Unhonored (6 page)

“Well, if I were him,” the clown said from behind his mask, “then I would wait however long it pleased you.”

“The watch?” Ellis insisted.

“Yes, the watch,” the clown said, taking the broken timepiece. “Let me take a look.”

“Have we met before?” Ellis delivered the words as she had spoken them before in this shop.

“I am sure I would have remembered you,” the clown answered.

The murmur running through the audience was getting louder. Merrick stood up in the front of the theater. “What is this?”

“Sorry, of course you're right,” Ellis continued, repeating the words as they came to her. “People are always saying that to each other.”

“It doesn't mean they're wrong.” The clown nodded. “We're meeting now and that's a good start. Your watch has a broken balance wheel, Miss…?”

“Ellis.” She smiled at the memory. “Ellis Harkington.”

“This may take some time, Ellis,” the clown said with a catch in his voice.

“There is no rush,” Ellis sighed. The words she had spoken before but now there was a warmth to them that she did not understand but felt deeply. She stepped forward, breaking out of the memory. The paintings on the background flats rearranged themselves back into the depiction of a restaurant interior and fell backward onto the stage with a bang.

“I
knew
you,” Ellis said. “You were there … I knew you in Boston! You're…”

“JONAS!” Merrick shouted, rushing toward the stage. “The play is finished! Let the hunt begin!”

A cheer rang out from the audience as they leaped to their feet.

Jonas grabbed Ellis's hand. “Run, Ellis! RUN!”

He pulled her toward the wings of the stage.

They ran.

 

6

BELOW STAIRS

Ellis trailed behind Jonas, his grip on her hand as firm as steel and, to her touch, just as cold. She caught a glimpse of the astonished face of Margaret as they slipped past her. The fire-safe stage door was wedged slightly ajar. Jonas made a beeline toward it, shoving it open with his free arm. The door swung violently open, rebounding off of the wall behind it. Ellis slipped through the opening just before the door slammed closed behind them.

Jonas did not hesitate. He turned at once to the left down a long, whitewashed hallway with mounted pipes running along the ceiling. Caged light fixtures with bare bulbs cast stark light in pools down the short length of the narrow hall that ended in a T intersection of even narrower passages. Jonas chose the right, smashing against the wall as he careened around the corner. Ellis, too, crashed against the wall but was dragged forward again almost at once by Jonas's unrelenting grip.

“Where are you taking me?” Ellis asked, her breath already coming in short gulps.

“Away,” Jonas replied. His volto mask still clung to his face. “As far away as possible.”

“But
where,
” she demanded.

“Anywhere!” Jonas cried out.

Their costumes rubbed against the narrowing walls. Ellis could see a wooden door at the end of the passage but the walls seemed to be closing in on them. She wondered for a moment if they would become stuck before they reached the door.

Voices echoed from the corridor behind them. Laughing voices. Giggling voices. Hysterical, disparate and desperate voices.

Jonas snatched at the latch handle. It shifted reluctantly and, in a moment, the wooden door swung open onto darkness.

Ellis cried out as Jonas pulled her in with him.

Jonas pressed the door closed behind them. Ellis's eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dim light. They stood on a landing of an open stairwell. The stairs were narrow, made of wood with an oil finish. She looked up but could not make out the ceiling let alone the top landing of the stairs. She leaned forward slightly against the railing to look downward. It gave slightly at her touch. She pulled back but even in that moment knew that she could not perceive the bottom of the stairwell, either.

“Don't stop, Ellis,” Jonas whispered urgently to her. “We have to keep going.”

“Going?” Ellis gaped. “I'm not going anywhere until you—”

“Stop it!” Jonas demanded, his voice firm, as though he would brook no opposition. “For this once, Ellis, just listen to me. Don't argue. Don't question. Don't doubt. Just follow me. Can you do that for just a few minutes until we're somewhere safe?”

Ellis felt her face redden. She wanted to defy him … was shocked at how natural it felt to defy him …

The muted murmur of voices could be heard on the other side of the door.

Ellis held her tongue and only nodded.

Jonas drew in a deep breath and then plunged down the stairs with Ellis in tow. They traversed several flights, each time coming to a landing with a door identical to the door they had just left on the previous landing. Jonas, however, did not appear to be looking at the exits at all, but rather was counting to himself with each landing to which they descended. Finally he muttered, “Seven!” to himself, reached out for the doorknob and pulled open the door.

He ran almost at once into the metal frame of a small bed that nearly filled the bare room. The steel legs screeched horribly as the frame scraped across the floor. Jonas swore indistinctly through teeth clenched against the pain, and pulled Ellis around the bed toward the door on the opposite side.

It was a nursery. The room was ornately decorated in muted Alice blue and light pink tones. There was a coffered ceiling in this room with a rocking chair set near an unlit fireplace and a large bassinet in the corner.

The wailing of a baby's lusty cries were coming from the bassinet.

“Wait!” Ellis cried out. “The baby…”

“Not now, Ellis,” Jonas insisted, pulling her across the room by the viselike grip of his hand.

“There's no one here to take care of it,” Ellis protested. “We have to do something…”

“There is nothing we can do for it.” Jonas scowled, his brow knitted in determination. “Not for it or for anyone else here.”

“So, we're just leaving this child?” Ellis was aghast.

“It doesn't matter,” Jonas said, impatience coloring his words. “Come on!”

The door should have led to a closet but instead opened onto a steep, narrow staircase plunging downward. At the base of the stairs more than twenty feet below them, dim bulbs cast an amber light from wall-mounted iron sconces set on either side of a door with peeling, beige paint.

Jonas stepped onto the stairs carefully. He glanced backward at Ellis, his free hand raising a finger to his lips, begging her to be quiet as well. The stairs creaked softly beneath their feet as they descended. At the next door, Jonas paused, listening for any sound on the other side. Satisfied, he turned the tarnished brass handle and pushed it open.

Ellis stepped through into a broad hallway. It had a floor of fitted tiles that shone in the incandescent glow from punch-bowl lights mounted to the ceiling at even intervals. There was a bench set to one side of the hall between a pair of closed doors finished in white paint. Across from these was a matching set of open doorframes. Through them Ellis caught a glimpse of a pristine kitchen unsullied by a dirty dish or cooking sauce. It was strange, Ellis thought, that nothing was happening in the one room in the house that she knew should be busy nearly every moment of a waking day.

I know you think you have to learn these things, but you upset Cook whenever she finds you in her kitchen.

Ellis's hand went to her head. That voice. Her mother's voice.

Cook is doing something every moment of the day in her domain and she has no time to take you on as an apprentice as well.

“Ellis,” Jonas said, carefully examining her face. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I am fine,” Ellis snapped, stepping back and snatching her hand sharply away from his entwining fingers. “But, you … I
remember
you.”

Jonas gave her a smile that was colored by the pain in his eyes. “Yes, I very much hope you do.”

“Don't be too certain that's a good thing,” Ellis insisted, keeping her distance. “I'm not. Take off that mask.”

Jonas drew in a breath.

“Now,” Ellis insisted.

Jonas sighed. He leaned his face forward, reaching up with his right hand. He slipped the mask up over his head and then raised his face to her. His hair was dark and wavy though now no longer carefully combed, disheveled as it was from removing his mask. His face still looked young to her as it was the type of face that would never look old, but there were lines at the corners of his gray-green eyes that she had not noticed on their previous encounters.

It was the paisley-shaped bruise around his right eye that made her catch her breath. It was darker and more pronounced than she remembered it, with a number of abrasions on his cheek that she did not remember him having before. Instinctively, she reached up with her hand toward his injured cheek.

He pulled away from her reach.

“Did Merrick do this to you?” Ellis asked.

“No.” Jonas shook his head. “You said you remembered me. What do you remember?”

“I remember a watchmaker's shop,” Ellis said. Even as she spoke the words, she could almost feel the cool of the cabinet glass and smell the lacquer from the clock housings on the wall. “My watch was not running and I was trying to keep an appointment with…”

“With some suitor your mother had arranged for you.” Jonas smiled at her.

“Yes.” Ellis nodded. “I never kept the appointment.”

“I pretended to take a long time fixing your watch,” Jonas said with a shy smile. “I didn't want you to leave and certainly not to meet another man.”

“Hmm.” Ellis conveyed neither approval nor disdain with the sound, just acknowledgment of the statement. She stepped around him, surveying their surroundings. “This is the servants' hall, I believe. We're below stairs, as my…”

Ellis stopped in thought.

“As your what?” Jonas urged.

Ellis smiled sadly as she stepped listlessly about the hall. “As my mother used to say. I don't think she ever paid much thought to the people who worked in places like this. She certainly didn't approve of my being anywhere near a kitchen.”

“Which explains a great deal,” Jonas said with a gentle laugh.

“Whatever does that mean?” Ellis asked with a sharp glance.

“Nothing at all,” Jonas said. He leaned back against the wall, setting his mask down on a bench next to him.

“Well, Mister … what is your name again?”

“Jonas,” he replied with less patience than he felt. “Jonas Kirk.”

“Well, Mr. Jonas Kirk of Boston—”

“Nova Scotia,” Jonas corrected.

“I beg your pardon?” Ellis's eyes narrowed.

“I only worked in Boston, in my uncle's shop,” Jonas corrected. “I was born in Nova Scotia.”

“Well, then, Mr. Kirk,” Ellis said, taking a step toward him. “I believe it's clear that we are no longer in either Boston or Nova Scotia now.”

“No, we are very far from both, indeed.” Jonas nodded. He shook himself out of the pleasant reverie. “Too far.”

“And what do you propose?” Ellis asked, her eyes fixed on him. She still did not trust him any more than she trusted Merrick but the memory of their meeting lingered in her mind.

You have to learn the rules before you can break them.

Her father's voice.

“That we find Jenny, wherever she is in this house,” Jonas said. “Please, Ellis. We haven't the time to stop now and talk.”

“We find Jenny?” Ellis mocked. “Slipping unnoticed about this house in our masquerade clown costumes so that we might find my cousin before one of the other lunatics finds her first. And once we do?”

“Once we find Jenny, we'll know what to do,” Jonas said with increasing urgency. “Please. We need to move on, Ellis. If we stay in one place too long, they'll find us.”

“Move on?” Ellis raised her eyebrow at the thought. “Find Jenny, you say, and move on to where?”

“Home,” Jonas replied. “I need to get you home.”

“Home? And I suppose you know where home is?”

“Yes, Ellis,” Jonas said. “I've waited a very long time to take you there.”

“And just what do you know of home?” Ellis asked, gesturing about her. “I have been told repeatedly that this is my home. This never-ending nightmare of senselessness. I am supposed to be some sort of queen of this asylum from what I understand. The lady of Echo House and the mistress of madness.”

“You are indeed, my lady,” said the chirping, nasal voice behind her.

Ellis turned around, startled.

Standing in the center of the servants' hall was an older woman wearing the plain, black dress common among the servants. Her hair was stark white and carefully pulled back into a bun at the back of her head. She had a square face softened by age. Her eyes were a deep blue, sparkling behind a pince-nez perched across the bridge of her nose.

“I'm sorry for having startled you, ma'am,” the old woman said gently. Her raised hand was as pale as linen and as thin as parchment. “I heard voices here in the hall and thought I might be of some assistance to your ladyship. And the boy is right, my lady, about one thing: you really must hurry along.”

“Who are you?” Ellis demanded.

“Beggin' your pardon, ma'am,” the woman said with a slight curtsy. “I'm your housekeeper … Mrs. Crow.”

 

7

MRS. CROW

“Mrs. Crow?”

The older woman folded her hands in front of her and cocked her head slightly to one side. “But of course your ladyship would not be remembering me, having just returned so far from outside the house. It is completely understandable and you shouldn't trouble yourself about it. You are as always welcome here, your ladyship, but I am surprised to see you below stairs. I'd offer her ladyship a cup of tea but if he's after you again then you've no time to lose.”