The response was a few seconds in coming, and again Hudson saw that cloud cross her face though it quickly cleared. “Yes, Father,” she said, “I do.”

“Ah.” Hudson gave her a smile; it was a tight smile, but he was doing the best he could. “Tell me what else you enjoy.”

The man said, “Mary Lynn likes to—”

“Pardon me, sir. I’d like to hear it from your charming daughter.” Hudson’s smile stayed fixed in place though the black tarpits of his eyes promised that violent destruction of this house could be achieved on a moment’s notice. He returned a softer gaze to the girl. “Go ahead,” he offered.

“Well,” she began, and she smiled brightly, “I do so enjoy—” She stopped suddenly, her smile faltered, and in her freckled face her blue eyes seemed to haze over as if they had become as ponds of ice. She looked to her counterfeit father, then back to Hudson, and then into her teacup as if her fortune—and the sense that was steadily leaving her mind—could be found there.

“Horseback riding,” Frederick Nash supplied. “You always enjoy that.”

“A notable endeavor,” Hudson replied, still staring at the girl. “Tell me … when was the last time you went riding?”

A silence followed. Berry Grigsby—now known in the Nash house and in this foul village of Professor Fell’s drug experiments as Mary Lynn Nash—took a sip of tea. Her hand trembled, just a fraction; her eyes, so usually sparkling with life, were now as dead as the doll’s face she had been painted and powdered to resemble. The sight of her like this—her body pushed into a pink gown too small for her, the brown wig of curly ringlets like a mudslide covering the coppery-red highlights of her own hair, her face whitened with powder and reddened with rouge and her eyes sunken down into purple hollows—made Hudson both saddened and enraged, and for a shilling and this pisspot of tea he would tear Nash limb from limb and then take this evil house apart at the joints. It had been explained to Hudson that Nash’s wife—Mary Lynn’s “mother”—was feeling poorly and had gone abed early, but Hudson thought it was a lie; he figured the woman simply didn’t want to see anyone who had known Berry in a previous life. Hudson had had to display several violent temper fits to get this far, and after smashing the furniture in his own cottage and throwing it into the street the word had come that he was allowed to see “the girl”, as his handler—a wiry and dangerous-looking man who called himself ‘Stalker’—referred to Berry.

He wanted to beat them all to senseless pulps, including the woman in the other room. But there were so many questions he needed answers to, and up until now no one in this place—Y Beautiful Bedd, it was called—would give him satisfaction; therefore he needed to hold his seething anger and his fists until he could learn what exactly was going on, and where exactly was the young man he and Berry had crossed the Atlantic from New York to find.