The girl hissed with relief. “Let’s get inside.”
“But he’s living here. Azrael. Isn’t it . . .”
“It doesn’t matter where I go in the end. Now come on!”
Tom hesitated. “Do it,” Simon said quickly.
So he unlocked the door, turning the well-oiled catch silently. As they slipped in he whispered, “I don’t know your name.”
“Sarah.” She looked around the black-and-white hall.
Tom bit his lip “You could go . . .”
“I know where to go,” she muttered. Quickly she climbed the curved stairs and they followed, among small creaks of floorboards and the old building’s shifts and murmurs in the windy night. The girl knew the way. She went up to the old servants’ quarters, tiptoeing carefully past the library wing. Everything was in darkness. Azrael must have gone to bed, Tom thought.
The servants’ stair was a mass of shadows; they inched their way up, keeping to the edge of the steps, Sarah letting a small mouse run over her feet with only a sudden intake of breath.
Beyond the alcove filled with filing cabinets she seemed suddenly lost. “They’ve changed this,” she whispered, close to his ear. “There used to be a corridor here.”
“Through there.” He opened the fire door; it slid behind them with a slow swish. This area was the sixth-form bedrooms; in his wanderings he’d been up here often, pretending, dreaming. He had a favorite room halfway down that he used as his. To his surprise, that was the door she stopped at.
“My room. Open it.”
He fumbled with the keys. Around them the vast house was silent, the only sound the chink of iron in the lock and almost too far off to hear, the thunder of the tide in Newhaven Bay.
And suddenly, something else.
A low sound. It rose from the depths of the house, so that Simon muttered “Listen,” and the key stopped in mid-turn.
Water. Deep, rumbling water, as if it ran inside them, in their veins, vibrating, a sound almost felt.
The girl was the first to move. “The Darkwater. Haven’t you heard it before?”
“Sometimes. It’s not often you can.”
“Give me that.” She took the keys, slid off the ones she needed, and dumped the rest back in his hands. “You’ll get them back.”
Then she had opened the door and slipped through. He took a step after her; the wooden panels closed firmly in his face.
“See you tomorrow,” the keyhole whispered.
In the morning he took the long way around the village. Up Deerham Lane and over the fields. It was cold and the sky was gray, and Simon ran ahead and opened the small kissing-gates for him so he wouldn’t have to take his hands out of his pockets.
“It sounds like a nice job,” his mother had said last night, eating toast and turning the newspaper pages. “I’m amazed he’s paying you so much.”
So was Tom. “What about this girl?” he asked now.
“On the run,” Simon said wisely. “You watch the papers, there’ll be something.”
“Should we tell someone?”
His brother shrugged, climbed the last stile, and jumped down. “Not till we know more. One thing: She’s been in that school before.”
“Ex-pupil?”
“Too young.”
“Maybe she came and then left.”
“Possible.”
Tom climbed the stile and walked into the wood. “Her face is familiar,” he said softly.
At the Devil’s Quoits someone had broken the iron fence around the stones. On the largest one was written STEVE WAS HERE in white letters made from straggly dollops of paint. Standing looking at it, hands in pockets, was Azrael.
He glanced up darkly. “Look at this! Who’s Steve?”
Tom shrugged. “Probably Tate. His father runs the post office.” Then, hastily, he added, “But don’t say I said so.”
Azrael glanced at him sidelong. “Don’t get along?”
“No.”
Azrael laughed. He had his dark coat on. “I’m just taking a stroll around the old place, Tom. I’d be grateful if you’d go to the lab and start up. I’ve left instructions. Be careful of the one burner; it takes ages to light.”
He turned. Tom said, “What sort of research is it?”
Azrael ducked under the low fir branches. “Didn’t I say? Transmutation. Of elements. A very long process.”
There was no sign of Scrab, and Paula had gone to Truro Christmas shopping, so he went up and tapped on the girl’s door. “Sarah? It’s Tom.”
No answer.
He tried the handle, but it was locked. Worried, he wandered down to the library, where Simon was waiting.
“Maybe she’s gone.”
“No such luck,” Tom said gloomily.
Azrael’s instructions were written on a rectangular white card pinned to the mantelshelf. Tom assembled the listed glassware, spooning in chemicals from the rows of jars over the shelf. The bottles of acid were huge and heavy; he poured from them with infinite care, seeing one drop of the sulfuric escape and burn into the bench with a whiff of acrid vapor.
The room filled with dim, unpleasant smells. Simon lit the burner, turning it up so the flame roared white-hot, and Tom scowled at him. “Stop messing.”
“Your trouble,” Simon sighed, “is that you’re too serious. That’s why they make fun of you.”
His brother jammed the stopper in furiously. “Drop dead.”
Simon giggled, and went over to the wall safe. “I wonder what’s in here.”
“It’s locked. And Azrael keeps the key.”
The girl was leaning inside the door; she came in and closed it and looked around. “Well. This brings it all back.”
Tom straightened. “I think you should tell us . . . I mean . . . We don’t know anything about you.”
Amused, she perched on a bench, her feet on a stool. She wore muddy walking boots and a thick fleece jacket, expensive-looking. Her hair was dyed. She looked about sixteen, he thought.
“Tell you what?”
“Well, have you run off?”
“No.”
“Left home, I mean.”
“No.” She grinned. “The opposite. This is my home.”
“It’s a school,” Simon said, and came and sat by the telescope.
She looked at him. “Maybe it is, now. But not always. I used to live here; in fact, I still own the place. I’m Sarah Trevelyan.”
Tom turned the burner down; the hot hissing died but the heat had warmed the lab. “Her descendant, you mean? Sarah Trevelyan was the woman who made this place a school—they read her will every year on Founder’s Day. A kid that goes here told me. She left money so that . . .”
“Every child that is able, whether boy or girl, rich or poor, may receive, without payment, the education that their heart desires. I know. I wrote it.”
A flask bubbled suddenly. Tom stared at her. “Are you crazy?”
Sarah smiled sadly. She hugged her knees. “I’ve dreaded this, but now it’s come, it’s such a relief. Keeping a secret for a hundred years is a torment—it bubbles inside you like that potion—it’s never still and you can’t stop it rising to the surface.” She laughed at their bemused look. The shapes of the planets began to drift in the warming air.
“I was born in 1885. I made an arrangement with a . . . creature. A supernatural power. The one you know as Azrael. He gave me a hundred years to live, and my own estate and fortune. The time runs out at New Year. That’s why he’s come back. He’s come for me.”
“Oh yes,” Tom said. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
Sarah shrugged. “Kids. I thought you’d be different.” She glanced at Simon. “Having him around, I mean.”
“What about him.”
She got up, impatient. “All right. I’ll prove it. Come on.”
She went to the door and out along the crowded library corridor with its chained volumes to a room by the entrance to the wing. On one wall a mothy rhinoceros head peered down. On the other was a painting.