The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (59 page)

Fernand frowned, but nodded readily. The police officers let them go inside without any complaint, and though some of them milled about in the foyer and on the second floor landing, when Chris brought Fernand into the dining room and they sat the head of the table, they might as well have been in their own little world.

The sumfinder’s lined face was a picture of concern as he laid his cane across his legs and leaned towards Chris. “What is it, young master?” he asked gently. “Is there something I can do to help you?”

“
Yes
,” Chris said, and it was easier than he’d expected. He gave a weary smile and folded his hands in front of him on the table. He sighed. “Fernand…you know I hate asking for anything more from you than you willingly give. I still don’t even understand why it is that you
have
given so much. We haven’t been able to pay you since I was sixteen, and―”

“Even if you could have, I wouldn’t have taken it,” Fernand cut in. He laid a wrinkled hand across Chris’s folded pair, and when Chris met his eyes, there were full of a gentle sort of fondness. No―not fondness. Something deeper. “You and little Rosemary are more than just children of a favourite client, Christopher,” he said kindly. “You’re family to me. You’re more family to me than the family I actually have.”

Chris closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. Well, it was time to test that. “I need your
help
, Fernand,” he breathed. “Doctor Livingstone was completely right. Rosemary can’t stay in Darrington. She can’t. It’s a cesspit and it’ll ruin her. But the doctor is gone and there’s no one to fulfill his promise, and I don’t even have the money to board up the estate, much less to move us anywhere.” He opened his eyes and focused deeply on Fernand’s, trying to pour the depths of his pleading into his eyes, hoping his oldest and truest friend would see it, there. “Can you help us?” he asked. “Please? We don’t need much, just enough to―”

Fernand was chuckling. Gently, he squeezed Chris’s hand and shook his head. “Young master,” he said with a smile. “Oh, young master.”

“What?” Chris asked. “What’s―what’s so funny?”

Fernand shook his head, still chuckling. “Yesterday, I mirrored my useless prat of a nephew, and I told him he won’t be inheriting my estate in Summergrove even if he were the last upstart in Tarland.” His smile widened when he saw the look on Chris’s face, and he squeezed again. “You see, Christopher? We’re family. I knew what you needed before you even asked for it, and I’m more than willing to give it. Summergrove is a beautiful little country town. Far nicer than Cooperton is, or anywhere else you could take Rosemary. She’ll be safe there. She’ll be happy there.
You’ll
be happy there.”

Chris felt a prickling in the back of his eyes.
No, I can’t accept this,
was the courteous, proper response. Certainly, he could never condone a man writing a blood relative out of his last will and testament, just to pass everything onto a pair of impoverished siblings who were technically employers. A gentleman would decline the offer, graciously, and ask with great humility for a loan with interest, instead.

He clasped Fernand’s hand in both of his. “I can’t thank you enough for this, Fernand,” he said. There was ferocity in his voice. He squeezed his eyes tight, trying to shut away the tears of thanks. “I
will
pay you back for this, not because I think I owe it to you, but because I
want
to.”

When he opened his eyes, it was to the sight of Fernand using his free hand to wipe tears from his wrinkled old cheeks. He caught Chris’s eye and nodded gravely, and then held one another’s gaze until Chris broke into a smile and pulled his hands away, settling them back down into his lap.

Fernand found a bit of his usual composure, then, straightening and fixing his tie and giving a firm nod as though to himself. “Well,” he said, and it came out very hoarse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Well, then, Christopher,” he said. His voice was gruff, but staid. “I’d like you to come by tomorrow, late in the evening, and we’ll have some papers drawn up. I’ll mirror my solicitor in the afternoon, give him a few extra royals to put a rush on it, and we can have it all dealt with and finalized by Godsday at the latest, hmm?”

And then something passed beneath his gaze, something Chris couldn’t place. Fernand swallowed hard, blinked and furrowed his brow, and then continued speaking, his voice even gruffer than before. “And…and there’s something else, young master,” he said. “Something…something your father left behind.” He shook his head. “He meant for it to be for Rosemary. He told me you weren’t strong enough for it, you never would be strong enough for it. But your father…your father was wrong about a great many things, Chris. And I always thought he was the most wrong about you. Michael saw only one sort of strength, but he was a short-sighted blighter to the very end. Aye, you’re strong enough for it, my boy. You’re as strong now as Rosemary will ever be.”

Chris had never heard words that had made him so happy. “What is it?” he asked.

He didn’t know what to expect. He certainly didn’t think the next words would chill him down to his core and make all the lights in the room dim. “A list,” Fernand said quietly. “A very important list.”

That night, after the corpse had been taken away, the reporters had been given their damned interviews, and the police officers had finally been satisfied with all of their answers, Chris sank into a fitful, restless sleep.

Fever dreams ripped through his mind, vivid and vibrant and seething with motion and colour. He dreamed of voices speaking next to his ear while he couldn’t move a muscle, of being held down against his bed by Duke val Daren’s kiss, of a ring of fire floating above his head and Olivia slapping him with her face blackened and slapping him with her face pale. He dreamed of Analaea’s insides on the outside, Duchess val Daren’s death rattle, the Duke’s penis covered in blood and tucked back into his trousers to spare the family embarrassment. He raised a firepistol and pulled the trigger against Ethan Grey’s temple, and the vilest sort of deceiver burned like kindling, screaming for mercy.
Nobody could understand
, he shrieked.
Nobody could understand.
And the worst part of it was that, for just one moment, Chris thought that he could.

He dreamed of Rosemary’s voice raised in eerie, skin-crawlingly wrong music, binding a host of elementals to her command, but she couldn’t keep them under her control, and they turned on her, burning and drowning and cutting and freezing.

He grabbed Rachel Albany and kissed her deeply, but she pulled away, her hair rolling around her shoulders, whispering
my brother will see us.
Francis Livingstone smiled a sad smile and waved goodbye to him with a black face, hanging from a noose. William Cartwright snapped a pocket watch shut, made an angry sound, but when he raised his face, his cheeks were wet with tears.
You didn’t remember,
he accused.
You said you’d always remember.

He dreamed of sitting on the roof and watching the Floating Castle fall just when he wished it would.

When his eyelids flickered open to morning light streaming through his window, and he saw the drawn, pale face of Olivia Faraday standing over his bed, he thought for a long moment it was just another nightmare.

Certainly, it must have been just another nightmare.

Her mouth tightened. He squinted against the sunlight, throwing up his arm against it. He closed his eyes, and then opened them, and she was still there. Sun picked out the golden highlights in her white-blonde hair, brought colour to her pale eyes. The morning light didn’t dissolve her like a ghost.

“Mister Buckley,” she said quietly, her voice humming. “I need you to come with me.”

“What?” he asked, not understanding any of it. “Why?”

“I need you to come with me,” she repeated. “Now.” There was no command or anything resembling a sharp edge in her manner. Her eyes were soft, and her mouth was sad, and something was very wrong.

Their hackney stopped in a part of town he knew very well.

Despite having known Fernand Spencer since he was old enough to know anyone, Chris had been to his home less than twenty times. When he’d been a child, he and his parents and eventually little Rosemary would go visit for dinner on Midwintersfest. They’d stuff themselves with roast wild geese, apple cider, and blackcurrant pies. After the Floating Castle, they’d maintained that tradition, and it had always seemed wrong to the lot of them to go there on any day but the shortest. Chris barely recognized the place without snow.

In a trance, he followed Olivia into the manor. It was small, compared to the Buckley estate, but Chris had always thought it was cozy and warm and comforting. Even without the candles and ribbons, the fir boughs and pinecones, the holly sprigs and mistletoe, it was a place that meant
peace
and
love
and
family
, more so than even his own estate ever had.

Olivia lead him up a flight of stairs, and then stopped before a door. She turned to Chris, her face grave. “His housekeeper found him this morning,” she said quietly. “She mirrored the station. The station put the file on Maris’s desk, and she took a quick look and then assigned it to me. She didn’t read the name. She didn’t know the connection at all. No one did. It was just a coincidence. Just one of those things.”

He nodded.

Olivia nodded, too. “The doors were locked from the inside,” she said. “The windows, too. All latched. I’ve been over it all five times. According to all the evidence, there’s only one explanation.”

Chris nodded again.

And Olivia did, too. “All right,” she said, and opened the door.

He stepped inside the modestly furnished water closet, sweeping his eyes around his surroundings. He felt curiously numb. He’d been in here before, many times. He’d come up to take a piss after having too much mulled and spiced cider, the only day of the year he ever indulged. He’d look out the window at the falling snow while he made his water, and then he’d let the bound undine take it away somewhere else. He’d admire the massive, claw-footed ceramic washtub on his way out and wish he could replace the old one at his own home for one like this.

How curious, that he’d find his oldest and only friend in that tub. How curious.

The bathwater was scarlet and the old man’s face was white. His eyes were open, staring grotesquely at nothing, and his features were locked into an expression of deep sadness and pain. One of his hands was in the bathwater, still, and hidden by the thick red mess it had become. The other splayed out of the tub, hanging over the floor, and the wrist was slashed down to the bone. Blood had rushed out of it, gushing all over the tiled floor, a red waterfall. A knife had fallen onto the floor beside the tub.

Fernand’s poor face. His staring eyes bored into Chris’s soul. He crossed the floor, uncaring of what he did to Olivia’s precious crime scene, and drew the old man’s eyes closed. It was more difficult than he’d anticipated, and he had no choice but to use force, and rather than an act of respect, a granting of peace, it felt like a desecration.

And then he stood there, hands fists at his side, until the first sob came, wracking through his body. And then the next. And then the next. He fell to his knees, his trousers pressing into the sticky, congealed blood. He clung to the side of the tub like it was his lifeline.

Olivia was mercifully silent. Chris was barely aware of her existence as he sat there, pathetically weeping out his soul. He seized Fernand’s limp, cold hand, sticky with blood, and he pulled it to his chest, gripping it tightly, threaded his living fingers with those dead, lifeless ones. The madness swept down on him like a tide, and he let it carry him away. This grief. This mad, blind grief that blotted out anything else. He let it pick him up and take him somewhere a million miles away, a cold dark place without hope or sense or future, and nothing mattered, nothing bloody mattered at all.

It felt like years had passed when he went to draw more tears from the well and found it completely dry. He heaved and sputtered without them for a time, but they quieted, as well, in time, and when he sat back on his heels in the dead silence that fell, and cracked his puffy eyes open, his eyes fell on a paper.