The House on Durrow Street

by Galen Beckett

  “I’m sure a plank won’t be necessary,” Ivy said in response to Rose’s look of alarm.

  After a quarter of an hour had passed, it was clear their caller was indeed late. Not that this was entirely out of character. In Ivy’s experience, Mr. Rafferdy’s notion of time was somewhat flexible.

  After another quarter hour the tea was sent back, to be replaced with a hot pot. Lily had grown tired of watching out the window and fidgeted with the ribbons on her dress. Rose remained frozen on the sofa.

  By the time the old rosewood clock struck an hour past midday, the tea had been drunk, and the tray was devoid of a large portion of its biscuits and sandwiches. Rose at last got up from the sofa, but as she did she caught the pocket of her dress on the arm, tearing it. She burst into tears. Ivy went to comfort her, and assured her the damage could be easily repaired.

  “Where can they be?” Lily said, pacing now before the window, apparently too perturbed to bother with speaking like a seaman any longer. “I hope they don’t think we’re going to send for more biscuits!”

  Whether more biscuits were needed was the least of Ivy’s worries. She hoped something ill had not happened to keep Mr. Rafferdy away. “Perhaps he forgot about our appointment,” she said.

  “That can’t be,” Lily said. “I reminded him about it just yesterday.”

  Ivy stared at her. “Yesterday? What do you mean?”

  “Avast!” Lily exclaimed. “I suppose I completely forgot to tell you.”

  “To tell me what?”

  “About how Mr. Rafferdy came here yesterday. He had stopped in to see if by chance you were to be found, but I told him that you were out with the viscountess, and how you two had become the best of friends.”

  Ivy stood, aghast at these words. “Lily, that was hardly a truthful thing to say! I have only just met Lady Crayford.”

  “So? How long you’ve known each other doesn’t mean anything. You can fall in love with just a glance—all the books I’ve read agree that you can. And isn’t friendship a sort of love?” Lily flopped onto the sofa. “Besides, last night you could hardly stop talking about your drive in the country. It was all Lady Crayford this and Colonel Daubrent that!”

  Ivy could not deny that she had greatly enjoyed the outing yesterday. That anyone was more well read or could make more interesting observations than Lady Crayford was inconceivable, and her brother was an expert driver. As for their friend, Lord Eubrey was such a wit that soon even the stoic colonel was laughing.

  No less than in the lively company, Ivy had delighted in the sight of the green hills and the feel of wind and sun on her face. They had paused to examine various prospects and vistas, to determine which ones were worthy of the Lady Crayford’s brush. To Ivy every one of them was, and the viscountess declared that, while she had felt such bucolic scenes no longer held anything of interest to her, in Ivy’s eyes she could apprehend a sublime beauty she had never before seen in them. She declared she would return to the country with her paints and canvas as soon as possible.

  As evening fell, Ivy had returned to the inn filled with a sort of excitement she had not felt since her time in the West Country. After describing the day’s events to her sisters, she had proceeded to write a lengthy letter to Mr. Quent, telling him all about her experiences.

  “Well, I wish you had told me about Mr. Rafferdy’s visit,” Ivy said. “Yet if you spoke to him about our plan for today, he couldn’t have forgotten.”

  “I should say not! Indeed, I was very adamant when I told him he had to come even if you weren’t here.”

  Ivy shook her head. “What do you mean if I wasn’t here?”

  “Well, the maid told me that the viscountess said she would most likely need you again today.”

  A horror began to blossom within Ivy. “And you told Mr. Rafferdy this?”

  “Of course! I told him that he must still come with Mr. Garritt even if you wouldn’t be here.” Lily frowned. “Really, Ivy, I’m very surprised you didn’t go out again with the viscountess today. Everything I’ve read says that best friends can’t bear to be apart from each other for even a short while. I’m sure if the viscountess were my friend, I should not abandon her so!”

  At last Ivy apprehended the whole truth. Because of Lily’s thoughtless words, he could only have come to the conclusion that she had chosen to cast aside their prior plans in favor of the chance to go with the viscountess. How callous he must think her!

  “I must go to him at once,” she said. “I must offer him my sincerest apology. He can only believe I had broken our engagement.”

  Lily shook her head. “Why should you apologize? It’s he who should be sorry for not coming. After all, I told him Rose and I were still going to be here today. It was very rude of him not to come!”

  Ivy did not answer. It was clear that Lily was insensible to the harm she had caused, and Ivy did not have the time or desire to explain it now. She went to retrieve her cloak and bonnet, then returned to the sitting room. Lily was nowhere to be seen, and the door to the room she shared with Rose was shut. Rose stood by the window, Miss Mew in her arms.

  “Do you think Mr. Rafferdy will be very angry with us?” Rose said, her brown eyes still bright with tears.

  Despite her distressed state, Ivy managed a smile for her sister. “No, not very angry. Not when I explain what happened.”

  There was no time to have Lawden ready the cabriolet, so instead Ivy asked the innkeeper to summon a hack cab. There was one right outside the inn, and Ivy instructed the driver to take her to Warwent Square. She hoped she would find Mr. Rafferdy at home, but if not, she would wait for him until he returned.

  Marble Street was crowded that day. The carriage moved slowly, and after only a little way it came to a halt. Ivy opened the window and leaned out to see what was causing the delay. There seemed to be some commotion ahead, but she could not see what the problem was, for a large fountain decorated with marble sirens and dolphins blocked her view. She leaned farther out the window.

  One of the dolphins slapped the water in the fountain with its tail. The sirens turned their heads to avoid the resulting spray. One of them looked at Ivy and smiled.

  Ivy clutched the edge of the carriage door, staring at the stone figures frolicking amid the splashing water. Then a flicker of black caught her eye as he stepped from behind the fountain. His black mask was wrought in a grim expression.

  Go to Durrow Street, he said. Though as always his mask did not move, and the voice sounded not in her ears, but in her mind.

  “To Durrow Street?” she managed to whisper. “Why?”

  You will find the Black Stork there. His time grows short. You must go to him while you can.

  “The Black Stork?” So she had been right in thinking it was not the man in the mask. “But then who is he?” she said aloud.

  Another splash rose up from the fountain, and when the spray cleared he was gone. The sirens and dolphins perched above the water, motionless once more. The hack cab lurched back into motion.

  Ivy gazed for a moment at the place where the man in the mask had stood. Then she pounded on the roof of the carriage. Again it came to a halt, and in a moment the driver stood outside the door.

  “What is it, madam? The jam’s finally cleared in the street.”

  “You must turn around,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Turn around? But that’s not the way to Warwent Square, madam.”

  “I know. I’m sorry to have given you the wrong direction, but I need you to take me somewhere else.”

  “As you wish, madam. Where is it I should drive?”

  Ivy swallowed, and a feeling rose in her that was at once anticipation and dread. “To Durrow Street,” she said.

  IT TOOK LITTLE more than a quarter of an hour. Ivy paid the driver his fee, then pushed through the iron gate into the garden before the house. She did not know what she expected to see. The last time the man in the peculiar black garb had told her to come here, the
magicians of the Vigilant Order of the Silver Eye had been on their way to seize the Eye of Ran-Yahgren. Had someone come now to try the same—perhaps some of those other magicians the man in the mask had spoken of the last time he appeared to her?

  It occurred to her this was foolish. If there were magicians here, what would she do against them? Besides, the house had its own defenses; Mr. Rafferdy had awakened them. And had she not told herself that she was done with the strange man and his cryptic warnings?

  Yet her father had said in his letter to listen to him.

  Ivy moved farther into the garden. It was quiet except for a faint hiss through the leaves of the twisted hawthorns. She moved among the trees and began a circuit around the house, looking for any sign of the one she was supposed to meet with.

  She had nearly completed her circle around the house when she came upon a dark heap in the grass. It lay beside a bush off the north side of the house. In life, its wings would have spanned as wide as her outstretched arms. Now they were crumpled beneath its body like black rags. Ants crawled across bedraggled feathers; its eyes were small, eaten pits.

  Ivy clapped a hand to her mouth. Was this what the man in the mask had meant for her to find? If so, it was a strange and horrid jest. She had felt badly at depriving the storks of their home. Now it seemed that, ill or injured, one of them had tried to return here to its previous roost to find safe haven. Only the window had been repaired; it could not get in. By the odor, the bird had perished several days ago.

  A black stork brings black luck, Mrs. Seenly had once said.

  But for whom? Surely the creature’s own fate had not been a lucky one. Nor did she comprehend how the masked man had known about the incident with the storks, or why he had wanted her to see this.

  Well, Ivy didn’t care what his reason was. Whoever the man in the mask was, he was no one she wanted to have anything to do with again. She would go back to the inn and write a note to Mr. Barbridge, asking him to send one of his men to see to the poor creature. She would request that it be given a decent burial here in the north garden. That much, at least, she owed it. Resolved, she made her way back around to the front of the house.

  And stopped.

  In the street, beyond the iron gate, was a carriage. It was not a hack cab. Instead, its wood was a glossy black decorated with gilded trim, and before it stood four dappled grays.

  Something moved in the window of the carriage. It was a thin hand, beckoning to her. A dread descended over Ivy. She wanted to turn, to flee into the house, like the stork searching for a haven.

  Again the hand beckoned, and she passed through the gate to approach the carriage. The driver stepped down from his bench. He tipped his hat to Ivy, then opened the carriage door. In the dimness within she caught a glimpse of something as withered and crumpled as the bird lying in the garden.

  “Can you help me?” came a dry voice.

  At first Ivy thought the words were directed at her, and a revulsion seized her. But it was the young driver who responded. He reached into the carriage and with strong, sure motions that suggested prior practice, helped a man through the door and down the step.

  Now a new kind of horror came over Ivy, but it was at once tinged with sorrow and pity. When she had seen him last year, he had been an older gentleman on the verge of corpulence. Now he appeared ancient rather than old, and thin—so terribly thin. He seemed lost within his dark suit and hat, like a child who had donned a grown man’s clothes for amusement.

  With the driver’s help, he crossed the short distance to Ivy in shuffling steps. Deep grooves etched his face.

  “Lord Rafferdy!” she uttered at last.

  He smiled—and despite the ruin of his face, she saw something of the good-tempered man she had met last year.

  “I am surprised you recognize me at all, Lady Quent.” His voice was hoarse, yet carried real feeling. “I know that I am much … altered since our last meeting.”

  Now any horror or revulsion she had felt passed. Those had been sensations of the most selfish kind, borne out of consideration of only her own feelings. Ivy moved to take his hand. It was like grasping a bundle of twigs; she held it gently yet warmly.

  “I would always know you, my lord.” She did not turn her gaze aside, but instead looked at him directly. “How could I not recognize one who has given so much to my husband, and thus to myself as well?”

  He nodded. “I am pleased to hear you say so. Yet I have given nothing so great to your husband as what you have given him, Lady Quent.”

  Ivy knew not what to say to those words.

  “I was going to send you a note,” Lord Rafferdy said, “yet I see you are already here. Keeping an eye on the final arrangements for the house?”

  “No, I came because the …” Ivy hesitated, unsure what to say. “But it does not matter. I am only glad that I am here to meet you. But why have you come here?”

  He gazed past her. “I saw you examining something in the garden over there, Lady Quent. You seemed very intent upon it. What was it, if you do not mind my asking?”

  “I fear it was nothing good,” she said, and she explained how it was a dead stork—presumably one of the ones that had been driven from the house. The lord inquirer seemed to stagger a bit as she described this, and the young driver steadied his arm.

  “It was a black stork, you say?”

  Ivy nodded. “It was.”

  Again his blistered lips curved in a smile, but this time it was a rueful expression. “How strange that one should be here! Only perhaps it is fitting somehow. It was what my closest friends called me, you know—when I was a young man serving in the army.”

  Now Ivy did stare at him, only out of astonishment rather than horror. “It is you! You are the Black Stork!”

  He tilted his head to regard her. “So you’ve heard that name before?”

  Her mind abuzz, she explained how she had seen an illusionist’s impression of three young lords at Lady Marsdel’s house, and also how her father had mentioned the Black Stork in something he had written.

  “The Three Lords of Am-Anaru,” he said, shaking his head. “It was Earl Rylend who named our little band. How like him to devise something so ostentatious. The Gold Crane—that was Rylend. And Lord Marsdel was the Blue Fisher. How grand and remarkable we thought ourselves! But that was long ago. They are years gone now, and Sir Quent’s father with them, Eternum rest his soul.”

  As he spoke, his withered hand had slipped into the pocket of his coat, and it seemed he gripped something within.

  “Lord Rafferdy?”

  His eyes had gone distant, and his lips moved, though they made no sound. At last, he shook his head.

  “Forgive me, Lady Quent.” He withdrew his hand from his coat. “Like all old men, I am easily lost in recollections of the past. But now that you have called me back to the present, I have a question for you. Do you know where I might find my son? I went to his home earlier, but he was not there.”

  Ivy confessed that she did not know where Mr. Rafferdy could be found. She described that he had come to The Seventh Swan yesterday, though she had not seen him herself.

  “So he is in the city, then. Very good.”

  “Is that why you came to Invarel, Lord Rafferdy? To see your son?”

  “One of the reasons.” A grimace crossed his face. “But I can stand out here no longer, Lady Quent. Though my girth is far less than what it was, still my legs find it difficult to bear. Please—let us go inside.”

  “Of course!” she exclaimed. “But surely you know—no doubt he has made his plans known to you—that my husband is not in the city. I do not expect him back for some time.”

  “I know, Lady Quent. It is quite all right. You see, it is not Sir Quent that I came to Invarel to see. Rather, it is you who I wish to speak with.”

  Again she found herself staring. “Me? But about what matter?”

  He turned toward the driver. “I am sure that Lady Quent can help me walk to the house. You may
wait here.”

  The young man nodded and stepped away. As he did, Lord Rafferdy laid a hand upon Ivy’s arm. His touch was dry and hot.

  “Come, Lady Quent,” he said. “Since you have heard of the Three Lords of Am-Anaru, it is time you learned what it was they discovered beneath the sands of the Empire.”

  And while it was he who leaned upon her arm, to Ivy it felt as if she was the one drawn forward toward the house. As they approached the door, he cast a glance at one of the stone lions that kept watch to either side. He seemed to give a small nod, then they passed into the dimness of the empty house. They made it as far as a bench beside a window, and this he sank to before she could even remove the sheet that covered it. He gestured for her to sit beside him, and she did, still wondering what matter he could possibly wish to speak to her about.

  “So this is Lockwell’s house,” he said, looking around with pale gray eyes. “It is an exceedingly handsome edifice. Though I am sure it did not look quite like this when your father dwelled here.”

  Despite the peculiarity of this meeting, Ivy smiled. “No, I fear it did not. My father was a doctor, and he was always far more interested in books and instruments of science than he was in housekeeping.”

  “Yes, such was my impression of him,” Lord Rafferdy said. “But he was more than a doctor, and he was interested in more than merely science, was that not the case, Lady Quent?”

  Surprised, Ivy could only answer with the truth. “Yes, he was also a magician of some ability. But I confess I am puzzled, Lord Rafferdy, for you speak almost as if you knew him.”

  Now it was toward her that he directed his gaze. “That is because I did know Gaustien Lockwell.”

  Ivy stared at him, trying to comprehend these words. She had always believed it was only due to Mr. Bennick’s machinations that she had ever had a connection with Mr. Rafferdy. Last year, Mr. Bennick had used her cousin, Mr. Wyble, as a means to bring Ivy and Mr. Rafferdy into association in the hopes that together they would open the door to the house on Durrow Street—a thing they in fact accomplished.