Chapter 12 #3
The bed was unmade. Books were stacked on the side table, on the chair, in piles on the floor.
Papers covered the wall opposite the door, and as she moved closer, she saw the writing on them was not words.
Just capital letters—C’s and H’s and O’s—surrounded by circles and connected by dashes.
There were postcards, too, from all over the world, bearing bright illustrations of the Arc de Triomphe, the canals of Venice, a huge, modern bridge Caroline thought distantly might be in New York City.
And a sentence handwritten in black ink, underlined twice. The curse is the cure.
“What kind of experiment?” Caroline asked, picking her way through shards of broken glass to the desk. Her heart was pumping uncommonly hard.
The wooden surface was covered in the detritus of a scientist’s laboratory. The dissected insides of an oil lamp lay in a pile of ashes, the black wick exposed, surrounded by glass vials full of purple liquid.
“Bit o’ this, bit o’ that,” Rab said noncommittally, sidestepping Caroline to shut the desk drawers.
“Is this my medicine?”
For amid the mess, in one of Mrs. Easton’s tea saucers, lay a tiny pile of rust-red powder.
“Er…um,” said Rab, scratching his neck. “Yes.”
“Did you discover the ingredients?” A bubble of hope swelled in Caroline’s belly. Only ten or eleven of Dr. Hoffman’s pills remained. She had been rationing them, one every third day, and she felt like a draining bathtub.
“No.”
The bubble popped.
“Leastways, not yet,” Rab went on. He fixed her with that strange yellow gaze. “But I do have some questions. Whereabouts in the Midlands did you say you were from, Miss Huxley?”
The query took Caroline by surprise. She arranged her face, praying she had let nothing slip, and said, “Birmingham. Why do you ask?”
He waved his hand airily. “Just trying to deduce the medicine’s active ingredients.
What gives it its color. Its smell.” He bent, picked up the largest piece of broken glass between index finger and thumb, and dropped it into the waste bin.
“And—refresh my memory—how did you say you know Charlie Foster?”
Caroline’s mind raced. She hadn’t mentioned Charlie’s name since that first night, when she had stood at the front door and begged Mrs. Easton to take her in. “I met him when I came to London,” she said. “Just once. But he was so kind.”
“And when was that?” Rab dropped a second piece of glass into the bin with a clink.
“Months ago. Early spring, perhaps? It was raining, I remember, and cold.” She laughed, a small, flat sound. “But it’s London, so that could be any time of year.”
Rab raised his golden eyes to Caroline’s face. She felt transfixed by them, stuck like one of Mr. Tythe’s pinned butterflies.
“Just once,” he repeated. And she felt in her bones that he knew she was lying.
“What does Charlie Foster have to do with my medicine?” Caroline managed to ask.
Rab’s gaze lingered a moment longer. She felt laid bare beneath it. But after a moment he shook his head, turned once more to his task. “Nothing,” he said softly. “Nothing at all. Just trying to piece together how you came to us.”
Caroline knelt on the floor beside him, willed her fingers not to tremble as she lifted the largest piece of glass and dropped it in the bin.
She felt Rab’s eyes on the nape of her neck as she scanned the carpet, but he did not press her more.
Still. He knew, or guessed, that her story was not true.
Just as she knew, or guessed, that he had something to do with Charlie’s disappearance.
“Let’s roll it up,” Caroline said, when all that remained on the rug was a fine, sparkling layer, “and shake it over the bin.”
Rab joined her at the fringed edge. His shoulder knocked against hers, warm and muscled, and it cost Caroline every bit of her strength to not jump away each time they brushed.
When the carpet was tightly spiraled, they lifted it—not unlike a body, Caroline thought, how the end lolled on her shoulder—and carried it to the waste bin.
“One,” Rab said, “two…”
On “three,” they hoisted the rug upright and shook it.
“Thanks for that,” Rab said, panting, as they lowered the carpet and rolled it back out. “Couldn’t have done it alone.”
“There’s still a fair bit of glass,” Caroline said, picking a fingernail-size piece out of the wool. “I can come by tomorrow morning with the broom. Get the last of it.”
She glanced at Rab from the corner of her eye. His hand moved, unconsciously, to his breast pocket. Where he kept his key, safe and close. There was something here, in this room, some bit of evidence that would lead her to Charlie. She could nearly smell it.
“That’s kind of you,” Rab said, flattening the edge of the rug with his boot toe. “But I’ll take care of it. I know how Mrs. Easton is; you’ve got enough to worry about without cleaning up my messes.”
“It’s no problem,” Caroline stood, made a show of surveying the carpet. “I have to sweep my room tomorrow anyway.”
She had unknowingly stepped closer to him. When she looked up, his face was inches from hers. His nostrils flared.
“Miss Huxley,” Rab said, in a low purr that sent a shiver skittering down her spine, “thank you for your help.”
“You’re—you’re welcome,” she stammered, taking a step backward.
Rab moved into the air she had just vacated. His boot sole was silent in the carpet, his yellow eyes still fixed on hers.
“Good night.”
The word was a whisper that felt like a touch.
“Good night,” Caroline repeated. She wheeled to the door, through it, across the landing, and into her own room. She drew the lock, slid the chair beneath the handle, and leapt beneath the quilt with all her clothes on.
As she lay trembling in the dark like a child, unsure what had happened, what had so frightened her, she heard, across the landing, a muffled masculine laugh.