Chapter Ten
Ashdown Manor, Skryne, County Meath (Scrín Cholm Cille, Contae na Mí)
Three Days Before Samhain
Sam yawned, peering through her cage veil at the dusty window of the carriage and beyond, to rolling green hills and tumbledown ruins of rural Ireland.
It seemed she’d barely closed her eyes the night before, when Van Helsing was hammering on her door again, telling her to dress for a funeral.
For a sleep-drenched moment, Sam had thought he’d meant her own, before she’d remembered: Mr. Enfield.
Lord Lusk.
While Sam and Hel had been sleeping off their misdeeds, Van Helsing had uncovered the location of Mr. Enfield’s funeral, which was to say, he’d read a newspaper.
Except it wasn’t a funeral, as Mr. Enfield’s body had been shipped back to his family in London for burial.
This was some sort of remembrance for his friends still in Ireland, to be held at Ashdown Manor.
Though why Ashdown Manor was so far from civilization, Sam didn’t dare imagine.
She couldn’t recall the last time they’d passed so much as a town.
It was as if the house itself were a secret.
The event would be their chance to corner Lord Lusk and get some answers, or at the very least, glean some off his associates, hopefully figuring out what Mr. Enfield had risked the curfew to tell him—and what Lord Lusk might have broken into Mr. Enfield’s house to burn.
They’d have to be clever about it, for they had no evidence other than a half-charred letter they couldn’t admit to. Which was Sam’s specialty, when she’d enjoyed more than two hours of sleep. Sam yawned again.
“What are you tired for?” Van Helsing grouched.
Van Helsing had changed his brown suit for a black one and shaved his scruff, his cheeks still pinked from the razor’s burn.
The green scent of witch hazel wafted off him, reminding Sam uncomfortably of knives in Parisian alleyways, of blood loss and alchemy.
“You’re the only one of us who got a proper night’s rest.”
“Bad dreams,” Sam said, grateful for the corseted jacket of her black silk mourning dress. It was the only thing keeping her upright.
The carriage turned, rattling down a cobblestone drive.
An English country house loomed in the distance, its walls subsumed by so much ivy it seemed as if the vines would pull it, crumbling, back into the earth from which they came.
An omen, Sam thought, except this wasn’t a vision.
Just her overactive imagination. She really did need more sleep.
“Are you certain this will work?” Sam said, tugging at her iron-infused gloves nervously as the carriage shuddered to a stop.
“It’s a wake.” Hel, of course, was always dressed for a funeral. “You don’t wait for an invitation to a wake. Unless stated otherwise, they’re open to anyone who knew him. We knew him. Briefly.”
But it wasn’t a wake—it wasn’t even the Protestant equivalent—and Sam could not shake the feeling that they did not belong.
“We’re private investigators,” Van Helsing said. “They’ll allow it. Or they’ll look guilty.”
Sam wasn’t so certain as she eyed the carriages lined up outside the manor, gilded with crests and monograms, pulled by matched sets of horses in shining white and shaggy black.
There was even a set that gleamed like gold—some Turkish variety as she recalled, and extraordinarily expensive.
She didn’t think anyone rich enough to claim such an estate would care much about looking guilty.
Not when they had the means to avoid the consequences.
Sam trailed Van Helsing and Hel out of the carriage and along a cobblestone path threaded with moss and dying grass. The driver clucked, and the carriage trundled away with a jingle of the harness and the clopping of hooves.
Sam tilted her head back, studying Ashdown Manor.
Ravens circled over the grounds, letting out raucous cries.
A profusion of black-creped windows peeked through the ivy.
Curiously, there was no glint of glass beneath their funereal veils.
In fact, they all appeared to have been boarded up from the outside.
As she drew closer, it became apparent why: Deep gouges marred the wood, as if something monstrous had been trying to crack it open to get at the sweet meat within.
The song whispered through Sam again, with that strange pull in her blood and the words just beyond hearing, as if daring her to close her eyes, to listen. She tried to ignore it. It was a distraction at best and a temptation at worst, which she could ill afford with Van Helsing watching.
Van Helsing knocked on the door. Sam’s eye hooked on the transom, in which a familiar sigil was worked into the iron and glass: two entangled crescent moons cradling a full moon between them, the pupil of a selenic eye.
The same sigil she’d seen on Mr. Enfield in her vision.
Sam’s breath caught. But before she could examine further, the door opened.
It revealed a gentleman in a loose-fitting black suit that looked as if it were quite fine but couldn’t escape being rumpled, any more than his chestnut brown hair could escape being tousled, as if it were in the nature of the man himself to be a little undone.
“Good morning—though I suppose there isn’t much good about it, is there?” the gentleman said, nudging his gold wire spectacles back up his nose. His accent trod the thin line between English and Irish. “Please, do come in.”
The room they entered was more what Sam expected of a museum than any place one might actually live, with grey-streaked marble floors and caryatids holding up the arched ceiling with graceful arms. Brass urns filled with spikes of asphodels decorated a fireplace ornately carved with lotus fruit, and waiters dressed in grey drifted through the clusters of mourners like ghosts, offering refreshments.
“I am Thomas Keene,” he said, beckoning a waiter burdened with glasses of garnet wine, “and you are friends of John Enfield, though I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“The poet?” Sam asked. Now that she looked for it, Sam could see it: There was a kind of enduring sadness behind his sea-grey eyes, as if he’d seen beneath the skin of the world and could not forget what he’d beheld.
His poetry had that feeling as well. It had a way of creating a space in you, filling you with a yearning for places that had never existed.
Places whose glory was crumbling when first you stumbled upon them, longing for the days when they were young and full of dreams. It kindled in Sam an ache so real it was like a memory.
“Your work,” Sam said, and found herself at a loss for words. Hel raised an eyebrow, but Sam studiously ignored her. It wasn’t every day you met one of your favorite poets. “I find myself missing worlds that aren’t real.”
“Would you change it, if you could?” Mr. Keene asked, his voice soft. “Would you trade this dull world for another?”
Yes, Sam’s heart answered, because what reader hadn’t?
Books transported you to other worlds, breathing life into them until you could close your eyes and run your fingers through the frosted blades of grass.
To have to emerge to dull reality seemed heartbreakingly cruel. But that wasn’t what she was here for.
“Are you talking about the Otherworld?” Sam asked.
“In a manner,” Mr. Keene said elusively.
“I wonder, sometimes, if our world was not always this way—if it has forgotten the many-splendored thing it used to be, the way it still is in the untouched Irish countryside. We cling to the chains of iron and industry, claiming they protect us—but what if, in keeping us from harm, from risk, they keep us from what we truly yearn for?”
Sam ached, her mind full of all the ways she wasn’t following her heart, of every word she swallowed and every dream she sacrificed on the altar of safe . . . Of what she might be capable of if she stopped.
It occurred to Sam that there was a time when she would have found this seductive. Before she realized her heart had already decided, rather without her consent, on a sharp-tongued woman with only one suit and a distressing aversion to nouns.
“Ah yes, because living at the whims of the Otherworld is something to strive for,” Hel said dryly.
“Hel!” Sam hissed under her breath. They were supposed to be keeping a low profile.
“That’s why you live that way, isn’t it?” Hel pressed. “Except you don’t, do you? Why is that, do you figure?”
Mr. Keene flushed. “I’m doing important work—”
“Sure you are,” Hel said flatly.
“Speaking of work,” Van Helsing interrupted, looming over Mr. Keene as Hel pushed past him into the crowds, “we had better get to it.”
“Get to what?” Mr. Keene asked, looking more perplexed than ever.
“Private detectives,” Van Helsing said, effectively scuttling any hope they had of being inconspicuous.
Mr. Keene’s features shifted from confused to closed off.
Sam sighed. So much for going undercover.
But then again, given that Lord Lusk already knew their names and assumed occupation, she supposed that was a given.
“Jakob Van Helsing, at your service. This is Miss Moriarty and Miss Harker.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Keene said, adjusting his spectacles. “Lord Lusk did mention something of the sort.”
“Is he here?” Van Helsing inquired.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Mr. Keene said distantly, and Sam frowned. For a man who was supposedly mourning the death of his friend, Lord Lusk had an odd way of showing it. “Perhaps I could help you?”
“Perhaps,” Van Helsing echoed. “Mr. Enfield hired me because he had reason to believe his life was in danger. Regrettably, upon my arrival, I found that he was correct. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”
Mr. Keene blinked. “What possible grudge could someone hold against Mr. Enfield? He was a paragon of loyalty and noblesse oblige.”