Seven for a Secret (3 page)

When Ruth opened the door onto the dark-wood-paneled hallway, Herr Professor Schroeder had only just risen from the closest of a row of three intricate, high-backed Macintosh chairs. His briar still smoked on the stamped tin dish on a side table, a gold-rimmed coffee cup resting on a mismatched saucer beside it. He wore blue cloth slippers and striped pajamas under a diamond-quilted dressing gown.

„Miss Grell,” he said, in German. „Miss Kneeland.
I suppose you do not need me to tell you that you have
endangered your privileges here.”

If Ruth’s name was first, did that mean she had been identified as the ringleader? If it would protect Adele, she’d accept the punishment. Though if it led Herr Professor to look too deeply into her background—

Well, that couldn’t be helped now. She could only hope that it would seem less suspicious to brazen it out. „It is
my fault we were delayed, Herr Professor Schroeder,” Ruth answered, also in German. „I insisted we walk further, and misjudged the time it would take to return.”

Adele tried to move up to Ruth’s elbow, but Ruth sidestepped to stay in front of her and just managed not to wince when Adele stomped on her right heel.

Herr Professor folded his arms. „You realize that you have special privileges because you have special responsibilities, do you not? That those privileges and your permission to come and go are contingent upon your value to the Chancellor? You’re very nearly graduates, ladies. You must acquit yourselves as responsible young adults, and not behave as children.
”

Carefully, Ruth nodded. From the corner of her eye, she could see the motion of Adele’s cap as Adele mirrored her.
„
I am sorry, Herr Professor,
”
Ruth said.

He still frowned at them over the bridge of his nose. „You are lucky seventh daughters don’t grow on trees,” he said, and let his hands fall to his sides, where he slid them into the patch pockets on his dressing gown. „Three demerits to each of you. Extra chores until you have expunged them to the satisfaction of Miss Krupps. And you are both restricted to the household until further notice.”

Ruth licked her lips and discovered that she’d been correct. They were chapping. „Yes, Herr Professor,” she said, as Adele echoed, „I understand, sir.”

„Good,” he said. „Now go up to your rooms. I shall inform Miss Krupps to expect you in the kitchens to help prepare breakfast.”Which meant rising before dawn. Short sleep was also a punishment.

„
Yes, Herr Professor,” Adele said, while Ruth was still considering that. Then Adele took Ruth’s wrist in her chill strong hand and led her past Herr Professor Schroeder—who stepped aside to let them walk up the center of the hall unimpeded—down the long corridor, and up the stairs on tiptoe. They moved as silently as wolves past the open doors of bedrooms so they would not wake the other four girls in their class, who might already be in bed.

„
That was close,” Adele whispered. Ruth balanced their latchless door open a crack, as the rules demanded.

Ruth leaned back against the wall beside the armoire in relief and smiled at Adele through the harshness of the electric light.
„
Well, what
was
he going to do to us? Somebody just reminded me, it’s not like sevens grow on trees.”

When he was in the company of Abby Irene and Phoebe, the wampyr remembered to think of himself as Sebastien. Neither had ever quite surrendered the name they first knew him by, and in a moment of honesty he would admit he found it comforting. Mortals had the luxury of demanding permanence and having some slight chance of getting it. They did not need to acquire the skill of letting names, lovers, places slip through their fingers like hourglass sand. Sebastien knew of—though he did not subscribe to—an Oriental belief ancient by even his standards, which taught the same principals as a means of avoiding suffering. He wondered how many of his court would think it a chilly and nihilistic philosophy.

So whatever name graced his papers, he was Sebastien, at home. And would remain Sebastien a little while longer, at least to Abby Irene and Phoebe.

The former of those had indulged his curiosity about what it was that might make a human girl smell of wolf-hide. The library of their deep but narrow townhouse was carpeted, and so Sebastien parked Abby Irene’s chair at one end of it and allowed her to bid him thither and yon, until the turned-leg table before her groaned with aged books.

After decades spent lightfooted on the continent, Abby Irene’s library had been much reduced. But in returning to occupied London, she had found an unexpected legacy. The Crown Investigators had been disbanded, those sorcerers who had not fled the country detained, and the Enchancery replaced by a skeleton staff of Prussian Zaubererdetektive. Some might consider her a traitor to the crown—she had to admit, she numbered herself one such—but Abby Irene still had a friend or two in London, and a friend or two among those previously employed by the Crown’s Own. Some of the Enchancery’s rarer books had mysteriously disappeared in the early days of the Occupation. And through happenstance or by design, a significant number of those books had come into Abby Irene’s possession over the intervening years.

Now, Sebastien triggered a latch on the book case that blunted one corner of the room and swung the entire piece of furniture open on concealed hinges, releasing the light scent of oil. There were more shelves within, concealed in what should have been wasted space created between the hypotenuse of the shelf and the angle of the wall. From within, he brought down an armload of tomes, many nearly as old as the printing press and created in an age when books were furniture, and nearly as large as couches.

The books were too well-kept and too carefully ensorcelled to reek of dust or mustiness, but Sebastien could clearly smell old leather, the dry protein of aged hide glue, the sharpness of ink. He was spared the acid reek of crumbling paper, because these books were printed on rag, and even after centuries their pages were still as white as starched shirts.

He stacked them on the desk and one by one began to lay them out, opening those which proved too heavy for Abby Irene’s fragile old bones.

Abby Irene wore white cotton gloves and turned the pages with a slender glass rod. Sebastien’s hands were devoid of the oils and salts that could damage ancient paper; he could handle the books directly.

It was a surfeit of riches, and Sebastien and Abby Irene were still huddled over the table when Phoebe came downstairs with the dawn. She paused at the library door and sniffed, leading Sebastien to wonder if Phoebe’s merely human senses were fine enough to pick out the elements of the book-scent, or if she were merely surprised she could not smell must and mildew.

She was slight, and the silver in her hair did not stand out against the blonde. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and folded her arms, but after nigh on forty years, he could tell when her sternness was a mockery. “Sebastien,” she said, arms folded over her blouse, “tell me you have not kept Abigail Irene from her rest all night and morning.”

“Um.” Sebastien glanced apologetically at Abby Irene, who was still bent over a book so thick that Sebastien could have slid three fingers under the arch of the spine. The back of one gloved hand rested against her forehead, the glass rod parting the strands of her snow-white hair. “Abby Irene?”

No response.

Sebastien cleared his throat again, then in a fit of helplessness reached out and pushed fallen locks out of her eyes.

She started, and looked up. “I didn’t hear you,” she said. “I was concentrating. Good morning, Mrs. Smith.”

Rather, she was growing deaf, and made it up by lip-reading. And Sebastien and Phoebe pretended they didn’t notice. For a small kindness, her eyes were still sharp, though her reading glasses got heavier and heavier as the years went by.

Sebastien said, “Phoebe suggests that I am an unfit associate, having kept you up long past your bedtime.”

Abby Irene pushed her chair back from the table, skinny, spotted wrists cording above the margin of the gloves. “I am eighty-eight years old,” she said. “I shall sleep when I’m dead, Mrs. Smith. Or when the last Prussian boot tromps up the gangplank out of England.”

Phoebe couldn’t hide the twitch at the corner of her mouth. “As you say, Abigail Irene. Shall I roust the housekeeper, then, and see about tea and a soft-boiled egg?”

Mortals. Sebastien had never understood, exactly, how it happened, but somehow over the years Abby Irene and Phoebe had shifted from strained, formal rivalry to an equal formal and sharp-edged friendship that folded deep loyalty behind a mask of prickly dislike. The friendship had nothing to do with Sebastien, though it was his needs that had brought these two brilliant and unconventional women
together, and he was pleased by the development. It suited him that these two oldest and most trusted members of his always-meager court had found an accommodation.

“That would be lovely,” Abby Irene said. “Thank you, Mrs. Smith.” While Phoebe still stood in the door, pressing down her smile, Abby Irene drew herself back up to the table and struggled to turn the heavy book. Phoebe withdrew. Abby Irene said, “Sebastien, look what I have found.”

He touched Abby Irene’s wrist lightly, so she would release the book to him, and turned it so it lay diagonally between them. “Werewolves,” he said. “Except there are no werewolves. Anymore.”

“That’s not the first time you’ve said that, in just such a manner,” she said. When he turned to catch her eye, he realized she’d been watching his face for a reaction, and wondered what she’d seen.

“It’s not?”

“Paris. Where we met Doctor Tesla.”

Where Jack died, but she wouldn’t say that. Jack, who had been Phoebe’s lover, and Sebastien’s best-beloved…and so in the end, it had been Abby Irene who held them together until what was shattered began to set in its new configuration. Sebastien was terribly afraid that her courage then had left her with a sense that she had no right to remember Jack, to speak of him. As if by being strong, she had forfeited whatever sorrow she too might have felt.

Perhaps it had taken him decades. But he was beginning to understand Lady Abigail Irene Garrett. And she was not the sort to proclaim grief she did not feel entitled to.

“So I wondered”—her blue eyes squinted sharply over the bridge of her nose—“what experience you had had with werewolves to lead you to speak so definitively on the subject.”

She was, Sebastien reminded himself, a criminal investigator. She needed no magic to pin a man on a stare. “That’s pure conjecture,” he said.

She smiled, satisfied. “You don’t deny it.”

“Deny nothing,” he said. “Tell me what you found.”

“Ways to build a werewolf. Other than contagion from the bite of another werewolf. Look. A wolf’s-hide belt, enchanted and studded with iron nails—seven, or nine, or twenty-eight of them. Wearing a wolf’s-hide into battle, as some Vikings were said to do. Born under a caul. One could be cursed by the gods, if one were an ancient Greek—”

“Lycaon, who gave his name to the breed.”

“Just so.” She pushed her shoulders back, as if wishing she could straighten her spine properly. “Sleeping outside under a full moon was said to provoke the transformation, though if that were the case, one would expect a commonality of werewolves. Drinking water from a wolf’s footprint. There were liniments as well, and I’ve found recipes for some. Eating ergot or henbane….”

“Eating ergot might make your neighbor
s
seem to be werewolves, in any case. Henbane was used to flavor pilsner before the Germans outlawed herbs other than hops in beer. That might also make for a lot of werewolves.”

“Another way to become a werewolf is…” and here Abby Irene smiled her sunken smile “…by being born the seventh son.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She tapped the page lightly with her glass rod.

“What about the seventh daughter?”

“That is supposed to make you a witch,” said the sorceress. “Personally, I’ve never found a correlation. But sevens are magical in all sorts of ways.”

“The seven sayings of Christ in his passion,” Sebastien offered, as Phoebe returned to the room. Behind her trailed the housekeeper, Mrs. Moyer, bearing a tray with one three-minute egg, a selection of toast points, and a steaming teapot.

“Going religious, are we?” Phoebe asked.

Abby Irene caught the comment this time. “Don’t put that tray by the books,” she said. Mrs. Moyer was already clearing off a side table. Her expression never so much as twitched.

“Magically significant sevens,” Sebastien explained.

“Seven virtues, seven sins,” said Abby Irene. “Seven continents and seven seas. It is a number of great ritual importance.”

Phoebe pulled out a chair and sat, folding her hands neatly across her lap. “Seven fingers and toes and eye-pupils of Cuchulainn, the Irish hero.”

“Trust you to come up with something obscure.”

Phoebe winked. “Not if you’re Irish. And if you are Jewish, God rested on the seventh day, and one takes seven days of mourning. There are seven branches of the menorah and seven archangels.” Was it a thought of Jack that brought the frown across her face, Sebastien wondered, or was he casting his own emotions on her?