Chapter 10
I sped down the hall after he’d disappeared, searching for him among the stuffed beasts in the main upstairs corridor. Looking for a trail that didn’t exist.
Ghosts disappeared all the time.
But how could a person just vanish?
If he was human, it was simple: He was either inside this house or he’d left it. And if he was still here, the only place I knew to look for him was the crypt below.
The place he’d told me not to go to.
The place everyone had told me not to go.
Why?
I paused to catch my breath as I stood at the grand staircase looking down upon the Artemis and Apollo statues… and the copper gate surrounding the stairs to the crypt. The house was quiet, and there were no servants in sight. No boys dressed in black.
Was the boy a prisoner or not? Because prisoners didn’t walk around freely.
I rehashed everything he’d told me. He’d told me to stay away from the crypt and from the obelisks outside.
A strange demand. I hadn’t really been outdoors since I’d arrived.
From the windows, I’d spied some formal gardens at the back of the house, but no one had offered to take me out there.
Maybe Voss would when he gave me a tour of the estate.
Perhaps I could find a way to ask him about the obelisks after he returned from town.
Wait.
The boy had known that Voss was gone from the estate, and he’d mentioned not having much time.
That sounded a bit like someone who was sneaking around.
Considering how many times I’d attempted to read all the apothecary bottles in the hospital pharmacy, I felt pretty qualified to know when someone else was doing the sneaking.
If that theory was right, and the boy had been tiptoeing his way around the manor when Voss was gone, logically that would mean that he wasn’t supposed to be out of his chains. It would make Voss his jailor.
Images of that slithering symbol on the crypt ceiling passed through my mind, along with Voss’s occult books. But every time I tried to entertain the notion that Voss actually had used the knowledge inside those books, I couldn’t get things to make sense in my head. And that frightened me.
The uncertainty.
The sound of running feet drew my attention to the foyer below, where Mr. Hoffmann hurried from the servants’ wing toward the front doors. He glanced up and spied me, calling out, “The master has returned!”
I gave the servant a little wave to indicate that I’d heard him, but I didn’t share his excitement over Voss’s return. I still didn’t know what to think about Voss. Or anything here, really. Especially the boy. I could still hear the strange melodies in his words:
Stay out of the crypt and don’t cross the aegis.
As the servants all scurried through the front doors to greet Voss in the driveway, I settled two things in my mind.
First, I needed to inspect this aegis, so I needed to find a good excuse to take a walk outside.
And secondly, Crypt Boy was definitely injured, and it was my job to help the injured.
I just had to find him again.
I didn’t get a chance to explore that day.
A flurry of activity surrounded the master’s return to the manor, and when I was finally taken into his quarters, he was in high spirits, energetic after a successful trip into town.
He was so caught up in a mountain of paperwork that he barely paid me any heed as I took a couple of vitals and Filomena served him his dinner at his desk, bread and milk.
“You need better nutrition,” I told him.
“Since when did bread become unhealthy?” he said, truly surprised by my words.
“Bread is the backbone of health. Ask the starving people going through that famine in Bombay whether they’d like some bread.
What would you have me eat instead? Lamb shank?
Would you have me butcher my goats and eat their roasted heads? ”
“No one is asking you to do that, sir,” I said, a little alarmed at how agitated he was getting. “Your body is working hard to fight your condition. It needs better fuel—fresh vegetables would be a start.”
“Vegetables make me violently ill,” he mumbled dismissively. “I feed them to my goats.”
I glanced outside his balcony doors and caught a glimpse of a couple of these animals, grazing in a distant field. “Fond of them, are you? Pets?”
A gentle smile lifted his cheeks. “Something like that. They are wonderfully intelligent animals, and I’ve raised them by hand.
” He paused and looked up at me from his desk, snapping his fingers.
“I have an idea. Tomorrow morning, first thing, meet me downstairs and we’ll go feed them together.
I can show you around the back of the estate. ”
I nodded vigorously. “Oh, sir. I’d like nothing more.”
“Marvelous! It’s a date, then.”
Date or not, it was a chance for me to see the obelisk border. Maybe I’d be able to see precisely what caused the boy in the basement to believe that the border was dangerous. Because that made no sense to me.
After leaving Voss that evening, I spent the remainder of the day helping the servants with various tasks.
I saw Voss once more before bedtime, to administer his cough medication, and then I returned to my room.
I called for Bethany, but she didn’t show herself.
The boy probably scared her away, I thought anxiously.
I had to hope that she wasn’t permanently gone, and even after I’d climbed into my bed, I tried to coax her out of hiding but to no avail.
So I spent a long, restless night worrying over her.
Worrying over the boy in the basement.
By the time dawn broke, I was still exhausted but could lie in bed no longer.
My thoughts turned to Voss and our arranged “date.” Surely this wasn’t a romantic gesture?
I couldn’t for the life of me understand why someone rich and handsome like Voss would be even remotely interested in a simple girl like me.
And every time I played out scenarios in which that might be true, I couldn’t ever make it work because my thoughts kept shifting back to the boy.
Despite my lack of sleep, I was eager to get outdoors and explore. So I quickly donned my blue uniform and wool cloak, planning to make it down to the kitchen before the master summoned me. But when I opened my door, Mr. Hoffmann was standing outside, his hand poised to knock.
“Oh!” He stepped back, startled, then smiled. “Great minds think alike. Are you ready for your stroll with the master? He is ready for you in the foyer.”
The sky was still purple outside my window. It wasn’t even seven a.m. yet. “Goodness, he must be an early riser.”
“He didn’t used to be,” Mr. Hoffmann mumbled as I stepped into the hallway with him and we began walking together.
Dark memories emerged of Mammy during her final year, when her sleep became erratic.
She would waste away in bed half the afternoon after not sleeping half the night, but would often get up before dawn and sit on the stoop outside our tenement building.
I supposed Voss was experiencing a similar restlessness. How long before he got worse?
Mr. Hoffmann was in a hurry, so I picked up speed through the Menagerie Hall.
When we got to the staircase, I spotted Voss below, standing at the foot of the Artemis statue.
He was dressed in wool and tweed and carrying a bow and a quiver.
Both of his brindled shepherd dogs were with him, straining at the leather leashes that Voss gripped in one gloved hand.
The bow and dogs reminded me of his sister’s portrait. I supposed all the Vosses must’ve enjoyed hunting. No surprise, being so far out here in the countryside and owning so much land.
“Good morning, Miss O’Rinn!” he called out exuberantly as I descended the curving staircase. “It’s a bit nippy, but that’s good for the lungs, I’ll bet. Are you ready for a brisk stroll?”
“Indeed I am,” I replied, a little breathless. “How are you feeling this morning?”
He discreetly coughed into one gloved hand and then gave me a sheepish look. “The cough isn’t intolerable. When we return from our walk, you can perform your medical measurements and spoon me up some of that boozy syrup of yours, yes?”
I nodded. “Happily.”
“Excellent!” He gestured with his bow. “Follow me, Miss O’Rinn. Let’s see what we can see…”
The dogs lunged against their leashes, jerking their master forward.
But instead of leaving through the front door, Voss directed the dogs toward the eastern side of the home.
The hounds’ nails clicked against wooden floorboards as we walked through the servants’ wing, across the dark kitchen and through a gingham-curtained side door that opened into gray, early-morning light and a misty fog that clung to the lawn.
The master bent at the waist to pet his hounds and spoke to them in a foreign tongue, what I assumed to be Dutch—a command to the dogs, which he released by unclipping their leashes. Once free, they bounded into the fog ahead of us, chasing an unseen bird.
“Nippy this morning, Miss O’Rinn. Hope you’re warm enough in that shawl,” Voss said.
“I don’t mind cold, and ‘Nurse Molly’ is fine,” I reminded him, closing the kitchen door behind us. “Miss O’Rinn was my mother.”
“Not Mrs.?”
I loathed that question every time someone asked it, and trust me, they asked it a lot. But I simply said, “My father died.”
“Ah, I see. Watch your step,” he warned, avoiding a fallen branch as I followed him up a leaf-covered footpath that curved around the eastern side of the manor. “So much unnecessary death in this world. Sometimes the ancient tales of cruel, vindictive gods still feel true.”
“I don’t think divinity had anything to do with my father’s death. Just caught a bad case of cholera during the outbreak in ’66.”
“There’s a Mesopotamian god named Nergal whose entire job was to spread disease, and even the famous Greek god Apollo was said to spread disease by shooting poison arrows at humans.”