“It’s just a bang to the head, right? Knocked him out for a bit, made him woozy….But he’s okay now.”
“Yes.”
“Well”—Holly Munro smiled—“that’s what we hope. If it’s a concussion, we’ll know in the next few days. Whether he’s cracked his skull or not, or if there’s bleeding on the brain.” She mixed her fruit salad and cherry yogurt with a spoon.
A day before I’d have bristled at her prim and proper manner, at the clear way she fixed her eyes on me. But I didn’t have the energy or the will to sustain that grievance now. Lockwood’s condition was my fault. And Holly Munro had pulled me up when I was about to fall.
“He’s awake, and he wants breakfast,” George said. “That’s a good sign.”
She nodded. “I’ve replaced his bandages, and I think the bleeding’s almost stopped. Sweet tea, food, and lots of bed rest, that’s all we can do.” She got up, put toast in.
“Fat chance of keeping him in bed,” George said. “I’ve already caught him sneaking down to the phone, wanting to call Wintergarden.”
Holly Munro smilingly flicked the kettle on. “You’re about to do that, aren’t you, George?”
“Absolutely. I’ll wait until nine, then give her the good news. Everything’s in hand. Right, Lucy?”
“Sure.” I pushed my uneaten cereal away.
Everything, as far as the Case of the Bloody Footprints was concerned, was in hand—in spite of (or because of) me. Lockwood, in his frantic leap to save me, had sliced his sword clean through the essence of the ghost. Flexing, warping, it had faded back across the attic landing. George, arriving moments after Lockwood, had seen it drift through the arch that led to the servants’ rooms, and fold itself down into the floorboards of the passage beyond. With me saved, he’d hurried over and stabbed his penknife into the exact place. The next half hour had been spent anxiously tending to Lockwood, unconscious following the impact of his fall. Only after he came around and we had his head wound stanched did George head for the passage alone, carrying a crowbar and a chain net. Hacking and cracking noises followed. When he returned, it was with a bundle tightly wrapped in silver: a battered tin box, filled with a Victorian woman’s shawl.
Right now, that silver bundle was dumped on the kitchen table, between the mugs, the cereal boxes, and the breadboard. There was plenty of breakfast on offer. George had eaten well. Even Holly was decorously vacuuming up a range of healthy options. I hadn’t had a thing.
“Lucy,” George said, “you’d better eat.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I will.”
Holly was arranging plates and butter on a tray. “You mustn’t be too downhearted, Lucy. If you hadn’t exposed yourself to ghost-lock, the Visitor wouldn’t have revealed the whereabouts of its Source. So really, our success is all due to you….” She smiled over at me. “Looking at it one way.”
A small hot cord knotted tightly in my stomach; it had been there since I’d stuttered out my first round of apologies and thanks several hours before. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”
George was gazing at me. “What exactly did you experience, Luce?” he said. “What made you put the rapier down?”
What indeed. Looking back on it, I found it hard to accept how easily I’d been manipulated by the ghost with the bloody hands. But I wasn’t about to say anything in front of Holly. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk to George.
“Were you in a trance?” Holly asked. “I knew two trainee agents once who were mesmerized by a Solitary on Lambeth Walk. They were only just rescued in time, like you. They said it was like being in a dream.”
“I’m not a trainee,” I said. “On the contrary, I was thinking very clearly.”
“You thought you were,” George said crisply. “Obviously, you weren’t. There’s a theory that some ghosts feed off psychic atmosphere. They pick up on emotions and play on it. Were you feeling particularly abandoned or needy up there?”
“No, of course not,” I scowled. “Not at all.” I didn’t look at him.
“Just that it sounds as if a sense of neediness and abandonment was what drove Robert Cooke mad,” George went on. “I got the full story in the end, in a penny dreadful pamphlet called Mysteries of London. I found it quite quickly in the other Archives building, but I was trapped there when DEPRAC cordoned off the street. That’s why I was so late. There was a riot going on, and then someone saw a Limbless, or said they did, and it was hours before I could leave the building. But the penny dreadful account of the Horror of Hanover Square couldn’t have been clearer. This Cooke—he was sixteen, by the way—had been more or less abandoned by his father, who was always abroad, but had a very close bond with his mother. She spoiled him rotten. Then she died, and he was looked after by an old nurse, who spoiled him even worse. Then she died, too, and was replaced by a manservant—this so-called Little Tom. He was a big man, a bit slow, and apparently more or less mute. The kid resented him, and began to maltreat him—working himself up into fits of rage when Little Tom forgot stuff, or didn’t hop to quickly enough. Anyway, one night the kid goes berserk—the servant had lost his favorite boots or something. He goes down to the kitchen, begins laying into Tom, snatches up a knife, and stabs him. There’s blood everywhere, and Tom’s badly hurt, but he’s strong and he’s angry. He chases Robert Cooke up through the house to the attic landing, where they tussle again. Tom falls over the banister. Cooke’s arrested, sitting there in a lather of gore.” George stretched back in his chair, sniffing discreetly at an armpit as he did so. “That’s how it happened, anyway. Boy, do I need a bath.”
“That shawl you found,” Holly Munro said. “His mother’s?”
“I should think so. Something that was precious to him. Who knows what weird mix of neediness and resentment turned him mad?”
I shrugged. “Clearly one very confused individual.”
“Yeah,” George said. “There’s a lot of it about.” He looked at me.
“Well, now,” Holly Munro said heartily, “Lockwood will be getting impatient. I’ll take him his breakfast.”
“I’ll go if you want,” George said. “You must be tired, Holly.”
I stood abruptly. “No,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Without waiting, I gathered up the tray.
Of all the rooms in a house, the bedroom is supposed to give the clearest insight into the personality of whoever inhabits it. That theory probably worked with my room (scattered clothes and sketch pads), and certainly worked with George’s, providing you could wade deep enough in among the library books, manuscripts, crumpled clothes, and weapons to see. Lockwood’s was trickier. There was a row of old Fittes Almanacs set out on a dresser; there was an armoire, with his suits and shirts all neatly put away. On the wall a few paintings of far-off lands—rivers winding through rain forest; volcanoes rising above tree-lined hills—suggested the travels of his parents. I guessed it had once been their room. But there were no photographs of them, or of his sister, Jessica, and the striped wallpaper and gold-green curtains were, in their genteelly blank way, as uninformative about Lockwood as if it had been a whitewashed box. He might have slept there, but I always felt he didn’t really inhabit the room in any tangible sense.
The curtains were drawn; a bedside light was on. Lockwood lay in bed, resting back against two striped pillows, thin hands folded on the counterpane. A neatly wound white bandage, tilted like a wonky turban, obscured the crown of his head; in one place a dark stain showed where his cut had bled; a spray of dark hair tufted out from under it on the other side. He was pale and thin—nothing new there—and his eyes were bright. He watched me as I set the tray down.