Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Those of us who claimed a bounty did so by peeling the note off the wall. Some with greater aspirations of conflict left it in place, hoping for a run-in with a rival and a bit of a wager wrought in blood.

  Only one had ever directly challenged fellow collectors, and only in matters of murder or assassination.

  As I forged my way through mist and dark, a silhouette painted in murky gold drifted into sight.

  My heart lobbed into my throat so hard that the whole of my body lurched with it. I stumbled on nothing at all, fingers clenched over the borrowed coat as my senses turned that shadow to a thin fellow with a large greatcoat and a bowler pulled low.

  A strangled sound captured in my chest echoed eerily in the collector’s station, bounced from brick wall to brick wall and was swallowed by the fog.

  The figure turned.

  Where I expected to see a blade of a nose and lazy smile, there was a flat, wide nose, a bullish jaw, and thick lips set in a scarred finish. He wasn’t nearly as tall as my imagination painted him, nor so thin, and extremely square shoulders beneath his fustian coat bore the breadth of a pugilist.

  My fear—my nightmares—eased with a hiss of air, and the tremors followed after. There was no chance, no matter how slim a miracle, that I might ever face my rival, my friend, again. He was gone. As surely as I still stood, he did not.

  It was a burden I carried, a memory I tucked with the ghost of my husband, and for the sake of them what I had lost—friend or rival, husband or standing—I could not allow the nightmares purchase.

  I braced my shoulders lest their slump translate through coal-smeared dark and my too-large coat. Weakness was as blood to predators when dealing with a collector; I had to be certain to show none.

  Signs I had missed in my panic made themselves clearer as I approached the wall on soundless feet. He wore a common dock man’s cap, not a bowler, and his jaw was both wide and made to look soft by the bulldog-like jowls dusted by dark blond whiskers. He had large eyes spaced widely apart, color indistinguishable in the dark, and they fixed on me with uncompromising suspicion.

  A glance at his attire revealed that it was not all shoulder beneath his navy coat, but leather padding and strange gauntlet vanishing into his sleeve. A like padding fastened around his chest and mid-section.

  If I kicked it, it would likely absorb much of the impact.

  Decidedly a collector.

  And here I stood, utterly underdressed for the occasion.

  I only pretended to ignore him as I closed the distance between us. His gaze remained fixed upon me as I strode to his side; shoulder to elbow, really, for like most, he was taller than I.

  Studying the wall revealed the usual run of collection notices. Them what owed money, them what had vanished with someone else’s belongings, items of note needed finding, and other such errands that were too dangerous or too complicated for someone else to bother with.

  More than one bore a notice that a dead collection was acceptable if a body could not be turned in alive. Few of those were matters of debt, however. One could not wrest coin from a corpse.

  In my many years as collector, there had usually been at least one assassination on the wall at any time. My rival—whose name I refused to give out of respect for the friend he had been first—had delighted in such notices, and sliced each in marked challenge to any collector who felt bold enough to take him on.

  I’d used that same ego against him, challenging him direct to find Jack the Ripper before I did—using a monster to bait a monster.

  It had worked—at least partially.

  I cleared my throat. “Been no sign of that Ripper, eh?”

  The collector grunted. “Not since November.” A grudging reply, but I sensed truth in it. I’d thought the monster my first real killing—as a rule, I had never collected children nor taken on assassinations. There were some men who simply needed killing, and the world might thank them what holds the knife, but the thought still left me with an acute discomfort.

  I’d murdered, and it had done something to my inside self I hadn’t quite come to terms with. A loss of innocence, maybe, if I were feeling particularly romantic about it.

  And for all of fate’s tossing about, I’d learned that I hadn’t quite managed to finish the job. The November papers had declared another murder while I was convalescing in the country.

  None since.

  I did not know if the murderer was still about, but to go near on half a year without sign nor trace suggested he was gone for good.

  Whether I’d injured him badly enough that he’d succumbed after that final murder he’d committed or if he’d fled London entirely, I couldn’t know.

  “Shame,” I murmured.

  “Good coin in it,” he agreed, misunderstanding what was so shameful. He thought I missed the purse. If only that were so. “Maybe the collector what likes the killin’s took ’im on.”

  “Mm.” Noncommittal at best, but I chose not to share what I knew on that regard. I’d earn no favors by confessing to killing a fellow collector, even if it was something of an unwritten rule to compete. “Been months after his last twist? Wager he’s gone.”

  “No bet,” he demurred, likely thinking the same as I. We would never know until the Ripper struck again, an unfortunate circumstance, but all of London had moved on. Whitechapel no longer spoke of the terror that haunted its streets from September to November.

  No, three months of five murders and then nothing at all?

  I may not have killed him outright, but my instincts assured me that he was gone. One way or another.

  And I had much more important matters than revisiting such unhappy memories. I frowned at the various bits of parchment, squinting at the cramped writing of some.

  “‘Ere, now,” the gruff bloke said suddenly. He flattened a scarred hand on the wall in front of my face. “Y’a collector or just lookin’ about where y’ain’t t’be?”

  I was tired, true. Fatigued, really, from the physical aches of a weary body to the mental strain of a day that would not cease its continued assault. I could have grabbed his wrist, if I’d wanted, kicked out the knee he put much of his weight on to stoop to my level, knocked him on his arse, then stepped on his throat for added punctuation.

  I could have done all this just as it played out in my head, but the whole of it seemed too much effort for a point to make.

  So I smiled at him instead; full, toothy and utterly lacking in anything kind. “I do this dance with every one o’ you blighters calling me into question.” I roughened my dialect, for the only known female collector was not a toff.

  He had thick eyebrows—bushy as I imagined his whiskers would get if he didn’t shave every few days or so. They drew together over his flattened nose. “What, y’ sayin’ yer ‘er?” He snorted. “Don’t look it.”

  “Thought I’d be taller?” I asked, dismissively letting my gaze return to the wall. Another batch of parchment, a little nicer than some, caught my eye. They were pinned close enough to suggest they’d come at the same time, overlapping each other.

  “Thought yeh’d—aye,” he said, snorting again. Habit or bad case of watery lung, I didn’t know. “It true y’collected Jauncey Copperpot?”

  “That weren’t even his real name,” I said absently, ducking under his confining arm as if it were nothing. I pinned a finger to the note, my teeth coming together. Communion.

  Pricks and plums, to borrow a nicely turned bit of cant.

  “An’ ’is beaters?” prodded the collector.

  I sniffed over my shoulder. “Nothing a twist or two wouldn’t solve.” Bracing my hand over the notes to hide the names from my odd interrogator, I lifted the note and surveyed the next. Zylphia.

  Naturally.

  The last two beside it threw all my flagging energies into abrupt reverse.

  Countess Compton, also known as Cherry St. Croix.

  Miss Black, collector.

  Dead or alive. Each posted by the Midnight Menagerie.<
br />
  “Bollocks,” I breathed.

  “Sommat good?” queried the collector, and I tore the four notes from the wall before he saw them. The glare I shot him warned of my claim.

  He raised his hands as though to indicate surrender, his thick lips hiked in a scarred twist. “Y’saw’m first, ain’t lookin’ fer a fight.” A glance over my black hair and mud-caked boots lifted a corner of his mouth. “Not that y’look like yeh’d stan’ up.”

  I scowled. “Better men’ve made the same call.”

  “Heh.” He scratched at his temple, leather at his gut creaking. “Thought’cha was a story.”

  “There’re some who’d wish it,” I said, stuffing the crumpled notes into my coat pocket. I scraped a filthy hand over my cheek, as a brawler might in show of attitude, and added, “You want to be one?”

  “Neh. I get my plen’y.” He stepped aside, as much a show of goodwill as to get closer to the wall and the bounties left. “I’ll tell you sommat ’fore y’go.”

  I tilted my head. “What?”

  “They leave us alone when they’re ‘round, but I got me thinkin’ they won’t do th’same fer a haybag,” he said by way of preamble, and it took me a moment to recall the word for what it was. This bloke came from outside the East End. West End, more than not, another by way of Haymarket.

  I let the descriptor go. “Who?”

  “The Black Fish Ferrymen.”

  I scoffed. “They’re a bunch of magsmen and mug-hunters,” I said, “I’ll grant you that, but even they won’t creep on collector ground.”

  He sucked air through his teeth, shaking his head as he turned his eyes to the notes that promised a good meal on a good day. “Used t’be,” he replied. “Used t’be.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else—duty more than discharged, and likely because I was female than for any collector’s camaraderie. “Grateful,” I told his back. He snorted.

  Clutching my notes in the fist I’d thrust into my pocket, I left the leather-banded fellow to his perusal.

  So the Ferrymen weren’t just encroaching in Limehouse. That sealed it. Something had given them an edge—a dramatic leverage over all comers. Nothing else could explain the ease with which they crossed boundaries they had not before, and even so far as to harass the collectors.

  That was highly unheard of. For all the Menagerie’s reach, they had only acted as providers of bounties when they needed debts collected. They had never flexed any muscle over collector business, and to learn the Ferrymen had no such cares was the last straw.

  They had a swagger, they always did, but such recklessness demanded a backer.

  The Veil was moving.

  Confound it. I could no longer put off a meeting with Communion. Of all my sources, he’d have the best information on the Ferrymen proper. Whatever he could tell me, I could merge with what I’d learned of the Veil’s actions and perhaps find a weakness—or the truth of whatever it was bolstering the Ferrymen.

  I might also gain an idea of how many collectors had a notice with my descriptor.

  Did the Society collectors know? There were only three that I knew of, lazy fellows who thought it a stylish sort of profession for the fashionably dangerous. They relegated themselves to roles of pretend authority, usually among the higher middle class and tradesmen of their purview.

  I was the only true collector in the lot, but they wouldn’t know that. Would they take on a countess? Unlikely.

  Would they come for a disgraced countess?

  The purse was good enough. I would.

  Of the four notices plucked, the one for my collecting self and the one for Ishmael Communion would surely give more pause than challenge. Communion was no small fish in the Brick Street Bakers, physically or otherwise. He was a large man, as tall as Osoba but at least three times his breadth. A watchmaker’s son, he possessed a remarkable grasp of the Queen’s English for a ranking officer in a low street gang, and an intelligence few would make the mistake of underestimating.

  When first I’d met him, he’d been a cracker of some repute, and a master rum dubber. What he taught me was what they called the black art—how to pick a lock like a virtuoso. I’d worked with him on occasion, and we’d pulled each other out of the proverbial fire more than once.

  I had hoped to keep him out of the Menagerie matters entirely—to prolong that time before he might call my attention to the debt I owed him—but the crumpled notes in my pocket forced my hand. However long the Veil had been placing bounties, I needed to ask him what he knew—and warn him, if he didn’t know already.

  It said much of my esteem for him that I did not think that he might be dead. The very moment I caught myself mired in such effortless arrogance, a chill stole over me.

  I had not made myself readily available since returning. Would the Bakers know to tell me if their leader had fallen?

  Biting back a few harsh words, I forged into the dark streets, my aim for Baker ground.

  Chapter Twelve

  Crossing London low without benefit of a hackney, carriage or well-paid gondola hired from above took more time than I could strictly afford.

  By the time I’d prowled my way around the border of Limehouse—the better to avoid the bulk of any Ferrymen—and through Poplar, I was convinced that Ashmore was going to murder me outright when he finally located my whereabouts.

  The months I’d spent in my mother’s rural estate might have been necessary for my well-being, but it lost me much of my connection with the people I’d relied upon as a collector. Every district I walked through seemed different—the smell, the sound, even the texture of the air carried with it a burden of sharp anticipation.

  Much had changed, that much was obvious, but how far did it reach?

  Poplar was Baker ground, the northern end. The dodgy end, the Isle of Dogs, thrust into the Thames and tended to smell of rotting fish. In the middle was where I’d find the bulk of the Bakers—Blackwall, where Communion often met his crew and divvied up the duties of a gang.

  They were not few. From the lowest abram men to the meanest rufflers, each rank in a crew had a duty to dispense, and quotas to achieve.

  Unlike the Ferrymen, the Bakers did not turn to peddling flesh—but they were no innocent party. More than a few fair victims had lost their lives and their coin to a mug-hunter wearing Baker best.

  I had no ground upon which to stand and judge, for I’d committed my share of crimes in the name of coin.

  Walking through Poplar in the dark was a lesson in intuition. The same pall that clung to the rest of the East End hovered heavily here, and even the catcalls of the doxies that claimed way stations along the streets—all with the Baker’s protection, if the fee was good—seemed to me to be sparse and intermittent.

  Poplar was not known for its gaming hells or its brothels, which meant them what lived in the night here did so for other means.

  Half through Poplar, the eerie stillness of the whole reinforced my certainty that I was right to come. Not a sight nor sound of Baker presence revealed itself, and I crossed the boundary into Blackwall without a single carrier to ferry word of intruder to them what watched for such things.

  Whatever had happened, it had spread like cholera through fog and flesh. A disease of the spirit, perhaps; something that felt too much like fear.

  In the distance, hounds bayed; an uncanny sound that should have been muted by the fog and instead seemed to soar above it. Others barked, some close enough to hear the staccato echo of it.

  I scrubbed at the back of my neck as the fine hairs lifted.

  When a figure darted from a back alley, I jumped within my flesh, bones rattling. The gas lamps lit along the road did not bathe the whole in light so much as reflect off the coal-choked wall surrounding us, but I glimpsed the hurried hand flicked out to others in the smoke and a brief flash of a grim face. None I recognized, but as three more slipped in his wake and vanished into the fog, I followed unseen.

  Where there were dodgy f
igures in Baker ground, there would be a fight.

  Voices did not carry so well in the peasouper; one might as well attempt to shout underwater. For this reason, I could not rely entirely upon my sense of sound to lead me in the right direction. I did not hear the brawl until I was near upon it.

  I was close enough to the shipyards to smell the pong of the filthy Thames, chock-full of waste and run-off from the factories farther up river. The bulk of shipping industries had moved above the drift, which bore the unfortunate consequence of thinning out river-side work.

  Of course, for the Bakers, this made for excellent stomping ground.

  And brawling ground.

  The men I’d followed spilled out of the cramped lane and darted across the open lot. They fanned like men accustomed to open-air brawls, where it came down to numbers over cunning.

  Numbers the Bakers had.

  It said something that I did not push farther into the lot. Instead of charging off into the fray, ready to swing a cosh and a fist, I halted just outside the lane, squinting against the bite in the air, and watched seven Bakers gang up on three Ferrymen.

  They were indistinguishable by all but their own recognition, yet it didn’t take much to figure that the three men thrown together in the middle of the grouping were the skivers dancing on enemy ground.

  I liked to think of myself as something of a skilled fighter—the sort of arts necessary to a shorter, often smaller body who needed to take on larger as a matter of rote. In contrast, the Bakers in my view were all taller, meaner, and didn’t much care for art when a brick in hand would do as well. They lit into the Ferrymen with abandon.

  The screams tearing through the night pleaded for mercy.

  A hand came down on my shoulder.

  Without so much as a breath in between, I seized it, twisted out from under, and rammed the cove it belonged to into the wall beside us. His arm strained in my grip, pinned higher up on his back than strictly feasible, and his laughter carried more than a few harsh curses.

  In the stark light of the lantern he carried, now rattling in its brass fixtures, I saw a man with golden hair slicked back, cheek to the brick facing, with a freshly pink scar twisting his lip into a false smirk.