“Well, madam,” he said, “you know how I hate to disappoint you.”
* * *
Rothport curled up the grey coastal cliff like an inverted question mark.
Rothling Abbey, a gigantic ruin in the local black stone, dominated the headland. On clear days—which this was not—it was visible for miles out to sea. A road wound up towards it, lined with crooked houses on either side, but stopped at the modern church built a little further down the hill. The bulk of the town hugged the harbour, where two-masted doggers with folded sails huddled out beyond the long grey pier, along with a handful of bobbing modern tugs with dark smokestacks. A thin strip of foul-smelling sand was in evidence at the apex of the harbour’s curve, and some brave soul had put up a large red parasol there to shade nonexistent visitors from the nonexistent sun. Stray spitting raindrops pattered on the red canopy and left spreading ripples on the dark surface of the sea. On that April afternoon, Silver stepped down from the hire carriage ahead of his mother, meaning to help her down, and then halted.
A memory that was only half his whispered to him that the ocean had not been there so long. There had been a broad valley, and half a hundred little rivers, and an unbroken forest cradling half the world stretching all across that silted land. And then, when the world changed and the water rose, there had been islands still strung out like a chain. Silver could almost see them, each crowned with its last handful of trees.
“—Henry,” said Mrs Silver, and Silver startled and turned to the sound of her voice.
Tobias Finch was at her side, holding her hand as she stepped down from the carriage.
Still half-mazed by a dream of rising oceans, Silver could only stare.
How had he forgotten the size of the man?
Tobias dwarfed Silver’s mother. He also stood head and shoulders above Silver, who was not short. But it was not just his height that struck one’s attention; it was the broadness along with it, the deep chest, the powerful shoulders, the profound solidity of a man who even now seemed more a feature of the landscape than a human being. Tobias might have been carved out of the Rothport cliff. He might have stood like Rothling Abbey on the headland, blasted and unbowed for a thousand years. Silver felt small, shabby, flimsy, looking at him.
His hair was short now. Maybe Silver’s mother had cut it. He wore sideburns and a neat moustache instead of the full beard he had sported when Silver first met him. He was less brown too than he had been a year ago; it had been a cold and sunless winter. In fact he looked every inch the well-set-up modern man. His shoes were shined; his hair was combed; his dark coat was good quality and fitted him well. Silver detected his mother’s handiwork in that. He could not justly object. He entirely understood the urge to put Tobias’s enormous and handsome form in decent clothes; hadn’t he been generous himself, when he’d had the opportunity?
He stood up straighter, wishing now he’d had the sense to protect at least some of his own good clothes from his self-indulgent ruin of Greenhollow Hall. He thoroughly regretted wearing the too-large tweed jacket. But if nothing else, Silver prided himself on his ability to smile and speak well: so he smiled, as if they had never quarrelled and never parted and were in fact no more than casual acquaintances in the first place, and he said, “Mr Finch. A pleasure to see you again.”
And already some imp in his thoughts was murmuring: It has been nearly two years. Perhaps, now that he sees you—
Silver pushed the thought down so it would not show on his face, and smiled at Tobias with, he hoped, the air of a man who had not been sulking for most of the time they had been apart. Nothing so unattractive as self-pity. But Tobias’s hazel-green eyes flicked over Silver once, and he only nodded to him. “Morning, Mr Silver” was all he said.
A lock of his combed hair fell across his brow. Silver’s hand twitched with the unacceptable desire to tuck it back into place, and he had to glance down. Tobias didn’t seem to notice it, or the tweed jacket Silver was wearing, or anything at all; foolish of Silver, probably, to expect the man to even remember a garment he hadn’t cared to take with him two years ago. He let go of Mrs Silver’s hand to pick up her travelling case. He passed her cane to her as well. He had always been a man of few words. Who knew better than Silver how firm Tobias’s reserve could be? Who knew better that under that implacable wall of reserve he had as much feeling as a hundred more demonstrative fellows? Perhaps, if Silver exerted a little patience, he might gain access to what lay beneath the surface. It had worked before, he told himself firmly. Hadn’t it worked before?
The sea breeze picked up a little. Silver felt it tug at his dishevelled hair, his shapeless coat. The brim of Mrs Silver’s hat bounced in the fresh air. The salt-and-fish smell of a minor harbour town rolled over the three of them. Tobias turned his back to Silver as he offered Mrs Silver his arm to help her walk up the hill.
For a snivelling and pathetic moment, Silver considered being jealous of his own mother.
Absurd. Embarrassing. He could do better.
It was not, he told himself, that he expected to win Tobias back. But there was nothing wrong with putting one’s best foot forward.
“Well, madam, I am here and I am in your hands,” he said, coming up on Mrs Silver’s other side. He did not offer his arm; her stern grip on her cane told him it would not be welcome. “Let us by all means see to the happy resolution of the peculiar case of Maud Lindhurst.”
* * *
The Lindhursts were a well-off older couple, living in one of the crooked houses on the hill. Their money would be in coal or cotton or wool or something; Silver had no interest in the matter. Thankfully, he barely had to speak to the pair of them. He got an impression of red-eyed helplessness from the mother, pompous terror from the father, and polite handshakes all round. Then Mrs Silver shut the three of them in the family dining room.
It was a substantial and gloomy apartment. Between the massive table, the carvers and dining chairs, the sideboards and ornamental cabinets and overblown mantelpiece, there was scarcely room for one person to sidle in, let alone three. As if all that were not bad enough, there was also an upright pianoforte crammed into the corner. The only way a person could possibly play it would be if they were rail-thin enough to fit themselves into the miniscule gap where the stool was jammed next to the fireplace screen.
Tobias was too big for the room. It took him some effort to squeeze himself around the far side of the table, and he knocked over a candlestick with his elbow and looked worried by it. Mrs Silver took the carver at the table’s head and sat with a little sigh of relief, setting her cane against the arm of the chair. Silver went to the window and threw open the dark green damask curtains, letting in some light if no air. This side of the house had a view of the church, squat and rather ugly, and the dark bones of the ruined abbey rising behind it like the carcass of a whale. Silver looked at it for a studied moment.
“A romantic spot,” he remarked lightly. “The sort of place where one imagines Gothic maidens being menaced by dreadful demons. So.” He turned, with his most charming smile, intentionally not aimed in any particular direction. “Tell me about this vampire.”
The big dining table was covered in papers; Mrs Silver’s looping handwriting predominated, but Silver could see a faded notebook full of a half-familiar scrawl, held open with a paperweight. The situation was serious if Mrs Silver had resorted to his father’s records. There were also three or four books that he recognised; his own copies were in the dusty library at Greenhollow Hall. De Stricibus et Lamiis; that was an old chestnut. Vampires, Ghouls, and Other Revenants: Some Continental Legends. Silver picked that one up, meaning to flip through it—only wanting something to do with his hands—and found it had been covering up a pile of pencil sketches. The topmost one showed the face of an older man: bald, unsmiling, strikingly hawk-nosed, with piercing black eyes. Silver raised his eyebrows and picked it up. “Is this the creature? Your sketches have improved, madam.”