The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [74]
“It’s all right!” I shouted. “There’s a switch up here!” The switch was a simple two-position job, but to my immense relief, one of them was Door Open. The thought of being trapped up here made me light-headed. I undid the collar button of my dress and fanned myself with a battered copy of an almanac until my heart ceased to pound.
Retrieving the lamp, I moved it away from the piles of books on the floor and set it back on the writing table. This surface was crackle-varnished and scarred, covered in ink stains and crumpled vellum scraps, as different from the ornate desk in the library as the School of Engines was from the Lovecraft Conservatory. It was clear to my eyes that my father—or some bygone Grayson—had spent hours here, high in the house’s aerie. And judging from the papered window and the frozen lock, they had spent their hours locked away in secrecy, with no one from the house or the outside world able to see in or gain entry.
They may have been content to stay in the dark, but I didn’t like the secrets that the long shadows implied. I tore down the oil paper from the window, letting in the weak autumn sunlight and illuminating decades of untidiness.
The eaves hung lower than I’d first imagined, and the space was so crammed with books and oddities I couldn’t take more than six small steps in any direction.
There were not just books—although books were most plentiful. In the watchful eye of the sun I spotted specimen boxes, a map cabinet for charts and blueprints, and a naturalist’s kit sitting atop it, complete with forgotten specimens in jars of formaldehyde. A globe dotted with the shapes of uncharted countries sat high on a shelf, along with a scattering of empty ink pots. Something crunched under my boot and I looked down to find a massacre of broken pen nibs littering the floor.
I saw on closer examination of the sagging shelves that none of the books had a title on the spine. Many were just diaries stitched together with heavy thread, even the covers filled up with the same square and precise handwriting that had labeled the clockwork that controlled Graystone.
“Aoife, are you coming down?” Cal shouted. “What did you find up there?”
I opened the trapdoor and leaned my head out, still holding the closest handwritten tome. “I’m looking around. I think I’ll stay up here for a little while.”
Cal waved his hand in front of his face to direct away the cloud of grit that opening the door had dislodged. “You can’t be serious.”
“You should come up,” I said. “There’s all sorts of specimens and gadgets in here.”
Cal resolutely shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d rather bother with a bunch of ancient scratch paper than explore the house.”
“The house will be here when I’m done,” I told him. “Just come up, Cal.”
“No, thank you,” he said quickly. “I’m not keen on being that far off the ground.” I saw him nudge Dean’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll have Bethina make us lunch. Aoife finds a book, she can have her nose in it for hours.”
“It seems to have done well for her.” Dean looked up and winked at me, but he followed Cal through the hidden servant’s passage to the kitchen. I dialed the trapdoor shut again. At least Cal and Dean had stopped sniping at each other for a moment, united by the common boy’s love of a hot meal.
That left me with at least an hour to search the room. I was sure that Conrad had meant for me to find it, but what he’d wanted me to see, I didn’t know.
I tried the map cabinet first. There were a wealth of charts, all misfolded and crammed together as if their owner had been in a terrible hurry to tidy up. Or hide something.
Yanking the clot of paper free, I was rewarded with nothing but dirt and beetle skeletons. I spread out the maps, finding a star chart like the one we used at the Academy. This one was older, covered in handwritten notations and numbers, and contained far more stars than I remembered from my one course of astronomy. Professor Faroul had been arrested for heresy just after I started my freshman year, for preaching at the class that