Aberline’s gaze darted to Clare, who began to have a very odd sensation in his middle. The inspector looked ready to object, and visibly thought better of it. “You are confident in your ability to find, out of all the unfortunates in Whitchapel, the one our Leather Apron has settled on?”
“Quite confident.” Miss Bannon’s faint smile bore a remarkable resemblance to a grimace of pain. She took another sip of water. “Quite confident indeed. I would explain, but sometimes a Work must not be spoken of.” She pushed her chair back, and both men leapt to their feet as she rose. “My apologies, sirs. My digestion is somewhat disarranged. Please, enjoy the remainder of dinner, I implore you. The smoking room is ready for you afterwards.”
Her black skirts rustled as she swept past Clare, and he discovered that she was not, as he had thought earlier, wearing perfume.
How peculiar. He settled once more into his chair, and Aberline applied himself to the roast in earnest. Finch was not serving tonight; Horace and Gilburn would bring the next course in due time. It was, Clare reflected, almost as if the house were his, and this a quiet dinner with a colleague or a fascinating resource.
“Have I been pleasant enough?” Aberline did not wait for a reply. “What do you make of that?”
“I am quite puzzled, I confess.” It is not like Miss Bannon to have a troubled digestion. Where is Mikal?
“No need to let it ruin one’s appetite. She dines well, if early.”
Clare almost replied, but another thought struck him.
It will be growing dark, and Tideturn is soon.
His faculties woke further, seeking to weave together disparate bits of information and deduction. Some critical piece was missing, and had he not been so… uneven… lately, he might already have it. Feeling did its best to blur Logic and Reason, and he had indulged himself too far in its whirling.
Did it matter, what irrational act Miss Bannon had committed upon him? It did not, and with the clarity of Logic he could even see why she had not told him. She had been… right, it seemed.
The vegetables arrived, and the sorbet. Dessert, and the savouries were savoured. Clare grew quieter and quieter, and Aberline saw no reason to draw him out. It might have been quite a companionable meal, had Miss Bannon been there–and the inspector absent.
It was not until he had entered the smoking room afterwards, its familiarity somehow smaller and more confining, that Clare realised he had been quite a buffoon, and Miss Bannon…
… was gone.
Oh, bloody hell.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Where The Dial Spun
Under a thick woollen blanket of vile buttery fog, Whitchapel seethed. The great hazy bowl of Londinium’s sky had darkened rapidly, yet the Scab had not come creeping out. There was oddness about, of late. From Kensington to the Dock, Caledonia to the Oval–and beyond each of those landmarks–the great smoky-backed beast was curiously… hushed.
As if it dozed.
Yet the shadows in Whitchapel were darker than ever. Ink-dark, knife-sharp, and even those who spent their brief violent lives using every scrap of shade to pursue survival felt a cold breath upon their napes. The Scab always came out at dark; it was like Tideturn or bad luck. Since there was no escaping, one made merry in the face of the reek, downed what passed for gin to soothe the sting, and snatched what one could.
To feel the absence of that familiar terror was to feel worse than uneasy.
She kept to those cold, sharp shadows; a short slim woman with a shawl over her head. Oddly, she passed unmolested through the darkness. The flashboys never bothered to catcall or demand a toll for passage; the young, unAltered blades seemed not to notice her. Once in a while an unfortunate glanced at her, taking her for one of the sisterhood braving the thoroughfares and alley-ways early to earn a few pence for doss or gin, or more likely, gin and more gin, and one last customer before staggering to a narrow bed if one was lucky.
If not, well.
Leather Apron, they whispered to each other, and each time they did, the shadows deepened. As if the fear and trepidation, the passage of rumour, somehow… fed that darkness.
The glamour should not have been so difficult to maintain. Emma was weary, disciplined Will alone kept her upright. Tideturn would be soon, she could already almost-hear the approaching, brassy thunder. The dozing beast of Whitchapel drew her in, a tiny particle in its vast pulsing, and she was quite content to pass unremarked.
Finding and engaging a hansom had been the difficult part. Now that she was here, a minnow in deep waters, it was…
Well, it was as if she had never left.
It was marvellous, how the intervening years fell away. Struggle, striving, experience, all of it so many shed garments, dropping away from the nakedness of memory.
The starveling’s words, of course, had made a mad manner of sense. Where the dial spun, where the beggar burned. How did Marimat know?
More importantly, who might have paid her enough–and in what coin–to divulge such things? Of course, the Scab witnessed black acts every night in Whitchapel. What might it whisper to the fallen creature in her pit?
Was her opponent Diabolic after all?
Emma put her head down. Tideturn grew closer, and she moved slowly because the rushing had filled her ears. Without Mikal, she would be blind and vulnerable when the golden flood from the Themis filled the city.
A sorceress, even a Prime, could vanish into the sinks of the Eastron End; but once, long ago, she had not feared these streets. Did a fish fear the water it breathed? The danger was simply air or rain, and when she had been plucked from it by the Collegia childcatchers she had suffered the gasping every fish performed when torn from its habitat.
Where the beggar burned.
She remembered, oh yes. A sweet-roasting stink, the crowd’s laughter, flames. After that, her mother–was it correct to call that poor creature a mother? She had fallen far, the woman who birthed Emma Bannon; her respectable husband’s death in a fire started by a drunken brawl meant poverty, shame, hopelessness. The men she gave herself to, while her youth lasted, had perhaps been kind enough. Some of them even spoke of marriage again, but it all came to naught.
Emma, grown weedlike and stunted in the Scab’s blight, learning to scurry and steal. Learning the cant and argot of the flashboys and the unfortunates, cuffed when she was noticed and learning to be watchful. Inside her, a spark of ruined pride, and the deeper flame of sorcerous talent.
The last man–one of many, she thought perhaps he might have been a carter or even a flashboy, though she could not remember any Alteration on his gin-thickened frame–had announced his intention to sell Emma into a bawdyhouse if one could be found that would take a skinny brat, and the mother had turned on him with drunken fury. Whether it was because some spark of natural feeling for her burdensome child remained, or simply that said burden represented a shilling or two the raddled woman felt should not go to the broad-faced, rotten-toothed monsieur who had paid for their doss that long-ago night was unclear.
What was perfectly clear was the blade as it flicked, unseaming the mother’s neck. A horrid scarlet necklace, a spray of crimson, and the burning in a thin child’s chest had ignited.
The man had dropped the knife and screamed, beating at leprous-green flames erupting suddenly, sorcerously, from his skin and clothes.
A second beggar’s burning, there in the reek and the dark. The child had run away, and been caught in a net other than the one she had feared.
Emma halted in a pool of darkest shadow, the glamour held close. Brass thunder unheard by most filled the air, and from one end of the street, a flood of ætheric force roared from the direction of the Themis’s cold, deep lapping.
Tideturn.
Golden charter symbols crawled over Emma’s skin. The shadows did not hide their flashing, but the malodorous passageway she stood swaying in was luckily empty of any witness. When the flood receded, she blinked and shook her shawl-covered head, expecting at any mo
ment to feel Mikal’s hand upon her arm and his quiet word of orientation.
Instead, she heard the scraping of tiny paws, a muffled squeak. Her skin sought to crawl, training clamped upon the waste of energy and it passed. She knew that sound, of course–grey whip-tailed rats with beady dark eyes, sensing in her stillness a possible weakness. The scuffing sounds retreated, and her nose wrinkled slightly, fresh strength filling her limbs.
She took careful stock of her surroundings again. Dorsitt Street was not strictly as she remembered it. Emma was uncertain whether this was a comfort or a danger, and took another few moments to study what she could.
Of course even squalor would change over time. It was still cramped and clotted with refuse, but the carts that had crouched here selling all manner of items were gone. The public houses thumped with the sounds of drunken revelry, but the flashboys did not congregate in their doors here, as was their usual wont.
Even a fast, murderous, well-Altered flashboy might well fear the creature hunting in Whitchapel.
A door slammed, raucous laughter and yellow gleams of gaslight spilled onto the street, and Emma drew further back into shadow. Three women, shapes very much like her own, with bonnets instead of shawls, hurried tipsily down Dorsitt toward the other ginhouse; the one in the middle had evidently been their first stop.
“Lea’ off, Nan,” one slurred petulantly, and her companions laughed.
“Black Mary, Black Mary,” one chanted, with a lisp that spoke of missing teeth. “High-mighty Jinnit.”
“I’us in France ons’t,” Black Mary retorted, hotly. She sounded young, and would be successful while that youth lasted. “I’en spek Westend dravvy, I may.”
A small smile touched Emma’s lips. The slurring song of Whitchapel cant was strangely soothing. I was in France once. I even speak proper Englene, I may. Perhaps her sad little story was told to draw custom. Or perhaps she had been to France, such a thing was not impossible.
Emma’s slight smile faded as she turned away from Dorsitt, picking her way with care further down the passage. The smell, oh, it was familiar. Coal and grease, rotting vegetables, spoiled meat. Rancid, unwashed bodies crammed into tiny rooms, the sooty trembling flames of rag wicks in fat.
The only thing missing was the thick greenness of Scab. She caught herself placing each foot carefully, a slip-sliding movement because the resilient ooze underneath should have been thick in this darkness.
She could feel ancient crumbling bricks, cobbles in some places. Her throat was so dry. The walls of the passage were only hinted at by some sense that extended around her, invisible fingertips brushing. Even her sensitive vision could not pierce this gloom.
Her skin chilled. Her skirts dragged; the quality of the cloth would outweigh the slight value of her life in this slice of Londinium. Yet she let the glamour unravel as she stepped carefully, shedding one more garment between herself and the past.
There, on the left, was the door. A window with a broken pane–it had been whole once. Another door had been cut further down the passage, but there was no true exit to the street save the one she had entered.
She remembered running, bare child’s feet slipping in thick Scab, bursting out into the whirl of Dorsitt Street on a late-summer evening, gold in the air and the rank ripe heat simmering all of Londinium on a plate.
The child-catchers had felt the ætheric disturbance, a powerful burst of untrained sorcery. Given chase, and finally brought her to bay in a blind court not far from here. How she had struggled, and bit, wild with terror, thinking only He has come to kill me too.
The door was locked. Emma cast a glance over her shoulder, then regarded the broken window for a few moments. A whispered charm, a breath of sorcery, and the lock yielded. She felt a twinge at her trespassing, set it aside. Foxfire light glimmered from her necklace, just an edge of illumination to show the dimensions of the sad little hole.
Where the dial spun, the starveling whispered again, and to Emma’s relief, the room was changed. A different bed was placed in an opposite corner, and the shabby hob had a cheapmetal kettle on it and nothing more. The floorboards were familiar, though a dark stain had been scrubbed away in one rotting corner.
She went unerringly to that corner. Knelt, her fingers just as deft as they had been in childhood. Perhaps, she thought, and her lips shaped a different word.
Please. Let it be gone, and me a fool.
If what she sought had vanished, she could call Marimat the Fallen’s whispers a feint, and retreat into her house’s safety. Let Clare think what he would, let Aberline go his merry way, and make to Mikal some manner of restitution for the display she had forced him to endure.
Leave Victrix–and Britannia–to her fate. At this juncture, such a thing would please her, and if she felt another murder within her frame, she would view it as a last unpleasant reminder that she had once served one who secretly despised her.
Magical whore, the mad sorcerer’s disguised voice sneered, and the term was so familiar. It teased at memory, but she set it aside. That was not the slice of the past she wished to consider at the moment.
It took a special pressure to lift the edge of the floorboard, and her hand wormed into the space underneath. Her fingers touched rotting cloth; she shut her eyes and fished the small thing out, settling back on her heels.
It was still wrapped in a scrap of cambric, the threads so rotted they fell apart at her gentle touch. Her skirts would no doubt collect all manner of dust and unwholesome things from the boards, but she did not care. Her fingers trembled as she brushed thin fabric aside, and the pocket-watch, its casing grimed with the passage of years under the boards, gave a slight gleam.
Its chain was short, and it was no doubt a corpsepicker’s bargain, but it had seemed so flash and fine to a young girl, once.
They had both been in a stupor when Emma’s fingers had relieved the man of his watch. She had slid it into the hiding place, intending to pawn it for perhaps enough pence for a pasty, or even a flower for her weeping mother.
But when he woke, he had noticed the theft, and threatened to beat them both to a pulp. The mother wailed that she had been next to him the whole time and her daughter said nothing, despite being prodded and her child’s shift searched thoroughly. Shivering, she had heard the man pronounce his doom: he’d get his pence back from a bawdyhouse, if they would take such a stick of a thing.
Then the cries, the red necklace, the fire.
Emma rose, a trifle unsteadily. The watch hung from its short chain, and she twisted her fingers to spin it, feeling the old childish fascination with its motion. If she wound it, would it work?
Who could tell?
Where the dial spun.
Old guilt rose, its edges sharp, and it was almost a relief to hear the soughing of air moving as the door drifted open.
She stood, very still, watching the spinning. Who cared how Thin Meg had known this secret? What mattered was that Emma had been brought to exactly the right place, and of her own will.
He approached, softly. Did he think her unaware?
When he was close enough, she drew in a sharp breath. “All in, all in,” she said softly, as if they were children playing the perpetual game of tag in the alley.
He halted for the barest moment. Approached, step by step. “Why have you ventured here, Emma?”
His voice, familiar, teased at her memory. She held very still. Come now. Stop speaking. I am offering myself; let it be quick.
“You are so clever, my love,” a dead man breathed in her ear, and he clamped a foul-smelling rag over her face. “Too clever by half.”
Emma’s body slipped her control for a moment, but any struggle was useless. The clot-thick vaporous substance on the rag filled her lungs, and the effect, purely physical, was perhaps the only one that would deprive a wary sorceress of her senses.
She felt, after it all, a certain relief.
Then, darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
And If
Not, Vengeance
Aberline hammered at the interior of the front door of 34½ Brooke Street, using quite colourful language, while Clare made himself comfortable on the stairs and, in defiance of all good manners, puffed at his pipe. No servant hurried to find the source of the noise; Miss Bannon had no doubt given orders.
There was no use in seeking to escape until the mistress of the house released them. Little good would be done by exhausting oneself as the good inspector was currently doing, but at least if the man was shouting and hammering he was exactly where Clare could see him.
It was the other man who gave Clare some pause.
Mikal had appeared in the smoking room just after dinner, looking grey and drawn as he did on those rare occasions when Miss Bannon left him to cool his heels. Just behind him had drifted the cadaverous Finch, who did not even deign to glance at the glowering inspector. Instead, he had presented Clare with a folded missive of familiar creamy paper, a delicate, feminine hand–also familiar–on its outer flap, his own name traced with her usual care.
The note inside the folds was extremely simple.
Come and find me.
Which was all very well, Clare thought, but locking them inside her house so deliberately was rather a bar to her stated wish.
The inescapable conclusion, since it was unfathomable that Miss Bannon had not planned this to a fare-thee-well, was that she intended them to issue forth… but not quite yet.
So, he smoked. He had taken the precaution of changing from dinner-dress into something a fraction more suitable to chasing a sorceress across night-time Londinium. Philip Pico, having apparently arrived at the same conclusion, had done the same. Or perhaps he had not dressed for dinner at all.
The rufous youth had settled himself easily on the stairs below Clare, and gone still as a stone. He eyed the inspector’s display with an air of faint condescension, but when his gaze drifted across the silent, haggard Mikal, it became troubled indeed.
Tabac smoke, fragrant, drifted up and was sorcerously compressed near the ceiling into neat spheres that bumbled off in search of a chimney. Clare had arrived at a number of conclusions, but the nagging sense of a missing piece would simply not cease.