by Paul Kane
Colin Radford adored university—all the thinking, the constant discourse over questions of philosophy, scholarship, and theology. At times he felt as though he had been waiting all his life to escape dreary Norwich, with its forbidding cathedral and the chill wind that swept across the Channel all the way from the Russian steppes. He had found in Oxford a truer home, where men put their minds to work upon the mechanisms of intellect. There were kindred spirits here, competitive though they might be.
So for Colin to allow his mind to wander required a vista of unparalleled beauty. And yet on certain mornings, Oxford glistened in such a way as to have earned the lyrical nickname that romantics had bestowed upon it.
The City of Dreaming Spires, they called it.
Had he known on that morning that he would never see it again, Colin would have been filled with such grief as to make him weep. And yet there was so much more grief to come.
A mods student named Chisholm hurried into the room the moment the lecture concluded, earning a disapproving glare from Professor Sidgwick, even as he handed a folded sheet of cream parchment to the bespectacled old man. Colin watched Sidgwick dismiss the lad with a sniff and then glance at the note, which could only have come from the headmaster’s office. Somehow, even before it happened, he knew what would come next. Sidgwick lifted his gaze, glanced around the room, and they locked eyes.
“Mr. Radford, come here, if you please.”
Colin felt a strange heat prickle his face. He did not fear Sidgwick the way he knew some others did, though if he thought the professor had caught him drifting during the lecture, he might have done well to be afraid of his wrath. Yet the look on the old man’s face, the way he stroked his pointed beard, and the almost militaristic manner in which he held that crisp letter still half raised in his right hand, made the young scholar cringe.
“Yes, sir,” Colin said, and as the other students departed, he made for the lectern.
Sidgwick looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. “You’re from Norwich, lad? I’d never have thought it.”
The significance of this—whether it contained compliment or insult—escaped Colin, so he did not reply.
“Instructions from the headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half crushing the parchment. “You’re to return home at once. You’ve a train leaving in less than two hours, so you’d best be on your way.”
Poison twisted in Colin’s gut. Expelled? How could it be? He’d done nothing.
“But, sir—” he began.
Sidgwick must have read the reaction in his face, for the old man instantly waved a hand in the air as though to erase such thoughts.
“It’s not expulsion, boy. You’ve been summoned.”
Reluctantly—as if by not doing so he might avert his fate—Colin took the note.
“But why?” he asked as he unfolded it and began to read.
Sidgwick did not wait for him to discover it on his own. “It appears,” the professor said, “that your father has disappeared.”
The Radford ancestral home rested on a hill in the city of Norwich, on the eastern coast of England. The seventeenth-century manse neither perched nor loomed upon its hill, and though there were many trees on the sprawling grounds, neither could it rightly be said to nestle there. Even to say the old house “stood” on that slope, with its distant view of the blue-gray waters of the English Channel, would have been a kindness. No, Colin had always thought of the house as resting there. After more than two hundred years providing hearth and shelter for the Radford family, its halls echoing with the shouts and laughter of Radford children.
Now, as the carriage that had awaited him at the train station climbed the long drive up to the front door, Colin stared at the house and considered another interpretation for his insistence upon the lazy imagery that accompanied the house’s personification in his mind. Absent his father’s inhabitance, the house seemed a body without its soul, a still husk of a thing, awaiting burial. Whether his own arrival might breathe some new life into the stones and beams of the place he quite doubted, as he had no intention of remaining forever, or even for very long, once his father’s whereabouts had been ascertained.
For all the golden, autumnal beauty he had cherished in Oxford, here in Norwich there was only gray. The sky, the stones, the prematurely bare trees, the pallor of its citizens, and the windchopped water of the Channel, all gray.
The carriage came to a halt, and it was not until he had climbed down and retrieved his single case that he realized he had taken for granted the comfort afforded him by the familiar clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the road and the rattle of the conveyance itself. Without it, here on the hill, the only sound remaining was the wind, which, when it gusted through the hollows and eaves of the old house, moaned with the grief of a forlorn spirit or a heartbroken widow.
Fortunately, Colin Radford did not believe in ghosts. Prior to university, he had lived all of his life in this house and he knew it as a lonely place, but not haunted.
Still, he hesitated as the carriage driver snapped his reins and the carriage began to roll away. The sound that had been a comfort receded; soon not even its promise would remain and the wind would rule. Better to be inside. The timbers and stones still moaned, but sorrowful as they were—gray sounds in a gray house in a gray city—they were familiar sounds.
As he started toward the door, it swung inward. Colin looked up, expecting Filgate or one of the other servants, but the silhouette that greeted him—stepping forward, bent and defeated—belonged to the nearest thing the estate did have to a ghost: his grandmother, Abigail.
“Took your time about it, didn’t you?” she said.
Trouble on the rails had delayed his arrival in London until after the last train had left for Norwich for the day, so he had been forced to spend the night in the capital and board the rescheduled train this morning. But the old woman’s disapproving tone and baleful gaze discouraged any explanation. Let her think what she wished.
“I came as quickly as possible,” he said, carrying his case into the foyer, where he set it down as Grandmother Abigail closed the door.
They faced each other in the elaborate foyer, surrounded by the odd religious icons that had been his father’s passion and then peculiarity over the years.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that he’s turned up,” Colin said.
Grandmother Abigail shook her head, her lips quivering slightly, a tiny yet startling concession to her fear for her son.
“Not a trace, Collie. Not a trace,” the old woman said, and then the familiar, hard mask he knew so well returned. “Word has spread throughout the city for people to be on the lookout for him, but there’s been no word. The grounds have been searched and every room in the house, from attic to cellar, but the only thing down there is Edgar’s mechanism.”
Colin frowned. “Mechanism?”
His grandmother fluttered her hand in a way that revealed a new delicacy in her, one that he had never seen before, brought on now by fear or advancing age or some combination of the two.
“A strange contraption of metal and wood, with no purpose I ever saw or he ever shared,” she said, her disdain obvious despite her concern for her son.
“I never imagined Father as much of an inventor,” Colin said, mystified.
“He began building it last year, not long after an argument he had with that ugly Irish spiritualist.”
Colin shivered. Finnegan had been a charlatan, no doubt, but his father had always seemed somehow to enjoy the man’s company. The birdlike man with his small eyes and misshapen nose had always tried to get Colin to call him “Uncle Charlie,” but as a boy he had only managed it once or twice, and as a young man, Colin had wanted nothing to do with him.
But he’d been away at university for more than a year, home only for brief visits in the summer and at Christmas, and had never thought to inquire about Finnegan. He had not even been aware that his fat
her and the ugly Irishman had had a falling-out.
Perhaps Sir Edgar Radford had finally realized that, no matter what he claimed or what sort of show he put on, Finnegan’s mediumship was a sham. The Irishman had been trying to help Sir Edgar contact his dead wife for more than a decade.
“Do you want to see it?” Grandmother Abigail asked.
Colin frowned. “See what?”
“Why, your father’s mechanism. The very thing we were just discussing.”
“I’d think my time better spent in joining the search, wouldn’t you?”
Grandmother Abigail dropped her eyes, as though worried what he might see in them. “Perhaps.”
“And yet?” Colin prodded.
The old woman lifted her gaze. “The infernal thing troubles me, that’s all. In the past few weeks, your father spent so much of his time down there, and he grew increasingly irritated at any intrusion. Fervent in his efforts and . . . hostile, yes, toward anyone who might question them. But you see, I had no desire to linger in the cellar. The thing makes me uneasy, even if it doesn’t . . .”
Dread climbed his spine on skittery spider legs. “Doesn’t what?”
Again she glanced downward. “It doesn’t work, of course.”
“What is it you’re keeping from me, Grandmother?”
With that, she shook her head and waved him toward the stairs. “Go on. Put your things away. Martha has seen to your room, and I’ll have a meal prepared for you. I imagine you’ll wish to speak to Thomas Church, who is organizing the search.”
Grandmother Abigail turned away, bent with age, and began to retreat along the corridor that led to the kitchens. “Perhaps it’s better you keep away from the thing after all.”
Befuddled, Colin watched her go. The old woman had never treated him with the kind of warmth many associated with the role of grandmother, nor did she exhibit the witchlike sort of behavior often portrayed in stories. Neither kindly matron nor wizened crone, Abigail Radford kept mostly to herself and had a fondness for coffee over tea and biscuits rather than scones. When not knitting or strolling the grounds on watch for “pests,” she had forever seemed to lurk just over young Colin’s shoulder, ready to tut-tut at any seemingly imminent infraction. If he attempted to slip into the kitchen for an early taste of dinner or to snatch a cooling scone from a baking sheet, she would be there. If he jumped on his father’s bed, slid on the banister, or tried to climb up onto the roof of the house, Grandmother Abigail seemed ever present, and able to dissuade him with a clucking of her tongue and the knitting of her brow.
A gray, joyless woman. And yet he knew she believed her efforts were all to keep him safe, and that in her way she loved him, a vital bit of knowledge for a boy who had grown to manhood without the benefit of a mother.
As a child, he had been told that his mother had gone off with the fairies and that one day she might return. A million fantasies had been born of this lie, and he had often imagined himself wandering into the woods in pursuit of his beautiful mother, joining her in the kingdom of the fairies, living with sprites and brownies and other creatures of magic and mischief. By the age of eight, he had begun to realize that this was mere fancy, but it was not until he turned twelve that his father told him of his mother’s drowning.
Now, with his father having also “vanished,” he could not help but remember the lies about his mother’s death. Had Edgar Radford also gone off with the fairies? Had the old man wandered off in the grip of some dementia, been killed by brigands, or suffered some fatal misadventure?
Colin meant to find him, no matter the answer. The idea that his father’s behavior had altered so radically over the past year with Colin completely unaware of the changes unnerved him. He would join in the search. If necessary, he would begin it again and conduct it himself.
Yet even as he made this silent vow, climbing the stairs and striding down the corridor toward his childhood bedroom, he realized just how impossible a task he had set for himself. Norwich was no tiny hamlet, but a city, with thousands of dark nooks and shadowed corners, not to mention the woods and hills, and the ocean that had claimed Colin’s mother. And if Sir Edgar had left Norwich somehow . . . well, he would be found only if he wished to be found, or if some unfortunate happened upon his corpse.
The quiet emptiness of the house—despite the presence of his grandmother and the servants—closed around him, suffocating, as he stepped into the bedroom. A fire had been laid in the fireplace, and logs crackled and popped, low flames dancing. The room had been decorated in shades of blue and rich cream and it ought to have been filled with the warmth—if not of the fire, then at least of memory.
Yet it was cold.
He did take a look that afternoon at what his grandmother had called “Edgar’s mechanism,” once he had searched his father’s study and found no note or journal or other document that might indicate the man’s state of mind prior to his vanishing.
Sir Edgar had left behind only the mechanism.
Though its intended use confounded him, Colin did not find himself unsettled by the machine the way the old woman seemed to be. Concerned, yes, even troubled—its seeming lack of purpose made him worry for the state of his father’s mind—but nothing more than that. If anything, the madness inherent in the contraption’s design made him hopeful that his father remained alive somewhere, that as Colin suspected, dementia had crept into his father’s life and he had subsequently wandered off somewhere, forgotten the way home, and would eventually be found and returned to his family.
Dementia seemed horrid, but Colin told himself he would prefer that to learning of his father’s death. Sir Edgar might be experiencing a certain amount of mental slippage, but at least Colin would be able to see him again, to provide him some comfort as he faded from the world. The man deserved that. For all of his eccentricities, Sir Edgar had been a proud, loving, and patient father.
Colin had left him behind without a single reservation, presuming that he would always be there, that there would forever be a home to which he might return, and the strange wisdom of Sir Edgar Radford to draw upon.
The air in the cellar was close and damp, warm even though the October days were chilly in Norwich and the nights even more so. Filgate had seen to it that there were lamps burning in the cellar before Colin descended, but as he examined the machine, he wished he had arranged for more light, or less. A single lamp would have done the job almost as well. With several, the light shifted and shadows played tricks upon his eyes, so that he had to use the lamp in his hand to take a closer look at the various gauges and turns and vents to ascertain their true shape and attempt to determine their purpose.
No matter how much light he shed upon the mechanism, however, he could not divine its use. During its construction, the cellar had been separated into three distinct spaces—one a wine cellar, one for cold storage, and one built around the base of a chimney, so that goods could be stored there in winter without freezing. Subsequent additions to the house had included expansions of the cellar, and it was in one of those that Sir Edgar had built his mechanism.
To Colin, it looked like discarded pieces of other machines, a tangle of pipes and flues, enormous cogs and gears, wooden joists and shelves and pulleys. Colin pulled levers and turned cranks, but his experiments with the thing yielded no result save for a clattering here and a grinding there. The machine, whatever its ambition, did not work. It did not run.
What puzzled him most were the thick iron pipes—perhaps four inches in diameter—that led off from the apparatus and directly into the stone walls in half a dozen places. They seemed intended to carry water or steam, but the mechanism worked not at all and so Colin could not determine which.
After half an hour wasted in the gloom, he doused the lights and ascended the stairs, to find Thomas Church awaiting him in the parlor. The ruddy-faced man had the paunch and thinning white hair of a friar, but his strong, scarred hands spoke of his youth as a mason, before circumstances conspired to raise him to
a life in the magistrate. As a child, Colin had always found himself impressed by the air of authority Church carried with him, in spite of his meager beginnings as a tradesman.
He spoke with authority as he told of the search effort’s utter failure.
“We’ve peered into every hole in Norwich and combed the hills and fields,” Church said grimly, running his fingers through his shaggy beard. “If Sir Edgar isn’t hiding, or being hid, he’ll turn up at some point. The lads I’ve got out looking aren’t ready to give up quite yet, but in a couple of days I’ll have to call it off. They’ve got lives to return to, y’see. Jobs and families.”
“I understand, Mr. Church,” Colin said. “And I hope you’ll pass along my gratitude to each of them.”
It was obvious Church wanted to say more, that he felt gravely dissatisfied with his own performance, but Colin could think of no words he might have spoken that would have provided solace and so he offered none. He watched Church withdraw and then depart, allowing himself no outward expression of the despair that had begun to gnaw at his heart.
That night, in the darkness of his bedroom, he felt sure he heard the walls whisper his dead mother’s name.
At first he thought it might be the moan of the October wind through the gap he had left in his window. He had surfaced from a deeper sleep into a state of disorientation, that drowsy, floating limbo that always waited on either side of wakefulness. Now his thoughts began to clear and he listened more carefully, ascribing any sound to the wind, the creak of old houses, or the rustle of curtains.
