The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [56]
“No,” I said, brushing over the spines. Emerson, Thoreau, Kant. Not heretical texts, but not the sort of thing upstanding rational folk read on Sunday afternoon, certainly. The old ways of superstition and belief, the search for a human soul, were like Nancy Granger. Nancy Granger snuck off to the Rustworks and met a boy at the jitney track. Nancy Granger had gotten in the family way. No one at the Academy talked about Nancy Granger after she went back to Minnesota.
“No?” Cal frowned. “What d’you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean he never married,” I said. “Not my mother or anyone else.”
Cal’s mouth opened, and then he shut it again. I knew his thoughts by heart even though he avoided my eyes. Nice girls aren’t bastards. Nice girls have fathers who come home and take off their ties and have a cocktail with the evening paper.
At least Cal knew me well enough to keep his thoughts as thoughts. The only fight I’d ever seen Conrad lose was to a bully over nearly the same words.
It mattered very little. I was already an orphan, a potential madwoman and possibly a heretic. What difference would Archibald and Nerissa having rings on their fingers when I was born really make?
It had bothered Conrad more. He felt like Archibald had denied him and set him up to fail. Without a recommendation from his father, a boy couldn’t hope to pluck a prime job as a Maintainer in the Engineworks. He might as well be stuck in the pit next to the steam ventors or doing menial tasks like sweeping or greasing.
Had Conrad and Archibald finally spoken? Or had Conrad found the same deserted corpse of a house I had? For that matter, where was he if not at Graystone?
Too many problems. My mind was starting to become disorderly again, like during the one memorable and horrific occasion when I’d tried to take Fanciful Maths. Numbers outside of engineering work were messy, imprecise, theoretical as fairy stories. Only mechanics made sense.
I turned to the single problem I could solve—the footprints. The shelves were solid, and the books were books, not disguised springs and levers that would show me Graystone’s secret places.
I chewed on my lip. “There’s got to be something behind this wall. People don’t just disappear.”
“People,” Cal agreed. I quirked an eyebrow.
“Surely Cal Daulton, most rational of all the Master Builder’s faithful, doesn’t cotton with spirits and vapors.”
Cal huffed through his nose. “Yeah. Rational as the day is long, me.”
I got down on my knees, dust tickling my nostrils, and ran my hands over the aged, rippled boards. The floor was solid and heavy with wax, but my fingers picked out an impression the size of my foot.
I put my hand over the spot and pressed down.
The door in the wall opened bereft of any trappings. No shrieking hinges, no breath of tombstone air chill on my face, not even a solitary cobweb. The section of the bookshelves rolled back on soundless hinges, a brass wheel-and-arm assembly pulling the philosopher’s books into a hidden pocket of wall. I nudged Cal until he raised the lamp, and peered cautiously into the space.
Within sat a passage made of raw boards and beams, and a warped staircase leading down. I beckoned to Cal. “Come on.”
“Are you nuts?” He backed up. “You don’t know what’s down there. This whole gear-forsaken mountain is overrun with viral critters and you want to go down some hidey-hole?”
With two years of our friendship at my back, I knew how to work on Cal. I put my hands on my hips. “Why, I’d say you’re scared.”
His forehead furrowed. “I’m not.”
“Fearless adventurer Cal, scared of a little dark and dank. What will the guys at the School ever say about this?” Without another word, I turned and walked ahead, leaving him to follow or be left alone in the library, with the eerie, intermittent heartbeat of that awful clock.
After three steps, Cal rushed after me, sticking to my shoulder like a burr. “And who would be there to look after you if I stayed behind?”
“Dean?” I suggested. Cal made a rude noise.
“The