The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  The Sluagh spat weakly at the wall and watched the phlegmy gobbet dribble down the planking.

  “Woods of protection, woods of binding,” he wheezed. “And something else too, something I cannot see that is making me as slow and rudderless as the men you protect, something like the cold iron you burned me with—”

  “The back of each plank is carved with words against such as you, for extra protection,” said Mr Sharp. “Your abilities will not, I’m afraid, work at all in there. I only mention it to save you later disappointments.”

  The Sluagh turned and looked into Mr Sharp’s eyes through the narrow viewing slit in the door.

  “You are very dainty for a mongrel. What are you going to do with me?”

  “I am going to check across the metropolis to see if you have been up to any other mischief or viciousness. If you have, you will answer to The Smith’s Court and be punished. If not—”

  The Sluagh threw back his head with a rattle of small bones, and chopped out a short bitter laugh.

  “The Smith? What of him? The Sluagh do not answer to anyone or anything, neither mongrels like you nor a turncoat cripple-foot like him. We are Pure. Besides,” he wheezed, “The Smith’s Court may still exist in name, but The Smith himself is no longer seen, we hear. He is gone and lost in the wind like the rest of your company.”

  Mr Sharp’s nostrils flared a little, but apart from that there was no sign that the barb flung by the Sluagh had found its mark.

  “If The Smith is not seen by you and yours, it is because he chooses not to be seen,” he said.

  The Sluagh laughed.

  “And the mighty Oversight? You talk as if you are still something. But you are almost extinguished. Your great days are gone.”

  “If the Sluagh think our misfortunes have weakened us to the point where you can come into the cities and prey on normal people, then they and you are much mistaken,” said Mr Sharp.

  The Sluagh smiled nastily.

  “Why else would we come into a city? A city is an abomination to us, a place of iron and steel, just as a brick-built farmyard with its fenced-in chicken run is a blight to the open countryside a fox loves. But like the fox and the chicken run, we have learned that a city has the single virtue of concentrating and controlling the quarry in one place…”

  “And because you cannot control yourselves, just as the fox once inside a chicken coop cannot stop his blood frenzy, Law and Lore forbid you from entering and limits you to the Wild Lands,” said Sharp.

  “But our wild land is not protected from your cities!” snarled the Sluagh. “And year by year the stink of iron and machinery begins to spread into our domain, with forges and manufactories, and rails of steel hammered into the ground like great metal snakes that run for hundreds of miles, caging the wild beneath it, breaking the flows of the older lines. And your precious Law and Lore do not protect us from that!” He spat again. “You are pets; we are Pure—”

  “You are many things, I’m sure,” cut in Mr Sharp. “But what you are now is in here for the night. I suggest you get some sleep.”

  “We do not sleep.”

  “My mistake. Of course you don’t.” Mr Sharp bobbed his head in apology. “Sit quietly then and wait until morning. I will come back then.”

  The Sluagh looked round his cell and waved a dismissive hand at the viewing slit.

  “Don’t trouble yourself. There is no window here. By morning I shall have stifled.”

  “You exaggerate,” said Mr Sharp. He was in a hurry to get back above ground because he wished to see what was happening with the strange girl whom Ketch had deposited with Sara Falk, and he had one more thing to do before he could return home, which was to patrol the area in case the Sluagh had had any accomplices lurking in the fog. Mr Sharp did not like leaving any unpleasant possibility unexamined.

  He turned on his heel and nodded at the landlord.

  “Lock him up, Bunyon. I will be back in the morning if not before.” He headed away down the corridor. Bunyon bent and slammed home the first of the three heavy bolts that added security to the lock on the door. When he had shot them all he peered in one last time, his hand rising to close the slit on the judas hole. As he did so he caught the Sluagh’s eyes which were staring right back at him, and paused.

  “I am a creature of the air.” The Sluagh’s voice wheezed in complaint. “Not some shadow-fed dirt-burrower. And you say you are not cruel.”

  Bunyon watched him through the viewing slit for a long beat. The Sluagh stared palely back, his shoulders heaving as he tried to get air into his lungs. With each breath Bunyon could hear them crackling and popping like a small twig fire. It was a sad and pathetic noise, and Bunyon was a kind-hearted jailer.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will leave this slit open. That will allow more air in. Goodnight to you, sir. You may as well rest. Nothing has ever escaped these cells. Your mischief is over for the night.”

  The Sluagh watched the lantern light bobbing away through the slit, listening as the footsteps diminished until they were cut off by the sound of the door to the ale cellar opening and then slamming him into darkness.

  He listened some more, heard nothing and knew he was alone.

  Then–and only then–did he reply with a nasty smile containing such a distillation of malice in it that for a moment he regained the malign vigour of a much younger version of himself.

  “Oh no, my fine fellow: the mischief has just begun.”

  CHAPTER 10

  BREAKING THE LIP

  The black carriage had pulled into a stable in a mews behind a tall house just off Bishopsgate. Coram slithered from the driver’s seat, turned up an oil lamp on the wall and opened the door of the carriage.

  “We’re ’ome, Father,” he said unnecessarily. Issachar made no move to emerge. He sat on the leather bench with a small basket on each side of him. Coram could see the oysters in them and his mouth watered. His father, who made his living by missing nothing, saw this and smiled. He wore a stained leather apron which served as a bib and napkin, protecting the sombre lawyer’s clothes beneath it. He pointed from one basket to the other with the stubby knife in his right hand.

  “Whitstables and Colchesters, my boy. Whitstables for meat, Colchester for cream.”

  His eyes, which had seemed so cheerful when talking to the pastor, had now deadened to something altogether flatter and more calculating. For a moment he seemed to be staring deep into the distance and seeing something only visible to himself.

  “My grandfather’s grandfather burned witches at Whitstable.”

  As he spoke, he tossed an oyster and the knife to Coram with the unconsidered condescension of a man tossing a bone to his dog. Coram moved fast and caught them both with either hand.

  “Burned ’em did ’e?” he said.

  Templebane nodded. And this was one of the hidden truths of the Templebanes–more than a century and a half before Issachar and Zebulon and their polished carriage, they had been Puritan witchfinders and witch-prickers, riding the countryside searching for the unnatural and the abnormal and bringing those they found to trial and death by hanging or burning.

  The Templebanes had been cunning men with a nose and an eye for the strange and the vulnerable, especially those who existed in the shadowy margins of even the most simple and sunlit agricultural communities. Their progress through the eastern counties of England had added a dark streak of blood and ash to the misery of a country torn by civil war. But they had been Puritans in dress only and had understood that, since fortune swings over men’s lives like a pendulum, the witch craze that attended the Roundhead’s victory and the following Commonwealth would pass, and that those who had prosecuted it would likely end up themselves pursued. The most successful witchfinders had a habit of ending their lives accused of the very dark powers they claimed to be able to search out in their victims, by a process of reasoning that said their success was itself unnatural and that the information they were privy to could only come into t
heir possession through uncanny means.

  The Templebanes certainly did have a network of informers and other stranger and more questionable allies, and perhaps because of this, they remained alert to the dangers of outstaying their welcome as Cromwell’s Puritan protectorate dwindled and the return of a less judgemental monarchy became increasingly inevitable.

  Ever adaptable, they had quit the rural stage before the curtain fell and moved to London, where the large amount of money they had earned for finding witches (paid by the government or the parish) and the even larger sum they had earned for not finding witches (paid by the accused witches and their families) was put to good use buying property and setting up a broker’s house in the City of London.

  Within two generations, the Templebanes were wholly respectable: they were not only owners of a brokerage but also lawyers or, as Issachar and Zebulon’s father had once said with a disconcertingly uncharacteristic chuckle, “Poachers and gamekeepers, my boys, poachers and gamekeepers both, and all the world to play for.”

  Respectability might have sat on them like a well-lined cloak, but beneath it they remained cunning men, and cunning men know that information itself is power. So they had never wholly given up on the shadowy contacts made by their forebears as they had travelled the hedgerows and remote villages of England, nor had they forgotten what they had learned about the gap between the natural and the supranatural worlds, not least the incontrovertible fact that both existed, and that there was often a profit to be turned brokering the exchanges between the two when opportunity presented itself.

  Issachar watched Coram trying to open the oyster, saw him slip and bloody his knuckles on the sharp shell, and noted with approval that he did not cry out.

  “You must break the lip,” said a voice from the doorway, “then the knife goes in easier.”

  The voice was Issachar’s, but he was still in the coach and his lips had not moved. Coram looked across the stable and saw what appeared to be the spitting image of Issachar, minus the apron, step heavily into the light. Coram nodded.

  “Father,” he said.

  And this was another hidden truth about the Templebanes: the bloodline tended to throw identical twins, and this was not Issachar, but Zebulon Templebane. In this way the orphan boys adopted into the house of Templebane may have lacked a mother, but gained two fathers in lieu. The current twins came by their archaic names due to a combination of professional foresight–the Templebanes holding that biblical names added a veneer of gravitas to their chosen line of work, though they were not, in truth, remotely religious–and uncharacteristic whimsy, their own father being a Jacob Templebane, and Issachar and Zebulon being listed in the book of Genesis as sons of the first Jacob.

  In earlier times, previous twins had ridden the countryside separately, gaining the reputation among a rural and credulous populace, who were unaware of the fact there were a pair of them, for uncannily being able to be in two places at once. Since the current twins had long ago agreed it would be more efficient to keep different hours, in order that Templebane & Templebane would gain the enviable distinction of being “the house that never sleeps”, their adoptees called them Day Father and Night Father.

  Zebulon, the Night Father, reached for the knife and oyster, which the boy relinquished with visible regret. He had hoped for food, and knew now that he was going to get a lesson instead. Issachar spoke as Zebulon demonstrated how to open the oyster.

  “There is a man, an ordinary man, a man with no abnormal powers but certainly abnormal wealth who wishes to possess something in that house on Wellclose Square.”

  “And he has commissioned us to help?” said Coram, eager to show he was catching on. “Catching on” was one of the qualities his adoptive fathers valued above anything else, bar a closed mouth to strangers and complete loyalty to the house of Templebane & Templebane.

  There was a beat of silence as Zebulon cracked the lip of the oyster and slid his knife inside, working it round, audibly severing the strong muscle keeping it shut.

  “So it would… appear,” he said.

  “Ah. He thinks he has commissioned us,” said Coram.

  Zebulon jabbed at the oyster with the knife, seeing it flinch with an approving smile.

  “Alive, alive-o,” he said. “Never eat a dead one, boy, or you’ll shit yourself into the grave.”

  He didn’t, at that moment, sound at all like a lawyer. He stared thoughtfully at Coram, who was unable to read that thought and avoided the resulting uncomfortable feeling by repeating himself.

  “So he thinks he has commissioned us, Father?”

  The Night Father snorted and swallowed the oyster. His dead eyes lit up with a flash of life as he chewed down, extinguishing the oyster between his teeth, squirting its juices down his throat.

  “Any conjurer or card sharp knows the only freedom about will is the freedom to manipulate it,” he said.

  He held his hand up to forestall interruption.

  “But in this business we are, as ever, mere honest brokers. Our patron wants something in that house, a powerful key that only someone with extraordinary powers can have a chance of obtaining. We do not have those powers, God be thanked—”

  “God be thanked,” said Coram, his eyes following the flash of steel as Zebulon tossed the oyster knife back across the stable to Issachar. There was something unnerving about the way the twins behaved when in the same room, a disconcerting thing which the boys only occasionally felt unwatched enough to discuss among themselves: the twins often talked and moved as if they shared the same brain, and did not need to speak to know what the other was going to do. In this moment, the uncanny synchronicity between the twins showed itself in the way Issachar reached out and caught the knife without seeming to need to look for it.

  “Indeed,” said Issachar picking another oyster–a Colchester this time–from the basket at his side. “That house is sealed tighter than this oyster. So we needed a tool to get in.”

  He broke the lip of the oyster with the brass butt plate on the knife, and then twisted the stubby blade, opening the flat top half of the shell with a small cracking noise. He smiled across it at Coram.

  “Now, it happens that our patron has, among his many treasures, another item that others who do happen to possess such powers want, but may not have. So I have brokered things in order that they will help us in acquiring the key in the Jew’s house, in return for which they will be given the object they wish.”

  “Is it a valuable object?” said Coram, eying the oyster meat hungrily.

  “They call it a flag, but it is no more than a tattered rag,” said Issachar.

  “And the key?”

  “A thing of great value,” said Zebulon.

  “Rags for riches then, Fathers?” said Coram, licking his lips.

  “So it seems. To the great man…” said Issachar.

  Coram had played enough of these games to know he was being given an opening to “catch on”, and that catching on was not only praised, but often greeted with a reward. His eyes had not wavered from the oyster glistening so appetisingly in the lamplight.

  “The rag is powerful too?” he said.

  “So it seems to the others,” smiled Zebulon.

  “And for this we get a fee?”

  “For this we get an opportunity.”

  Issachar held out the oyster. Coram reached for it, but as his fingers brushed the shell the Day Father pulled it away and stared at him with a look Coram knew to fear. It was a look that seemed to pierce through one’s eyes and see the truth of your soul. It was a look the Templebanes had used in their earlier trade at the very point when they wanted to break some poor country simpleton and have them confess to sins that they had not committed.

  “So. Now. Your brothers are in position?”

  “No one can leave the Jew’s house without us seeing them,” said Coram.

  Issachar stared at him.

  “If the girl succeeds at first stroke and emerges with the key, and th
e people within the Jew’s house do not give chase, you know where to bring her?”

  Coram nodded.

  “And if they do give chase?” he said.

  “Let them catch her. If you have any suspicion that they may be following, let them catch her up again. Do nothing. They must not on any account know we are the invisible hands who move against them.”

  “But what of this key?” asked Coram. Issachar looked at the oyster, then into the young man’s eyes as Zebulon spoke.

  “If you remember one thing of this conversation, Coram, remember this: every plan is a gamble against the unforeseen, and the unforeseen happens more than is strictly comfortable. So always have a contingency.”

  Coram was about to nod, then realised he did not know the word and, more than that, knew the Templebanes knew he likely did not, and he also knew that pretending to knowledge was one of the crimes for which he was apt to be punished. When either Templebane told the “sons” things the lessons were usually laced with traps for the unwary. Coram had not achieved the position of most trusted son without being wary.

  “What’s a contingency, Fathers?” he said.

  The Templebanes smiled, though whether with pleasure at Coram’s guilelessness or at their own cunning it was hard to say. Issachar reached into his pocket beneath the apron and produced a small rectangle of paper fastened with a wax seal. He held it out.

  “An openness to the play of chance, a second plan, a fall-back: for if the first stroke fails, the next may do just as well. If the girl is taken back, or does not emerge by dawn, take this envelope to the magistrate.”

  “And then?” said Coram, taking the letter but keeping his eyes on the oyster.

  “And then we shall, if all goes well, have the freedom of the house and all its contents. There are more ways to open an oyster than a knife. Some you pry open,” said Zebulon. “Some you boil.”

  “You will boil it open?”

  “With the full heat of the law. As I said: the best tool is an honest man, and who is more honest than a magistrate or a policeman–or a pastor?” smiled Issachar.