Chapter Forty-Six Arachne and the Inventor
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Arachne and the Inventor
Morrigan’s mind was instantly thrown back to a dark, long, lonely room in her childhood home. The Hall of Dead Crows, with its walls covered in gilt-framed portraits of all her ancestors, was where she had last seen the small, pallid face of Bertram Crow: her father’s younger brother, who died of a fever when he was nine.
This man couldn’t possibly be that Bertram Crow. Not just because that Bertram Crow was supposedly dead, but because the Vulture, with his stark white hair and shadow-sunk eyes and papery skin, appeared to be much older than her father.
Was he, though? She’d assumed he was an old man when she first saw his face properly, at Dario’s memorial. But, on closer inspection, he didn’t look elderly so much as … unwell .
Morrigan pushed open the watchhouse doors to follow him outside, and ran straight into another familiar figure on their way in.
‘What are you doing here?’ she yelped in surprise.
There was a flash of genuine fear on Noelle Devereaux’s pale face as she looked up. She seemed to hesitate for a moment when she saw who she’d run into, then rearranged her features into a scowl.
‘Here to give another anonymous tip-off , are you?’
‘What? Noelle, that wasn’t me, I swear—’
‘Oh, just get out of my way ,’ she snapped, aggressively shouldering past Morrigan into the watchhouse.
Why in the world was Noelle Devereaux visiting the Silk on her own, at this time of night? Was she looking for her parents, perhaps? Morrigan was tempted to stick her head inside and tell her they’d been taken to the Ogden Town police station, but she didn’t think it would be welcome and besides, the Vulture was already across the street, sauntering away from her.
By the time she’d caught up, he was entering a dark, narrow alley – exactly the sort of alley you’d be stupid to follow a murder suspect into, Morrigan thought, as she followed him into it.
‘You’re not my uncle,’ she called out uncertainly.
‘Oh yeah?’ He kept walking, eyes ahead. ‘Why’s that?’
‘My uncle’s dead.’
‘Only in the eyes of the law.’
‘And in the eyes of his family! My father thinks Bertram is dead.’
He gave a cold little laugh, glancing back over his shoulder as he turned into another, even narrower side street. ‘I’ll point out that Corvus also thinks you’re dead.’
Morrigan hesitated for barely a second before following him into the cobbled alley, keeping a few metres between them. She hummed a little and wiggled her fingers. They gave a reassuring tingle. ‘But my grandmother … Bertram’s own mother thinks—’
‘My mother thinks no such thing. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.’
‘Explain it to me then!’ Morrigan raised her voice, sounding bolder than she felt. The Vulture turned left at the end of the alley and disappeared. She hurried to catch up. ‘If you’re really Bertram Crow, explain to me how you’re alive, and why you’re here in—’
Morrigan pulled up short as she emerged in a small courtyard lit by a single streetlamp. In the middle was a familiar yet unexpected sight: a gigantic mechanical spider, its bulbous glass abdomen raised two storeys high on eight long, spindly legs.
‘—Nevermoor,’ she finished in a whisper.
The Vulture tapped one of the legs lightly, and all eight crouched low, metal joints grinding as they brought the belly of the spider closer to the ground. A hatch door opened in its side and a little staircase unfolded, tumbling outwards.
‘And why you have Octavia!’ she added in surprise.
He gave her an odd look. ‘This is Arachne – the original prototype. I designed Octavia later. Slightly different set of schematics.’
Morrigan had a flash of memory from when she’d first left Jackalfax aboard Jupiter’s arachnipod. He’d spoken about the mechanical spider with deep affection.
Beautiful, isn’t she? Her name’s Octavia. One of only two arachnipods ever built. I knew the inventor.
Of course the designer of Vesta’s chair and the inventor of the arachnipod were one and the same. It seemed so obvious now it was staring her in the face.
The Vulture stomped up the rickety staircase and disappeared into the arachnipod, and the hatch began its slow descent. Morrigan hesitated, then made a quick decision and ran up the stairs behind him, ducking under the door seconds before it closed.
The man removed his wide-brimmed hat, flung his dusty coat onto the floor and dropped into the battered leather driver’s seat, spinning to face her with a look of annoyed resignation. Morrigan didn’t take the passenger seat, and he didn’t offer it.
‘You know Jupiter North, don’t you?’ she jumped in before he could speak. ‘He bought your other arachnipod.’
He looked offended. ‘ Bought it? Inherited, you mean. Octavia was never for sale. Even if she was, he couldn’t afford her.’
‘You do know him, then,’ she pressed, bringing him back to the point.
‘Course. He’s my brother .’ He said the word almost sarcastically, as if it tasted bad, and suddenly the pieces connected in Morrigan’s head with a satisfying clunk.
Not remotely funny, dear brother.
She knew she’d recognised that voice coming from Jupiter’s study on Christmas Eve! Jupiter had called him Bertie .
This revelation sent a storm of new questions whirling through her mind. There were so many dots to connect she didn’t know where to start. Bertram Crow. The Silver District. The Darlings. Her mother. Jupiter . She pinged from one thought to the next, until the inside of her brain felt like Cadence’s investigation wall – a jungle of pins and red string lines and names and faces – but messier. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, unable to translate the mess into words.
The Vulture took pity on her. ‘Start from the beginning, shall we? You and I have something in common.’ He pulled out a pocket watch to check the time, then held it up to show her. It was well after midnight. ‘Happy birthday to us.’
‘You were born on Spring’s Eve?’
‘Not just any old Spring’s Eve. The big one.’
‘Eventide.’ She swallowed. ‘You’re saying that you were … like me. You were—’
‘Cursed,’ he confirmed, with a distasteful sniff. ‘Bingo.’
‘Does that mean – are you a Wundersmith ?’ Wild possibilities began fluttering like butterflies in Morrigan’s stomach, but they disappeared with a dismissive shake of Bertram’s head.
‘Just an unlucky kid,’ he said, ‘born on the wrong day in the wrong place.’
‘Your inventions, though—’
‘Fine, an unlucky genius . But not a Wundersmith. Even so, I was removed from my dire situation, like you, by the person who would become my patron in the Wundrous Society. My mother arranged the whole thing. She told me what she’d planned – how this stranger would spirit me away one night, and she’d tell everyone a fever took me.’
So that was how her grandmother knew what she had to do to save Morrigan’s life. Ornella Crow had done it all before, for her own son.
‘She never told me the plan.’
‘No, well I don’t suppose she would, after how things went with me,’ said Bertram. ‘I think she wanted me to feel comforted knowing the curse wasn’t real and I’d live after all, but I made a terrible fuss. I didn’t want to go. Cried for days. Begged her to come with me, begged her to let me stay.’
‘Weren’t you relieved you weren’t going to die?’ Morrigan thought of the sinking dread she’d felt that day in Jackalfax, when the Skyfaced Clock had turned to the inky black of Eventide.
Bertram shook his head. ‘I was nine. I loved my mother more than anyone in the world. I think I felt I’d rather die than be in some strange new place without her.’ His expression clouded, but he shrugged. ‘Still here though, aren’t I? And it wasn’t so bad. When I turned eleven, I joined the Wundrous Society. Swapped one ambivalent older brother for eight new siblings.’ He paused, and his left eye gave a little twitch. ‘Including, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, your illustrious patron.’
‘He never told me about you,’ Morrigan muttered. She’d been feeling so much kindlier towards Jupiter, until just now. In her heart, she’d already forgiven him for not telling her about the Darlings. How could she not, after reading his letters? But now … had he really been keeping another family member from her all this time? She felt like someone had poured ice water over her.
‘I made him promise not to,’ said Bertram. ‘He didn’t have a choice. Sisters and brothers, loyal for life and all that.’
Morrigan felt rage bubble up inside her. ‘ Why? All this time I’ve been right here in Nevermoor, and you’ve known about me. And we were both …’
‘Cursed children,’ he prompted with an impatient gesture as if to say, go on, hurry up and make your point.
‘… cursed children, yes, who faked our deaths and came to Nevermoor with some stranger and joined the Wundrous Society, and’ – the words came spluttering out so fast she almost choked on them – ‘and you’re my uncle, my actual uncle, related by blood … and you’ve not even bothered to introduce yourself ?’
Was there a limit, she wondered, on feeling hurt and sad and wronged by relatives who were determined to ignore her? The revelation about the Darlings was bad enough, but to learn that her not-dead uncle hadn’t wanted anything to do with her either? It was too much.
Her uncle’s face was impassive. ‘It’s nothing personal. I’m sure you’re a perfectly amiable child. But it would have been better if you’d never heard of me, and if you hadn’t got yourself arrested trying to destroy my house, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. However, here we are,’ he said, pulling a crumpled slip of paper out of his trouser pocket and holding it out to her, ‘and since you seem to think I could be a murderer as well as a weirdo , I might as well take the opportunity to clear my name.’
She snatched the paper from him. It was the list of suspects she’d dropped at Proudfoot House Station; the one Jupiter had taken from her.
‘Jove’s not happy about this amateur detective lark,’ he added, before nodding at the list. ‘Something you want to ask me?’
Morrigan stared at him. ‘Did you kill Dario Rinaldi?’
It wasn’t the way Cadence would have handled it. Detective Blackburn would have had a much cleverer, more finessed way of getting to the truth than coming right out and asking a suspect if he dunnit.
But she knew her father’s face quite well, all his little tells and tics. And now she was seeing Bertram up close, he was so very much like Corvus she could hardly believe she hadn’t noticed it before. They had the same cold blue irises, the same serious set of their jaw, the same left eye twitch when they were annoyed. If her uncle’s answer was a lie, she thought maybe – just maybe – she’d be able to tell.
He looked at her flatly. ‘No. Why would I kill Dario Rinaldi?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. You don’t seem to have a motive, but you did have the opportunity. You weren’t in any of the photographs of the cake-cutting, which is when the murder happened.’
‘Motive and opportunity, eh? You do mean business.’ One corner of his mouth curled upwards, and he raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Well it weren’t me, guv’nor. On me honour as a gentleman, I didn’t do nuffink.’
Morrigan didn’t crack a smile. ‘Why were you at the wedding, when you’d never accepted any Silver District invitations before? And then the memorial? Why have you suddenly started showing up to every event attended by the Darlings, when you never—’ She cut herself off, blinking as more pieces of the puzzle slotted into place. She flushed, feeling stupid.
I have eyes and ears in the Silver District. That’s what Jupiter wrote in his letter to Aunt Margot. And on Christmas Eve, she’d heard Bertram telling him, Don’t expect me to go spying for you anymore.
‘You started accepting invitations when I came to the district,’ she guessed. ‘Because Jupiter asked you to.’
‘Correct. And for the record, I didn’t miss the cake-cutting because I was offing the groom. I missed it because you missed it. I followed you into the gardens. You went to the boathouse, tried to steal a swan boat, fell into the canal – hilarious – and then hid in the boat while the groom and the wedding singer had their secret rendezvous before sulking off to sit in the gazebo and play with fire, and then I followed you over to the bridge to watch the dragon flying.’ He sighed. ‘Couldn’t know all that if I was busy killing someone, could I? Satisfied?’
‘Not really,’ said Morrigan, feeling a little creeped out. ‘You were following me the whole time ?’
‘Had to, didn’t I? Sisters and brothers, loyal for life. Jove got himself into a great frolicking panic from the day you met the Darlings, and I fell victim to his emotional blackmail. Promised I’d keep an eye on you.’ He gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘Terrorising the Grand Old Houses has been an unexpected bonus.’
‘They call you the Vulture,’ Morrigan told him. ‘Did you know? They’re paranoid you’re waiting around to pounce on their estates if they ever get into financial trouble like the Beauregards.’
‘It’s only paranoia if it’s not true,’ Bertram said with a small, slow smile. He regarded her through slightly narrowed eyes. ‘You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, Morrigan, but there are very few aristocratic families who aren’t in debt, and quite a few who are in it up to their necks. You’ve seen what they’re like. They throw fistfuls of money away on endless leisure and pleasure, yet they’re embarrassed about doing anything to earn money. They have big household staffs to pay and enormous old homes to heat and light and maintain. They’re living on the fortunes of generations past, but life keeps getting more expensive. The families who’ve refused to adapt to the modern world – which is almost all of them, bar the clever Rinaldis with their thriving dragonsport enterprise – find themselves going extinct. They sit like dragons on piles of gold that shrink a little more every year.
‘Then, someone like me arrives to speed their extinction along. Someone with a seething grudge and an axe to grind and a bank account bursting at the seams and all the free time in the world .
‘They’re right to be frightened of me. It’s extraordinary, the private information you can uncover if you’re sufficiently determined and willing to pay the right price. All a family’s hidden debts. All their unpayable bills and failing businesses and past misdeeds. Every crime they’ve ever swept under the carpet, every consequence they’ve bought their way out of.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Do you know how shockingly easy it is, Morrigan, to buy those things? How completely you can own a person, once you own all their debt, all their secrets, all their shame ? I took those things from the Beauregards, then I took everything else they owned, including their precious place in the Silver District social hierarchy. And I’ll do it again. The Devereaux. The Darlings. All of them. Their time is coming.’
So Noelle wasn’t entirely paranoid after all, Morrigan thought. The Vulture really was circling Devereaux House. He was circling the whole Silver District.
Bertram smiled and his face filled with savage pleasure. ‘You know, I used to think happiness was for other people. But I can’t describe the joy, the sheer incandescent bliss of watching these powerful, privileged fools realise they’ve sleepwalked into annihilation.’
Morrigan grimaced. She’d always been vaguely unsettled by the Vulture, but now she felt repelled. It wasn’t that his assessment of the Silverborn was wrong , exactly. They were, for the most part, as he’d described – powerful and privileged and materialistic. But his vicious glee in destroying their lives was so … well, in truth, it wasn’t like a vulture at all. Vultures were scavengers, eating the carcasses of unnimals that were already dead . Trying to survive.
This didn’t look like survival at all. It looked like revenge .
‘What did the Beauregards do to you?’
‘Me? Nothing.’ The feral smile dropped from his face. ‘It’s about what they did to Meredith.’
‘You knew my mother.’ It wasn’t a question. Morrigan already knew it couldn’t be a coincidence that he was here in the Silver District, while Meredith had ended up in Crow Manor, married to his brother.
‘Barely. I knew a chap at university who was courting her best friend, Kitty Beauregard. A group of us students used to meet at the Talon & Horn pub every week, and Kitty and her friends started tagging along. They were younger than most of us and frankly quite annoying, but eventually they just became part of the set. And later, when Meredith got it into her head to run off and join the Wintersea Party … for some reason I was the person she told.’
He paused, seeming to get lost in memories for a moment, and Morrigan had to resist the urge to shake more words out of him.
‘I think she felt safe to confide in me,’ he continued, ‘since I was from the Republic myself, and had no connection to her family, and I wasn’t a gossip. But I’m afraid I disappointed her, because I told her it was a stupid idea. She wouldn’t be dissuaded.’
‘ Why ?’ Morrigan demanded. ‘Why would a girl from Nevermoor just decide to run away and join the Wintersea Party ? I don’t understand.’ She could see why her mother felt suffocated and stifled in the Silver District. But Georgette Devereaux felt that way too, and she only ran as far as Bohemia! Committing treason seemed an extreme response to what, frankly, didn’t look to Morrigan like the world’s biggest problems.
‘She didn’t tell me why. And I didn’t ask, because …’ Bertram looked down at his hands. ‘I don’t think I believed her, really. It seemed like the mad fantasies of a spoiled rich girl. When she asked about my family in the Republic, I gave her my mother’s name and address and told her to go to Crow Manor if she ever found herself in trouble or fancied a Sunday roast … like it was all a joke. I wished her the best and forgot all about it.
‘I should have tried harder to talk her out of it. I should have gone to her family before it happened, given them a chance to put a stop to it. But I was a stupid, self-centred young idiot who didn’t take anything seriously. Didn’t even realise she was gone until months later, when I heard it from Kitty Beauregard.’ His expression twisted into loathing. ‘I was so ashamed that I hadn’t done anything to stop her. I made the mistake of telling Kitty all I knew, thinking she’d pass it on to Meredith’s family so they might use it to find her and bring her home. And instead, Kitty told her own family, who told everyone they could think of – starting with the newspapers. Suddenly Meredith Malcontent, the traitorous teenage aristocrat who’d run away to join the Wintersea Party, was front page news everywhere. Stories full of the most heinous, made-up nonsense.’
Bertram opened a compartment above the control deck to retrieve a familiar pastel-blue paperback. He hesitated a moment, then handed it to Morrigan without looking at her.
‘ Madeleine Malcontent, ’ she whispered.
‘They all betrayed her,’ he went on bitterly. ‘Every friend she ever had, every Grand Old House in that silver-gated viper’s den … even her own family. Lord and Lady Darling denounced her as a traitor – more concerned with protecting their place in the Greater Circle than protecting their own child .’ His voice trembled with anger. ‘She was barely more than a teenager! A sheltered, na?ve girl who had no idea what she was getting into. I went to see them. Tried to make them understand there were ways out of the Wintersea Republic but I needed their help. I was just a broke student back then and I knew it would be difficult and costly . Especially in Meredith’s case, because you don’t just—’
Her uncle stopped quite abruptly. For a moment Morrigan thought he was choking. His eyes bulged slightly, and blood began to trickle from his nose. She stepped forward uncertainly, but he took a sudden heaving gasp of a breath.
‘You don’t just … change your mind …’ The trickle of blood became a stream. ‘About joining the Wintersea Party.’