all grew grimy, working in London’s chalky soil.
“Not much clay in this spot,” Marshall said, scooping up a handful of dirt in his hand and working through it. “Part of the problem. And it’s getting wetter, too.”
“Shall we call it off for the night?” one worker asked.
“I think—”
Above them came not so much a rumble, but a groan.
“Move,” Kendrick barked as earth started to crumble.
All the workers scrambled for the shored-up entrance of the tunnel. Kendrick seized a vampire bodily and pulled them along when they would have tried to rescue tools scattered along the tunnel. “Go!”
The vampires were fast enough to escape the falling edge of the dirt that came piling in—all except Marshall, who was the last out.
The dirt swallowed him in a deluge before the fall slowed and stopped.
Kendrick commanded, “Get those timbers and shovels!”
Marshall was a vampire and could not die from lack of air, but it would be one of the more frightening things to have happen to you, Kendrick thought, digging with a will as the others came behind, trying to make the dirt stable.
Trapped under the weight of earth, buried alive, just as imprisoned as any human would have been.
Finally, he moved enough earth to see some of it twitch, and he switched to his hands, scooping the earth away and reaching for the vampire.
Kendrick found a hand and seized it, pulling hard.
Marshall came forth, wheezing after being freed from the crushing pressure, and the vampires quickly made sure that no more of the tunnel would come down.
“All right?” Kendrick asked, a hand on Marshall’s shoulder as the vampire wiped his face and coughed.
“All right,” Marshall said, wiping some of the grime from his face and looking down at himself. “Ugh. Lily is going to kill me.”
“How is Miss Pendleton doing?”
“Better,” Marshall admitted. “I stick by her when we leave the Ossuary, and I try to do more aboveground than just feed. I took her to a pantomime yesterday, since it’s nearly Christmas. She enjoyed that. She still has moments of…distance, but she’s improving.”
“I don’t think she’ll be very distant when she learns what happened.” Kendrick grinned. “It means she cares enough to worry and take you to task for it.” He wiped a hand down his own shirt and shook off some of the grime. “I’m looking forward to seeing that myself.”
“I just wanted to thank you again for letting me cook,” Addie said cheerfully in the kitchen of Carmine House, a huge apron wrapped around her and a smudge of flour on her cheek.
“You’re very welcome. We ought to be thanking you for stepping in until we have an official cook for the human staff. What did you make tonight?”
“I baked some bread to see if I could match the smells of the bakery near our house and then made some biscuits for the children.” Addie smiled.
“Do you think the staff would enjoy brisket of beef for dinner tonight or a mutton roast? Etienne bought me a new cookbook, but I can’t decide what to make!
” She cast a glance at Etienne, who was writing up a report for Kendrick at the kitchen table.
“And he’s no help. Any recipe that isn’t French is suspect. ”
“Mon ange de beauté et d’amour, all I meant was that I never sampled the English cuisine and so cannot tell you what would be best. I will purchase you a French cookbook next, and then I shall have an opinion,” Etienne murmured, staring over his pince-nez at the papers spread out before him.
“Sally should be awake shortly. You can ask her what she’d prefer. Fletcher will be more than happy to do the marketing for you if you leave a list of what you need.” Fletcher had settled into the household rhythm, but he still had a burning need to be useful.
“Oh, good idea,” Addie agreed happily, filling a tin with the cooled biscuits. “Oh! And Christmas is soon! I could roast a goose or make oyster soup—and cranberry sauce! Plum pudding!” Her face glowed with the possibilities.
Genevieve resisted the urge to worry at her fingernails.
She had been leaving her gloves off purposefully more and more, trying to be at ease with her hands, but the knowledge that Christmas was so close made her antsy.
“You make whatever the staff would like, Addie, though you certainly don’t have to. ”
“Oh, but I want to,” Addie assured her as Sally entered the kitchen, her apron fresh and clean and her hair swept up in a knot.
“Want to what, ducks?” Sally asked. She had taken on something of a maternal countenance towards Addie because she appeared so young. Addie didn’t mind.
She beamed. “Cook a Christmas feast! Would you rather a goose, or perhaps a turkey?”
They set to a spirited discussion of possible Christmas menus. Genevieve had just stood to excuse herself quietly when the dirtiest person Genevieve had ever seen emerged from the Ossuary’s lower entrance.
It took her a long moment for her to recognize her husband. “Kendrick! What happened?!” she exclaimed, flying to his side.
“Lor’ lumme, I ain’t never seen any cove so dirty.” Sally blinked rapidly as she took in Kendrick’s appearance. “Except maybe for one night soil man who accidentally fell in.”
“I don’t smell that bad.” He laughed, a bright smile flashing through the grime. “But don’t embrace me unless you’re resigned to throwing away that gown,” he warned Genevieve.
“Hang the gown!” Genevieve said, seizing him by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”
His eyes twinkled at her. “Yes, I’m fine. We had a little problem in the tunnels, but no one is hurt.”
“What is a little problem?”
“A little cave-in, I should say, but only a small tunnel that probably should not have been there in the first place. We had to dig Marshall Cutter out, but he was remarkably phlegmatic about the whole thing. I’ll meet with the architecture team again tomorrow to determine whether or not we’re going to try to dig it out again or reinforce it and fill it in.
” Kendrick looked down at himself thoughtfully. “Could do with a bath, though.”
“I should say so!” Genevieve exclaimed.
“You take him on upstairs, missus; I’ll have one of the girls start heating water,” Sally said, waving them on.
Genevieve sat by the fire in their bedroom and paged through Wynnflaed’s Knight, waiting for the door to open.
The sun was nearly up, and she was becoming drowsy, but Kendrick was still washing.
The procession of buckets up and down the stairs had been daunting.
He had looked like a mud monster when he had come through the door, after all.
She settled deeper into the armchair as she reached the chapter in the book where Wynnflaed and her wounded stranger had a discussion on names and what she should call him, as he would not reveal his true name to her.
He rejected Wynnflaed’s suggestions of AEthelweard, “noble guardian,” and Saewine, “sea friend,” before finally accepting Waermund, which meant “cautious protection.” It was telling that he had rejected the two names that seemed lofty or open in favor of the one that alluded to the secrets and reasons that he had come to be in Wynnflaed’s home, wounded and alone.
In a lot of ways, it reminded her of the passage in Ruth where Naomi declared to her friends to call her “Mara,” which meant bitter, after the loss of all her menfolk. The text never referred to her that way, though—it was always “Naomi.”
She was still pondering names when Kendrick came into the room in a scarlet dressing gown, scrubbed clean of mud and dirt with his hair wet around his shoulders.
“What are you thinking about with such a serious look on your face?” he asked, pulling up another chair beside the fire.
He ran his fingers through his hair and winced when he hit a snarl.
“Names, and what they mean.” Genevieve got up and fetched a comb from her dressing table. “Here—I’ll do it,” she said, when Kendrick reached for the comb.
“I knew you married me for my hair,” he murmured, his eyes full of wicked humor.
Just for that, she rapped him on the head with the comb before tackling the knots, which made him laugh. “Are you going to smack my knuckles with a ruler next?”
“You’ll have to see, won’t you?” She slowly pulled the comb through his hair, carding through the strands to remove the tangles and dry it.
“What sorts of names?” he asked after a moment.
“The passage in Wynnflaed where the warrior won’t speak his name, and she names him.
He decides based on the name’s meaning, and he doesn’t accept the more noble suggestions.
I was just considering how names can inform character.
Certainly, they do in the Ossuary, where people can put on a new name like a different coat. ”
“Would you like a new name? A surname,” Kendrick amended, looking up at her. “I like Genevieve too much to change it. But a new family name.”
“For both of us?”
He nodded. “I had the thought during our honeymoon that it might be something you’d like. A signal of the change for the Ossuary, a direction for the people.”
“It would have to be the right name,” she said.
“That’s right. You’ll have to think about it.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Me?”
“You’re good at that sort of thing,” he said. “Thinking of the future and what direction to head from here. Far better than I.”
“I don’t know about that,” she hedged.
Kendrick roared with laughter. “Genevieve, how quickly we forget how you harangued me on the poor job I was doing at the start of the month. It was a needful harangue, and a helpful one. I would be lost if you began yes, dear-ing me now. Promise you’ll never stop chiding me when I go wrong.”
She smiled, pleased, and dropped a brief kiss on his lips. “Most men would hate that, you know. Master of their household and all that.”
“Even masters have counselors. What good are yea-sayers when the lord is wrong, and the wolves are at the door?” Kendrick sobered.
“The truth is, Jenny…when thinking of the future—or just thinking of humanity in general, it feels like the world is a warmly lit room full of light and life, and I and all the rest of us vampires are outside, consigned to the dark.”
Genevieve put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “But you said that the madness had to do with the proximity to humanity. Could that be it? You interact with humans, you allow humanity’s stories to change you.”
His hand came up to cover hers, rubbing the gold ring on her finger.
“Yes, that tether to humanity may decide which vampires turn their backs and walk into the outer darkness. But there’s a difference between staving off madness at the window and stepping into the room to join in concert with life. ”
“I don’t know what makes the second possible, but, Jenny—you’re in the room. One of the few vampires I’ve met who’ve accomplished that task.”
Genevieve stared down at him in wordless surprise.
He smiled up at her. “I told you. I enjoy mysteries. Come to bed.”