Tom had seen it many times. The young Sarah Trevelyan looked down at him from a luxurious Victorian sofa. Her dress was dark blue, with an ivory lace collar, her brown hair long and intricately pinned.
“It looks like you,” Simon said, considering. “Was she your great-grandmother?”
“It’s me.” Sarah stood with her back to the painting.
The likeness was incredible, if you could ignore the short blond hair. Tom was shaken, but he shrugged.
“How could it . . .”
“Look at her hands.”
The girl in the painting had her hands on her lap. She was looking at the watcher with an amused, knowing smile, and her palms were turned up. Across one of them were five red weals.
Sarah held up her own hand, facing him.
Five red marks crossed it. Identical.
“I had it painted like that deliberately, though the wretched artist had to be nagged to put them in. I knew I might need them.” She leaned back against the bookshelves. Tom said carefully, “How did you get them?”
“Beaten. You think they should have faded in a hundred years, don’t you? But when the clocks started ticking, I just stopped. My nails didn’t grow, my hair stayed the same length. I never lost a tooth or an eyelash. It took me a while to notice it, but then I knew I was static. The world moved around me, but I never grew up.”
She smiled, spinning an old Empire globe, fingering the dusty countries absently. “It’s so ironic. I never wanted to grow old. What I did want was knowledge, and I got it. Do you know how many schools I’ve been to? At least sixteen, till I got sick of it. I’ve got dozens of exams—O Levels, A Levels, Certificates, even a few GCSEs. I’ve had jobs—in the wars it was easy; I worked on the land, in factories, got evacuated from London. I’ve traveled too. Rome, Paris, I know them like you know that beach down there. Every country in Europe, I trailed around them, learned their languages, saw their history happen, was in Berlin when the Wall came down. Trouble was, it wasn’t the sort of knowledge I really wanted. Maybe it took me the first fifty years to realize that.”
They were staring at her. She looked away, up at the picture. How could she tell them how it had all been, that hundred years? More than a lifetime, places and people she could barely remember, all the friends, enemies, houses, mistakes, brief happinesses. And it had changed her. Azrael had known it would.
She remembered the moment the clocks had started; that was vivid, even after all this time. And it was still here, the one on the mantelshelf, still ticking, as it had ticked all down the years. “That first day I told myself Azrael was mad,” she said. “That he’d just gone home, to wherever he came from. But when the days passed, and months, and I didn’t age, then I knew, I really knew I had done it. I had sold my soul.”
Tom leaned against the window and folded his arms. If she was lying, she was good at it. “People would find out,” he said.
“They almost did, a few times. My father died six years after we came back here, and I lived here two more years, but I knew by then I dare not stay anywhere too long. So Sarah Trevelyan endowed her school and went to live abroad, and after that I did everything through letters to the solicitors. When I wrote the will I left the money to myself—my own daughter. And so on. But I couldn’t make friends my own age, because there were none. I’m still sixteen! And yet I’m not.” She smiled, going over to the telescope. “I used to be pretty selfish. I thought having money was important. Then I felt sorry for the villagers—we used to call them the poor, and my God, they were. I tried to help them, to undo what the Trevelyans had done.”
“That was good,” Tom said at random.
She turned sharply. “Yes. But it took me too long to find out that the poor had more than me. Family, for one thing. A hundred years is a lot of loneliness.”
Tom bit his lip. “But Azrael. Does that mean he’s as old as . . .”
“Older. He comes from the world’s beginning, that one. Are you working for him?”
“Yes. He’s paying—”
“Oh he pays well, but don’t make any deals. And never—”
Footsteps came up the stairs. Sarah turned quickly. “He’s back. I don’t want to see him. Not yet. I’ve still got ten days left.”
“But won’t he know?”
“I don’t care!” She backed into the maze of rooms.
The library door opened. Azrael’s voice said, “It’s me, Tom.”
Sarah glanced around. “The fire escape.”
They raced through the rooms of books and papers. “Look at it,” she muttered. “As much a mess as ever.”
Simon had the fire door open.
“Tom?” Azrael called.
Pages ruffled in the chill breeze. Sarah climbed out and crouched.
“Never what?” Tom said.
She grabbed the collar of his coat. “Never touch the jar. The big one, the one in the safe.”
And then, just as he shut the door, she whispered, “Because I think I may be the one who killed your brother.”
nineteen
Christmas was almost here.
Tom’s mother got the box of decorations down from the attic and he had to put them up, pushing the pins into last year’s holes. Paula always enjoyed Christmas. She made the small cottage cozy, burning logs on the hearth and making swathes of ivy and holly across the fireplace. Lamps were lit and the best china came out, and extravagant cheap boxes of chocolates from Truro market. The house smelled of brandy and fruit cake. That evening Steve Tate’s dad dropped the tree off in his van. Tom kept well out of the way. From the upstairs window he saw Steve in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard, whistling to the loud thump of music. He turned his head and glanced up.
Tom dropped the curtain and jumped back. Just too late.
“Where’s your girlfriend, lover boy?” Steve shouted. He took something small out of his pocket and held it up. “Be seeing you.” He grinned.
Tom stood still, chilled and puzzled. It had looked like a key.
All evening his mother decorated the tree with tinsel and small wooden angels painted gold, their tiny haloes needing straightening after months in the box. They’d had them for years. When he’d been small Tom’s favorite had been the one with the tiny broken foot; he picked it up off the floor now and handed it to her. As she hung it he went back to wrapping the presents while Simon lounged on the sofa and ate chips.
What had Sarah meant? How could she have killed Simon? It didn’t make any sense, and it scared him. Like this crazy story of a hundred years of life. Had she deliberately cut her hands to match that portrait?
Folding the silver paper with its galloping reindeer, he bit the tape off and looked at Simon, who muttered, “Just imagine for one minute it’s true. Think of all the things she’s lived through! Both World Wars. The sixties. Politics, fashions, inventions.”
“Maybe.” He turned the package over.
His mother put the last star on the treetop and flicked the switch. Red and blue and gold, small lights sparked into brilliance, lighting the green secret spaces of the tree. Hands on hips she looked at the room with satisfaction.
“That’s more like it.”
That night in bed, he was cold. Frost was forming outside the window, a white intricate pattern. Deep under the bedclothes he muttered, “So what happens to her on New Year’s Eve?”
“He takes her away. To some dark, supernatural place.”
Tom was silent. Then he said, “She’s scared. And what does that make Azrael?”
Simon sighed sleepily and turned over. “God knows. Ask Sarah.”