For all his bluster, Nathan looked startled by Helen’s appearance. She lay on the bed, still as death, white as the sheets Manon washed every day. Manon had pushed the shadow veil off her face but its horrible black feelers still clung to Helen’s gaunt face. Manon stood up as we came in and stared at Nathan.
“You’re Nathan, aren’t you?” she said. “It’s about time you got here.”
“Yes,” Nathan agreed, sitting down on Helen’s bed and taking her hand. “I was unavoidably detained at the Battle of Mons. But I’m here now. Thank you for taking care of her.”
Manon sniffed. “Mais oui, monsieur. Mademoiselle Helen is très sympathique. I would guard her to my death.”
Nathan tore his eyes off Helen’s face to glance at Manon. “I believe you would. Would you guard the door for us while Ava and I are here with Helen? It’s very important we are not disturbed.”
Manon straightened up. “Oui, monsieur, if the Bosch try to pass I will stab them with this.” She drew out a ten-inch butcher knife from her lace basket.
“Good girl,” Nathan said, clapping her on the shoulder. “I’ll see you get the Silver Star for valor. And look, you’ll have company.”
Bottom stood at the door nervously revolving his cap in his hands. Raven stood behind him, glaring at Nathan. “Sorry to disturb you, Beck—Captain, but the blokes downstairs wanted me to tell you them shadow-thingums are coming again.”
I stood up and looked out the window. The ground around the river was filling with ghost soldiers. They were pulling new guns. I could smell the reek of iron and blood in the air. Eisen und Blut. Raven and Nathan came to stand beside me.
“Will they never stop coming?” I cried.
“Not until we cut their tie to van Drood,” Nathan replied, “and the only way to do that is travel into Helen’s dream world.”
“Ava can’t do that,” Raven said. “It’s dangerous for a Darkling to vision travel. The last time Ava did she almost died. Can’t you do it yourself?”
“I would if I could, but Helen told me she needs Ava.”
“I have to do it,” I told Raven. “I came back last time. I’ll come back this time.”
“You’d better,” he said, then turned to Nathan, “because if you don’t I’ll have to kill him.”
“Fair enough,” Nathan said, grinning. “We don’t have any more time to argue. Bottom, tell them to hold them off as long as they can. And then come back up here and guard the door with this pretty mam’selle.”
Bottom smiled sheepishly at Manon, saluted Nathan, and clambered down the stairs. Raven kissed me, glared once more at Nathan, and then followed him. Nathan looked over my shoulder out the window at the gathering shadow troops. “It doesn’t look like we have much time. We’d best get started.”
33
NATHAN SAT ON the bed beside Helen holding her right hand and I sat on the chair holding her left. “Once we enter the dream space with her we mustn’t lose contact with each other. If we do, I’m afraid Helen will be lost forever in there.”
I nodded and reached out to take his hand. As soon as our fingers touched, the room went black and I felt the floor fall out from beneath us. I squeezed Nathan’s hand, terrified. Before I’d fallen into the dream space through the gentle door of sleep; now I was plunged into it like falling through a trapdoor. I held on to Nathan’s hand, then felt a reassuring squeeze from Helen’s hand.
“It’s all right, Ava,” I heard her say inside my head. “Pretend you’re riding the loop the loop at Coney Island.”
“When did you ever ride the loop the loop?” Nathan asked. “I could barely get you on the Steeplechase.”
“I’d have ridden it with you,” she said. “Remember when you dared me to climb up to the bell tower?”
“Yes—”
“Remember it now,” Helen said, her voice suddenly serious. “Remember the bell tower. You too, Ava—the bell tower at Blythewood. Quick!”
I tried to picture the bell tower the first time I’d climbed up to ring the bells. I could almost hear them . . .
“Good, Ava, I nearly forgot you’re a chime child. You’ve summoned the bells to ring us home. We’re almost—”
We landed with a thud in the bell tower. It was a crisp autumn day, the valley spread out around us in shades of red and gold, the river gleaming below us. The air smelled like apples and wood smoke. The Hudson! How beautiful it looked. My eyes filled up with tears as I realized how afraid I’d been that I would never see Blythewood again.
Helen was also looking out over the river valley. “I never really appreciated this view before; I was always too scared. Fear kept me from so many things,” she said, looking at Nathan. “But I’m done being afraid now. Come on.” She pulled both of us down the belfry stairs. “Let’s go find Jude.”
We crept down the stairs, still holding hands. On the landing Nathan stopped and stared at a newel post. “I broke this sliding down the banister when I was six.”
“We’ve come back to Blythewood before that,” Helen said, leading us down the stairs to the classroom hall. “I’ve been trying to get us back to just the right time . . . ah, see this rug?” She pointed to a runner in the classroom hall. “It’s not the one from our day. Dame Beckwith had to replace it after the flood of aught-one. This is Blythewood before we were born—oh, look, here’s Mr. Bellows’s classroom, only it isn’t his yet. It’s Jude’s.”
“Why does she keep calling him Jude?” Nathan whispered to me. “It gives me the creeps.”
“Because it helps to get closer to him,” Helen replied. “Look, he’s preparing his lesson. He’s planning a demonstration on one of those boring Roman battles.”
She pointed to a figure seated at the front desk—the desk that would belong to Mr. Bellows in our day—which was covered by tin soldiers in Roman garb and toy chariots. At first I thought Helen must be mistaken. The slim young man bent over the mock battle scene couldn’t be Judicus van Drood. He looked like—
“Me,” Nathan said. “He looks like me.”
Van Drood lifted his head as if he’d heard Nathan’s voice. His gray eyes flashed in the sunlight. A lock of dark hair fell over his eyes. His features, which would one day harden to a mask of contempt, looked fine and sensitive here. And he did look a lot like Nathan.
“Can he hear us?” I asked. “Is this his dream space?”
“It is his dream space,” Helen said, “but it’s a corner of it he no longer comes to, so he can’t hear us. But he can hear her.”
A girlish laugh came from behind us in the hall. Van Drood’s face when he heard it became . . . soft. I turned to see where the laugh was coming from and a girl walked right through us. It made me shiver. Helen squeezed my hand. “Did you feel that?” I nodded. “Hm, I never feel it when they pass through me.”
“It might be because Ava’s half Darkling,” Nathan said. “Raven said—”
“It’s my mother,” I interrupted. The girl whose laugh had softened van Drood’s face was younger than I was now and dressed in a corseted and bustled dress. Her long red hair was piled on top of her head. Little ringlets escaped around her face. When she smiled at van Drood a dimple appeared in her left cheek.
I’d never seen my mother look so young—or so carefree. She walked to the front of the classroom and sat with hands clasped on top of her desk looking at her teacher with an expression of studious attention. Her other classmates were not so well behaved.
More girls were filing in now, filling the classroom with loud voices and raucous laughter. Van Drood’s face hardened as the noise grew.
“Ladies, please!” he remonstrated in a weak, quavering voice. “Please sit down and be quiet.” It was shocking to hear the tentative voice issuing from his mouth. His face was turning red with embarrassment. He was gripping a metal ruler so tightly that it was cutting into his hand. He rapped it on the desk to g
et the class’s attention, upsetting a bottle of ink over some papers. The class was startled into a momentary hush and then burst out laughing even harder than before.
“Oh, do grow up!” Evangeline cried, standing up and facing the class. “I, for one, would like to hear Professor van Drood’s lecture. It’s on magic, isn’t it, Professor?” She smiled engagingly at van Drood.
“Why, she’s flirting with him,” I said.
“Don’t sound so shocked,” Helen said. “Lots of girls have crushes on their teachers—as I’ve tried to explain to you—and look, she’s gotten the class to be quiet.”
I looked back at the class, who were indeed regarding their teacher with interest.
“Oh yes, please,” one of the girls, who looked like a young Albertine Montmorency, said. “Tell us about magic. Professor Jager’s lecture on the four kinds of magic didn’t make any sense to me.”
“This is Latin class,” he said, fiddling with one of the toy soldiers. “I’ve prepared a lesson on the Battle of Cannae.” He pointed to the carefully laid-out battle scene.
“Oh, but we’re learning Latin for spells, aren’t we?” Evangeline said. “So it really is all about magic, isn’t it? And I’m sure you could explain so much better than Professor Jager. What I don’t understand is how earth magic can break air magic. It doesn’t make any sense. Can you explain it?” She was practically batting her eyes at him.
“Why are we watching this?” I asked Helen. “I know van Drood was in love with my mother and that her rejection of him turned him into a monster—”
“Sh!” Helen shushed me. “It’s this bit that’s important.”
Coaxed by Evangeline, van Drood was demonstrating the principles of earth and air magic, much as I’d seen Professor Jager do. He had created a simulacrum of my mother by affixing a strand of her hair to a toy soldier. He made my mother laugh by blowing on the soldier and ruffling her hair. He made the class gasp by making my mother levitate in the air by holding the toy soldier over his head. Then he gently put the soldier back down in the battle scene. “I will refrain from demonstrating the effects of fire and water on the simulacrum . . . for obvious reasons.”
The girls laughed. For a moment van Drood’s face pinked, but then he realized they were laughing at his joke, not at him, and he smiled. Such a happy smile that it made my heart ache.
“And will you release me?” Evangeline asked. “Or am I to continue as your slave for the rest of the school day?”
Now he did blush as he fumbled to pull a bell from his drawer. “Oh yes, all it takes is a bit of earth magic—a bell forged with a drop of blood—”
“Ew,” squealed Albertine Montmorency, “that’s gross!”
“But necessary,” van Drood said, ringing the bell, “to break the bonds of air magic. See, now the bond is broken . . .” He toppled the toy soldier and my mother fell hard to the ground. All the girls gasped, but none louder than van Drood.
“Evangeline!” he cried in a voice that revealed how much he cared for her. He reached to help her up, but in doing so he brushed the toy soldier with his arm into the pool of spilled ink. Instantly, Evangeline started coughing, blue ink bubbling up out of her lips. One of the girls screamed. The door flung open and Dame Beckwith strode into the room. She was younger, but still commanding. The girls were instantly silenced.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded.
“I-I was demonstrating air and earth magic,” van Drood stammered. “And something went wrong. I used the bells to break the bond between Evangeline and the simulacrum . . .” He lifted the soldier from the ink and Evangeline screamed. “But it didn’t work! I-I don’t know what’s gone wrong!”
“Whyever were you demonstrating magic in Latin class?” Dame Beckwith muttered, while gently cupping the toy soldier in her hands. “Ah . . . I see, you’ve gotten blood on it. The mixture of iron and blood in the simulacrum creates a bond indissoluble by the bells.”
“Iron and blood,” I whispered. “Eisen und Blut. That must be why our bells don’t break the bond between the soldiers and van Drood. How do we break it . . . ?”
Helen hushed me again. Dame Beckwith was dismissing the class—all except Evangeline, who lay on the floor crying.
“I never meant to hurt her!” van Drood cried.
“Of course you didn’t, Jude,” Dame Beckwith said gently. “But this sort of magic is very dangerous to play with.” She lowered her voice. “Once you introduce blood into the mix you’re working with shadow magic. It can only be reversed by a chime child. Luckily, we have one. I shall send for Emmaline Sharp. In the meantime, I will keep an eye on Evangeline and her simulacrum.”
“That’s it!” Nathan said. “A chime child can break the bond between the simulacrum and the soldiers. Ava can do it.”
“But how?” I said. “And what’s he using for a simul—” But suddenly I knew. Eisen und Blut. “The guns. They’re made of iron. If they were forged with blood . . .”
“Van Drood has forged a bond between the soldiers and the guns; he’s made the soldiers . . .” Nathan began.
“Part of the machine,” I said, remembering the awful dream of the factory girls sewing themselves into their machines and van Drood drinking their blood. “It’s diabolical.”
“But most effective,” Helen said. “Look.” She pointed to van Drood, who was staring at the scattered soldiers on his desk. “He came up with the idea then.”
“I always thought it was being spurned by my mother that turned him to the shadows,” I said.
“In part, yes,” Helen said, “but it started here with his need to control. To never be laughed at or shamed again.”
Van Drood was ordering the toy soldiers, his face set and grim, looking out at the rows of empty chairs, and then he looked at us.
Helen gasped. I followed her gaze and saw why. The man standing at the desk was not the young Jude; he was the van Drood we knew, the Shadow Master.
“Congratulations, my dear, you’ve surprised me. And here I thought you were just playing hide-and-seek with your friends. You’ve discovered my little secret. But it won’t do you any good. Ava still doesn’t know how to undo my spell with her chime magic and you’ve run out of time. Do you hear that?”
For some time I’d heard a faint drumming, but now it was louder. It shook the walls of Blythewood so hard that the glass shivered in the windowpanes and books fell from the classroom shelves.
“That’s my army pounding on the gates of Bouillon Castle. It will only be a matter of minutes before they storm the castle and slaughter your friends. Ah, do you smell that?” He sniffed the air. I did smell something—smoke. “The flames will reach your tower room soon.”
A sudden jolt threw me to the floor, which was caving in beneath me. The dream space was collapsing and I was sinking into oblivion. I felt the same chill that I had when I’d fallen into the North Atlantic from the Titanic and I’d lost a piece of my soul. I felt that tug now, of being sucked into a churning maelstrom where my soul would be chewed to bits . . .
And then I felt two hands grasping mine, pulling me out. Helen and Nathan pulled me back to the classroom, but the building was falling apart. Cracks ran down the walls, books fell to the floor, the very stones of Blythewood were crumbling. Just as the walls of Bouillon were crumbling under the pounding of the guns.
“I have to go back!” I cried.
“We need the bells,” Helen cried. “The bells of Blythewood rang us home; we need the bells of Bouillon to bring us back there.”
I could hear them ringing—both the bells of Blythewood and the ones at Bouillon—and, holding Nathan and Helen’s hands, I ran out of the classroom and down the hall toward the tower stairs. The glass cases holding our trophies had shattered. I glimpsed, along with the pictures of Blythewood girls of the past, faces I recognized—my classmates—Daisy’s plaque for the Latin prize and
newspaper clippings of Hawthorn boys killed in the war. The future Blythewood was somehow folded into Helen’s dream space—but did that mean that future was collapsing or that Blythewood was being destroyed?
We came out into the Blythewood tower, the bells ringing so hard the walls were shaking, the landscape shrouded in fog. Over the tolling of the bells of Blythewood I heard, like an echo, the bells of Bouillon and one other bell—the smallest treble bell chiming faintly as though it were underwater. It was Merope’s bell, the one that had fallen into the Hudson River when the bells were brought over from Scotland. I could feel its chime spreading out in circles, like rings in a pond, spreading over Blythewood and beyond—across the ocean to Bouillon.
The fog cleared and we were standing on top of the tower at Bouillon. The air was thick with smoke and the reek of gunpowder and blood and the metallic tang of iron. A mortar shell whizzed by and struck the castle walls. Stones tumbled to the ground leaving a gaping hole, which the ghost soldiers poured through. Mr. Bellows charged forward, sword in hand, Sam Greenfeder by his side. Raven and Marlin led a battalion of Darklings into the fray. Bottom blew his bugle to muster the Hawthorn Fusiliers. Miss Sharp and Miss Corey shot burning arrows into the advancing lines of shadow soldiers.
All our friends were fighting valiantly, but the ghost soldiers kept coming. There was an inexhaustible supply, and they kept coming with the relentless precision of a machine.
“They are a machine,” I said aloud. “Van Drood forged the guns with the soldiers’ blood and bound them together into one infernal killing machine. If I can destroy the guns—”
“But we destroyed them before,” Nathan asked, staring at the destruction around us. “And it didn’t keep the soldiers from coming back.”
“Because we didn’t break the bond between the guns and the soldiers. Only my bells can do that.”
I closed my eyes and tuned in the sound of the bells inside me. I could still hear the subaqueous echo of Merope’s bell tolling beneath the Hudson River, spreading vibrations out through the water, connecting the bells of Blythewood to the bells of Bouillon. I let myself fill with all the bells until I was vibrating to their tones—to the deep bass clanging fear and the sweet treble chiming love, and to everything in between—despair, joy, envy, hope.