She’d telegraphed ahead to authorize sending for a doctor; if the girls could be saved, it would be better for her plans.
The taxi stopped at the gates, and Arachne stepped out onto the pavement without a backward glance, leaving Reggie to pay the fare. She went straight to her office; from the gate to the office there was no sign that anything had gone wrong; the sound of work, the noise of the machinery that ground and mixed the clay, the whirring of the wheels, and the slapping of the wet clay as the air and excess water was driven out of it continued unabated under the glaring gaslights—which was as it should be. Accidents happened, but unless the entire pottery blew up or fell into the river, work continued. The workers themselves could not afford to do without the wages they would lose if it shut down, and would be the first to insist that work went on the moment after the debris was shoveled out of the way.
The main offices were vacant, and unlit but for a single gaslight on the wall, but her managers knew what to leave for her. Her office, a spacious, though spartan room enlivened only by her enormous mahogany desk, was cleaned three times daily to rid it of the ever present clay-dust. This occurred whether she was present in Exeter or not, so that her office was always ready for her. Reggie caught up with her as she entered the main offices and strode toward her private sanctum. By the light shining under the door, someone had gone in and lit the gas for her; she reached for the polished brass knob and pulled the door open, stepping through with Reggie close behind her.
The doctor—one she recognized from past meetings, an old quack with an addiction to gin—stood up unsteadily as she entered. He had not been sitting behind the desk, which was fortunate for him, since she would have left orders never to use him again if he had been.
A whiff of liquor-laden breath came to her as she faced him”Well?” she asked, shrewdly gauging his level of skill by the florid character of his face and steadiness of his stance. He wasn’t that bad; intoxicated, but not so badly as to impair his judgment.
He shook his head. “They won’t last the week,” he told her. “And even if they do, they’ll never be more than bodies propped in the corner of the poorhouse. One’s blinded, one’s lost an eye, and all three are maimed past working, even if their injuries would heal.”
He didn’t bother to point out that they probably wouldn’t heal; the lead-dust they ate saw to that. The lead-poisoned didn’t heal well.
She nodded briskly. “Well, then, we’ll just let them lie in the infirmary until they die. No point in increasing their misery by moving them. Thank you, Dr. Thane.”
She reached behind her back and held out her hand. Reggie placed a folded piece of paper into it, and she handed the doctor the envelope that contained his fee without looking at it. He took it without a word and shambled off through the door and out into the darkened outer office. She turned to Reggie, who nodded wordlessly.
“We might as well salvage what we can,” Arachne said, with grudging resignation. “Tomorrow I’ll find replacements. I’ll try, at any rate.”
“We’re using up the available talent, Mater,” Reggie pointed out. “It’s going to be hard to find orphans who can paint who are also potential magicians—”
She felt a headache coming on, and gritted her teeth. She couldn’t afford weakness, not at this moment. “Don’t you think I know that?” she snarled. “Of all the times for this to happen—it could take days to find replacements, they probably won’t be ideal and—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and exerted control over herself. “And we can burn some of the magic we salvage off these three to help us find others. We might as well; it’ll fade if we don’t use it.”
“True enough.” Reggie led the way this time, but not out the door. Instead, a hidden catch released the door concealed in the paneling at the back of the office, revealing a set of stairs faced with rock, and very, very old, leading down. “After you, Mater.”
They each took a candle from a niche just inside the door, lit it at the gas-mantle, and went inside, closing the door behind them. The stairs led in their turn to a small underground room, which, if anyone had been checking, would prove by careful measuring to lie directly beneath the infirmary.
At the bottom of the stairs was a landing, and another door. Arachne took one of the two black robes hanging on pegs outside the door to this room, and pulled it on over her street clothing. Only when Reggie was similarly garbed did she open this final door onto a room so dark it seemed to swallow up the light of their candles.
She went inside first, and by feel alone, lit the waiting black candles, each as thick as her wrist, that stood in floor-sconces on either side of the door. Light slowly oozed into the room.
It was a small, rectangular room, draped in black, with a small altar at the end opposite the door; it had in fact been a chapel, a hidden Roman Catholic chapel that dated back to the time of the eighth Henry, before it became what it was now.
It communicated with an escape tunnel to the river—the doorway now walled off, behind the drapery on the right—and its existence was the reason why Arachne had built this factory here in the first place. It wasn’t often that one could find a hidden chapel that was both accessible and had never been deconsecrated.
It still was a chapel—but the crucifix above the altar was reversed, of course. This place belonged to another form of worship, now.
Arachne went to the wall where a black-painted cupboard waited that held the black wine and the special wafers, while Reggie readied the altar itself. She smiled to herself, in spite of their difficulties; if it was rare to find a chapel of the sort needed for a proper Black Mass, it was even rarer to find someone who was willing to go through the seminary and ordination with the express purpose of being defrocked just so he could celebrate it.
Clever Reggie had been the one to think of going to the Continent and lying about his age, entering a Catholic seminary at the age of fifteen, being ordained at eighteen—and being defrocked in plenty of time to pass his entrance examinations and be accepted at Cambridge with the rest of the young men his age. It had taken an extraordinary amount of work and effort. But then again, Reggie had enjoyed the action that had gotten him defrocked quite a bit. Enough that he hadn’t minded a bit when it had taken him several tries to actually be caught in the act by the senior priest of his little Provence parish.
He had made quite certain there could be no forgiveness involved. Bad enough to be caught inflagmnte delicto with a young woman of the parish. Worse, that the act took place in the sacristy, with her drunk and insensible. But when the young woman was barely pubescent—and feeble-minded—and especially put in his charge by her trusting parents—and to cap it all with defiance of the priest, saying boldly that it was no sin, since the girl wasn’t even human—well.
The old man had excommunicated him there and then, and had gone the extraordinary step of reporting his behavior to Rome to have his judgment reinforced with a papal decree.
Had all this happened by accident, it would have been impossible to hush up, and would have ruined Reggie.
But he and Arachne had been planning it from the moment he was old enough to understand just what it was that his mother was doing in her little “private bower.” He had gone to France under an assumed name. No one ever knew he had even left England.