The carriage turned, rattling down a cobblestone drive. An English country house loomed in the distance, its walls subsumed by so much ivy it seemed as if the vines would pull it, crumbling, back into the earth from which they came. An omen, Sam thought, except this wasn’t a vision. Just her overactive imagination. She really did need more sleep.
“Are you certain this will work?” Sam said, tugging at her iron-infused gloves nervously as the carriage shuddered to a stop.
“It’s a wake.” Hel, of course, was always dressed for a funeral. “You don’t wait for an invitation to a wake. Unless stated otherwise, they’re open to anyone who knew him. We knew him. Briefly.”
But it wasn’t a wake?—it wasn’t even the Protestant equivalent?—and Sam could not shake the feeling that they did not belong.
“We’re private investigators,” Van Helsing said. “They’ll allow it. Or they’ll look guilty.”
Sam wasn’t so certain as she eyed the carriages lined up outside the manor, gilded with crests and monograms, pulled by matched sets of horses in shining white and shaggy black. There was even a set that gleamed like gold?—some Turkish variety as she recalled, and extraordinarily expensive. She didn’t think anyone rich enough to claim such an estate would care much about looking guilty. Not when they had the means to avoid the consequences.
Sam trailed Van Helsing and Hel out of the carriage and along a cobblestone path threaded with moss and dying grass. The driver clucked, and the carriage trundled away with a jingle of the harness and the clopping of hooves.
Sam tilted her head back, studying Ashdown Manor. Ravens circled over the grounds, letting out raucous cries. A profusion of black-creped windows peeked through the ivy. Curiously, there was no glint of glass beneath their funereal veils. In fact, they all appeared to have been boarded up from the outside. As she drew closer, it became apparent why: Deep gouges marred the wood, as if something monstrous had been trying to crack it open to get at the sweet meat within.
The song whispered through Sam again, with that strange pull in her blood and the words just beyond hearing, as if daring her to close her eyes, tolisten. She tried to ignore it. It was a distraction at best and a temptation at worst, which she could ill afford with Van Helsing watching.
Van Helsing knocked on the door. Sam’s eye hooked on the transom, in which a familiar sigil was worked into the iron and glass: two entangled crescent moons cradling a full moon between them, the pupil of a selenic eye. The same sigil she’d seen on Mr. Enfield in her vision. Sam’s breath caught. But before she could examine further, the door opened.
It revealed a gentleman in a loose-fitting black suit that looked as if it were quite fine but couldn’t escape being rumpled, any more than his chestnut brown hair could escape being tousled, as if it were in the nature of the man himself to be a little undone.
“Good morning?—though I suppose there isn’t much good about it, is there?” the gentleman said, nudging his gold wire spectacles back up his nose. His accent trod the thin line between English and Irish. “Please, do come in.”
The room they entered was more what Sam expected of a museum than any place one might actually live, with grey-streaked marble floors and caryatids holding up the arched ceiling with graceful arms. Brass urns filled with spikes of asphodels decorated a fireplace ornately carved with lotus fruit, and waiters dressed in grey drifted through the clusters of mourners like ghosts, offering refreshments.
“I am Thomas Keene,” he said, beckoning a waiter burdened with glasses of garnet wine, “and you are friends of John Enfield, though I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“The poet?” Sam asked. Now that she looked for it, Sam could see it: There was a kind of enduring sadness behind his sea-grey eyes, as if he’d seen beneath the skin of the world and could not forget what he’d beheld.
His poetry had that feeling as well. It had a way of creating a space in you, filling you with a yearning for places that had never existed. Places whose glory was crumbling when first you stumbled upon them, longing for the days when they were young and full of dreams. It kindled in Sam an ache so real it was like a memory.
“Your work,” Sam said, and found herself at a loss for words. Hel raised an eyebrow, but Sam studiously ignored her. It wasn’t every day you met one of your favorite poets. “I find myself missing worlds that aren’t real.”
“Would you change it, if you could?” Mr. Keene asked, his voice soft. “Would you trade this dull world for another?”
Yes,Sam’s heart answered, because what reader hadn’t? Books transported you to other worlds, breathing life into them until you could close your eyes and run your fingers through the frosted blades of grass. To have to emerge to dull reality seemed heartbreakingly cruel. But that wasn’t what she was here for.
“Are you talking about the Otherworld?” Sam asked.
“In a manner,” Mr. Keene said elusively. “I wonder, sometimes, if our world was not always this way?—if it has forgotten the many-splendored thing it used to be, the way it still is in the untouched Irish countryside. We cling to the chains of iron and industry, claiming they protect us?—but what if, in keeping us from harm, fromrisk, they keep us from what we truly yearn for?”
Sam ached, her mind full of all the ways she wasn’t following her heart, of every word she swallowed and every dream she sacrificed on the altar ofsafe... Of what she might be capable of if she stopped.
It occurred to Sam that there was a time when she would have found this seductive. Before she realized her heart had already decided, rather without her consent, on a sharp-tongued woman with only one suit and a distressing aversion to nouns.
“Ah yes, because living at the whims of the Otherworld is something to strive for,” Hel said dryly.
“Hel!”Sam hissed under her breath. They were supposed to be keeping a low profile.
“That’s why you live that way, isn’t it?” Hel pressed. “Except you don’t, do you? Why is that, do you figure?”
Mr. Keene flushed. “I’m doing important work?—”
“Sure you are,” Hel said flatly.
“Speaking ofwork,” Van Helsing interrupted, looming over Mr. Keene as Hel pushed past him into the crowds, “we had better get to it.”
“Get to what?” Mr. Keene asked, looking more perplexed than ever.
