Mad Miss Mimic

by Sarah Henstra

  I cried out and knelt beside the slumped form, but Mr. Thornfax snatched my arm and hauled me back to my feet. “Curtis, help the poor lad up,” he said.

  Tom was lifted. His head lolled, and Curtis yanked at his hair and slapped his cheek to rouse him.

  “My darling Miss Somerville,” Mr. Thornfax crooned. “Would it bother you so terribly much to be parted from this boy? I hate to think you’ve developed an inappropriate affection for him.”

  At that moment, I think, I could still have fooled Mr. Thornfax. I could still have managed to convince him I was in the warehouse by happenstance or innocent folly, and I could have calmed him, flattered, and cozened him into delaying whatever vengeance he was planning against Tom. Instead I panicked. “D-don’t hurt him!” I cried. “He didn’t want to c-cross you. He acted only to s-save D-Daisy’s life!”

  Mr. Thornfax laughed, and the sound raised gooseflesh across my arms. “Ah, yes. Daisy. The Juliet to his Romeo, isn’t that right, Rampling? I am sorry that your efforts to save your sweet little dope-fiend failed so miserably.”

  “How dare you!” I said. “You m-m-murderer!”

  “Leo, stop,” Tom begged. He turned to Mr. Thornfax, hands raised. “Please, milord. She has nothing to do with any of it.”

  “‘Leo,’ is she? You are on familiar terms.” He turned to Watts and Curtis. “I believe we’ve found our abductor and seducer, gentlemen.”

  I moaned with fear as Watts drew a revolver from under his coat. “Daniel w-will know where w-we are—” I tried.

  “No, he will not know.” All pretense of civility suddenly dropped like a discarded cloak from Mr. Thornfax’s voice. He drew me tight to him, pressing until I struggled for breath. “And even if he suspects, he will not act. Dr. Dewhurst is a mild man who hates a confrontation more than anything.

  “Curtis!” he barked. “Find some rope and bind her.” He hurled me into his desk chair.

  “No! I am accountable, not her.” Tom tried to hold Curtis’s arm and was tossed backward against Watts, who wrapped him in a chokehold and pressed the gun to his ribs.

  “Indeed you are accountable, as you declare with such chivalry,” Mr. Thornfax told him. “Fortunately you will have an excellent chance to make the account square.”

  Curtis tied my wrists together behind me and knotted the rope to the chair. I was weeping now, trying to stifle the sounds so Tom would not feel even worse. Curtis did not look at me as he worked.

  Mr. Thornfax gestured toward the laboratory next door. “Mr. Rampling. Watts here will supply you with the materials he has prepared. In forty minutes’ time he will be an eyewitness to a great catastrophe at the British Parliament. We will all witness it, for it will light up all London like Christmas!” Mr. Thornfax’s smile managed to convey boyish excitement as well as bloodthirstiness, and his men sniggered in response.

  Watts shoved Tom toward the lab. A moment later they reappeared, and Tom had a fresh welt on his cheek. Watts held a newspaper-wrapped cylinder and the copper lightning cap with its coiled wick. “The cap were in his pocket, sir. He’d stole it already,” he reported.

  Mr. Thornfax drew out his pocket knife.

  “S-stop!” I cried.

  He cast me a look of great disdain. “Miss Somerville, I intend no violence. I mean only to ensure against sabotage.” Taking the blast cap from Watts he unwound the wick and cut it to a length of four inches. Then he handed it back to Tom.

  “He’ll be k-killed!” I said.

  “He will have only seconds after he lights the fuse,” agreed Mr. Thornfax, “but he will die happy to have secured your safety. That is, so long as we see the evidence of his work within the specified forty minutes.”

  “Lord Rosbury.” Tom stood straight, ignoring Watts’s gun. “No one will be inside Parliament tonight except guards and clerks. Shouldn’t we make more ... more of an impact if we wait until morning?”

  Mr. Thornfax clasped Tom’s shoulder. “Ah, my boy. I do appreciate your strategizing on my behalf, truly. Your impulse to wait is wholly selfless, wholly in the service of the Black Glove, I am sure. And yet I am decided. Parliament, you see, is largely a symbolic target. ’Twill confirm suspicions that the very fabric of our society is threatened by the lawlessness of the opium gangs, and that passing the ban is the nation’s only hope.

  “But your cause needn’t be so involved as all that. For your motivation I think you need only look there.” He jerked his chin toward me, and Tom’s tortured gaze followed. “She will be freed when it is done, and killed if it is not.”

  Watts thrust the explosive and lightning cap into Tom’s hands. Then he took out his gun and prodded Tom into motion.

  “See him as far as the Embankment, then take your distance,” Mr. Thornfax ordered.

  When they had gone he turned to me and shook his head. “Your silence. That is all I ever wanted from you. Your pretty face, your respectable name, and your silence.”

  “Who c-could be s-silent?” I sobbed, “when you are a m-m—”

  Mr. Thornfax put his shoe to the corner of my chair and tipped it onto two legs so that I hovered, gasping and off balance. “Or in lieu of silence, the ravings of a madwoman,” he said. “Who would ever believe talk of conspiracy and murder coming from the lips of Mad Miss Mimic? I was perfectly safe, you see?” He released the chair, and my head snapped forward on my neck as the legs hit the floor. “But you thought of a way to interfere anyhow.”

  Mr. Thornfax gripped the chair’s arms and leaned into my face. “I am going home, Miss Somerville. After Mr. Rampling has completed his task Curtis will take you home, too. Tomorrow I shall call early at Hastings House—frantic for your safety, having searched half the night and slept not a wink—and we shall be joyously reunited. In two weeks we shall be married. And then I think my new wife will be more than ready to begin a course of Dr. Dewhurst’s experimental medicine.”

  He gripped my head with both hands and kissed me. I felt his hard breath in my throat. His lips and teeth pressed into my flesh until I tasted blood and whimpered with the pain. When he released me he was grinning, and his eyes gleamed with cold elation.

  Mr. Thornfax gathered his hat and gloves, motioned Curtis into the warehouse, and closed the secret door. I heard their muffled voices and a single pair of footsteps receding. I was left a prisoner under guard.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Thus began the longest, most torturous effort of my life. I worked at the knotted cord long after my fingertips had lost all feeling. Every hint of give in the bindings sent my heart pounding, and I froze, holding my breath, whenever I heard a cough from Curtis or the sound of his pipe being tapped out against his boot. I was unable to loosen the knots completely, but I set to twisting my wrists until at last one hand had made enough room for the other to squeeze free. I turned to untangle the rest, wincing at the bracelets of raw skin and my torn, bleeding fingernails. Then I forced myself to sit still, with my hands clasped again behind me, while I thought of what to do next.

  Perhaps it was the act of pretending to be bound when I was no longer. Or perhaps it was the sight of Mr. Thornfax’s silver-tipped cane propped by the door where he’d forgotten it. Whatever the incitement, Mimic sprang suddenly to life.

  “Curtis, I need you!” I called, adding an edge of panicky urgency to Mr. Thornfax’s suave baritone.

  I scrambled round the corner into the laboratory just before the office door opened.

  “Milord? Where are you?” Curtis sounded uncertain.

  I searched in the wan moonlight and lit upon a heavy marble mortar. I clutched it in both hands and pressed myself next to the doorway. “In here, man! Help me!” Mimic-as-Thornfax shouted.

  The moment Curtis’s head appeared past the doorway I struck at it with the mortar. He fell against the wall with a grunt, blood spreading on his temple. I hit him again, panic redoubling my strength. The mortar rolled from my hands, and I fled out into the enveloping shadows of the warehouse.

  I made it to the so
utheast corner of the building, feeling along the wall and skirting the piled crates whenever my knees struck them. My legs shook in delayed reaction to the violence I had committed. Then I heard Curtis shout Mr. Thornfax’s name, and I saw his hulking form emerge from the doorway behind me. He held aloft the lantern. Its swaying light showed me his face, gruesome and half-blinded by blood, and the gun clutched in his other hand.

  Something soft brushed my shoulder and I stifled a scream. A canvas sail-bag on a hook.

  Curtis swung the gun in my direction. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  I shrank into the space under the bag. Curtis took several lurching steps in my direction. Then he stopped, wiped at his brow with his wrist, and shook his head as though trying to clear it.

  I understood then that he hadn’t seen me in the lab before I hit him with the mortar. He’d truly been fooled by Mimic’s ruse, and now his injury was befuddling him still further. In fact, I thought with a surge of desperate hope, Curtis was afraid. When he’d called out just now I’d caught the note of fear in his voice.

  So Mimic decided to bring Daisy back from the dead.

  I began with a cry, a shuddering wail of despair that rose from a low moan into a shriek. “How could ye?” I said next. “Oh sir, how could ye do it?”

  Curtis had jumped back at the first sound, but now he thrust the gun forward. “Who is it? Show yerself!” he blustered.

  “’Tis only poor Daisy, sir. Only that me poor spirit hungers an thirsts, so.” As Mimic spoke I tore the pins from my hair and shook it forward, covering my face. I shrugged from my coat and knotted its sleeves around my waist to mask my white skirt. Fumbling with the buttons I tore open the bodice of my dress to expose my shoulders and chest.

  “I watched you die,” Curtis said. “I dropped you off myself. You was cold as …” He faltered as I came to my feet in the shadows beyond his lantern.

  “Cold! Ah, it’s so cold!” Mimic-as-Daisy sang out, elongating the o into another hollow, harrowing wail. “Won’t you come warm me, sir?” I took a heavy step forward, hunched, and swayed just at the edge of the light.

  Curtis blinked and boggled as if forcing his eyes wider could make Daisy disappear. But I wasn’t going anywhere. The big man’s quaking and panting—a shallow, wet panting like an unhappy bulldog—sent a glow wicking through me, a surge of something like real power. Curtis backed up and must have tripped on something, for his arms wheeled wildly and he dropped the lantern. The gun went off—I screamed, and Mimic kept my scream going long after I knew I hadn’t been shot, modulating the pitch into a piercing, inhuman sound.

  The lantern rolled, but before it sputtered out I saw Curtis scrambling backward on all fours, mad with fear. He stood, stumbled, found his feet again, and fled.

  I waited until the frantic tread stopped echoing through the warehouse and I saw the outside door swing closed behind him. Then I stumbled along the warehouse wall toward the longest crack of moonlight until I found the dockside door.

  I circled the building and peeped round the corner. A figure materialized suddenly from the darkness and sprinted across the street toward me—Tom! It was Tom! Elated, I was just about to step out to greet him when he ran directly past without seeing me and slammed full-force into Curtis, knocking the big man hard against the boards.

  “Where is she?” Tom said. “What’s he done with her?”

  “God forgive me!” Fear and confusion still laced Curtis’s voice. “’Twarn’t my doin’. ’Tain’t fair she be hauntin’ me for it.”

  Tom shook him. “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead, God forgive me! The girl is dead.”

  “Stop him!” Watts’s nasal shout came from up the street. Tom dropped Curtis. I shrank back as his footsteps fled and Watts pounded up. “What’s the matter with you?” he said to Curtis.

  “M-my head.” Curtis sagged against the warehouse wall.

  Watts cursed and leaned forward, hands on his thighs. “That wily young bastard knows every alley in the city,” he panted. “Slipped me not four blocks from here and led me on a merry chase. We’re better to hold the girl for Thornfax, at least.”

  Knowing I had only the time it would take for Curtis to collect himself and confess my escape, I turned and ran back the way I’d come. Keeping close alongside the brick-wagons and containers, I crept toward the foot of Nicholson’s dock.

  Minutes passed. Even as I scanned the piers for a sign of Tom, willing him to catch sight of me, and listened hard for signs of Watts’s pursuit, I found myself becoming strangely calm and clear-headed. All of these hulking silhouettes of industry seemed to offer not menace but shelter, now. Even the shriek of a rusty, far-off winch seemed benevolent. So this is how a person grows brave, I thought. In escaping greater danger the lesser dangers are a relief to fear.

  A sudden flare drew my eye. “Leonora!” Tom’s shout came across the piers, but I could make out nothing between the ships’ hulls. A bright arc cut the night, and a trailing plume of blue light—there he was, at last, beside the Heroine! He’d hurled something onto the deck.

  “It’s too late. Run, Leo!” Tom was waving his arms wildly at me. Then he disappeared, and I heard a splash—had he fallen? I searched, and saw him surface in the moonlit water, swimming fast, his wet hair slick as sealskin. “Miss Somerville! Seek cover!” Terror turned his shout into a yelp.

  I saw another flash of light—Watts firing from the pier behind Tom—and the shots cracked out across the water. I dove to my knees behind the lip of a cargo sled, afraid my white bodice would reveal me to Watts as it had shown me to Tom, more afraid still for Tom in the open water.

  Then the whole river lit up like noontide.

  I was thrown flat onto my belly. Pain bit across my chest and burrowed through to my spine. The hard-packed mud suctioned to my cheek and breast as if it would swallow me. A roaring torrent of heat and light shot past my ear. Suddenly upended, the massive iron sled loomed above me and teetered a long moment before settling, miraculously, on its narrow edge, where it shielded my body from the onslaught of flying debris.

  Dazed and deafened by the blast I rolled to my back. Pain stabbed through me with every breath, and I found I could not move my left arm. I watched the scene unfold above me soundless and vivid as a dream. Hell had broken open and was mounting its vengeance upon Heaven. A column of fire wide as the Thames thrust furiously into the sky. Silhouetted against it, the great steam-winch broke silently from its crane and plunged into the heaving river. Silent, the crane itself shuddered and tipped from its moorings; I felt its impact through the vibrating earth at my back. Glass showered from the shattered windows of the warehouses. A burning barrel rolled past my feet.

  I struggled to sit up, to stand. At the centre of the inferno teetered the incandescent shell of the Heroine. The adjacent ships were burning, too, and many buildings smouldered and glowed where debris was landing on their roofs. I could hardly bear the heat, let alone the pain, but I clutched my arm against my body and stumbled down to the water’s edge. Fiery timbers bobbed everywhere on the churning surface.

  It seemed an eternity until I spied Tom. He was floating face down, his shirttails billowing behind him. I tore the coat from my waist and, one-handed, lowered myself into the river.

  At first the icy water was welcome relief to my scorched face, and by clinging to a broken crate I managed to propel myself the short distance to Tom’s side. But I could not hold both Tom and the crate with one arm, and my sodden skirts wrapped round my legs, dragging me down.

  We were not far from the shore. I kicked hard against the wet weight of fabric, against the suck of the black water. Although I knew Tom was not breathing, I fought to hold his face above water. I shouted his name again and again, my own voice silent in my deadened ears. I forced myself to focus only on his mouth, on keeping the bluish lips from going under. I refused to look at the white, closed eyelids for fear that horror and grief would drown me before the river did.

  My injured
arm twisted in Tom’s shirt, and when I cried out I choked on a mouthful of foul, silted water. The explosion had crumpled the timber wall along the bank closest to us, and a section of it heaved loose in a torrent of muck. Waterlogged, it sank beneath us, dragging us out and down in its wake. The bank slid and melted and became a sinkhole, too slippery for a foothold and now, in any case, too far away.

  I could feel the river’s insistence against my body from toe to neck. As if in a dream I heard its dark invitation: Come away, come down. I kicked at it in fury and screamed, but though I felt the rawness in my throat I could not hear my own voice. All this time, my damaged ears could hear nothing. And now, as my head bobbed under the firelit surface, I saw nothing, either. The whirling pyrotechnics vanished above me, leaving a blessedly cool darkness.

  Only for one moment, I thought. I’ll rest only a moment. The river sighed against my face and the pain drained from my body. I stopped moving and allowed myself to sink.

  But sink I did not. Instead I was wrenched upward by strong hands. I surfaced, spluttering and bleating at the renewed agony in my shoulder. I saw a policeman in the water beside me and more policemen crowding the bank. Then my arm was twisted again—I was certain this time the limb was torn from its socket for good—and the blessed darkness rushed back in to claim me from the pain.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The silence and the darkness—and the dreaming— went on for a long time. I dreamed I lay in a white bed with my arm bound immobile across my chest. I dreamed I floated on the Thames, watching the stars perform a lantern show for my amusement. I stumbled through dark caverns, clinging to damp walls. I saw Archibald Mavety pacing on the pier and shouting words I could not hear. I walked a sunlit footpath with Tom and felt—but did not hear—his whisper in my ear. I fought a black, slithering dragon and choked on its sulphurous breath.