A Spark Unseen tdu-2 Read online




  A Spark Unseen

  ( The Dark Unwinding - 2 )

  Sharon Cameron

  The thrilling sequel to Sharon Cameron's blockbuster gothic steampunk romance, THE DARK UNWINDING, will captivate readers anew with mystery and intrigue aplenty.

  When Katharine Tulman wakes in the middle of the night and accidentally foils a kidnapping attempt on her uncle, she realizes Stranwyne Keep is no longer safe for Uncle Tully and his genius inventions. She flees to Paris, where she hopes to remain undetected and also find the mysterious and handsome Lane, who is suspected to be dead.

  But the search for Lane is not easy, and Katharine soon finds herself embroiled in a labyrinth of political intrigue. And with unexpected enemies and allies at every turn, Katharine will have to figure out whom she can trust--if anyone--to protect her uncle from danger once and for all.

  Filled with deadly twists, whispering romance, and heart-stopping suspense, this sequel to THE DARK UNWINDING whisks readers off on another thrilling adventure.

  A Spark Unseen

  The Dark Unwinding 2

  by

  Sharon Cameron

  FOR MY FAMILY

  AND THEIR QUEST FOR TRUTH DURING A

  SUNDAY LUNCH

  1

  September 1854

  I opened my eyes, the air in my bedchamber pulsing with the kind of silence that only comes in the wake of sound — a sound that never should have been there. I waited, listening. Shadows hid the dressing table, my bookshelves, the roses on the wallpaper, each window swathed in a shroud of black. But my room was empty. I felt this as certainly as the satin coverlet clutched in my hand. And then it came again. A soft clink of metal, and a creak of floorboard in the hall. I watched a shaft of yellow light move across the crack beneath my door.

  I flung back the coverlet and ran, barefoot and noiseless, across the carpet; all thought now narrowed to a single key that stood in the lock on my door. The same key I had forgotten to turn before climbing into bed. My feet stopped of their own accord just before the door, nightgown tangled about my knees, and quietly I pressed one cheek against the cold mahogany while my left hand felt through the darkness, searching for the key. There was a low murmur in the corridor, a man’s timbre, and an answering grumble. Two of them. My fingers found the key. I turned it, slowly, dreading its click. And just as slowly, I felt the knob above my key begin to move, twisted by a hand from the other side. The door locked with an audible thunk as the knob gave a short rattle.

  And then I fled, skirting around furniture I knew to be there but could not see, hair wild and unbraided, through the inner door, across the bathing room, and into Mary’s little bedchamber. I passed her sleeping form and tried the latch of the door to my uncle’s workshop. Locked. I let out my breath. The room we called the workshop also had a door to the corridor, the corridor that held at least two men trying to enter my bedchamber. But it was not me they wanted to find, or my maid; I was certain of that. How long before they discovered they had the wrong door? I hurried to the rumpled bed, Mary’s face just visible in the red light of her stove’s dying coals.

  “Mary!” I whispered. “Wake up!”

  Mary’s breath went in and out, whistling.

  “Mary!” I grabbed a candle, thrust the taper in the coals, and put the flaming wick to an oil lamp on the bedside table. Light bloomed across her dreaming face. I shook Mary hard, and when that didn’t work, shook her violently. Heavy lids fluttered, her mouth opened, and I clamped a hand over it before any words could come out.

  “Men in the corridor,” I said, holding my voice low.

  Mary’s eyes focused, going large and wide above my knuckles.

  “We must get Uncle Tully. Do you understand?”

  She stared at me a moment longer, then nodded. I removed my hand and she clambered out of the bed, her nightcap askew. “Lord, Miss, but you gave me a fright!” she hissed. “I don’t know what this house is coming to when —”

  “Never mind,” I said, pushing away her hands. She had been trying to stuff my arm into the sleeve of a dressing gown, as if I might be concerned at this moment with a lack of decency. “Where is the key? To the workshop?”

  “On the table. But what about John George, Miss? Weren’t it his night to be watching in the —”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. We have to get Uncle …”

  We froze at the same instant, Mary’s gaze snapping up to find mine. There were voices in my bedchamber, echoing on the marble walls of the bathing room, no longer bothering with quiet. How could they have gotten through my locked door so quickly and without noise? The dressing gown slipped from Mary’s hands, becoming a silken puddle on the carpet.

  I flitted to the bathing-room door, shut it softly, and slid its bolt into place — no lock to turn here — while Mary shuffled through the things on her bedside table, searching for the key to the workshop. The door moved, and then rattled hard in its frame, caught against the bolt.

  I took a step back, and Mary knocked the key off the table and into a basket of knitting.

  One.

  I counted the dull, slow thuds of a shoulder ramming against the door.

  Two. Three.

  I grabbed the oil lamp while Mary got to her knees, scrabbling for the key in a tangle of yarn.

  Four. Five …

  Mary pulled the key free.

  Six. Seven. Eight … She thrust it into the keyhole, fumbling with the lock.

  Nine.

  Wood groaned, Mary coaxed the lock to turn, and then we were in the workshop, running the outlandish paths that snaked through the stacks of my uncle’s inventions. My light slithered over cogs and wheels of brass, catching on the metallic under-webbing of a shin or cheek, or a disembodied leg, their gears exposed like sinew and bone. And then we heard the wounded door succumb, splintering around the bolt.

  I pulled Mary to a stop. My uncle’s bedchamber was in the gloom on the other end of the room; I could almost see his door from where I stood. But I would not be so foolish as to show it to them. Mary looked at me and understood. We turned together, the lamp shining out from my hand like a beacon, facing the pair of black shapes that now stood motionless in the doorway of the workshop.

  We examined each other. Two against two, white nightgowns and yellow light against dark clothing and shadow. The door to the corridor was too far away, across a sea of humanlike machines, all eyeless, skinless, and unfinished; there had been no one here to give life to their expressions for a long time. And then I saw that the living shapes before me were also without faces. The two men wore masks. Mary’s hand tightened on mine.

  The larger one took a cautious step toward my light, and I could just make out the glint of eyes through the slits in the mask, searching for the path that would lead him to us. He focused on my face and began picking his way gingerly in the dim. The smaller of the two hung back, still and enigmatic. My eyes roved, seeking help that was not there.

  “Ne te déplace pas,” said the large one softly, almost soothingly, as he moved. “Ne bouge pas, Katharine.”

  My stomach twisted. He was speaking French, and he knew my name. I might not know what words he had used, but any doubt about why these men had come was now banished. I thought of my uncle Tully’s door, hidden only by the darkness behind me; I had not the smallest hope it would be locked. The man reached out a hand as he came, beckoning, a gentle gesture, almost imploring. In his other hand was a dagger, twinkling in my light.

  “On n’a pas besoin d’avoir recours à la violence, Katharine,” he said. “Donne-moi Monsieur Tulman.”

  This time I understood my uncle’s name and something about “violence.” The other man stood silent, waiting behind his mask. “Mary,” I s
aid, hoping these men had no more English than I had French, “we will move toward the hall, away from … from …” I didn’t want to say “Uncle Tully.” Mary nodded, still gripping me hard. We took one small side step, together, toward the corridor.

  “Donnez-nous Tulman!” the man said, voice now gruff. “Maintenant!” He waved the dagger.

  “This way,” I said, very loud and clear. I pushed Mary slightly, and we took another step toward the hall, and then another. I bumped my hip hard as I moved around a workbench, eyes on the arm with the dagger. Sleep, Uncle Tully, I begged silently. Stay asleep. And where are you, John George? You were supposed to be watching the corridor. You should have been in the corridor. … Mary whimpered, her fingers digging into my hand. “Mr. Tulman is this way,” I said again.

  The man shouted again, and we had taken three more steps before I realized that the silent one was moving, coming fast across the room. In one movement, he had vaulted the workbench between us and yanked Mary by the arm, tearing her away from me. A small pistol cocked, the muzzle disappearing into her tangle of braids.

  Mary screamed, yelling as if she’d been shot already, and my arm moved instinctively, acting on an eruption of pure, unthinking fear. I threw the oil lamp.

  It was a decent shot. The lamp hit the man and exploded, leaving lines of streaking flame as the base skipped across the carpet. Mary broke free, pushing herself away from the blaze, stumbling over backward as the man dropped the pistol; his arm was on fire. I reached out for Mary and was jerked from behind, cold metal touching the warm skin of my neck. I sucked in a gasp.

  “Ne bouge pas ou je te coupe,” said the man with the dagger, his breath hot in my ear.

  I clutched at the viselike arm around my chest, pinning me from behind as the burning man struggled to rip off his jacket. The sharp point of the knife pressed into my throat. I squeezed my eyes closed, terror giving way to a sort of cold surprise. This was not how I’d thought I would die. Had not been part of my meticulous plans when I’d pulled on my nightgown and climbed into bed. There were this month’s ledger books waiting on my desk, and the new plastering to start tomorrow in the ruined lower wing. That rent to be mended in my white stocking, and the walls of Uncle Tully’s new workshop, rising stone by stone from the riverbank …

  My eyes flew open, widening at the sting of the knifepoint as it entered my skin. Lane would come back to Stranwyne Keep, and I would not be here to meet him.

  And then the mouth at my ear grunted, the body behind me jerked, and the knife fell away from my throat. I spun, hand on my bleeding neck, and saw the masked man folding in on himself, like badly starched laundry, crumpling to the floor with an almost imperceptible thud.

  My gaze traveled up and found Mary, each freckle dark on her pale and sweating face. She had a hammer in her upraised hand, its blunt end bloody in a flickering orange light.

  I coughed and looked behind me. The burning man was gone, the hall door open, the air a haze. The jacket blazed in a ball of fire on the carpet, the flames inching outward.

  “Water, Mary!” I yelled, stumbling to the drapes, hearing her throw down the hammer as she ran for the bathing room. I ripped the rods from the windows, dragging the heavy cloth over tools and torsos of clockwork, knocking them to the floor until I could pile the drapes onto the fire on the carpet. Smoke billowed. I stomped, beating the fire beneath the drapes with bare feet as Mary threw water onto both the cloth and me before running for more.

  A few minutes and the fire was gone, the air around us a poisonous fog. Mary’s face was blackened, her watering eyes laying a white stripe on each cheek. She thrust a wet cloth into my face to breathe through as I staggered toward the naked window. I tried to turn the latch — an act that had likely not been attempted in more than two hundred years — and when it would not yield I picked up a metallic arm and smashed the windowpanes, sending sprays of glass down into the gardens below. The cool autumn night sucked at the smoke.

  I took a breath of the purer air, the burn of it like fire itself, and turned away from the broken window, stumbling through the wreckage of machinery, past the twisted shape on the floor, a dark stain spreading halo-like from around his head. The soles of his shoes were smoldering. And then I broke into a run across the workshop, scattering a bucket of screws and tearing my gown on a jagged piece of iron before I burst through the door in a cloud.

  “Uncle Tully!” I yelled. “Uncle!”

  I searched the bare and tidy room with streaming eyes. But my uncle was not there.

  2

  Mrs. Cooper put a cup of boiling tea in front of me on the kitchen table. I was sitting in what I thought of as “my chair,” the one I had claimed more than two years ago, the first day I’d stepped inside Stranwyne Keep. I felt much the same now as I had then: frightened, uncertain, and steaming with an anger that set the heat of my tea to shame — my inevitable reaction to anything beyond my control. But I was a different girl from the one who had sat here brazenly baiting Mrs. Cooper — Mrs. Jeffries, then — with a bravado that only partially covered my fear. I counted that day I’d come to Stranwyne as the first of my life, my real life; the person I’d been before it was hardly worth remembering. I held my anger in check.

  Mrs. Cooper put another cup of tea in front of Mary, nattering on and on as she did it, calling her “duck” and “poppet” and a “right good girl,” the rags tied in her hair fluttering like feathers above a white cotton nightgown. I was wearing her dressing gown, the faded blue she kept in the kitchen for baking, pulled close over my wet and sooty nightdress. I reached for the little jug in front of me.

  “Cream, Mary?” I asked, steadying my hand.

  She didn’t answer, just stared stone-faced while I poured it, her unnatural silence hurting me so much more than the small, throbbing cut at the base of my throat. She should not go back upstairs tonight. Maybe she should go home with Mrs. Cooper, or to her mother’s in the village. I smiled gamely at the still-blathering Mrs. Cooper, an expression I knew would give her comfort, and then my gaze lifted past them both, into the far corner of the room and another source of chatter. And like the cream pouring into my over-hot tea, my anger cooled, sweetened by an exquisite sense of relief.

  My uncle sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, his attention directed like a beam of light on a broken pocket watch, a trinket I had tucked away for just this purpose, to bring about distraction when needed. I had found him in his nightshirt, wandering in the ticks of his clock room, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the upper reaches of Stranwyne. The bright eyes were innocent still, intent as he hunched over the watch, alternately listening and then peering at its innards.

  “Would you like some tea, Uncle?”

  “One, two, three, click,” he muttered. “Spin, spin, four, five, click …”

  “Or some milk?”

  “Yes, yes. That is just so. Just so …”

  I did not think he was speaking of milk. “Or …”

  “I am not sleepy, Simon’s baby!” The light of his attention had focused suddenly on me. “I am not sleepy. The clocks were ticking, but you came before they could tell me when.” He cocked his head, accusations now over. “You know about the clocks, don’t you, little niece? You like the ticks. You know how to listen to the when?”

  “Yes, Uncle.” I understood it perfectly. I smiled as his face relaxed in relief. How I wished I could go to him, give him one fierce hug to assure me of his safety. But only crisis or exhaustion had ever induced Uncle Tully to accept affection, and right now he was conscious of neither. He was sighing happily.

  “My little niece knows. Lane knows what is right, and my little niece knows the when, and what we should do. This one does not tell me when. Right now, it cannot say. …”

  His white beard moved with soft but incessant words, the intense gaze back on the watch, observing the machinations of tiny gears. He would solve the problem in his hand very soon, if he had not solved it already. It was for this that those men had come,
for the strange and wonderful contents of my uncle’s mind. And they could not have it. They would not have it.

  Knuckles rapped at the door, and Mary started violently, knocking the contents of her cup into a brown, seeping streak across the table. Mrs. Cooper fell mercifully silent.

  “Tea doesn’t belong on tables,” Uncle Tully stated. “No, no. Tea belongs in cups, pots, cupboards, cabinets, people, mugs, tins. …”

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  The response from the corridor was muffled. “Only Matthew, Miss.”

  I breathed again, shaking my head at my foolishness as Mrs. Cooper moved to unlock the door. I doubted the man that had nearly shot Mary and run flaming from the workshop was likely to announce his presence with a polite knock. His companion would never knock again.

  Matthew shambled into the room, a shy, retiring ox of a man whose unlikely occupation was filling in the tiny details of flowers and vines on the figurines produced by Stranwyne’s pottery kilns. How his enormous fists did such fiddly work was a conundrum to me. I set down my cup.

  “You found nothing of him?” I asked him.

  “No, Miss.”

  “Then the man is likely several miles onto the moors by now. I will come upstairs and see what can be seen.” I stood, glad of something to do. “Mrs. Cooper, lock the door behind me, just in case, and see that Mary has a place to lie down, or that she gets to her mother’s, would you?” I saw Mary cross her arms at this, frowning at the table.

  “Don’t go for long, little niece,” my uncle called, eyes on the watch. “Not for long! We are not sleepy, but it is the wrong time for kitchens. The wrong time. I can wait in the wrong time without my niece for twenty, and then we must be back in the right place for the right time. I can only wait for twenty.”

  “Of course, Uncle.” I leaned close to Mrs. Cooper. “If the watch is repaired before I return, there is a broken clock on the top shelf of the sideboard.”