“Oh,” Agnes said, looking guiltily at Sam. “Didn’t we say? He’s been asking for you.”
21
THE AMERICAN SEAMEN’S Friend Society Sailors’ Home was located at the end of Jane Street on the corner of West Street in a handsome red brick Georgian-style building. Fittingly, it faced the river, and in the distance, New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty. A polygonal corner tower gave it the look of a lighthouse. The Cunard Line piers were just across the street. Seeing them reminded me of the awful night last April when Helen and I waited with a huge crowd to see who had survived the sinking of the Titanic—and the horror of learning that Helen’s father had not. Glancing over at Agnes, I guessed from her pale countenance that she, too, was recalling that night and her own experiences of the doomed ship.
We passed through a plain but pleasant lobby in which several gentlemen in nautical garb sat in wicker chairs reading newspapers or dozing beneath framed prints of famous ships. The nautical décor was continued in the rope trimming in the elevator and the teak paneling and framed seascapes of the upstairs corridor, which was so narrow it resembled a ship’s corridor. Small rooms were strung along it like berths. Sam knocked at one and a shaky voice told us to “come aboard.”
The tiny room, perhaps seven feet by seven feet, was so like a ship’s berth that I half expected the floor to rock when I stepped inside. A narrow bed was built into the teak-paneled wall. Drawers and small cubbies were fitted beneath it. The single window, affording a view of the river and harbor, was shaped like a porthole. Omar sat cross-legged in a rope chair that was suspended from the ceiling. A thin, pale man, wisps of sand-colored hair sticking up from his head, sat on the edge of his bed, his hands clasped tightly together. He smiled when he saw Agnes.
“Oh, Miss Moorhen, how lovely of you to visit my stateroom. Is this another passenger? I don’t believe I’ve seen her on board.”
“This is my friend, Ava,” she said. “She’s been kept to her berth since we embarked by a bad case of mal de mer.”
“Ah.” He smiled at me kindly, the lines around his eyes crinkling like cracks in a china teacup. “It took me some time to get my sea legs, but now I hardly feel the motion of the ship at all! And look!” He pointed out the porthole window toward the Statue of Liberty. “We’re almost there. We’ll be docking by morning, I wager.”
“Yes,” Omar said in a silky voice. “We ought to start packing, don’t you think, Herbert?”
“Yes, yes, you’re so right, my dear friend.” He knelt on the floor beside his bed and began rifling through the drawers. He pulled out a worn leather portmanteau.
“It’s the one he had with him on the Titanic,” Agnes whispered in my ear. “But it’s empty. We hope that he’ll remember what happened to the book when he goes to pack it, only . . . he often gets distracted at this point.”
He was indeed holding up the leather satchel, blinking as he peered into it. He looked up from it and noticed me. “Oh, Miss . . . Ava, was it? Have you met Mr. Omar? He has traveled all the way from India. He’s on a worldwide tour, demonstrating his remarkable talents. I have met such interesting people on this voyage . . .” His voice faltered again and he looked down at the empty satchel. “Though a few rather unpleasant, I’m afraid. If you run into a man in an Inverness cape, for instance . . .” He shivered and then began to shake so hard he dropped the satchel. Sam picked it up for him and Agnes helped him sit back down on his bed. Agnes sat down beside him and motioned for me to sit down on the other side.
“It’s all right, Mr. Farnsworth,” Agnes said in a soothing voice. “You don’t have to pack right now. We’re not docking until morning.”
“Oh, that’s good,” he said with a sigh of relief, “because I’m afraid I’ve misplaced something.” He stared at the satchel, which Agnes now held in her hands, and then back at me. “What did you say your name was, dear?”
“Avaline,” I replied. “Avaline Hall.”
It was as if I’d thrown icy water in his face. He sat up straighter, his vague watery eyes snapping into attention, and grabbed my hand.
“He remembers,” I heard Omar whisper to Sam, and then in a louder voice to Mr. Farnsworth. “You mentioned Miss Hall’s name to me several days ago. You spoke of a letter you had received from her.”
“Yes, yes, Miss Avaline Hall of Blythewood. I had a letter from a girl of that name.” Still holding on to my hand, he began patting the pockets of his jacket with his other hand. From inside a breast pocket he withdrew a much folded and faded sheet of paper and unfolded it with a shaking hand. I gasped as I recognized the pale blue shade of my own stationery with the embossed Bell and Feather Blythewood insignia.
“Yes,” he said, nodding over the page. “A Miss Avaline Hall of Blythewood School wrote to ask me about a book . . . a very old, rare book. Only I can’t quite make out the title. Can you?”
He held the page for me to see. I stared at it, my throat thickening at the sight. Pale wavy blue lines ran across the sheet where there had once been handwriting, but the page had evidently been soaked in water and the words had all run together. Staring at my own blurred handwriting I felt the icy chill of the North Atlantic where the Titanic had gone down and heard a bell tolling in my head. It was an entirely new bell I’d never heard before, a distant gong that sounded seven times, in three pairs and then singly.
“Tell him you can make out the title,” Omar whispered in my ear over the sound of the bell, which once again rang seven times, this time closer.
“Yes,” I told him, “I can read it. The book was called A Darkness of Angels. I wrote to ask you if you had a copy at Hawthorn.”
“And I wrote back to say I did!” he said with childish glee. “And I told you I would bring it on my voyage . . . only . . . only . . .” He looked around the tiny room. He knelt back on the floor and began going through the drawers. The seven-beat bell rang again. “Only I knew the shadow man was looking for it, so I hid it.”
“Did you hide it in your stateroom?” Agnes asked gently.
We were all thinking the same thing. If Mr. Farnsworth had hidden the book in his stateroom on the Titanic, the book was now most likely at the bottom of the ocean. Mr. Farnsworth looked at me and clutched my hand harder.
“That man followed me onto the ship because of the book.” His voice was as cold and flat as a frozen sea. As cold as the bell tolling seven.
“Yes, that’s most likely correct,” Agnes said gently, “but that wasn’t your fault, dear Mr. Farnsworth.”
“But I knew he might,” he said, his voice swelling with agitation, the lethal ice cracking, the seven-part toll ringing louder now. There was something that the bell was trying to tell me, something Mr. Farnsworth was trying to tell me. His hand in mine was beating time to the peal—three pairs and a single, three pairs and a single. He was making the bell ring inside my head. But why? I looked into his eyes but saw only confusion and fog there. Then I closed my eyes and listened to the bells.
Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding—
The air around me grew colder with each toll. The floor pitched and swayed. I opened my eyes and found I wasn’t in Mr. Farnsworth’s room at the Sailors’ Home anymore. I was standing on the deck of a ship at night. In front of me were Mr. Farnsworth and Agnes, both bundled in heavy wool coats—because it was cold here in the North Atlantic. So cold that enormous icebergs floated in the sea. One was coming toward us right now—or rather, we were heading toward it on a collision path. And standing on the foredeck of the ship, his arms spread out as if he were conducting an orchestra, was Judicus van Drood.
“He’s summoning the iceberg,” I heard Agnes say just before the ship lurched. “And no ordinary iceberg—look!”
I followed Agnes’s trembling finger and stared at the iceberg. Inside the ice a creature writhed—a hoary giant trapped in the ice. Van Drood had summoned an ice giant to ram into the Titanic.
The ship was turning. The crew had spotted the iceberg and were steering away from it. I found I was holding my breath, waiting to see if we would be able to avoid the iceberg, as if the Titanic’s fate might be avoided, but then I heard the awful screech of metal against ice as the hull of the ship scraped against the giant berg.
“It’s breached the hull!” Mr. Farnsworth cried, grabbing Agnes’s hands in his. I heard him telling her to go get Mrs. Hall and then go straight to the lifeboats.
“But what about you?” Agnes cried.
“There’s something I must do,” he said solemnly. “But I will see you again.” And then he kissed her—rather passionately, I thought, for a librarian. Agnes, her cheeks flaming, rushed past me as though I were invisible. I watched her go but didn’t follow her. I knew now why and how I was here. The bells I’d heard were the seven bells signaling the last half hour of the last watch, which rang ten minutes before the ship collided with the lethal iceberg. He had used his memory of the bells to transport me back to the moment of the ship’s sinking, so that I could see what he did with the book. When Mr. Farnsworth turned I followed him, but I wasn’t the only one.
I let van Drood go first, not wanting even in a vision to have van Drood behind me, and followed them both below deck, past cabins where sleepy passengers were being woken and summoned to report on deck in their lifejackets. With dawning horror, I realized that many of the people I passed were going to die. Mr. Farnsworth saw it, too, but he went deeper into the ship, to his second-class cabin. When he reached it he paused, looked behind him, and then quickly made a hand motion over the door before going inside. Van Drood was staring at the door. Then he stepped back behind a corner to hide. I slipped past him, holding my breath as though he might hear me breathing, and slipped into Mr. Farnsworth’s cabin.
As I crossed the threshold I felt a prickle of energy, like electric static, and noticed a glowing sigil on the doorjamb. Mr. Farnsworth, mild-mannered librarian, was, after all, also a knight of the Order. He had placed a ward on his cabin so that van Drood couldn’t follow him and see what he was doing.
He was searching through the built-in drawers beneath his bed just as he had been at the Sailors’ Home in New York, muttering under his breath. Was he looking for the book? But he already had the portmanteau strapped across his chest. Agnes had said he carried it with him always. So what was he looking for?
He was scrabbling through a stack of books now, holding up one and tossing it aside, holding up another and rejecting it. Finally he found one that seemed to please him. I peered over his shoulder to read the title.
Some Problems in Archival Record Keeping.
That was the book he’d come back to rescue? Had poor Mr. Farnsworth already been deranged?
He placed Some Problems on his berth and then removed the book from his portmanteau. I gasped aloud when I saw it. It was bound in thick leather the deep blue of a midnight sky engraved with an intricate gold pattern of wings and an ancient runic script that read A Darkness of Angels. This was the book that my mother had spent years looking for, that Raven had said possessed the secrets of the Darklings. The book that could heal the rift between the Darklings and the Order and lift the curse from the Darklings. Here it was in Mr. Farnsworth’s hands on a sinking ship.
He opened the book to the first page, on which there was an engraving of a Darkling poised in mid-air over a sleeping woman. Mr. Farnsworth ran his hand lovingly over the ancient illuminated illustration . . . and then ripped the page out of the binding.
I cried out at the sight and lunged to stop his hand, but my hands passed through his flesh like water. I could only watch as he ruthlessly tore the pages of the ancient book out of its binding. When he was done, he picked up Some Problems in Archival Record Keeping and did the same thing. While he worked, icy water began to fill the cabin. The ship was sinking fast, but still Mr. Farnsworth worked like a medieval monk removing the binding of one book and then the other.
He placed the pages of Some Problems into the binding of A Darkness of Angels, and then took the original pages and slid them into an oilcloth pouch, which he tied securely and stuck under his shirt. Then he put the fake Darkness of Angels back into the portmanteau, secured the clasp, and stood up. He took one look around the cabin and at the rising water. Then he lifted his chin, squared his shoulders, and said aloud, “Tintinna vere, specta alte!” He marched out of the cabin as though he were marching into battle.
I saw his eyes flick toward where van Drood had been hiding in the corridor, but he turned the other way down the now-flooded hall, with van Drood following. Mr. Farnsworth stopped to help a woman carry her children out onto the deck and van Drood stayed behind, watching, waiting for his opportunity to seize the portmanteau. I wondered why he didn’t just grab it, but then I noticed that there was a shining light surrounding Mr. Farnsworth. He had armored himself with some sort of ward.
I followed Farnsworth and Drood to the deck to a scene of utter chaos. Passengers in life vests were crowding around already-full lifeboats, screaming and pushing to find a seat. When one lifeboat was lowered the crowd surged, looking for the next one. In the midst of this chaos, one figure shone like a beacon. Agnes Moorhen, feathered hat perched jauntily on her head, was guiding my grandmother and Mrs. van Beek through the roiling crowd. Mrs. van Beek was weeping, but my grandmother’s face was steely.
“For heaven’s sake, Honoria,” she cried, “remember you are a lady of the Order and get a grip on yourself!”
“But we’ll drown!” Mrs. van Beek wailed as a half-full lifeboat was lowered to the water.
“Stop this instant!” Mr. Farnsworth cried, striding forward. The crewmen stopped lowering the boat. Without another word, Mr. Farnsworth bodily lifted my grandmother into the lifeboat, then Mrs. Van Beek, and then Agnes. As he placed Agnes in the boat she begged him to join them. He seemed to consider it, but then glanced behind him. I followed his gaze to where van Drood stood still among the surging crowds—then I looked back at Mr. Farnsworth. He gave Agnes a tender kiss, whispered something in her ear, and ordered the crewmen to lower the now-full lifeboat down. Then he turned to join the seething crowds on the deck.
I plunged back into the wild melee that now filled the deck of the Titanic and followed Mr. Farnsworth. I saw him stop again and again to help others onto the lifeboats, never taking a spot for himself. He kept heading for the prow of the ship, which was now the highest spot as the great vessel began to tilt toward the bottom of the sea. Anything loose was sliding down the deck, careening into the struggling passengers, while Mr. Farnsworth and van Drood made their inexorable way to the prow of the ship.
When he reached the prow, Mr. Farnsworth calmly stepped over the railing. The ship was almost vertical now. I was only able to keep from sliding down the deck by holding on to a stanchion. Drood, though, had no such difficulty. He walked straight up the tilting deck like a praying mantis climbing a stalk of wheat. As he passed me I saw his face, his lips stretched into a horrible grin, smoke curling out of his mouth. He was feeding off the horror of the crew and passengers, and now he intended to swallow Mr. Farnsworth and take the book.
Mr. Farnsworth regarded him stoically as he approached, his lips mouthing silent words that I thought might be a prayer or perhaps a curse. Whatever it was, he was powerless to stop van Drood. I saw van Drood reach for Farnsworth. He grabbed the portmanteau. Farnsworth let go of the railing and spread his arms out wide, like a diver preparing to do a backward somersault, held up only by the straps of the portmanteau . . .
Van Drood jerked the portmanteau, snapping the straps, and Farnsworth fell backward. I screamed and was suddenly airborne, my wings breaking through my corset. I flew over the prow of the ship, which was now plummeting into the sea, and dove down, following Mr. Farnsworth into the sea.
The shock of the frigid water nearly made me lose consciousness. Would I die back in New York if I died here
? This felt horribly real, the water cold as death. The pull of the sinking ship was dragging me down into the depths of the sea. I remembered what Raven had told me about souls caught in the Hellgate—how even a Darkling could be caught forever in that deadly whirlpool. I could feel the souls of the drowning all around me, their lives pulling me down with them, a bit of my soul going with them . . . and then I was rising up toward the surface, borne up by something winged.
It was a Darkling—a male Darkling with a face carved with lines of grief and a streak of white in his dark, wet hair. His eyes regarded me sadly as he brought me to the surface—eyes that were somehow familiar.
“Even in dreams you can lose your soul, dearling,” he said to me. Dearling. My mother had called me that.
He helped me onto a stray bit of wood bobbing in the sea where Mr. Farnsworth lay.
“You can see me here?” I asked.
“I could see you anywhere.” He touched my face, and I could feel the warmth of his worn hand. “But I cannot stay. There’s something I must do for this one.”
He turned to Mr. Farnsworth, who was watching the older Darkling with wide, stunned eyes. One hand clasped the edge of the float, while the other pulled out the oilcloth packet that contained the book.
“Take it,” he rasped. “Keep it safe. It tells how you can save your kind—and ours.”
The Darkling took the packet and slipped it underneath his shirt. Then he gathered up Mr. Farnsworth in his arms. “Come with me, dearling,” he said as he sprang into the air.
I followed him into the sky and over the wreckage of the Titanic—over the dead and dying in the frozen water. There were other Darklings here—a whole flock—swooping down and flying up again with pulsing light in their arms. They were carrying the souls of the dying away, so they wouldn’t be sucked down into the whirlpool created by the sinking ship.
Then we were flying over the lifeboats full of terrified, wide-eyed survivors. I saw Agnes and my grandmother with their arms around Mrs. van Beek as she wept for her husband. And I saw van Drood crouched in the hull of another boat, his cloak drawn low over his head, the portmanteau clutched to his chest. As we flew over him, he tore open the portmanteau, took out the book and rifled through the pages. When he saw that he’d been tricked, he roared, and out of his open mouth poured smoke, and the smoke turned into a murder of crows that followed us.