And she didn’t go home. She didn’t even think of the cottage until Azrael mentioned it. Late on the night before Hallowe’en, she helped him open the great casements in the laboratory and wheel out the brass telescope. Scrab was there too, muttering in disgust at the oil on his hands.
“What you want with this contraption,” he said sourly, “I don’t know.” He ran a dark eye around the room. “Nor yet the rest of the junk I ’ave to clean.”
Azrael smiled. “All knowledge is in the heavens, Scrab.”
“And in ’ell, more like.” He shuffled out, wiping his palms on his sleeves.
“Why do you put up with him?” Sarah asked.
Azrael looked surprised. “He’s an old family retainer. I’d miss him, if he went. He’s devoted to me, of course.”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
He smiled, sitting at the eyepiece, and turned the scope to face the moon, adjusting the focus carefully. “And as for you, well, tomorrow is Sunday. Your day off. You must go to church, and then home.”
“There’s too much to read,” she said evasively.
“It will wait. You’ll have a lifetime to read it all. Maybe more.”
She stared at him, but he was taking notes in the moonlight. So she said, “What if I don’t want to go?”
“You must. Otherwise my name will be further blackened in parish gossip. Sarah Trevelyan kidnapped and held against her will!”
He swiveled around, his face lit with mischief. “Or they’ll say we play cards eternally for the soul of your grandfather!”
The idea seemed to amuse him. He got up, took a pack from a drawer, and slapped it down in front of her. “Shall we, Sarah?”
“Don’t make a joke of it.”
“I’m not! I mean it. Cut the pack.”
Alarmed, she said, “Why?”
“Do it! For a wager. It will help you understand how he felt—the recklessness, the madness! I tell you what—I’ll wager all the books of my library. They could all be yours!”
She didn’t trust him in this mood. He jumped up and leaned over the bench, his lean face transformed with feverish excitement. “There’s nothing like it! The thrill of knowing you could lose everything.”
“I haven’t got anything to lose.”
“Of course you have!” He smiled, sidelong. “You have what we all have. You have your soul.”
Sarah went cold.
The feeling she had had once before swept over her, of being balanced on the edge of a dark bottomless pit of terror, wobbling, unsteady.
“My soul?” she whispered.
“Yes.” Azrael looked eager. “The most secret part of you. The real you. The spirit that will live for all eternity.”
He was joking, of course. And yet pictures from the old Bibles of the library began to haunt her, the terrible screaming torments of the damned, who had chosen evil, burning, lost in unimaginable suffering. She turned to the table. “That’s not funny.”
“Indeed no. But consider. Does a person’s soul even exist?”
“You should know. You’re the alchemist.”
He smiled. “I am. And science needs experiment. Why not find out? Go on, Sarah. Turn the card.”
Slowly, she put her hand out. She looked down at the pack, their backs patterned with tiny chevrons that almost mesmerized her. The room was quiet. Outside the open window, a few bats flitted under the eaves. The stars were bright and frosty.
She touched the cards.
The cat hunkered down, eyes wide. Far off in the stable, a horse whinnied. And she lifted her hand back and closed it tight.
“Maybe I should go to church,” she said.
Azrael smiled again.
nine
Church was strange.
Azrael sat in the Trevelyan pew—she had never seen him there before. Darkly elegant, he listened to the sermon with scholarly reserve, raising an eyebrow now and then, or flicking a speck of dust off his knees, so that old Mr. Martin the rector got flustered and lost his place in his notes.
In her new dress Sarah felt everyone was looking at her. Mrs. Hubbard certainly was, over the rim of a gilt pince-nez, and behind her Major Fleetwood, his wife, and seven children, all identically dressed. Demure, Sarah smiled down at her gloves.
Over the chancel arch, there was a Doom painting. She had stared at it countless times before, but today it held her eyes as the doleful hymns of the service were sung, and the sea fog dimmed the candles and made old men cough. On the left a hideous demon grimaced and capered; his black, tailed attendants forcing damned souls into the grinning mouth of a vast hell; inside was all fire and torment. Small naked figures were being pulled out of their graves, wealthy and wailing, some with crowns, some with miters, tearing their hair, wringing their hands. It reminded her of Azrael’s strange eagerness over the cards. She’d heard stories from Martha about men who’d sold their souls. To the devil.
He hadn’t been joking.
The fear she had felt swept back, and she fidgeted, dropped a glove and picked it up. And for a moment, as she glanced back up at the picture, she saw herself in it, a small white-faced creature half out of a grave, wailing, and her father and grandfather and all the faces from the paintings screaming silently around her, so that she froze in her seat, eyes widening slowly, the mists of sea fog obscuring the ancient plaster.
And then they were only small, indistinct sinners again, lost in disintegrating, flaking paint.
She shivered. On the right, things were better. She preferred this side. Just above Azrael’s head the blessed spirits ascended, ranks of beautifully delicate winged angels in white, guiding the righteous up ladders. The top of the painting was long lost. Ghosts of figures loomed there, brilliant, barely seen.
Azrael caught her eye, and winked darkly.
Mr. Martin lost his place again.
“Are you sure?” Martha said anxiously. “You really like it there?”
Sarah unpacked the fruit and cake and sweetmeats Azrael’s cook had given her. “Yes, I told you! It’s fine! These are for Papa. Don’t tell him where they came from.”
“He’ll know,” Martha said drily.
“How has he been?”
“Tormented.” The stout woman sighed, hitching the baby up on her hip. “So fretful. Sits all day and says nothing. You’d best see for yourself, Sarah.”
Reluctant, she turned. Even after only a week at Darkwater the cottage depressed her. She saw now how dim and smoky and filthy it was, and she knew for the first time something of the despair her father must have felt, how heartbroken he and his young bride must have been, on that terrible day fifteen years ago. She stared at the row of cracked plates with loathing. She knew one thing already. She could never live here again. And suddenly she hated it that Martha had to live here, that all of them had to endure it, the squalid cottages, the boys with no shoes, the red raw hands of the fishwives, salt-swollen at the harbor. She hated it that they worked so hard, in the fields, down the mines, Jack out at sea for days, and all for so little. Martha could barely write her own name. And was proud of the cracked plates, because there were six, all matching.
It made Sarah despair. Because there was nothing she would ever be able to do.
For any of them.