The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  Coram was presently occupying a bench outside the sugar refinery on Wellclose Square. He had been watching the Safe House since dawn, taking turns with a rotating roster of his brothers, two of whom were even now watching the rear door and the discreet river gate beyond. It was a pleasant place to sit, and favoured by the neighbourhood as such, since the caramel smell of the sugar boiling in the giant vats within the manufactory wafted over it in a warm miasma. For Coram, however, this smell was not pleasant, and he was quite looking forward to being relieved from his watch. When he had been small, before being taken into the protection of the foundling hospital at Coram’s Fields, from which he derived his name, he had witnessed a disaster at a sugar baker’s. In fact it had been the same disaster that had orphaned him, since his parents had both worked in the place, and he had been being babysat at a neighbour’s rooms close by. He had little exact memory about it other than a great alarm raised across the parish, the night being lit by a roaring inferno and, most memorable of all, as he was carried away on the shoulder of the fleeing neighbour, he had looked down and seen streams of burning sugar, molten like lava, running along the road behind them. Twelve people had died in the fire, eight buildings including a church had burnt or been so badly damaged they had to be demolished, and Coram had been deposited in the care of the orphanage before the burning lake of sugar had cooled enough for the rescuers to remove–with picks and crowbars–the bodies of his family and their co-workers. As a result, he had what his brothers considered to be an irrational dislike of toffee apples and a lifelong aversion to the smell of burnt sugar.

  He was thinking of this when Abchurch appeared at his shoulder with the alarming news that “Poor ol’ Pountney’s squittering nuffink but blood now”. Coram grimaced sympathetically and made room on the bench.

  “Can’t fink how Pounters is going to see out the week if he goes on like this,” said Abchurch, choosing to remain standing. “It’s a wery wicious flux as ’as got him in its grip and no mistake.”

  He squinted down the long cobbled slope towards the Safe House and rummaged in a brown paper bag of apples he had obviously purchased on the way over. Abchurch squinted at everything since his eyes worked independently of each other, the legacy of untreated childhood strabismus ensuring they were always out of step. This, taken in tandem with his lisp, part affected, part natural, made some less perspicacious people think he was not as bright as he actually was.

  “Poor ol’ Pounters, eh?” he repeated. “Can’t fink how he can ’ave got taken so low, and all the rest of us right as trivets. Pippin?”

  He rummaged in the bag and hooked out a shiny apple which he offered Coram. Despite or maybe because of him accompanying this invitation with as innocent and engaging a smile as a boss-eyed young man with little chin could muster, Coram declined.

  “You have it,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for apples.”

  Abchurch looked at the apple. Coram watched him with hidden amusement from the corner of his eye, interested to see if he would bite into it. A horse trotted round the corner pulling a milk cart, wheels trundling noisily on the granite setts. Abchurch flinched at the noise and stepped back.

  “Oh blast,” he said.

  The apple bounced on the pavement and then rolled into the road. It bobbled away on the cobbles, gathering speed as gravity pulled it down the incline. Halfway towards the Safe House, the camber on the road on that side of the square had pulled it into the gutter where it accelerated until it met the angle at the corner of the square and bounced over the lip of the pavement, rolling across the paving stones and disappearing into the area in front of the Safe House.

  “Blast,” repeated Abchurch. “What a waste of a werry good Pippin.”

  Coram stood, hiding his amusement. Perhaps it was all an accident. But either way, Abchurch’s apple had just given him the germ of an idea.

  “Don’t worry, old son. Nothing’s ever truly wasted,” he said, clapping his skew-eyed rival on the shoulder. “Not if you look at it straight.”

  He allowed his smile to appear once he was safely round the corner. He would cloak it again once he reached his father because it never did to let on that one was pleased with oneself in front of Issachar, but in his heart he knew he had a plan for them that would not only confound his rivals, but would put an end to The Oversight once and for all, with never a clue as to who or what had been behind it other than mere accident and unfortunate topography.

  SECOND PART

  THE DEATH OF AIR

  ON SOLITARY AGENTS

  It is not only the Free Companies who police the border between the canny and the uncanny. There are some who do not avail themselves of the benefits of shared endeavour, and prefer to act independently in the pursuit of balance and protection. Their motives are often the same as those in The Oversight, or The Remnant of the Americas, or the French Paladin, but equally they are sometimes acting for mere personal enrichment as an unlicensed thief-taker might. They are known as seeker, or venator (from the Latin for “hunter”) or, if female, venatrix.

  The venatrix operates as a local wise woman might, except with a roving disposition. Strong and independent women with natural and supranatural blood in their veins have made an unconventional and self-supporting life for themselves on the fringes of more normally patriarchal communities by using their gifts as healers or seers, providing valuable succour, support and protection in exchange for food, services or money. The venatrix, however, works beyond the confines of a single community. Often ills are visited on one location by malign forces that then move on beyond the ambit of the local protectress, if the neighbourhood is lucky to have one. The venatrix undertakes to hunt the perpetrators down and to do whatever they can to ensure restitution is made. They do not like the constraint of the Free Companies for obvious reasons, in that the unpaid provision of the services they charge for is a serious impediment to their well-being. As a result they are more likely to operate in remote rural areas, and are almost never seen in heavily populated areas like London itself.

  from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)

  CHAPTER 15

  THE CHANGE

  There are as many ways to steal a child as there are children, but there is only one way to do so and be absolutely undetected, and the young woman on the edge of Upper Rathbone Place had the trick of it. She stood in the lee of a mews house, her eyes fixed on the lights on the back of the tall building that overhung it.

  She knew which of the windows were bedrooms, and indeed she knew who bedded whom behind the topmost window, the small one below the eaves, where the servants lived. She knew the room below it was the child’s room, the night nursery. She knew the night nurse and the father of the house had an assignation every Thursday night in the room above. And it was Thursday. The little bundle in her own arms shifted and gurgled, and she stroked it calmingly, without taking her eyes off the story the lights were telling her in case she missed the opportunity for which she was waiting.

  The father of the house was a medical man. The night nurse was an accommodating young Irishwoman from Skibbereen with a tight waist, a high bust and a dangerous twinkle in her eye. The woman in the shadows knew the twinkle was dangerous because she had put it there, or if not precisely applied a twinkle where none had previously existed, she had looked into the eyes of the medical gentleman and left him with the impression that this was so. She had that skill too, as well as the secret of stealing children undetected: she could suggest things to people without them remembering she had done so. She could do this and then make them forget they had ever even met, let alone been worked on by her. She had done this often, through many bodies but only one unconscionably long life. She was a changeling.

  She was also a watcher in the shadows, and while she watched undetected, she planned. She knew the medical gentleman was in the habit of administering a calming draught of his own concoction to still the jangled
nerves of his wife. The wife’s nerves had, the wife herself felt, been particularly set on edge by the discordant and messy business of childbirth, but the truth is that she had always been of a highly strung–not to say delicate–disposition, and had she not been an heiress, the medical man might not have been so keen to wed her. Bedding her was another thing altogether, and the procreative exertions had occasioned so many tears and so much silently exacted post-coital recrimination that he had subsequently made other arrangements for quenching that particular fire, arrangements involving the taut waist from Skibbereen.

  The marital consummation had, however, had one other consequence, and it was that particular child that was the subject of the changeling’s plans. She knew that on Thursday nights the medical gentleman increased the proportion of laudanum in the draught he prepared for his wife with the result that she slept early and deeply, rendering her unaware of the movements of her husband in the intervening hours as he made his way up the narrow back stair to the night nurse’s bed. She heard neither suspicious creaks, nor the unattended noises of her child in the night nursery above her.

  The husband and the high bust from Skibbereen were too mutually occupied to pay much attention to the intermittent grizzling of the infant in the room below them. And it was this gap in attention–partly cultivated by her own actions–that the changeling was waiting to take advantage of.

  The light in the uppermost room dimmed. And with that the watcher moved. She flitted across the slick cobbles and swung herself up onto the roof of the mews house with startling ease, seeming to swarm up the wall without pausing to select handholds, and then she was nimbly running across the sloped tile roof before jumping to the narrow top of a garden wall that took her all the way to the back of the tall house. Reaching the looming cliff of brick, she stretched an arm up for the nearest window-ledge and scaled the façade with the fluid ease of a piece of smoke made flesh. In less than a minute she had transferred herself from the shadows in the alley to the window of the third-storey nursery, and then she ducked her head below the sash and disappeared inside.

  The small child was chuntering unhappily in the cot, not quite exhausted enough to stop. The woman bent over him and placed a hand on his cheek. Despite the darkness, she could see a gleam as the infant eyes searched for hers and then, as they found them, the grizzling dwindled and then petered out.

  The interloper made a low cooing noise, and the previously unhappy noises were replaced by a gentle gurgle of contentment. The changeling lifted him out of the cot and looked at his face in the shaft of moonlight lancing through the window behind her. It was a distinctive face, with a strong brow overhung by a tangle of short dark curls and a single mole just to the left of perfect rosebud lips.

  She put the child on the floor and leant over the cot, pulling something out of the bundle tied close to her body which she tucked beneath the covers. Then she bent down, picked up the child from the carpet and in two steps had reached the window. An instant later she was gone without a backward look, and the room was silent, and only a very sharp pair of ears would have caught the only other noise which was the rustling and scraping that marked the child thief’s descent back to the street.

  Then there was a cough and a squeal. And though there was no one to see it, an identical child with rosebud lips and a mole began to wail in the cot.

  In the room above, the father of the house was lying on top of the night nurse, his face buried in the crook of her neck, cushioned by the soft abundance of her red hair. He breathed in deeply, bewitched by the smell of her which was to him the clean salt-tang of the sea above the sweet smell of sun-warmed gorse that he remembered from his childhood long ago.

  This, he knew, this is what drew him to her and though what they did was undoubtedly wrong, it felt right: it was in truth both beautifully, exhilaratingly wrong and badly and addictively right, because the flat stomach and the perfect skin beneath his hands felt and smelled like home. His hands circled her waist indecisively, as if unsure whether to venture upwards to the rising curve of her breast, or to slide downwards to find the tantalisingly forbidden warmth waiting to welcome him between her legs.

  As his fingers made their own decision and headed south, the girl stiffened and raised her head from the pillow, ears cocked.

  “Now did you hear that?”

  He froze, groggy between guilt and frustration.

  “What?”

  He watched her listen, the clean cut of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the bright eyes softened by the grey-dark of the unlit room but still, to him, intoxicating.

  “Nothing,” she said and turned to him. “It was nothing.”

  Her smile was more than reassuring. It was, in that moment, everything to him. He could not tear his eyes from hers. He wanted to tumble into them, he wanted to lose himself, he wanted to be inside her, deep inside, hidden inside, safe-home inside, so deep that nothing could…

  Her cool hand gently paused the urgent resumption his fingers had made on their downward journey.

  “Now, mister, I think you’re done…”

  Momentary confusion ploughed a shallow furrow across his brow.

  “But I…”

  Her other hand came up to his face and just as gently smoothed the creases away.

  “Arrah no, sure but you’ve had a lovely time, and are you not powerful sleepy now?” Her voice was naturally sweet and softened by the gentle accent of her native County Cork. “So you are, so drift away now, and all the naughty fun you’ll be wanting of me will be had in your dreams and will seem quite as real to you when you wake as if we had done it anyway, so no one’s the poorer, and I’ll be a sight less discommoded…”

  He smiled as he felt the warmth of her hand move to his waiting tumescence and closed his eyes in beatific anticipation. And then sank face forward into the pillows and began to snore.

  The girl from Skibbereen neatly slipped out from beneath him as he descended, a smile on her face as she looked at the side of his head, the greying hair and the thick mutton-chop whiskers now wedged into her pillow. She turned his head so that he wasn’t stifled, had one last look at his slumbering face and patted him on his back. There was no malice in the gesture; it seemed like a friendly farewell of sorts.

  “No, no, there you go. Sleep like a baby, big strong man… I’m far too nasty for you anyway.”

  And with that she twisted out of the bed and headed for the door.

  She entered the night nursery and crossed straight to the cot. She twitched back the covers. The child lay happily on its back, arms sprawled in the abandonment of sleep, one flung wide, the other curved behind its back, breathing easy through the distinctive rosebud mouth.

  The night nurse reached down and pulled out the arm trapped beneath the child. She turned its wrist, as if expecting to find something there.

  The child opened its eyes and looked at her, bleary with waking. The mouth began to twist into an unhappy grimace and it took a deep breath.

  The gentle girl from Skibbereen slapped it, and slapped it hard.

  “One keek out of you, you little monster, and I’ll be after tying a brace of flat-irons round your neck and throwing you into the deep dark waters of the Fleet Ditch with the rest of the filth that flows through it.”

  The tears began to flow from the shocked child’s eyes. It took another breath, face red with shock and indignation.

  The girl slapped it again.

  “Nary a squeak. I’m not joking. I’ll do it. By the Lady Stone at Drombeg, you have my oath I’ll do it, so I will. It’s not like I haven’t done it to your sort before.”

  The child became silent, lip quivering, little hands opening and closing in frustration. The night nurse picked the child up by the arm and calmly put it in the carpet bag.

  “Not a single keek, boyo,” she repeated as she quickly tied back her hair. Then she picked up the bag and quietly left the room.

  The girl from Skibbereen walks calmly through the night streets. In one hand s
he swings the child-laden bag. In the other she holds something small that she rubs between her finger and thumb, like a pebble.

  Whenever she comes to a junction or a cross-alley she pauses and closes her eyes, the only movement being the repetitive rolling of the pebble, which seems unconscious.

  She doesn’t stop long and when she does, on two occasions, men of dubious appearance emerge from doorways and ask if she is lost or requires help, offers which, given the late hour and the demeanour of the men, contain more promise of trouble than actual succour.

  She doesn’t speak to either of them, but the look she returns seems to satisfy something in each, and they leave her to pass on into the narrower streets of the city unharmed.

  She finds the child thief in a basement room on the edge of a rookery in Endell Street. She stops in the narrow roadway and lifts her head as if sniffing the wind. And then she walks backwards a few paces and turns slowly, face blank, the hand rotating the pebble casting vaguely to right and left in a distinctive and almost hypnotic motion as if she was dowsing for something.

  It is a thin house at the fork of two alleys that led past it on either side into the darker recesses of the rookery proper. It had once been painted white, but that was long ago, and presumably although it had also been built with the use of a try square and plumb-line, age had not only mottled and discoloured it, but had also combined forces with a local subsidence which had encouraged its ancient walls to belly and sway alarmingly out of true, so that it stood akimbo in the black maw of the rookery like a single tooth, crooked and rotten.