Azrael was bent over the workbench, absorbed in the contents of a glass flask. He had been nervous and on edge all day. His expensive coat was stained with splashes. “Do you know what this is?” he said at once.
“Acid?”
“Aqua regis. It can dissolve gold.”
She came through the musty, cluttered room. “And?”
“Sarah, I may finally have succeeded!” He gazed at her, pale with excitement. “After all these lifetimes, Sarah! All this work! I started with the basest ingredients, but they’ve been purified and distilled, endlessly filtered, until now they’re almost quite new, the faults strained and burned out. A painful process for them sometimes, I know, but we’re so close!”
“Them?” she said slowly. “You sound as if you’re talking about people. As if it’s people you’ve been changing.”
He smiled, coy. “Do I? Well, it’s true the sages said that real gold is that which is created in the soul. The turning away from evil, from pride.”
“The soul again.”
“It’s a subject that interests me.”
“The Trevelyans were proud,” she said. “I wonder where their souls are.”
“Do you?” He held her gaze for a moment, then turned abruptly. “Look,” he whispered.
She bent over the strange apparatus, sniffing its sour smell. The vessel was one Azrael called an alembic, and in the dish on the top was a tiny crust of brass-colored metal, cold and brittle.
“Is that gold?”
“I pray so.” He seemed too nervous to keep still; putting the flask down he paced over to the fireplace and put both hands to it, leaning on the marble mantelshelf. Looking down into the fire made his face a mask of shadows and red light. “Whether it is or not, is up to you.”
“Me!”
“Pour the aqua regis onto it. Carefully. If it dissolves, its gold. I will have done what generations have only dreamed of.”
He was watching her intently in the mirror. The cat was staring too, its green eyes tense. Sarah shrugged and picked up the flask, oddly uneasy. Outside, the rain pattered on the windows.
But just as she went to pour he said, “First. Is there anything . . . you want?”
She looked at him. “I’ve got everything I want.”
“Are you sure? Think hard, Sarah. Think of your father. Of Martha, of all the villagers. Think what you could do for them.”
The flask was heavy. Her hand trembled. Azrael stepped forward. “We could make an agreement,” he whispered.
But instead of answering she asked a question. “What happened to the tramp?”
“Who?”
“The tramp. You know.”
“He ran off.” He seemed irritated. “Never mind him! Please Sarah . . .”
“He told me things. He said you deliberately destroyed my grandfather.”
Azrael’s gaze went dark. “Indeed.” For a moment he was silent, watching her. “And you believe him?”
“I don’t know whom to believe.”
“He’s not the first to make such claims,” Azrael said sadly. “I have always been misunderstood. But I told you what really happened.”
“And he warned me.”
The cat spat. Azrael turned. “Warned you?”
“Not to make any bargains with you.”
He shook his head, his smile hard. “You already have. You work for me.”
Sarah’s fingers were tight around the smooth glass. “I know.”
“And you really think I would ruin your family? For what?” He waved a hand. “For this? I have estates of my own, Sarah.”
“So you keep saying. But I don’t know anything about you. And you’ve got too many things that should be mine.”
She looked at the flask, then put it down on the table quickly. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I think you’d better do this yourself.”
She walked to the door, and glanced back. Azrael had picked up the flask. All the excitement seemed to have drained right out of him. Bitterly he poured out one drop of acid.
The crust of metal stayed exactly as before.
She turned and went out. She didn’t want to see his disappointment.
That night she waited in the library, reading. She read feverishly, as if all the words of all the people from the books could block out the loneliness she felt. She should never have come here. But it was too late now. She was changed. She could never bear to go home, not back to the cottage. Because this was home. Every day she felt that more strongly. It was so easy to wander the empty house and feel that it was hers. That was the thought that kept intruding, around the edges of the words.
Turning a page, she heard a door creak.
She looked up.
Footsteps walked stealthily down the corridor.
At last!
She slid to her feet; opening the library door she saw Azrael at once in the shadows of the landing. He was climbing the south stairs quickly, the cat a lithe slither at his feet. She slipped out silently.
Above her, on the walls, his candle threw bizarre shadows. They moved around him like a host of attendant spirits, the cat streaking ahead.
Keeping well back, determined, Sarah followed him.
She slid from doorway to doorway, lurking behind great vases. On the stairs she tiptoed on the crimson carpet. She knew where he was going. Down the dim corridor past her bedroom, the cat sniffing at the closed door. Azrael’s shadow stretched long and eerily over the paneled wood. Then he stopped.
Crushed in an alcove, her fingers tight on a velvet curtain, she watched, intent.
Azrael pulled the tapestry aside. He lifted the candle and she saw only the wall, but he touched some part of it and the whole panel seemed to spring forward, and she saw it really was a door, ingeniously hidden. He drew out a bunch of keys; they clinked in the silence.
After one quick look down the corridor he unlocked the door and went through, leaving it ajar. For a long moment she waited, seeing again the weird red glow that flickered through the slit, and then she moved swiftly after him, slipping through the tapestry folds and easing the door wide.
There were stairs, going down.
She had to be careful; after a while tiny stones scattered under her feet. The stairs were stone, and crumbling. They made a great curve, and she tiptoed down and down until she felt sure she was below the cellars, below the house itself, and still the steps descended and far down ahead of her the roar and grumble of the Darkwater grew loud. It echoed, as if there were caves down there, and the strange misty glow in the air was a steamy heat, and the stench of some powerful sulfurous miasma came up to her.
Ahead, far down, Azrael’s dark shape turned a last knob of rock. She lingered, waiting in tense excitement, seeing how a sudden redness lit him, as if huge fires burned down there.
And then a voice in her ear said slyly, “I’m glad yer still up, Miss Nosy. There’s someone here to see yer.”
Azrael turned. In the echoing roar he stared up at her and his face was a dark amazement and then a fury that chilled her.
“Get her out!” he snapped, and Scrab grabbed her hand and pulled her hastily up the stairs, an endless scrambling breathless climb until they tumbled out into the corridor hot and trembling.
In seconds Azrael was with them. He slammed the door and locked it, and turned on her in wrath. “You were following me! Why, Sarah?”
“Because you never explain anything to me!”
Scrab was waving someone down the corridor.
“I can’t,” Azrael said tightly. “Not yet.”
“Sarah?” It was Martha, wet through, almost distraught. She glanced at Azrael in fright, then grabbed Sarah’s hands. “You have to come home . . .”
“No!”
“You must!” Martha gripped tighter. “Right now, Sarah. Your father’s dying.”