Castle of Shadows (4 page)

Charlie was hiding inside the abandoned butler’s pantry on the ground floor of the north wing, her heart thudding in an irritating fashion. She pressed her ear against the panelled door and listened to the groan of approaching whalebone, the slither of starched bombazine. Like the windings of an enormous serpent, the sound of Mrs O’Dair slid past the butler’s pantry and hissed away down the corridor.

‘Can we get on now?’

‘Hush! She might have heard you!’ It wasn’t really a lie. A few seconds earlier, it would have been true. She wasn’t enjoying sneaking Tobias into the attics. Unless he was on an errand for O’Dair, the gardener’s boy wasn’t allowed in the Castle. But Tobias was Maria’s special pet. It wasn’t fair the way the cook spoilt him, slipping him treats and stopping work to make him cups of tea whenever he poked his head into the kitchen. But Charlie had to admit it had been useful today. Maria had merely shrugged when Tobias slid through the scullery door, then gone back to peeling parsnips.

Charlie knew O’Dair’s schedule by heart. It was just past one. The housekeeper had spent the last hour devouring an enormous lunch. Now she would be settling
her black bombazine backside into the well-cushioned armchair beside the fire, easing off her boots and propping her large, stocking-clad feet onto an ottoman. She would rest in her office for at least an hour, snoring until her corsets creaked.

Charlie counted to fifty, then crept out of the butler’s pantry. Motioning Tobias to follow, she tiptoed to the servants’ stairs and began to climb. The narrow wooden steps twisted round and round. A shaft of light dropped from a window far above, and the dry patter of their footsteps fell with it, down the dim brown well of stairs all the way to the basements.

The door on the sixth landing squeaked as she eased it open, a rusty screech. She jumped. Tobias snickered. She dug an elbow in his ribs. ‘Shut up, you!’

The door opened onto a dark, narrow corridor. The only light came from the stairwell behind them. Charlie had not been up here for years. The dusty floorboards creaked under their feet, and the noise of their footsteps seemed to echo endlessly. ‘Shhhh!’ she hissed.

‘There’s nobody to hear us, Charlie.’ Tobias pushed past her and strode down the corridor towards a pair of large double doors. He tried the door knob. It was locked.

‘Well?’ she said.

He grinned at her. ‘You don’t reckon I can get in there, do you? Well just you watch!’ He fished in his pocket and pulled out a buttonhook.

Charlie stared at him. He was mad. ‘What use is that?
Unless…’ Her mouth fell open. ‘You’re not…you can’t…’

His grin grew wider. He squatted, stuck the buttonhook in the keyhole, wiggled it for a few seconds, and Charlie heard a click. ‘How did you learn to do that?’ she asked, awed in spite of herself.

Tobias shrugged. ‘Me stepdad was a thief. But just you remember to keep quiet about it.’ He pushed the door open, and Charlie walked into a room outside her imaginings.

The light that fell from enormous skylights dazzled her, and she stood still for a moment, blinking. She saw tables: rows of tables laden with brass microscopes, boxes of prepared slides, white ceramic dishes, burners, copper and iron vats, small and large charcoal ovens, wooden geometric models, stands holding coloured wooden balls arranged in intricate patterns, and racks of glass tubes, both empty and full. A blanket of powdery grime lay over the whole room. No one had been in here for years.

Tobias slowly revolved on one heel, digging a divot in the dust. ‘Blimey!’ he breathed at last. ‘What a place! What
is
all this stuff?’

‘It’s my mother’s equipment, of course.’

‘I know that, you gurnless girl. What’s it do? What sort of things was she working on?’

‘That’s what I need to find out.’ She wandered among the tables, moving on each time her eye caught something new. A cupboard filled one wall. Through its glass door she saw ceramic jars with strange words written on them:
selenite, beryllium, protosulphate of iron, antimony, tellurium. On the opposite wall stood an even larger cupboard full of crystals of every shape, colour and size, each carefully labelled.

‘Sweet Betty!’ Tobias was craning over her shoulder, reading the labels. ‘Didn’t even know words like them existed,’ he said. ‘Right clever, your mum.’

‘You can go.’

‘What?’

‘Go away! Go back to work. I don’t need you now. You got the door open, and I’m grateful. I owe you another book. Don’t worry! I’ll pay you.’

He was irritating her, wandering around her mother’s laboratory, his sharp eyes peering, his clomping boots tracking through dust that had lain undisturbed for years. She wanted to be alone here. ‘Just go away!’ she snapped, as he ignored her and sauntered across the room to peer inside another cabinet.

‘I ain’t going nowhere, Charlie. So just get on with what you want to do and put up with it.’

‘Why not? This is my mother’s laboratory. It’s nothing to do with you!’

He turned to her, wearing his most annoying smile. ‘And it’s kept locked, ain’t it? How you gonna lock it when you’re done? Didn’t think of that, did you? You want Watch to find this door unlocked next time he bothers to get his spindly shanks this far north, and go running to O’Dair?’

‘Show me how to do that trick with the buttonhook. Then you can go.’

Tobias stared at her, then roared with laughter. ‘Just like that, eh? You want to learn lock-picking in five minutes? Thinking of starting a career as a cracksman, are you, Charlie?’

‘Blast you, Tobias Petch!’ She stamped through the dust to the desk which stood beneath a dormer window. A minute later she had forgotten him. One of the desk drawers was crammed with letters from other scientists, and Charlie scanned the names eagerly. No Bettina. She pulled out some of the letters to take away and read more carefully.

A pneumatic messenger had been installed to one side of the desk. Its brass body was tarnished greenish black, but the wire catch basket below was still full of the brass capsules used to carry messages. She unscrewed them, one by one, but they were all empty. No long-forgotten message lay curled inside. She even lifted the flap of the pneumatic tube itself to make sure a forgotten capsule hadn’t stuck in its throat. Then she gave up and turned to the pair of filing cabinets standing nearby.

Over eight years of research was carefully documented in her mother’s spiky writing; each experiment recorded in precise detail and filed in chronological order. But the last paper in the cabinet was dated November 1843. Her mother had disappeared in May 1846. The vital two and a half years of research were missing.

A noise made her look around. She was startled to see  Tobias. She had forgotten him. He was scuffing round and round a machine that stood at the other end of the room. It was nearly six feet tall and wide and sprouted glass tubes, brass wheels and gears. He caught her eye and grinned. ‘Look at this, Charlie! I do believe it’s one of them machines for making electricity!’

She shuffled over and stood, looking at the machine. Tobias swiped at a brass plaque with his sleeve. ‘Read that,’ he said.

Charlie leant over. Through the greenish tarnish she could just make out the words:
Epsalom Tidbury’s
6,000-Volt Generator. Patent Pending.

‘That’s no help! What sort of use do you think that is, Tobias Petch?’

‘Didn’t find nothing, then?’ His tone was conversational. She was grateful to him. She couldn’t have stood sympathy.

‘No!’ She kicked Epsalom Tidbury’s Generator and wished she hadn’t.

‘Here!’ Tobias pulled her away. ‘Don’t be daft – you’ll break your foot. You didn’t really expect things to be that easy, did you? Your mum was clever. She wouldn’t have left her research here to be snaffled by whoever was after it, would she?’

It was appallingly obvious, and she hadn’t wanted it to be true. The miracle of finding the letter was supposed to transform her life, give back her mother, make up for
all the years of loneliness, all the years of Mrs O’Dair and her father’s card castles.

‘You’ve still got the name, Charlie.’ Tobias’s voice broke through the blackness of her thoughts. ‘This Bettina might know something, and there’s got to be a way of tracking her down. I’ve got to go now, it’s nearly been an hour. Fossy’ll be waking up, and he don’t appreciate me taking leave of absence.’

Bitterness lay beneath the words, like mud on a river bottom. He was smiling, but she wasn’t fooled. She knew Tobias tended to skive off work whenever he could, but had never occurred to her that he might really hate working for the old gardener.

‘He doesn’t beat you, does he?’ It was a horrible thought. Not even the housekeeper had ever dared strike her. But she knew that many children were not so lucky.

Tobias looked at her with narrowed eyes. For a moment she thought she had made him angry. Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Fossy? Course not. But he moans on at me for hours on end. A beating would be a sight quicker.’

She grabbed the pile of letters from the desk and watched as he locked the laboratory door behind them.

‘Would you teach me to pick locks?’ Charlie asked, as politely as she could. ‘So I can get back in here?’

He glanced up at her, sighed. ‘Just get a buttonhook and practise, Charlie. Ward locks ain’t hard. But you got
to find the knack. Some never manage. Now let’s shift.’ And he was gone, nipping down the servants’ stair and out of sight, leaving her to follow, clutching the bundle of letters and the last of her hope.

Charlie’s supper was a bowl of cold parsnip soup and a hunk of stale bread. All her meals were left outside her bedroom door on a tray, and if she didn’t collect them promptly, the rats got there first. She gulped the soup, shuddering at the taste, before racing downstairs to the library, anxious to get there and back before the gas lights were turned off for the night.

None of the letters from the laboratory had mentioned a woman called Bettina. She had pored over them for hours, looking for that name and for any clue to her mother’s last project. All she had learnt was that her mother’s work involved something called ‘synthesis’. She was going to the library for a bit of research while it was safe. Mrs O’Dair and most of the servants would be arrayed round the trestle table in the servants’ hall, digging into something more appetising than parsnip soup.

She rounded the last corner and slid to a stop, surprised to see the door to the library open and light flooding out into the dimly lit corridor. She pressed into the wall and sidled as close to the door as she dared. Watch’s voice drifted out. The words were mushy, as though struggling to find room in a mouth doing double duty.

‘—mighty kind of you, Toby-boy. You know how fond I be of Maria’s meat pies. Ain’t no one conjure up pastry like that woman.’ There was a pause filled with chewing sounds.

‘…just have a look…’ Tobias’s voice was fainter.

‘Look all you want, Toby. I’m too busy to notice if a book or two goes missing. Now, about Maria. You promised to write out that letter for me. You ain’t forgot?’

‘…haven’t forgotten, Watch. But I don’t…’

‘Leave the thinking to me, boy. Women likes love letters and such rubbish. Sweet talking will get you almost anything, and Maria’s worth sweet talking more’n most. Not many women can cook like that one. And there ain’t a female yet didn’t want to get hitched. She’s a rare one, but she ain’t no spring chicken. Boy?’

Tobias’s reply was muffled.

‘Well, hurry up about them dang books. Then I’ll tell you what I want in this here letter. You do this for me, son, and you got free range all over the Castle. My word on it.’

Charlie eased back the way she had come. Her research would have to wait. A thief! That’s all Tobias Petch was. Just like his stepfather. A thief and a swindler and not to be trusted. How dare he bribe Watch in order to steal her books! She only wished Maria knew the company her precious Toby kept, and what he got up to with the food she gave him.

Early next morning, Charlie visited her father again. She knelt on the floor of his chamber and watched as he demolished his castle. The King climbed his scaffolding until he was just above the highest tower. Dangling from his knees, he plucked the topmost layer of cards, harvesting them neatly, sending them fluttering to the ground. Her job was to creep about the floor, gathering the cards and sorting them into decks. They worked without speaking, the silence broken only by the whirr of falling cards.

Charlie loved watching the cards float down, spiralling like strange, rectangular leaves. But today… She knew she must choose her time, make him listen. And pray that they would not be disturbed again by the O’Dair. She watched and waited, her fingers gathering in the steady drizzle of playing cards.

The crenellations of the first tower took over three hours to demolish. Charlie’s hands were stiff from sorting cards into packs, her knees sore from kneeling. The King drifted to the ground with the last of the cards. He counted the packs and stacked them in neat piles against the wall. ‘One hundred and two. Excellent! I needn’t remind you not to bend them, Charlotte. A bent card is a wasted card.’

‘Yes, Father.’

The King turned to gaze up at the remaining thirty-seven towers. This was it: in a moment he would be up the scaffold,and it would be another three hours. She
reached out, caught the hem of his trouser leg, gave it a gentle tug. ‘Father!’ she whispered. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘What?’ He turned and stared at Charlie’s left ear distractedly. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Have you heard of someone called Bettina?’

‘Bettina?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, my dear. It isn’t a Qualian name, you know. Sounds Durch to me.’

Charlie sighed. Another dead end. Her father turned away, and she caught his trouser leg again. ‘Wait, Father. There’s something else. Something important.’

He sighed. ‘Please, Charlie. Be brief. I am busy.’

‘Something’s wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ Her father looked both puzzled and irritated. ‘Of course nothing’s wrong. What could possibly be wrong?’ His eyes widened in fear, and his hands wrung themselves in a flutter of anxiety. ‘It’s not the playing cards, is it? They haven’t stopped making my playing cards, have they? They wear out so quickly, and I haven’t had a new shipment for months.’

‘It isn’t the playing cards, Father!’ She tried again. ‘Things are bad in the Kingdom…and you need to know …there are horrible rumours about you. The papers are full of stories about Republicans and Radicals—’

But he was once more standing with his arms folded across his chest, gazing up at his castle made of cards.

‘
Father!
’ This time she did not bother to whisper. A dozen card towers shivered.

The King frowned at his daughter. For the first time in five years, he nearly looked at her. ‘Charlotte! You know the rules. If you cannot obey them you must leave.’

‘But the Kingdom’s in danger!
You’re
in danger!’ Charlie blinked back tears of frustration. ‘
Listen to me!
’

‘Nonsense! Alistair would have told me if anything were amiss. He has everything well in hand, as always. You are imagining things, child.’

Her mouth dropped open. Of course! But there wasn’t time to think about it now. He was turning away. ‘Father! Please listen—’

It was no use. The King was gone, swinging hand over hand high into the scaffolding. He didn’t look back at her. He had forgotten she was there.

Charlie knew what she had to do. She didn’t bother with the servants’ stairs. She raced down the main staircase to the ground floor and pelted along the corridor. But she had forgotten that on Wednesday mornings the housekeeper supervised the cleaning of the state rooms.

‘Where do you think you’re going, young lady?’ Mrs O’Dair hove into sight, a battleship of black bombazine and starched linen running at full sail, her corsets creaking and groaning like ship’s tackle under strain.

Charlie was going too fast to stop. She slid straight into the prow of the Battleship O’Dair. There was a smothering moment as the black bombazine yielded
slightly beneath the invader, then the O’Dair rebounded, and Charlie found herself flying backwards. She hit the floor with a
whump!
that knocked the air out of her.

The housekeeper loomed above her. Charlie lay gasping on the floor, unable to speak, looking past the mountain range of Mrs O’Dair’s bosom, past her starched lace collar and the double chin it struggled to contain, past the beaked nose, straight into the clever dark eyes glaring down at her.

With a sudden creaking of corsets, O’Dair leant over and, with one large square hand, plucked Charlie off the floor and dangled her for a moment, before dropping her like a mother cat discarding a kitten. ‘Well?’

‘Sorry, Mrs O’Dair,’ Charlie muttered.

‘You were running! Princesses do not run. To help you remember that fact when you are next tempted to run in the corridors, you shall have no supper tonight.’ She swept on in a rustle of starch and linen, then stopped suddenly and creaked round to spear Charlie once more with her stare. ‘What are you doing here, by the way? You have no business in this part of the Castle.’

‘I…I was going to the library.’ Charlie was painfully aware of her heart thumping and a drip of sweat beading down beside her left ear.

‘Indeed,’ the housekeeper said at last. ‘You know perfectly well that you are not allowed to choose your own books from the library. No more books for a week. Then, if you ask me, I shall select something suitable for
you. And now,’ concluded Mrs O’Dair, ‘I shall lock you in your room, where you will stay for the remainder of the day.’

The key clicked in the lock. Charlie crouched beside the door and listened to the housekeeper’s corsets squeak and wheeze down the corridor. ‘
No supper!
’ they taunted. ‘
No
supper tonight!
’ She ignored them. No one was going to stop her. Certainly not the O’Dair. She had known what she must do since the moment her father reminded her about Alistair Windlass.

Not that she had forgotten him. The man was impossible to ignore.
The People’s Enquirer
,
The
Illustrated News
,
The Dispatch
and
The Morning
Chronicle
disagreed about most things, but on one subject they were united: Quale’s brilliant young Prime Minister was the only thing standing between the country and disaster.

What Charlie
had
forgotten was that Alistair Windlass had been one of her parents’ closest friends. He had often dined with them privately, and was always to be found at their grand evening parties. On these occasions she had been allowed a brief visit to the minstrels’ gallery above the ballroom.

She would pull herself up onto her toes and peer over the banisters at the gentlemen in their dark suits and the ladies in their silken frocks of butterfly colours. Her father was the best dancer of them all. She watched him, a
slender figure in black, his dark red hair burning in the gaslight like the flame on a match, twirling among the pinks and purples, blues and golds, waiting for him to remember to look up at her and wink. She shivered with delight at the vision of her tall, golden-haired mother. ‘The most beautiful lady in all of Quale,’ Nurse said. Nurse delighted in pointing out the grandest of the guests. ‘And that’s the Prime Minister, Mr Alistair Windlass, dancing with your mother. Isn’t he a handsome man? And not yet thirty. Youngest Prime Minister in history!’

How could she have forgotten that he had been such good friends with her parents? He might even know who the mysterious Bettina was. It was her last hope. It was also her great good fortune that a few years ago Alistair Windlass had moved his headquarters from Parliament House into her father’s old office in the ministerial wing.

She tucked the skirts of her dress and her red flannel petticoat into her drawers, opened her bedroom window and clambered out onto the parapet. A north wind sliced through her clothes. The Castle roofs stretched before her: a maze of parapets, lead gutters, slopes and alleys. The wind snarled, snatching at her hair and the dag-ends of her tucked skirts. She hesitated for a moment, then began to climb.

She knew every inch of these roofs: they were her summer playground. But she seldom visited them once the autumn winds grew boisterous. She didn’t like the feel
of the wind today, but there was only one place where she need be cautious. Concentrating on where to put her hands and feet made it easier to ignore the cold and, to her relief, by the time she reached the ridge the wind had stopped gusting and blew steadily.

The ridge was a flat strip of lead sitting atop a section of the chapel roof. She would have to walk its length to reach the ministerial wing. It was six inches wide and nearly ten feet long, and the roof it belonged to slid away on either side. There was no parapet to catch a falling body – nothing but the cold flagstones of the inner courtyard forty feet below.

The sky was a cloudless, bitter blue. Beyond the sprawl of tiled roofs, the sullen brown worm of the River Quale twisted towards the docks. Charlie balanced against the push of the wind. Knowing that if she didn’t go now she never would, she stepped onto the ridge. She had crossed it countless times.

She was three feet from the other end when the wind suddenly caught its breath, dying away to nothing. She wobbled and steadied herself. Her heart was pounding. That had been close. The wind roared back, slamming into her. Charlie felt herself falling and launched forward, diving for the opposite roof. She crashed onto elbows and knees, her feet dangling over empty space. She pressed her face and body into the cold lead of the roof as she gasped and shuddered.

Five minutes later, Charlie slid open the attic window
of a small, unused room over the ministerial wing and climbed inside. She was frozen with cold, but it was the shock of having nearly fallen that kept her shivering as she began the last leg of her journey to the Prime Minister. Soon she was shivering for another reason. Alistair Windlass was the last chance she had to find her mother. He
must
help her. Life couldn’t be so miserably unfair that it would nearly kill her on the chapel ridge only to present her with yet another dead end! On the other hand, life hadn’t exactly played fair with her so far…

The offices on the upper floors of the ministerial wing were abandoned. She reached the first floor without seeing a soul and started down the wide marble steps. Everything was grand here: from the glass dome in the ceiling to the floor that looked like a giant chessboard made of grey and white marble. Enormous panelled doors lined the marble hall. Directly opposite the stairs stood the largest door of all. Gilded carvings of fruit and birds sprouted all around it, and a statue of a lady wearing hardly any clothes stood above. She had reached the Prime Minister’s office.

There was just one problem: a big problem wearing a red and gold uniform and enormous black moustaches. Stationed outside the office of the Prime Minister, obviously on duty and complete with rifle and sabre, was a corporal of the Castle Guard.

Charlie and the corporal saw each other at the same moment. Their mouths fell open in unison. The corporal
blinked first. His bushy black eyebrows floated up his forehead and disappeared beneath his helmet.

‘How did you get here, missy? You’ve no business here! Run along at once before you get into trouble.’

Charlie was desperate. She couldn’t turn back now. If the O’Dair found out she’d been here there wouldn’t be a second chance. ‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘You don’t understand. I must see the Prime Minister!’