Illusion

by Stephanie Elmas

  Illusion

  Stephanie Elmas

  © Stephanie Elmas 2017

  Stephanie Elmas has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Mia, Azra and Leo

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  BOOK 1 – Tom

  Chapter 1

  1873

  The face emerged through the snow and fog like a spell. He squinted into the distance, trying to make sense of it, but the cold scattered frosty prickles across the white haze. He squeezed his eyelids together for a moment, brushed the freezing tears away, and then peered out again. Nothing. The face had gone.

  Tom shook his head, chasing the ridiculous illusion away, and turned back to the gnarled lips that were still smiling up at him.

  ‘You awright love?’ mused the lips. They barely had a tooth to defend. Above them, two coal-black eyes sparkled with promise. ‘Lost in yer thoughts?’

  As she spoke, a package slithered into one of his hands. The few coins he had offered were expertly extricated from the other. He barely noticed. Once again he found himself staring out into the fog. Could it…could it possibly have been…?

  He faltered backwards. Several giant cargoes had come in that day and the crowd was in an unforgiving mood. Shoulders jostled, sacks crashed against knobbly spines, barrels bounded precariously across his pathway. Through the white air, the faint outlines of masts and funnels huddled like trees in a forest. Tom allowed his body to bend in tune with the force of the chaos and let his eyes scan the scene in one final attempt to find the face again; now more indulgent fantasy than genuine hope.

  And for one blissful moment, as he gazed into the distance, London’s docks seemed to slip away from him, taking their noise and stench and fury with them. He imagined himself back - far, far, back, in the house of red bricks he’d once known, with the speckled silver birch that brushed the windows. The memory was slowly dying, but he still clawed on to fragments of it as often as he could: the smooth bannister, dead bluebottles on a heat drenched windowsill, the smell of Ma’s cooking…,

  The sound poured back in once again, an unrepentant tide. He blinked, glanced at the crush of faces and bodies around him and squeezed the package in his hand. The touch of the thick, slightly oily paper allowed him a sliver of recompensing joy. The face had gone; it had never really existed. But they’d have a good supper in their bellies tonight: Tom and Ma and Sally.

  He squeezed the package again. And then an odd feeling suddenly managed both to jerk and slither through his guts at the same time. He knew that feeling well; it had been an appallingly common feature of his life so far. Walter used to call it ‘all dried peas and eels’, which was a fair approximation for what Tom could only describe as that nasty stomach-wrench you get when something is most definitely ‘wrong’.

  Looking up, he noticed that those gnarled lips and coal-black eyes were rapidly retreating through the crowd, as far away from him as possible. The old woman was already some distance away; her small figure moved surprisingly nimbly through the oncoming obstacles.

  His blood suddenly quickened and he began to follow her, tearing the paper open as he moved. One quick glance confirmed his suspicions. Three. Just three measly pairs of blistered eyes peered back up at him from inside the wrapping.

  ‘Stop!’ he yelled after her, quickening his pace. ‘I paid for six herrings, not three. Stop that woman! Stop her!’

  A lock of her matted grey hair danced around a corner and he plunged after it. Something hard and sharp smarted against his leg. He winced, but continued to charge forwards, half hopping, half running through the clamour whilst clutching the three pathetic fish to his chest.

  ‘She’s a thief I tell you!’ he shouted out, to no one in particular. ‘You look away for one second and …,’

  And then he could say no more. For suddenly, out of nowhere, a giant wall of granite stepped into Tom’s path and his face smashed directly into it. Instantly, the world turned into a swarm of grey flies and his mouth filled with iron. He swallowed hard. Pain whistled like hot steam through every crevice of his skull. Thankfully, the granite wall appeared to move back a little and, as Tom’s vision cleared, he discovered that the pain had been inflicted not by a rock, but by the cast-iron chest of a beast masquerading as a man. A black-bearded face glowered down at him. It was framed by the wings of a hawk tattoo that embraced his trunk of a neck.

  ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ came an oozing voice. His mouth leaned down to align itself with Tom’s face.

  But the pain was too extreme for him to summon up an answer. He gawped and stammered, still tasting the blood in his mouth. The huge man rumbled with something resembling laughter and then, in the corner of his eye, Tom spotted an immense fist rising up into the air. It loomed over him, like a row of overstuffed sausages. He could already see his crushed face mirrored in their walls of gristle. He had to move, fast, but the crowd was closing in; he was also still reeling with pain, there wasn’t a whisper of wind in his lungs….

  ‘Come on, head down,’ came a voice, suddenly in his ear. He started at the strange familiarity of its sound.

  Without a second to register what was happening, a hand gripped his arm from behind and scooped him away at a sharp angle. Another hand pushed his head down and suddenly he was being forced through an impossibly small gap between the back of a cart and pile of sacks. His head bubbled and his feet swerved and skidded beneath him. But the vice-like grip on his arm forced him on, relentlessly.

  He registered very little of what came next, surrendering himself entirely to the guiding grip of the mythical figure behind him. Every inevitable collision into barrels, walls, horses, and even the outraged faces of the crowd, seemed to be saved by no more than a needle’s width. Magically, his body was thrust through impossible clearings, invisible lines of passage that he would never have found himself and, as cries of outrage chased them like a furious wave, he could do little more than keep his head down, just like the voice in his ear had told him.

  Gradually, as the cries became a little fainter, air began to flood into his lungs again. He spat out the last of the blood and, to his overwhelming relief, felt warm life pumping back into his fingers and toes. They charged around a corner, where the crowd had thinned a little, and then the voice came to his ear again.

  ‘Now, run,’ it commanded.

  The hand unleashed itself from his arm and his feet firmly caressed the ground once more. Without a backwards glance, he drew his chest up into the air and charged forward, the cold gnawing at his cheeks as mud splattered up beneath his pounding feet. And his companion, his saviour, charged with him, their feet clattering together across the cobbles and mud and shit an
d ice like one stupid, crazed horse. And when finally he glanced back, he caught the flicker of a green cloak ribboning around the feet of the man behind him.

  Tom felt his mouth curve into a smile; his racing legs danced through the air. In his head he heard violins, plucking churlishly at the gawping fishwives and the drunks in the alleys. He smelt the river again and flew towards it, laughing, on a current of warm joy.

  *

  When at last they couldn’t run anymore, the two men clutched at their knees and stomachs, gulping in the sweaty, blackened flavour of London’s air. And then, finally, Tom allowed himself to look into the face of his friend; his dearest friend in all the world; his brother in everything but blood. Walter. Walter Balanchine.

  ‘Is it really you?’ he stammered, his lungs burning with the effort. ‘I thought I saw you earlier, only for a second, through the fog. Thought I was going mad. And then, just as I was waving goodbye to my own face …. You appear again, like that!’

  Walter’s thin mouth remained straight, but Tom knew that it was smiling back at him. He knew that face better than his own.

  ‘Three years, Walter!’ he spluttered. ‘How could you have stayed away so long?’

  ‘Three years you say? I thought it was only two.’

  ‘How long’ve you been back?’

  ‘A few days. Thought I’d lie low about the docks for a bit; I knew you’d turn up eventually.’ And then his mouth did betray something of a smile. ‘Good thing I ran into you.’

  Tom breathed in deeply; tears stung at his eyes. For a moment they were boys again, bare-footed, hoping to catch an errand or pinch a morsel of anything they could lay their hands on.

  He squeezed his friend’s bony shoulders tightly. ‘Welcome home, Walter.’

  They wandered down to the edge of the river. Tom’s mind burned with questions and yet he could barely bring himself to utter a word. Not yet. Below them, mudlarks foraged in the grim, littered banks of the low-tide. Boys as young as five crunched through the thin layer of ice that now laced the surface of the mud. The skin on their bare shins gleamed with a blue, marble hue.

  ‘Remember when we tried that?’ murmured Tom.

  Walter wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Waste of time and effort. I’d rather pick oakum.’

  ‘I’d rather do neither,’ responded Walter.

  A group of boys paused in their efforts to peer back at the onlookers. Someone must have caught sight of Walter. Their faces were grey and pinched, sprinkled with fine dust: mere ghosts of childhood. And yet they were the ones who gawped in amazement. They murmured to each other with a greedy interest, pointing.

  Tom had almost forgotten how dreadful it was: that defensive outrage he always felt on behalf of Walter, coupled with a shameful understanding. He, after all, had also once stared at Walter Balanchine as a young boy. The first time he saw him, his jaw had almost unhinged itself in wonder and horror at the peculiar older child. How could Tom have possibly known then that that skull-faced scarecrow would go on to snatch him from danger, save his life even, again and again and again?

  The problem was, that even in a place such as this: the rich tapestry of London’s East End, visited and inhabited by people of every origin; a corner of the world, where the notes of a hundred different languages drifted past your ears in the space of a day, Walter Balanchine was still the most unusual looking individual that most people had ever seen.

  For one thing, he was at least two heads taller than the average man and this, coupled with a near skeletal build, gave the observer the immediate impression of a long, thin spider. This impression was worsened by the fact that, for a man of such distinctive height, he had an impossibly small, sallow face. His eyes were also small, like two brown nuts, and he possessed no more in the way of lips than a lizard. His hair did little to assuage these unfortunate attributes. It was thin and wispy, and when it rained it stuck so closely to his head that it seemed as if he had no hair at all.

  ‘You’re the ugliest thing I ever laid eyes on. Look at you! You’ve got the face of a reptile and the hair of an old man.’

  Those had been the words of Mrs Rafferty, one of their old mistresses. Walter must have been no more than eleven or twelve at the time and he’d merely blinked back at her in response. He was used to such remarks; he’d been subjected to far worse as a result of his looks. But the butch, florid Mrs Rafferty got the shock of her life the next morning, when an entirely bald woman peered back at her from the mirror. The whole workhouse had shaken to the tune of her screams; even the rats had taken shelter.

  ‘She’s that scornful,’ Walter had said when Tom quizzed him about it at the time. ‘Scornful to the bone that woman.’

  Tom looked at Walter now, ensconced in a great cloak of emerald green. It didn’t surprise him. In their world of greys and blacks and browns, Walter had always been entranced by colour. Where others sought to paste themselves into their surroundings, melt into the muddy streets, Walter courted difference. He saw nothing strange in lurching about East London like a great, bony peacock.

  The emerald cloak was rich and luxurious. Walter had wrapped it fully around his body so that only his head showed, rather like a round stopper on a tall, green bottle. Even the most normal looking person would probably have been gawped at in such a get-up.

  ‘Eh, you a wizard or somefink?’ chided one of the mudlarks.

  Walter seemed to think about this for a moment and then nodded, slowly. A low, mocking laugh rippled through the small group, but they began to back away nonetheless.

  ‘Come on, Walter. Let’s get a drink inside you.’

  Chapter 2

  They made their way to Limehouse, a quarter with streets so narrow that the houses seemed almost to touch in the middle. It was snowing now. A confetti of snowflakes filtered through between the narrow gaps in the gables above and floated, innocent and feathery, into the grime beneath their feet. They made their way along in amicable silence, Tom watching his old friend absorb his home territory once again.

  Soon they fell upon Narrow Street, where chandlers sold their wares and the smell of spices and chops and old barnacled ropes filled the air. Walter took the lead and they squeezed on through.

  ‘Well, if it ain’t Walter Balanchine!’ cried a voice ahead.

  It belonged to a gap-toothed old man selling nuts.

  Walter patted him softly on the arm. ‘Hello there, Norman.’

  ‘Come to steal from me again? I better watch out.’

  ‘No, not this time.’

  ‘Hey, where you been?’

  ‘East.’

  ‘East? You’re already East.’

  ‘I know that Norman. I know.’

  Tom glanced absently behind him and suddenly spotted the shadow of something dart away from his gaze. It had been small and nimble, with a dark shock of hair. He frowned at it, or rather at the place where it had been, and then nudged Walter on.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll turn up here.’

  They landed at The Nightingale; a small hole of an inn with no more than three tables and a thick layer of sawdust on the floor. Tom had chosen it for its stove: deliciously large for such a trifling establishment. It set the moisture steaming from their shoulders as soon as they entered. A young, blonde woman was serving. Her eyes flirted at Tom through lustrous lashes at first and then widened to popping proportions when they fell on Walter’s strange looks.

  In response, Walter nodded at her courteously and sat down, removing a long, thin pipe from his cloak. The young woman watched on as he lit it and began to blow giant smoke rings into the air. With a small puff, he blew one in her direction and it enveloped her head, sinking down over her shoulders like a frothy necklace. She paddled her fingers through it, erupting into giggles.

  Tom smiled at his friend’s quick triumph. He leaned back in his chair, unfastening his coat, and let the drowsy, contented atmosphere of the room take hold of him. But then, again, he caught sight of a figure spying at them through a
greasy window pane. Tom sat up abruptly. It was that same nimble little dark-haired person, flashing for a second time out of sight.

  ‘You know what, Walter,’ he said in a low breath. ‘I think we’re being followed.’

  Walter drew on his pipe, seemingly unperturbed by the revelation. ‘Oh yes, that would be Kayan,’ he replied. He blew out a smoke ring that took the shape of a perfect sickle moon.

  ‘Kayan?’

  ‘A stowaway. Been following me since Calcutta; good with a pack of cards. Kayan! Come on, come out!’

  An olive-skinned boy with a mop of black hair materialised from around the door. He smiled broadly at them, displaying a perfect set of white teeth. Tom shook his head and felt himself groan.

  ‘O, he looks far too healthy for a place like this!’

  Walter pulled a chair over for the boy. ‘This here is Tom Winter,’ he said, clearing a space on the table.

  Without a word, the boy sat down and fished a pack of cards out of his pocket. In a moment he had spread them out on the table, and was shuffling them so deftly with his quick fingers that the cards seemed to be almost an extension of himself. Tom watched the red and black shapes swim before him. In the corner of his eye, Walter puffed at his pipe and the blonde woman hung over the counter, now watching his friend like a coy kitten, all cleavage and curls.

  Tom wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the moment. Less than an hour ago, it had been just another normal, cold, dreary day. The purchase of some meagre herrings had been his chief interest, his greatest object of joy! He had had no concept of the torrent of colour that was about to gush back into his life. He couldn’t possibly have imagined himself then sitting here, as he was now, with Walter back by his side and this strange, olive-skinned boy, creating rainbows in the air with a pack of cards.

  ‘Pick one. Pick one, Master Tom Winter,’ Kayan said in a voice accented like soft treacle.

  Tom plucked a card out in mid-flight and turned it over. The Queen of Spades. Kayan scooped it back up and began to shuffle the cards again; so deftly that it was a spectacle to watch them fly between his hands. They seemed to move with a life of their own, like wriggling fish.