CHAPTER 57

PACKING UP

The arrival of the lead caskets in the Red Library was a strange thing for the whole house. The already oppressive atmosphere, occasioned by Sara’s injury and all that surrounded it, became successively heavier with each muffled thump made by Emmet laying the metal boxes on the floor of the room as he brought them up from the secret passage to the river.

Of course, he was tireless and strong enough to carry two of the boxes at a time, but Hodge and Mr Sharp helped, managing to bring up a single box between the two of them for every four that Emmet brought up the stairs. Hodge was limping and his side still clearly hurt from the boot-storm it had absorbed, but no one commented, nor mentioned the black eye which was still swollen to a slit and gone all the colours of the rainbow, mauve and indigo in the ascendant. The Smith and Cook busied themselves in the library, packing the books and objects in muslin and straw.

The Smith had a good blaze going in the cavernous marble fireplace and he kept a salamander crucible filled with molten lead in the heart of the fire. Whenever they had packed a casket and could fit no more inside, they put the close-fitting lid on it, and he took long-handled tongs and thick leather gloves and gripped the salamander, lifting it out of the fire. He then poured lead into the waiting runnels around the lid with unwavering hands to make a waterproof seal.

The first thing that had been sealed in the only casket which was double-walled, and lined with both fire-clay and chalk, was the innocent-looking single candle that always burned at the centre of the kitchen table. They carefully seated it in the middle of the casket and took care to transfer the five leafy twigs surrounding it without disturbing the star shape made by the oak, ash and thorn interlaced through the apple and hazel.

The Smith then carefully unscrewed the candle-sconce from inside the Murano Cabinet, wrapped it in red silk and sealed it in the same box.

“Wildfire and Discriminator can sleep safely together beneath the water,” he said.

“You’d know if any of us would,” said Cook. “Though why anyone would call a candlestick a key is beyond me. It’s just confusing.”

“Nothing wrong with a little confusion when you’re hiding something,” said Hodge, puffing past them carrying a smaller lead box.

“Look who’s cheered himself up,” said Cook.

“He still has hopes of the Alp,” said Mr Sharp quietly. “The Raven is abroad and Jed is still casting about for the trail. Think the beating he took knocked a sense of proportion back into him.”

“Good,” said Cook. “Because I was worried you were all going hysterical on me.”

They worked quietly and efficiently, and part of the silence between them was due to the fact that none of them felt good about what they were doing, or what it signified. The Smith had been right when he had told them that ends of things come quicker than most people realise, and they were each in his or her own way absorbing this new and bitter truth.

The only item which was not due to be casketed was the Murano Cabinet itself. Mr Sharp had insisted, and since it was the biggest object anyway, it had been decided to carry it down and put it in the brick arched room at the end of the secret passage lined with the handprints of the doomed victims of the Disaster.

“It’s where it used to be anyway,” said Mr Sharp. “That’s where they went into the mirrors, and it’ll stay well enough hidden there for now.”

They agreed more easily than he’d expected because they knew why he wanted it kept above water. They had each talked about it with The Smith and had agreed that, since they were a Free Company, he should be allowed the liberty of leaving of his own volition, and leaving in the way he thought most fit.

“And if it’s off on a wild goose chase into the mirrors. Well, good luck to him,” Hodge had said. “He’s an obdurate fellow, and we won’t argue him out of it.”

“Said the pot about the kettle,” said Cook darkly.

The other thing they agreed was not to tell Sara. She had been declining so rapidly that she had stopped coming out of her room and was now only capable of making the short journey from her bed to a table by the fire where she insisted on eating her meals, although “eating” was a euphemism for “leaving most of it on the plate” in Cook’s view. Cook had suggested that she take a tray in bed to save her the evident exhaustion of walking shakily across the carpet, but a spark of her old fire had kindled in her eyes as she announced that “only invalids eat in bed, and I haven’t given up yet”.

At the end of the day, Cook brought a tray of hot broth and two poached eggs on toast up the stairs. She stopped in the doorway, for there was someone else in the room.

Sara was asleep, her face slack and her breathing so light as to be almost unnoticeable. Cook saw Mr Sharp lean in and check that Sara was actually inhaling and exhaling by holding the back of his hand close to her nose. His other hand gently held hers, an intimacy Cook had never seen before.

She was about to clear her throat and give him a moment to compose himself before she entered, when he reached down and back into his coat and drew a blade that caught the candlelight in a short flat flash of highly sharpened metal.

Cook breathed in in shock, and was about to cry out, but stopped as she saw him gently take the end of Sara’s hair, which was loose and tumbled around her head on the pillows, and cut a short length from it. The knife disappeared and he pulled a length of dark ribbon from his pocket, and quickly bound the stolen lock together.

Cook took a quiet step backward. Then another. Unfortunately there was a loose floorboard and it creaked loudly. She harrumphed and walked forward, eyes on the tray, and entered the room.

“Oh,” she said, “there you are.”

Mr Sharp was standing by the bed, no hint that he had ever been holding Sara’s hand, the tell-tale lock of hair nowhere to be seen.

“She is no better,” he said.

“She looks no worse,” she replied.

“No better, no worse is not acceptable,” he said. “I just came to bid her farewell. If you would be so kind as to tell her I came, and that I… wish her the very best of everything.”

He stopped with his hand on Cook’s shoulder.

“As I do you, my dearest old friend. As I do you all.”

He shocked her by taking her hand and kissing it, and then walked stiffly out of the room without a backward glance. She put the tray down and wiped her eye.

“Bloody dust,” she said to no one in particular. “Gets everywhere.”

And she reached into her sleeve, fetched out her sail-sized handkerchief and blew a brisk cannonade into it.

Sara stirred but did not wake, even at that.