by Gaie Sebold
“Charlotte. Your baby sister. I’m sure you remember, since you both disappeared at the same time. Perhaps she was stolen away by gypsies?”
Eveline said nothing.
“The remaining servants said that Lathrop had had two wards briefly living under his roof, that their mother had died, and that the older had run away, apparently taking the younger, who was barely more than a babe-in-arms. He placed a notice in the papers, stating that you were not of sound mind, and he feared for you and your sister.”
“Did he.”
“Lathrop was a local councillor. Much respected. Did he discover he had taken under his roof someone who was not worthy of his generosity? Someone whose behaviour, perhaps, did not reward his kindness and care? Who was, in fact, even at that tender age, a corrupt and unregenerate criminal?”
Eveline stared at the curtain over the window. He came looking for me. He already knew who I was. What are you up to, Mr Holmforth? You want something from me, but you’re not all flattery and pretty words, are you?
“Hmm,” Holmforth said. “It seems that you are capable of discretion after all. Well?”
“Well what?”
“Are you prepared to enter the Empire’s service?”
“I still don’t know what you want me to do.”
“You will work for Her Majesty’s Government, completing the tasks you would be set to the best of your ability, with absolute loyalty, absolute discretion, and absolute obedience. To this end, you will receive housing, clothing, food, and an education.”
“Why me?”
“Because you, Miss Duchen, may have the skills I need.”
I, she thought. Not we, not Her Majesty’s Government. She stored it away.
“And if I don’t?”
“You may still be of use to the Empire.”
He was doing his best to make her feel she’d no choice in the matter, but that was a trick she’d seen played on more than one mark. She’d done it herself. What he had, and she didn’t, was information. Knowledge, Ma Pether’s voice whispered in her ear. If you’ve got a brain and the means to fill it, you can outwit the Queen and all her ministers.
She knew what her skills were: deception, trickery, lifting... any way of getting by on the wrong side of the law that she’d been able to find out about, she was good at, bar murder. Did the Empire need thieves and tricksters? Her brain raced. How much did he already know about what she could do? She wasn’t going to sit here listing every trick she’d pulled; for all she knew this could be some elaborate ploy to draw her in. To get not just her, but Ma and all the girls.
His face gave nothing away. He might as well have been a stone angel in a churchyard, for all his expression betrayed. His eyes remained fixed on hers throughout, but she could read nothing in them except, perhaps, a cold curiosity.
“For all I know they might want me to walk a high wire like in the circus, twirling a parasol.”
“Under what circumstances do you imagine Her Majesty’s Government would require you to do such a thing?”
“I dunno. P’raps Her Majesty might be bored and fancy a laugh?”
“I hope you are not in the habit of referring to our Queen with disrespect.”
“I ain’t disrespecting no-one. So you’d train me like a circus girl, would you?”
“That is hardly likely to be necessary. You will receive a somewhat wider education than is normally available to girls, even of the highest class. Does the idea appeal?”
She shrugged. “Depends if it’s useful. I can read and I know me numbers. I get by.”
“You disappoint me. I thought the idea of knowledge might appeal to you. I understand you read for pleasure, as well as when it might be useful to... Ma Pether, you call her. Her real name is Fulshott, by the way.”
Was that true? If it was, he knew far more than he should – far more than Eveline, and more, perhaps, than Ma.
“How’d you find me?”
“I made enquiries. It took time.”
“Who peached?”
“Is it relevant?”
“It is to me.”
“An intimate of the Pether household. He was most helpful, for the right sum.”
An intimate... Bloody Bartholomew Simms. It had to be. There were no other men who hung about the place enough to be called an ‘intimate.’
That tiny bit of knowledge fought against Eveline’s increasing chill. If Holmforth thought that hadn’t been enough of a clue, then he didn’t know quite as much as he thought. Besides, fear would do her no good at all, nor would thinking about what would happen to the others if Ma got taken up. Saffie, pretty little curly-haired Saffie who wiggled like a puppy at the slightest kindness, out on the street with no-one to watch her... she’d not last a day.
She kept her voice calm. “You said housing, clothing, food?”
“You will be housed in a dormitory with other young women, and of course, fed. On completion of your training, you would be provided with accommodation. Clothing as necessary and, once you are trained, a personal allowance.” He looked down at her feet, which were clad in a pair of broken-down black boots that were too big and stuffed with paper at the toes to keep them on. “Shoes. New ones. That fit. And a pension, do you know what that is?”
“No.” Although she had heard the word. She remembered hearing it in those dreadful days after Papa had died, when everything had started to go so wrong. There had been supposed to be one, but there wasn’t.
“A sum of money, regularly paid, once you are too old or otherwise unfit to work.”
Food. A roof. A personal allowance. Shoes she didn’t have to share. And money when she was too old to work.
She had a vision, then. A room, her own room. An armchair. A little footstool, a roaring fire, a plate of sausages. A door that locked. Even when she was old and too crippled with the rheumatiz to lift a handkerchief.
She wasn’t scared of work; she worked hard for Ma. And a pension sounded like a very good deal indeed. The thought of it was like a big soft blanket. As for an education... Ma wasn’t the only one who believed in knowledge. Knowing her letters and numbers gave Evvie an edge others didn’t have – not to mention that reading helped you forget cold feet and an empty belly in a way nothing else did. An education meant books, of which she’d never had enough, and chances, of which she could do with as many as she could grab.
A good-sounding deal, right enough. But she knew about good deals. She’d offered them herself. They tended to have a great big fishhook stuck somewhere in the middle.
“And if I don’t ‘complete my training’ in whatever it is you want me to do, fall off me tightrope too many times, maybe?”
“A return to the streets, without even the fragile protection of Ma Pether. You may be lucky enough to find employment in the factories.” He leaned forward. “Clever as a monkey you might be, Miss Duchen, but you are young, poor and female. You have been lucky so far. Luck runs out.”
He was right, she knew. And she also knew, in the depths of her gut, that he was lying, or at least, not telling her something. What?
Clever as a monkey.
That wasn’t such a compliment, when you thought about it. Monkeys got caught and put in a fancy jacket and a little red hat and chained to a barrel organ, holding out a tin cup in a shivering paw.
I’m nobody’s monkey, mister, Eveline thought. Not yours, not Her Majesty’s Government’s, not even Ma Pether’s. I’ll go along. And I’ll see what’s to be seen.
And we’ll find out who’s the clever one, Mister Holmforth.
The Britannia School
THE CARRIAGE MOVED steadily out of the centre of town, up through St James’s, into the park and out the other side, uphill, always uphill. The shuffling foot-traffic, the clatter of iron wheels and clopping of hooves, the chuff and rattle of steam-cars all dropped away. As the last of the daylight faded, leaving only a sullen red glow in the west, they were out in the country, with no light but the carriage’s own swaying lamps to
show the road ahead and no sound but the brisk clopping of a single set of hooves, the rumble of just four wheels, the creak of springs and leather. As the roar and stink of town and its endless smoke faded into the scents of a spring night, dewy green and sweet, these small, familiar sounds seemed to make the surrounding silence bigger; as though all around the carriage, something, some living, breathing thing, listened.
The shadows of great trees loomed beside the road. Eveline shivered, but could not stop looking, gulping in the cleanest air she’d smelled in years. She had been born and bred a country girl. Until that last terrible journey with Charlotte, the woods had held few fears for her. In the spring she’d lain for hours among the bluebells, half-drunk with their scent, watching the tiny flickering figures that hummed and dived among them, teasing the bees and stealing their pollen and sometimes, if she stayed very still, landing on her skirts, or tugging at her ribbons with minute, mouselike hands. They had huge insectile eyes in pale pointed faces, and wings like coloured glass.
In the winter Eveline had run among the wet black trunks, catching her stockings on the hooked thorns of the bare red-stemmed brambles, leaving a tribute of stolen cake or bright ribbon in the fork of a tree; glimpsing a spike-headed bogle like a teazle with legs, and once a nixie with green-ripple skin and webbed fingers and a crown of ice, brooding at the edge of her frozen pool. Eveline had brought her a flowering snowdrop bulb stolen from her mother’s garden, and the nixie had smiled at her.
Her father declared the Folk a still-living but less relevant version of the fossils that fascinated him and filled every spare shelf of the house – a fading mystery, soon to be relegated to academic lectures and browned-ink footnotes. Her mother had, like her daughter, been fascinated by the Folk. She had sought them out, sometimes with the instruments she made.
A great tree stood by itself in the middle of a field, barely more than an outline in the gathering dark. Eveline had a sudden, painfully clear memory of her mother, cross-legged under just such a huge spreading oak, her hair falling out of its bun, a humming box in her lap, surrounded by curious Folk, many Lesser like bogles, and even one or two of the Higher, who looked like people, only prettier. They had laughed, when a change of note sent the little ones spiralling madly up into the branches.
Eveline took every opportunity to escape from chores and lessons into the woods to seek out the Folk. They seemed to her, even then, such carefree creatures, unburdened by rules and Don’ts and Mustn’ts. And eventually, there had been Aiden.
She didn’t want to think about Aiden. That was a long time ago, like her last trip through the woods. Then a wall of dark brick, blood-coloured in the swaying carriage light and at least eight feet high, imposed itself between Eveline and the view. She glanced at Holmforth; he had closed his eyes, but she knew he was not asleep.
The coach slowed and turned left, and stopped. Eveline heard the driver speak – she assumed it was the driver, though she had yet to see his face. She peered out of the window, and could see only a brick column surmounted by a gas lamp, which threw yellow-green light on a strange object in brass, a little like the mouth of a trumpet, set into the column at the height of the coach-driver’s head.
There was a clunk, a hissing creak, and the coach moved forward, the wheels clattering on gravel. The bars of a high iron gate, straight and unadorned, passed by the window, and Eveline could see the edge of a well-kept lawn fading into darkness beyond the reach of the carriage lamps.
It occurred to her that there had been nothing on the gate or the column to mark what sort of place this was. She felt a cold churning in her stomach and glanced sidelong at Holmforth. Had she been gulled? Was this some sort of bawdy-house after all, or something worse?
Holmforth opened his eyes. “There’s no need to look so anxious. I would hardly bring you all this way if I intended murder.”
The coach crunched to a halt in a spatter of gravel. “One thing,” Holmforth said. “I wouldn’t advise trying to run. There are dogs that patrol the grounds, and they are exceptionally temperamental.”
He opened the door for her and handed her out, courteous again. She noticed a faint tracery of scar-tissue on both palms, a row of pallid overlapping crescents like the bite marks of some furious ghost.
Eveline drew in a great gulp of spring-scented air. Her heart tugged in her chest, and despite herself she could not help looking out over the grass to where the shapes of trees clustered against the last faint light of the sky. They were properly out in the country, all right. She pulled her gaze away and stood blinking at the vast building in front of her.
It bulked against the night sky, its roofline bristling with chimneys. A dozen faint slivers of light indicated the presence of firmly curtained windows; black bars crossed them, as though trying to prevent even that much light from escaping. A door big enough for a church, bound and riveted with iron, stood like a muscular sentry in a stone porch, faintly illuminated by a gas lamp in a wrought-iron cage.
It didn’t look much like the village school Eveline remembered; one room, a thatched roof, and a privy out the back. Not that she’d gone herself, of course. Only the boys got schooled. She’d sneaked up to peer in the windows and listen, but the endless lists of Kings and Queens and the chanting of times tables had bored her. Her mother had been teaching her to read and write and reckon, in the cluttered, chiming, whirring room that served her as a study. Her father had occasionally, absentmindedly passed on such scraps of history or biology as he himself found entertaining.
The building bore down on her, with its walls and bars and frowning ironwork, trying to make her small and helpless and afraid. She lifted her chin and glared at it. After what she’d been through, no mere heap of bricks was going to make Eveline Duchen feel like that.
The door opened and a figure stood outlined against light. Tall, straight, female, hair drawn close to the skull; that was all that could be made of it.
“Mr Holmforth,” it said.
“Miss Cairngrim.” Keeping his hand firmly on her shoulder, Holmforth steered Eveline towards the door. “This is Eveline.”
Close to, Eveline could see that Miss Cairngrim had a high-browed, handsome face, darkly drawn brows, greying hair, and an expression of chilly reserve, which changed not at all as she looked Eveline up and down. She had a strange, harsh, throat-catching scent that added to Eveline’s unease, making her feel suddenly weak and tearful.
You’re hungry and tired, Eveline Duchen. Perk up and keep lively or you’ll get in trouble.
More trouble.
“I see,” Miss Cairngrim said. “You had better come in.”
Eveline marched up the steps and through the door, holding her chin high.
The hall was high-ceilinged and chilly, the floor laid with a complex pattern of black and white marble. A large, plain lamp hung from the ceiling. A small dark table with a mirror in a gilded frame, spindly gilded legs and a single shallow drawer stood against one wall, bearing a brass plate on which a lone letter sat forlorn. Eveline gave the table a professional once-over; the drawer might be worth a look, the brass plate would fetch a few bob, but the table itself was cheap, the gilding already flaking from the legs. That aside, the hall contained nothing but closed, white-painted panelled doors and a faint scent of cabbage and gravy.
Miss Cairngrim’s dress was grey wool, with a narrow skirt and a small bustle that hardly seemed to move as she walked. Eveline followed the bustle down the hall.
Miss Cairngrim opened a door to reveal a small parlour. It was just as chilly as the hall – the fire lay unlit in the grate. Three green-upholstered chairs stood at bay around a circular table shrouded in yellowed lace, and a faded red sofa huddled in one corner. A lamp with a yellow silk shade missing two tassels stood on a battered escritoire. The mantel bore chipped figurines of a shepherd and shepherdess, in the sort of flounced, beribboned costumes that always made Eveline give a silent snort. Anyone who thought you went herding sheep guyed up like that had never hauled o
ne of the stupid beasts out of a bramble patch – or helped with a lambing.
Neither figurine had been worth a lot, even before whatever rough handling had robbed the shepherd of some of his fingers and the shepherdess of her elegantly pointing toe. Between them, leering, was a Toby jug of immense and grinning ugliness, stuck full of pens and slate pencils. Eveline took to him immediately – he was worth even less money than the chipped shepherd and shepherdess, but was by far the most cheerful thing in the room.
“So, Mr Holmforth, what have you brought me?” Miss Cairngrim said, turning up the lamp and examining Eveline as though she were a dusty mantelpiece.
“Eveline Duchen. A thief,” Mr Holmforth said. “A child of the streets, of little education, uncertain temperament, deceptive nature, and excessive pride.”
Eveline, who had been called worse, though seldom in such fancy language, simply sighed. She was weary, hungry, and despite her resolution on the doorstep, more than a little unnerved. It was all very strange. And where was everyone? Going from the lights she had seen, and the sheer size of the place, there must be other people in it, but she couldn’t hear a sound. It was all reminding her rather too much of arriving at Uncle James’s. Shoes, she told herself. Shoes and clothes and a pension.
“I see,” said Miss Cairngrim, apparently unmoved by Holmforth’s litany. “And this is the girl you believe is suitable for training?”
“Whether she is or not, I require it,” Holmforth said, his voice cold as a knife blade. Eveline saw the muscle in Miss Cairngrim’s jaw twitch. “Her education is to concentrate on those areas in which I instructed you. Otherwise, she is to receive the same as the other girls. She has received the basics and not much more, but she appears reasonably intelligent. She may have a facility for languages; I have heard her speaking French.”
He must have been the man she saw on the docks – or perhaps he had overheard her chatting with her friend Bon-Bon.
