The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  He pulled out the Coburg Ivory from the pocket of his coat, and flipped the coat back to reveal a belt full of knives. Knives that Sara recognised with a sick lurch in the pit of her stomach as Sharp’s blades. Dee watched her keenly.

  “A black mirror occurs where blood is spilt. It opens a door to quite another sphere than ours, I think. If these boots, these knives and this get-you-home belonged to friends of yours then I am afraid it is likely they are gone past any ability you may have to find them.”

  “Him,” she said, the word tumbling out before she could bite it back.

  “Him?” he said.

  “Not they,” she said. “Him. There was only one.”

  “And now I am afraid he is undoubtedly gone,” he said. “I am sorry. But that is the honest and bitter likelihood of it.”

  His face was impenetrably bland, but his eyes were too sharp for her to do anything other than remain wary.

  “Lady,” he said, “if I were a liar, why would I tell you such a harsh truth? If I were a deceiver, be sure I would give you honeyed words and hope.”

  She did not trust herself to speak. The sight of Sharp’s blades–blades which were as much a part of him as his slow smile or his serious eyes–had sucked all the vitality and urgency from her. The sight of his knives in another man’s belt was, to her, the almost complete extinction of hope.

  Almost.

  “What did you do to the Raven?” she said.

  “I am sorry?” he said, brow crinkling.

  “You will likely be so if you lie to me again, sir,” she said. “What is your business?”

  His smile was feline and infuriating. Her hand loosened the blade in its sheath beneath her coat.

  “I am what you might call a supranatural philosopher, a student of the arcane,” he said. “I have confederates beyond the mirrors who help me, and who in return I render services to…”

  “But not The Oversight, of which the real Dee was once a part,” she said, “and that is curious, no?”

  “I assure you The Oversight and I went on our parallel but separate ways after an amicable separation,” he said. “What the history you may have read says of me I do not know, but that is the truth of it. The Free Company was ascendant, there was, if anything, a superfluity of members and I left it by mutual agreement in the rudest of health, in order to pursue my own studies.”

  “I do not think you are Dee. I think you are an imposter in a pair of stolen boots,” she said. “And for all I know, that ring round your neck is something else you have robbed from its rightful owner. But whatever or whoever you are, by Law and Lore I require you to hand over those knives, that Ivory, the boots and above all that ring.”

  What she really wanted most of all was the Ivory, the get-you-home. Everything else was sentiment. The Ivory was a practical aid that might lead her to Sharp. Her mind was running clear again.

  “Law and Lore,” he said. “And how will you enforce that, Miss Falk?”

  “By any means necessary,” she said.

  “Such as the one you are holding beneath the skirt of your jacket, for example?” He smiled, and suddenly he did not look so old or so well disposed towards her, as if a veil had just been discarded. And his hand was also beneath his own coat, where she now knew Sharp’s blades were.

  “I do not wish to harm you. Or fight you, Miss Falk,” he said.

  “That is wise,” she said, “for it won’t end well if you do.”

  He smiled again, and then, faster than she had imagined possible, he had a knife in both hands, and was crouched and ready with a litheness that belied his age.

  “It didn’t have to—” he began, when a high-pitched and persistent chime filled the space. He winced.

  Sara took advantage of this to step away from him and draw her knife.

  The chiming put her teeth on edge. He stood and, to her surprise, sheathed the knives. He put his hand around the bell on the chain round his neck as if trying to muffle the noise. It didn’t work.

  “Well,” he said, the words clearly hurting him almost as much as the sound of the bell. “I am called elsewhere. This unpleasantness is postponed…”

  And before she could move, he stepped out of the passage into the mirror behind him.

  And Sara was alone again. But this time without even the companionship of the Raven.

  She tried to remember how many steps she had got up to on her quartering of the mirrors. She wanted to get away from this spot as soon as she could, in case the unsettling Dr Dee returned.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE HUNGRY WORLD

  On their return from the afternoon with Hodge in which they’d discovered the Alp’s abandoned quarters, they found Cook complaining about the untidy state of her kitchen. A series of deliveries had all arrived at the same time, and her large scrubbed tabletop was invisible under all manner of sacks and brown-paper-wrapped parcels.

  “Right,” she said as soon as they entered the kitchen. “It’s no use making those big hungry eyes at me, Charlie Pyefinch. There’ll be no tea until this is packed away, and I have business at Goodbehere’s, so I suggest you all fill the storerooms with this mess, and then when I return I shall no doubt be in a better frame of mind and attempt some pikelets or suchlike.”

  Lucy’s sharp eyes had spotted pastry sitting beneath a damp towel on the sideboard, so she knew Cook was not really in the foul and thunderous temper she was affecting.

  The Smith came in with a large dripping basket of eels while they were putting things away.

  Cait caught him at the door appearing, as was her wont, from nowhere.

  “Ah, see, I wouldn’t be dribbling that wet creel into the lady’s kitchen right now if I was you,” she said. “She’s a bit on the sensitive side today. I’ve been hiding from her all afternoon.”

  “Right. Thank you for the warning,” he said, turning round. “Back pantry it is.”

  Lucy was already in the back pantry, putting a coarse sack of potatoes away. The dirt on the vegetables had seeped through the sack and her gloves were muddy as a result. So she’d gone to the sink and begun to wash them with a new bar of Caverhill’s Patent Pine Tar soap. She washed the gloves on her hands, just as if washing the hands themselves, and as she did so inhaled the piny tang of the suds and somehow the smell and the coarse sacking filled one of the holes in her memories, and she found she was gripping the side of the sink very tightly so as not to fall over at the nastiness of it.

  It was at that moment The Smith entered with his basket of eels. He put it on the ground over a drain grate, and then saw her face.

  “What?” said The Smith.

  “A memory,” she said. “It. I…”

  “You glinted something?” he said. Then looked at her gloved hands. “But how—?”

  “No,” she said.

  She had to sit down; she moved a box off a barrel and lowered herself onto it. The Smith gave her a peculiar look, and then walked out of the door. She heard the screech and whoosh of the pump-handle, and then he returned with Cait and a cup full of cold water. She took a few sips and nodded. He leant back on the shelves and raised a shaggy eyebrow.

  “I just remembered things I didn’t know I’d forgotten,” she said. She pointed at the hessian sack, then at the soap.

  “It was the smell,” she said. “This piny, tarry smell. And then the sacking. It just made me remember something…”

  “Nothing good,” Cait said. “Not from the way you reacted. You’re white as a sheet.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me,” said The Smith.

  “Arrah now, come sit by the range and get your colour back first,” said Cait. She put her arm round Lucy’s shoulder and led her gently back into the kitchen proper.

  Jed cocked his head at them. Charlie opened his mouth with a question that The Smith killed with one look before he could voice it.

  Lucy sat at the table and sipped her water. She was conscious of them looking at her, of the heat at her back from the range
, and most of all of the firm hand that the girl from Skibbereen kept companionably on her shoulder.

  Clearly looks were exchanged that she wasn’t privy to, because Charlie suddenly got very busy clearing the rest of the provisions off the table, and Hodge decided Jed wanted to go outside to take care of some canine needs better addressed in the street than inside a kitchen.

  “Go on,” said Cait. “If you’ve a mind. Better out than in.”

  “I was brought to the Safe House with a plaster put over my mouth,” Lucy said. “It was a rough square of sacking like that potato sack and it smelled of pine, because of the pitch they’d used to stick it to my face.”

  “Yes,” The Smith said. “Sara Falk was horrified that you’d been treated like that. Sharp too.”

  “Well, I remembered that well enough,” she said, taking another sip from the tin cup. “But until I went in there…”

  She nodded at the back pantry.

  “I’d forgotten the people who did it to me.”

  “The plaster?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Was a man called Ketch,” said The Smith. “Sharp said. A sort of local drunk. Bill Ketch.”

  “No,” said Lucy. “It wasn’t Ketch. It was others.”

  “Others,” said The Smith, raising an eyebrow. “What kind of others?”

  “Others like the ones who tried to stop us on the way here. Charlie and me. On the canal. Others with faces covered in blue lines, wearing skins and bones–I mean clothes that looked sort of normal except they’re made of hide and fur and use bits of dead things to fasten them.”

  “Sluagh,” said The Smith.

  “Yes,” she said. Her heart was thudding at the memory of it. “Sluagh.”

  “Bad cess to ’em,” said Cait, squeezing her shoulder encouragingly.

  “Slow down,” The Smith said. “Take your time.”

  She shook her head. She had to get this memory out of the way as fast as she could.

  “They took me and they tied me up somewhere. I can’t remember where they took me from except I was asleep and then I wasn’t and they were carrying me away from the light into a wood. I think it was a wood: there were branches and brambles anyway. And then they held my head and they stared at me. And I tried to not look into their eyes because I knew that was what they were trying to make me do, so I concentrated on the patterns on their faces, the blue tattoos, and I just followed the lines like a maze, trying to lose myself in them and not hear what they were saying, but all the lines kept leading back to the eyes, and I think that’s when they got in my head and started shutting bits of memory away and putting other bits and pieces in there.”

  She shuddered and felt sick and cold at the core of herself.

  “Them going inside my mind,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain but it’s… it leaves you feeling dirty and…”

  “Violated,” The Smith said gently. “It’s like rape.”

  Cait stepped back and looked at him.

  “Arrah now, and how would you be knowing what rape felt like, big strong man?”

  Him saying the word didn’t help. Putting a name to it wasn’t the thing. Saying it made it worse. Made it public. Lucy felt sicker and more exposed.

  “It’s nothing like rape,” she said. Though of course it was. “I mean, I’ve not been that unlucky, but I’ve had men try after me, bad men, and so far I’ve been faster and smarter than them.”

  She remembered breaking a bottle on a man’s head by the sea in France. It wasn’t a good memory either: she could remember his hands, his breath, hot and meaty and garlicky, and she could still feel the impact in her hand and the cracking sound. She’d run so fast she never knew if it was the bottle or his skull, or both.

  “And you can fight, because you’re strong,” Cait said. “And I can—”

  “But against the Sluagh, opening your mind and laying your innermost self bare–there’s no power, no strength that you can use against it,” said The Smith. “It’s like they put a thing in you, a stain…”

  “A blackness,” Lucy said. He nodded.

  “They put a blackness inside you and your brain freezes in terror and then they can do what they like because all the rest of you can do is concentrate on that blackness and watch it, in case it moves and hurts you.”

  She stared at him.

  “Yes. How do you know?”

  “I’ve been around a very long time, Lucy Harker,” he said. As if that answered anything at all.

  And then Cook returned and the tension in the room broke as she had to be filled in, and then Charlie miraculously reappeared, having finished pretending he was stacking things in the storeroom, and Lucy was sent to get dry gloves, and then tea, jam and buttery pikelets and pipe-smoking happened, and the world looked better again.

  Except clearly Lucy’s memory that the Sluagh had been involved in working on her mind had added evidently something to the equation that The Smith had been trying to solve as he tried to assess the sum of the enemies currently ranged against them. She noticed him talking quietly to Hodge and Cook when she was supposedly involved in conversation with Charlie and Cait, and when she asked again if she might to go back out with Hodge and Charlie to look more closely at the house on Golden Square, he forbad it. She had been looking forward to a break in the routine of going back to the Isle of Dogs each night and staying out with them, but she found herself back in the dog cart with The Smith, heading east as the evening lengthened.

  He spoke little as they went, not even pointing useful and educative things as they passed them in the way he normally would. When they reached the house, he bade her a good night and went into the workshop.

  She lay awake, thinking of the day’s doings and trying to put them together, adding the new scrap of memory to the patchwork of her past, and most of all trying to parse the sudden tension she had felt between Cait and The Smith. And then she found she was just thinking of Cait and wishing she could be more like her, more direct and calm and then she started thinking she’d like wild, unruly hair like Cait’s… and then she noticed the silence.

  The Smith had stopped working in the room below.

  And then she heard the ghost of a footstep on the ground outside, and perhaps because it was a footstep evidently trying not to be heard, she slipped out of bed and looked out of the window and saw The Smith walking carefully away from the house in the dark.

  Of all the lessons that Lucy had enjoyed most, the ones involving tracking each other through the crowded city was her favourite. In part this was because she was so very good at it, naturally alert and gifted with the ability to go fast-yet-slow when she needed to. And she and Charlie had been told that since they were to be trained on the job, that no experience was to be wasted. Maybe this is why thirty seconds later she found herself beneath the starless sky, trailing The Smith as he picked up speed, striding across the rough ground, heading north. Or perhaps it was the unexpectedly furtive way he had left the house, carrying a bag she had never seen before. Maybe she just followed because she was inquisitive and thought if she could see where he went she might get to the bottom of why it was she was so deeply ambivalent about a man who should, by all rights, be a welcome protector.

  The Smith was a very fast walker, his long strides eating up the mileage with no hint of slowing as they headed north, moving off the Isle of Dogs and following the course of the North London Railway line all the way to Bow Road, where he joined it, heading east on the high street until they crossed the turbid waters of the River Lea and doglegged north again via Pudding Mill Water, where she nearly got seen by him as she flitted over the mill race by the looming new flour works. Luckily she found a scrap of shadow in time as his head turned to look back at the city he was now leaving behind as he struck out across the wilds of Hackney Marsh itself. From then on it was more a matter of guessing where he was going and zigzagging an intersecting course, keeping to the cover of the scant hedges vegetation lining the drainage cuts as he made his wa
y in a more easterly direction, until he crossed the last major water by a thin, single-plank footbridge and strode up and over the railbed of the Cambridge Line, his feet crunching the clinker as he went.

  Lucy followed on his tail, making sure she kept low and only trod on the wooden ties as she crossed the iron tracks. And then, three and a half miles and less than an hour after they had left The Folley, he came to a halt at a crossroads on Ruckholt Lane. On the south side was a farm, on the east the silhouette of a grand mansion behind a wall spiked with railings. To the west stretched the flat water of the new reservoirs for the East London Waterworks, dull silver planes looking blankly up at the night sky above.

  The Smith turned towards the copse of trees on the north quarter of the junction. Lucy was in a ditch to his west. And for a long time they stayed like that. Then The Smith walked forward and hung the bag on a gnarled tree, and stepped back, staring into the shadows.

  “Take it,” he said.

  This far from the city his voice, though quiet, reached her ears quite clearly. And for a while it seemed only her ears. And then there was a barely discernible rustle in the shadows beneath the trees, and a hoarse voice replied.

  “Smith.”

  The shadow resolved into a man with hair plaited into long pigtails that hung from beneath an ancient fore-and-aft hat decorated with limpet shells. His clothes were patched from rabbit fur and pinned in place with bones instead of buttons. And his face, as Lucy had somehow dreaded it might be, was scarified with a maze of dark ink. She dipped her head lower behind the band of dock leaves, sure the Sluagh’s eyes were sharper in the dark than The Smith’s. But what disturbed her more than the Sluagh was The Smith’s ease with it.

  “How did you know we are here?” said Fore-and-Aft.

  “There’s just one of you, so don’t be playing games with me,” said The Smith easily. “And I’ll be straight enough with you.”

  “But how did you know one of us would be here?” said Fore-and-Aft. “For you wouldn’t have seen me if I hadn’t moved.”