“No,” I said, “take Helen. I’ll fight this thing. I’ll get free.”
“Tsk, tsk,” van Drood clucked like an old schoolmarm. “Such a difficult choice, son. I suppose it’s times like these you really need a father’s advice. Hm . . . what would a good father say?” He scratched his chin and furrowed his brow, looking for all the world like a benevolent patriarch. “I know! Follow your heart. Choose the one you really love. You do know which one that is, don’t you?”
Nathan’s face turned pale, his gray eyes flicking between Helen and me. Then he raised his eyes as if he were looking to heaven for guidance. A whistle broke the terrible tension. It came from the other side of the platform, where another train was arriving. Nathan’s eyes flicked toward the arriving train and widened as if he’d found what he was looking for.
He turned the envelope sideways and tossed it across the platform, onto the empty track in front of the oncoming train. A muscle twitched in van Drood’s jaw.
“Bad choice, son. Someone’s going to have to get that. Let’s see . . .” He turned to Helen. I was already reaching for her as he said, “Darling, be a dear and retrieve that envelope for me.”
As Helen stepped across the platform I grabbed for her arm, but I only got a handful of netting. It was writhing around her like a cloud, carrying her across the platform as she stepped into the path of the oncoming train. I screamed and threw myself toward her but before I could reach her a feathered missile streaked in front of the train and knocked Helen back onto the platform. Marlin was on top of her, his wings mantled over them both.
“Well, my dear,” van Drood said, brushing a bit of coal smut from his coat. “I think we’ve learned who cares the most for you. It’s very touching. Shall I relinquish my claim on you and leave you to your winged paramour? I really don’t have any use for you now. Sadly, I know what happens to girls like you after they’re jilted by their fiancés. Society will see you as ruined, especially after all the unchaperoned time we have spent together. No one will want you. You and your mother will languish in poverty. You’ll end up like the heroine of that book I saw you reading the other day—what was it called?—oh yes, The House of Mirth. Doesn’t the heroine die penniless and alone in a boarding house of a laudanum overdose—oh, dear, did I ruin the ending for you?”
As he spoke the netting writhed around Helen. She pushed Marlin away and struggled to her feet.
“Don’t listen to him,” Marlin said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Do you think you can stop her from ending herself once I’ve gotten inside her brain. Do you?” he asked me. “I’ll never let her go. I’ll hound her until she kills herself—just as I did to your mother. If you couldn’t save her, what makes you think you can save Helen?”
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Let her go and I will tell you where the third vessel is.”
“No, Ava,” Nathan said. “We’ll find another way.”
“There is no other way. He’s right. My mother thought she was free of him but she never truly was. I can’t let that happen to Helen. I’ll tell you right now where the third vessel is. I’ll draw a map.”
“And why should I trust that you will tell me the truth?” he asked, his voice a low growl that made my wings stir beneath my skin, “when you have tried so often to deceive me? You and your cons.” He spit the word out.
“I’ll take you there,” I said.
“No!” Nathan stepped toward me, but I held up my hand—the netted hand—to keep him back.
“And how will I know that you won’t lead me on a merry goose chase?” van Drood asked.
“Because I’ll come, too,” Helen said, stepping away from Marlin. “And Ava will know that you’ll kill me if she doesn’t keep her promise.”
“What a capital idea, my dear,” van Drood said, giving Helen a smile that turned my stomach. “I take back everything I said about calling off our engagement. I believe we will make an excellent team. Shall we embark on our wedding tour with your friend as companion?”
He held out his arm. Helen’s arm rose as if lifted by the netting on her sleeve and took his. She held out her other arm for me. “Ava?”
I heard Nathan shouting behind me but his voice was drowned out by the train whistle and the engineer shouting, “All aboard!” The steam had cleared around us, freeing the passengers and porter to board the train. I turned around and saw Agnes, Omar, Kid Marvel, and Daisy hurrying toward us. Raven was swooping down from the ceiling, where he’d been fighting off the shadow crows. In a moment he would reach me. He would never let me get on the train with van Drood—but then Helen would get on alone.
I took Helen’s arm and stepped onto the train.
23
A TEA TABLE was set for three in van Drood’s private car. A white ostrich-skin traveling case, trimmed with peacock blue, with my name printed on the luggage tag sat by my chair. A leather wallet containing a ticket for the Dover-Calais ferry reserved in my name lay on the table.
“He knew I’d come,” I said after van Drood had gone with Spring-heeled Jack to make arrangements to have our luggage transferred at Dover.
“Yes,” Helen said, dabbing at her wrist with a white linen napkin. “I told you—he always gets what he wants. I tried to warn you.”
“They’ll be following us,” I whispered. Even though van Drood and Jack weren’t in the car I suspected the railway waiters were his spies. “Raven and Marlin, Sam and Agnes, Nathan, Omar and Kid Marvel.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Helen said. “You’ve already told van Drood where the vessel is.”
I had. It had taken only three minutes after we’d departed Victoria Station. Van Drood had suggested Helen use the fish knife to slit her wrist. I’d given him the location of the vessel as the first drop of blood bubbled through her skin.
“Ah, the Ardennes! I should have guessed. We’ll go to Paris first as planned and then take the train to Brussels.” Then he’d gone to make the arrangements.
“We can still stop him,” I said, leaning over the table and grasping Helen’s hand. “Mr. Bellows is already on the way to the Ardennes to warn the guardian of the vessel. Sam and Agnes will tell the Order to protect the vessel. Raven and Marlin will muster the fairy creatures in the Ardennes—there are apparently quite a lot of them in the forest there. We’ll stop van Drood from opening the third vessel and we’ll destroy him.”
“Then you’ll destroy me, too. This net”—she plucked at her veil—“ties me to him. If he dies it will choke the life out of me. You too.” She pointed at the bit of netting that encircled my wrist. It was only a tattered scrap that could have been mistaken for a bit of lace trim on my sleeve, but when I tried to pull it off it bit deeper into my skin. “If you don’t get it off soon.”
She drew her hand away and tugged her sleeve down to cover the mark on her wrist. “Perhaps there’s still time for you,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “If you get away, Omar might be able to help you.”
“And as soon as I’m gone van Drood will tell you to hurt yourself. If you could stop yourself—”
“But I can’t,” she said in a resigned voice. “When he tells me to do something I can feel his voice inside my brain.” She touched her temple where the feelers of the veil were attached to her skin. “My body goes numb and I see myself doing things I can’t control. It’s the most awful sensation.”
“It’s all right,” I said, alarmed at how distraught she sounded. “We’ll find some way to get that damned thing off you. Until then I’m not going anywhere. Besides,” I said, trying to make my voice light, “I’ve always wanted to see Paris.”
At Dover we got off the train and boarded the ferry to Calais. I looked around for Raven or Marlin, but there were too many people crowding onto the ferry to see. It seemed like everyone was going to France—packs of schoolboys, families on holiday, clutches of spinsters toting th
eir blue Baedekers, solitary clerks-turned-artists sketching the white cliffs of Dover as we pulled out into the channel. Helen stood on the deck by the railing—my arm firmly linked around hers—and watched England recede into the mist. It seemed like the fog had followed us down to the seacoast. The famous white cliffs were so covered in mist we could hardly see them, but then the sun broke through the cloud cover and lit them up. They shone white-gold under an ink-blue sky, edged with a bristly black border as if they had been outlined in India ink.
“Will you look at that!” a young man in tweeds looking through binoculars remarked to the troop of schoolboys he was evidently in charge of. “I’ve never seen the likes of that.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Crows,” someone said, “’undreds of ’em.”
“No,” the schoolteacher said, lifting the binoculars back to his eyes. “They’re too big to be crows. Those are ravens. A whole—oh, what’s the collective noun for ravens?”
“An unkindness,” one of the schoolboys, who was sucking on a bright red peppermint stick, piped up. “But I never understood why. The ravens are supposed to protect England.”
“That’s right, Tommy,” the schoolteacher said. “That’s why there are always six in the Tower.”
“Can I borrow those binoculars?” I asked the schoolteacher.
He turned bright red and stammered something unintelligible while managing to tangle the binocular strap with the strap to his satchel.
“I think you’ve made an admirer,” Helen whispered.
She sounded so much like her old self that when I lifted the binoculars to my eyes I found they were too misted over to see anything. I blinked and wiped at the lenses with my sleeve and then looked again—and my heart rose in my throat. The cliffs of Dover were lined with black ravens all cawing loudly. Amidst them I made out larger shapes—Darklings. They were mustering the ravens. As I watched, two of those Darklings launched off the cliff and flew toward us. I lowered the binoculars and looked around to see if anyone else saw them, but except for Tommy, who was gaping up, his bright red mouth fallen open, no one seemed to see the two Darklings flying toward us. Their wings cloaked them from view, but they couldn’t land in such a crowd. Opening my Darkling ears I could hear their voices as they flew overhead.
“Are you all right?” Raven demanded. “Has he hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” I said in a quiet voice I knew he’d be able to hear. “It’s Helen he’s threatened to hurt. That’s why I have to stay with her.”
“I’ll kill the bastard,” Marlin swore.
“Helen says that will kill her. Omar has to find a way to sever the shadow net. Tell them to follow us to Paris. You two should fly to the Ardennes to warn Mr. Bellows . . . I-I told van Drood where the vessel was.”
“To save Helen,” Marlin said right away.
“You couldn’t have done anything else,” Raven said. “We’ll send Sirena and Gus to the Ardennes. Marlin and I will stay near you.”
“Thank you,” I said, glad that Marlin and Raven would be near. The schoolteacher, thinking my teary thank-you was for him, handed me his handkerchief.
“It always chokes me up, too, seeing the white cliffs of Dover. In fact, it reminds me of a poem . . .” His students groaned as he began to recite, one hand over his heart, the other raised and pointing to the cliffs.
The sea is calm to-night
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand
Glimmering and vast . . .
Although his students giggled and elbowed each other at first, they soon quieted and looked up at him with the same open-mouthed awe that Tommy had given the Darklings. The spinsters with their Baedekers and the families with their picnic baskets stopped talking to listen, too. I noticed sleek black heads pop up in the ferry’s wake and heard a selkie sigh at the line “Ah, love let us be true . . .” By the time he got to the final lines the whole deck was listening.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
While ignorant armies clash by night.
When he finished one of the spinsters broke out in “Rule, Britannia!” and we all joined in, even Helen, whose voice rang true and clear. I turned to her and saw that the wind had blown her veil away and her face was wet with tears.
“You see,” I said. “It will be all right.”
“No,” Helen cried out in a voice that sounded as if the net was choking her. “Don’t you see? All these poor boys are going to die. And we can’t do a thing to stop it.”
At the train station in Calais I saw van Drood studying the schedule board. “Ah look,” he said, “there’s a train for Brussels. Shall we skip Paris and go straight to the Ardennes?”
When he saw my frightened expression he laughed. “Or do you have a previous engagement in Paris? Perhaps your friends are meeting you there and you are afraid you’ll miss them if we go straight on to Brussels? Or perhaps you are worried they will not have time to send their friends into the Ardennes?”
He smiled, waiting for me to respond. Instead Helen said, “You promised I could go shopping in Paris.”
“So I did,” he said. “And what kind of fiancé would I be if I denied my bride a pre-wedding shopping spree in Paris? Jack! Four tickets to Paris please, and wire the Meurice to expect us for a late supper. Oysters and champagne for my bride and her companion.”
I puzzled over van Drood’s actions on the train to Paris, and then in the taxi from the Gare du Nord to the Hotel le Meurice, where we were escorted to a lavish suite overlooking the Tuileries gardens, and in the coming days, that turned into weeks, as we lingered on in Paris. What were we doing here? Why weren’t we rushing to the Ardennes to find the third vessel and crack it open?
Helen only shrugged when I pursued the issue with her. “Why question it? We’re in Paris. Isn’t it lovely? I thought we’d go to Worth’s this morning and then lunch at that lovely place on the Rue Royale.”
And so, on the eve of a cataclysmic war, with forces marshaling all around us, we spent our mornings shopping. We would leave our suite, passing by the door to van Drood’s private sitting room, where there always seemed to be some bureaucratic-looking gentleman nervously smoking, and walk up the Rue de la Paix to visit the great maisons de couture—Worth, Paquin, Doucet, Poiret, the Callot Sisters—where we were served tea in their gilded salons and waited on like royalty. Helen chose morning gowns, afternoon gowns, and evening gowns in sumptuous silks and satins, trimmed with jewels and lace—all that finery spoiled by the black veil she still wore. I heard the shop girls whispering, wondering why la belle americaine always wore the veil. Was she a religieuse? Was she hiding a hideous birthmark? Helen ignored them all, silencing them with the lavishness of her purchases.
At first I refused to take anything, since van Drood was footing the bill, but when Helen pointed out that I couldn’t wear the same dress every day I relented and agreed to have the plainest of tea gowns and a few shirtwaists made for me. The tea gown was made of white lawn so fine it felt like silk and was fitted with inserts of Belgian lace that had been made by nuns. All hand-stitched, the proprietress, one of the Callot sisters, told me. The stitches were so tiny they looked like they had been sewn by hummingbirds.
Broderie des fées, Madame Callot called it. Fairy stitching, she said with a wink that made me think she might know something about fairies. But when I tried to question her she looked uncomfortably at Helen and asked if “Monsieur van Drood” liked the dresses she had purchased for the opera.
After a heavy lunch in one of the fashionable restaurants, we would take a walk around the Tuileries gardens. One turn around the carefully groomed paths and then Helen would say she felt tired and wanted a little rest before dinner
. I would go back with her, but I felt restless in the suite during the afternoon. If van Drood was out—he often went to long lunches or meetings—I would prowl around his desk to see if I could find any clues to what he was up to, but he would lock away his letters and only once did I find a torn envelope, which had the name Count Alexander Hoyos written on it.
Frustrated, I would go out again and walk around the gardens some more or into the Louvre. I would climb the stairs, passing the headless Winged Victory of Samothrace, and wander through the cool, vaulted galleries, gazing at paintings that I had only seen before in books—the Mona Lisa, who smiled at me as if she knew a secret she would tell if only I knew how to listen; Vermeer’s lace maker, so intent on her task she seemed to make her own light; Delacroix’s Algerian harem girls, staring out at me as if daring me to understand their lives.
But the work I spent the most time looking at was a sculpture of a winged man and a swooning woman in a rapturous embrace—Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. The sculptor had caught the moment when Cupid has just landed and embraced his beloved, who has succumbed to the deadly poison from the flask Venus ordered her to bring back from the underworld. Psyche is tilted back, reaching for her lover, her curved arms framing Cupid’s face, his wings soaring over his head, their eyes locked, their lips only inches apart. Although Psyche isn’t winged, the way her arms curved reminded me of how Raven would mantle his wings above me when we kissed. And the way Cupid’s wings stretched upright made me feel as though the figures were about to take off, made me feel as if I were about to soar upward, while looking at the space between their lips made me feel as if I were suspended in time, caught in marble, waiting while the world moved steadily toward war and every day Helen seemed less like herself.
She had begun to talk about van Drood as if he weren’t the evilest man alive. “Isn’t it generous of Jude to buy me all these clothes?” she remarked one day at the Maison Paquin. Or “Look at the lovely ruby choker Jude has given me. Will you help me with the catch?”