Arcane Adversaries

by Jess Faraday

  “Not a chance, copper. We’ve come this far.”

  How far? I squinted through the storm to try to find some familiar landmark. We could just as easily have been an hour out as knocking on the town gates.

  “I’m an Edinburgh lass,” she shouted over the wind. “This is nothing! Besides, Alice will murder me if she stumbles across your thawing corpse next spring while walking to market.”

  Well. Who could argue with that? I sat down, feeling an uncomfortable combination of guilt and relief as the horse let out a sigh, lowered its head, and plodded into the wind.

  •••

  Despite our best efforts, we arrived in Bodmin just a hair too late.

  “The London train?” said the man behind the ticket window. “It left five minutes ago, but there’s another one at 12:15.”

  “Oh, Simon, I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said as the world seemed to fall away beneath my feet. Twelve fifteen. The last train to Edinburgh left King’s Cross at seven. The connection would be close if it happened at all. But I couldn’t just turn around now.

  “May I exchange my ticket?” I asked.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Elizabeth’s hand squeezed my shoulder through my thick winter coat. “Ask if he can book you onto the Flying Scotsman just in case.”

  “I’m not going to Edinburgh,” I said. Cal and I would spend a few days in London if we needed to discuss things further. And if we needed more time after that, we could make that decision then. I passed my useless ticket beneath the barred window to the ticket agent. He checked the relevant information, shuffled the necessary papers, and wrote me out a new ticket.

  “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said again as we walked toward the platform.

  I waved off the apology. “Thank you again for the ride. I’d still be out there, I’m sure, slowly freezing to death, with only my stubbornness to keep me warm.”

  She laughed. “Then you’d be plenty warm indeed.”

  “Very funny. I’ll miss you, you know.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to Edinburgh.”

  I wasn’t. What the hell?

  All around us the sounds of holiday travelers echoed through the station. But the building might as well have been empty for all that they mattered to me. Elizabeth had become my closest and dearest friend, and I would miss her fiercely should I not return to Cornwall. Which I would.

  “Right. Well….”

  I reached for my money. There wasn’t enough money in the world to pay her back for risking her life to help me to make what would no doubt be another colossal mistake. But at least I could buy her breakfast. No doubt she saw my intentions, for she stayed my hand.

  “I’m not a cab driver, Simon. I wanted to see you off.”

  I took several coins from my pocket and pressed them into her hand anyway.

  “Well, go buy yourself something warm, at least.” I glanced out the window. “Or maybe a room for the night if this storm doesn’t clear. I can’t thank you enough for…well, for everything. Really.”

  She stuffed the money into her coat pocket, then took my hand between both of hers. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “I hope so too. Stay safe, and don’t be too hard on poor Trevelyan.”

  She laughed. “Write when you get to Edinburgh.”

  “I’m not going to Edinburgh.”

  She gave me the eyebrow again, her mouth twisting in a knowing smirk. “And have a wee dram for me, when you get there.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but by that time, she had turned on her flat-soled boot and was making her way through the crowd.

  The train arrived at King’s Cross at six forty-five. I was already waiting in the stairwell, and sprang from the door the minute the station employee unlatched it.

  “The Flying Scotsman,” I said to him.

  “Platform 19, sir.”

  “Has it left yet?”

  He consulted his watch. I tapped my toe impatiently as the exiting passengers surged around us. He wore a strange-looking uniform, I noticed. Similar to, though not the same as the other King’s Cross employees striding purposefully along the platform, and no insignia. Perhaps he’d been a last-minute temporary hire to help with the holiday crowds.

  “Not yet,” he said, the closing snap of his watch bringing me back to the present. “You can still catch it.”

  “Thank you.”

  King’s Cross Station was huge but well-marked. I made my way as quickly as I could down the corridor to the staircase leading to the ticket office. The air around me was a solid wall of sounds: the hum of a thousand conversations, the muffled overhead voices announcing arrivals and departures, the loud whistles and clanks and hisses.

  It was no wonder when the woman in front of me stopped suddenly on the bottom stair, that I kept walking right into her.

  “Oh!” she cried as she and I both went sprawling.

  “By God, Miss! I’m so sorry!”

  “You wretch! You absolute wretch!”

  It wasn’t the young lady delivering the much-deserved rebuke. She was too busy watching her arm full of newspapers scatter onto the platform, skate away on the breeze of exhaust, and get trampled beneath the inexorable parade of well-shod feet. The woman who continued to upbraid me, I took, from her age and similar features, to be the young woman’s mother.

  “I’m sorry!” I cried again.

  My satchel had gone flying as well, and as the older woman continued to curse me, her daughter and I quickly gathered up her belongings and mine, and separated them out as best as we could.

  “My apologies again, Madam,” I said to the mother. “And Miss.”

  The younger woman was probably all of twenty, with a heart-shaped face, large, dark eyes, and a wide mouth that looked like it might have been accustomed to smiling, when she wasn’t being trampled by distracted coppers. And when she wasn’t in full and recent mourning for a close loved one, as her black clothing—and her mother’s—informed me. Fuck’s sake.

  “My mind was elsewhere,” I said weakly.

  “Well,” the mother said. “I hope it’s returned, now. Come along, Caroline.”

  They strode past me, heads held high, and walked, to my dismay, toward Platform 19. The passengers were already swarming the train’s entrances, and it looked as if they were preparing to board. A whistle confirmed my suspicion. My heart pounded. Where was Cal? Would I even see him in this mob? I stepped backward toward the staircase, hoping to get a better view.

  “Oi!” a man cried, as I trod on his foot.

  “Sorry,” I ground out between my teeth.

  He pushed past me with an evil glare. It was a good thing he, too, was hurrying to catch the train. He was bulky enough to have given me a good pounding, should he have been so inclined. And from his misshapen boxer’s nose and the jagged scar on the side of his face, it appeared he’d followed that inclination more than once.

  “The Flying Scotsman?” a voice asked, suddenly at my shoulder. “This way, please, sir. The train is boarding now.”

  I whirled as the porter put a guiding hand on my elbow.

  “Thank you,” I said, shaking it off. It was the same porter who had directed me to the platform. Had he been following me? He was actually quite good looking, I noticed. Not thin, but muscular and well-formed beneath his uniform. His dark, tightly-curled hair and plump lips reminded me of Theo, though unlike Theo, this man’s skin was London-pale.

  It’s amazing the trivialities upon which the mind chooses to focus when it should be focusing on other things.

  Like finding Cal.

  “Can I be of any further assistance, sir?” he asked.

  And that’s when I realized what was really bothering me about him. He didn’t carry himself like a servile porter. And his speech was a bit too refined. But it was none of my business, and I had to find Cal before he got on that train.

  “No,” I said.

  The train whistle shrieked. I whipped around—and that’s when I
saw Cal, all six-foot-and-more of him, his head just above the pulsating mass of passengers. He looked exactly the same—the same flop of sandy-brown hair that would never stay out of his eyes; the same well-worn overcoat and scarf that somehow managed to appear the height of fashion. My heart pounded. My throat went tight, and such a wave of emotion broke over me that for a moment I feared Elizabeth had been right. Having seen him again, how the devil was I to let him go?

  “Cal!” I shouted, but the sound was lost in the tapestry of shouts, whistles, hisses, and bangs. “Cal!” I called again. I jumped up and down on my step like an idiot, waving one arm in the air.

  Down below, Cal glanced at his watch, then around him. Disappointment clouded his face. And then he was gone.

  I ran toward the train, pushing my way through the knot of passengers and well-wishers. All well-wishers, I realized. The passengers had already stepped aboard and found their places. The crowd was moving in the opposite direction, away from the train. There was a great hiss as the train released a cloud of steam and began to move.

  Just then, Cal’s head popped back out of the stairwell. His eyes met mine then went wide. For a split second, we stared. Then he put out his hand.

  “Come on!” he cried.

  I ran.

  “Sir!” some official cried as I ran alongside the train. I pushed past him. The train was picking up speed.

  “Hurry!” Cal called.

  I put on one last burst of speed. As I came up to the stairwell, I tossed my satchel up the stairs ahead of me. Then I grasped the handle in one hand, and Cal’s arm in the other, and swung myself aboard.

  We stood there for the longest time, hands grasping forearms, hearts pounding, desperate to speak yet afraid to utter a word and break this fragile connection. King’s Cross Station dropped away behind us, the darkness closing in as the train headed northward and across the river.

  What now? I’d no ticket, no seat, no plan. At the same time certainty filled me. This was the right thing, the only thing. The idea of fate was ludicrous. Predestination—an illusion. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that every miserable hour of this catastrophic year had been pointing me to this very moment.

  Did Cal feel the same way?

  Oh, God, what if he didn’t?

  The train whistle cut through the silence. Cal’s hand tightened around my wrist. His expression softened, and a little smile played at the edges of his lips.

  “Hello,” he said, a little tremble in his voice.

  “Hello.”

  •••

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to ride first class,” I said, as I followed him through a narrow, wood-paneled corridor set about with gleaming brass, shiny wood and clean glass. It was a strange way to re-open a conversation with someone I’d not spoken to for so long, but one had to start somewhere.

  He laughed nervously. “I wouldn’t have expected you to cut things so close. You were always half an hour early for everything.”

  It had been a year, more or less, since I’d left Edinburgh, but an entire lifetime had passed between us since then. It was comforting how easily we fell back into the familiar back-and-forth. At the same time, the whole situation felt tentative and awkward.

  “There was a snowstorm in Bodmin,” I explained. “I missed the morning train. I’d have made this one in good time, but I was in such a hurry, I knocked some poor woman down the stairs.”

  “You what?” He turned, blue eyes flashing. “She was all right, I hope.”

  “Fine, fine. But she was carrying a bundle of newspapers, and they went everywhere. I was trying to help her pick them up, and her mother was standing over us, making a terrible scene.”

  He giggled. “Oh, my God.”

  “On top of that, they were both in full mourning. My luck, they’re on this train, too.”

  He let out a glass-shaking laugh at that—a laugh that would have been perfectly at home in third class—or Scotland—but here, in the first-class carriage of a London train, the unexpected jollity caused more than one annoyed face to appear in the corridor to investigate.

  “I hope you won’t be sharing their compartment,” he said.

  “Doubtful, considering I didn’t have time to buy a ticket.”

  “Constable Simon Pearce,” he said a bit too loudly. “Are you saying you broke the law for me?”

  “Fuck’s sake!” I hissed, though he couldn’t have known the circumstances under which I’d left London. “And it’s Detective Sergeant, by the way, as you well know.”

  “Oh, yes, quite,” he said, pulling a serious expression.

  “You’re impossible. We should find the train manager so I can buy a ticket. How long do you think we’ll need? To Peterborough?”

  Now annoyance flashed across his features. “Train doesn’t stop until York, but if we skip the pleasantries and hurry through the agenda, maybe you can get some reading in after.” He nodded toward my newspaper-stuffed satchel.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “But I wasn’t planning to travel all the way to Edinburgh, today.”

  His face fell “You weren’t?”

  Fuck’s sake. We hadn’t been together fifteen minutes, and I’d managed to step in it again.

  “I’d thought…oh, excuse me,” I said as a man entered the corridor and attempted to squeeze past. “I’d thought if we had enough…agenda items…we’d take a few days in London to discuss them, and proceed from there.”

  “Oh,” he said, somewhat mollified.

  “But no, I didn’t quit my job, throw over my…well…my…and…and pack everything I own into this woefully inadequate satchel with the expectation of running away to Edinburgh, no.”

  His features tightened, and I braced myself for a slash of sarcasm. But that was Theo’s style, not Cal’s. Instead, I watched him tuck away whatever it was he’d thought to say, and master his emotions.

  “Well, I counted at least three agenda items right there that can get us started.” He gestured ahead into the corridor. “Shall we? You can be first foot.”

  “First what?”

  “It’s a Hogmanay tradition,” he explained. “The first person to cross the threshold on New Year’s Day. It’s good luck if he’s tall, dark and handsome.”

  “You’re making that up. Besides, it’s not New Year’s yet.” Nonetheless, I felt a little spark of delight at the idea that he still considered me handsome.

  Cal’s compartment had four seats. Thankfully, none of them seemed to be occupied. He shut the door behind us, and, as we sank onto overstuffed, leather-upholstered chairs across from one another, a tense air of expectation settled over us.

  “So,” he said.

  “So.”

  “So you have someone in Cornwall.” Never one to beat about the bush, our Cal.

  “I did,” I said. “Until he found your letter.”

  His eyes went wide. “Oh! Oh, dear. Simon, I’m sorry.”

  “Yesterday,” I continued. “On my birthday.”

  “Oh,” he said again with a grimace. “Happy birthday?”

  “Cheers,” I said.

  “Did you love him?”

  “You were serious about skipping to brass tacks, weren’t you?”

  He bit his lower lip and caught my eye. My heart stopped for a moment. It always did when he did that.

  He said, “It’s not very English, is it? But I find it saves trouble.”

  “At this rate, I might have time for those newspapers after all,” I said.

  “Oh, Simon.”

  He set a hand over mine. Just then, the floorboards creaked in the corridor. He jerked his hand away just as a face appeared in the polished glass of the window. I cursed under my breath.

  “What is it?” Cal asked as the door opened and a mountain of a man stepped inside.

  It was the man I’d stepped on back at the platform. His beady eyes met mine, and a tense current passed between us. He scowled, checked his ticket, muttered something, then took the seat by
Cal, next to the window.

  “I fancy some air,” I said. “Care to join me?”

  “Good idea. Observation carriage?”

  Said carriage turned out to be a luxurious space kitted out with lush carpeting, velvet drapes, and fat, leather-upholstered benches. Large windows sat on either side, though deep darkness prevented any actual observation. It was quiet and blessedly empty.

  “I could get used to this,” I said, as we sat down together on one of the benches.

  Cal sighed. “I’d have gone third class, but Uncle Henry insisted.” Him again, I thought but did not say. Cal’s family friend and benefactor had been the cause of the vicious argument that had led to my leaving Edinburgh. I’d been in the wrong, and had admitted it, but it was still a sore subject, at least for me. “It’s nearly eleven hours to Edinburgh. Imagine doing that journey back to back on wooden benches. So, I suppose I owe you an apology for ruining your life, again.”

  “You never ruined anything,” I said. “Still, I suppose I should have told you about Theo. You certainly told me about—”

  “About my abortive attempts to fuck away a broken heart?”

  I laughed. “You are a blunt people.”

  “That was me being subtle.”

  “I’ve missed you,” I said. “More than words can express.” His blue eyes shimmered in the gaslight. I laid my hand over his and gave his fingers a squeeze.

  We both jumped when the door of the observation car opened. A small group of people entered—two couples, it appeared—talking animatedly. I sighed.

  Cal nodded toward my satchel. “That’s quite a lot of newspapers,” he said.

  “It was a long way from Bodmin.”

  “You probably finished them all in fifteen minutes. Come on, then, let’s see what’s happening in the world.”

  “Right.” I plunked the satchel down between us and flipped open the buckles. “There’s a copy of The Lancet, in here somewhere,” I said.

  “Thinking of me, were you?”

  “Always. Blast. Where is it?” Curiosity turned to annoyance as I realized that the young woman on the platform and I hadn’t separated our papers as well as I’d hoped. “Sorry,” I said to Cal. “My victim must have ended up with that. But I do seem to have seven copies of The Record Register.”