The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  The skeleton passed Bethnal Green on the Paradise Row side, and then plunged into a hole and skittered underground for half a mile before emerging behind another stampede of panicked rats which fled ahead of it until they splayed off each way down the towpath either side of the humped bridge over Regent’s Canal.

  The bone pet hurtled straight ahead along the bridge’s parapet and off into the less built-up land north of the water. It slalomed between rows of neatly planted cabbages and hurdled sprouting carrot tops all the way to the scrabble of cottages bordering the junction between Mutton Lane, Essex Place and Mare Street. And there, at a smouldering tinker’s fire beside a rough shelter on the tip of the triangle of grass in the centre of the junction, it stopped.

  There were two horses standing by the tent, small beasts, ill-used and hung with skulls and bones plaited in their manes. The bone pet passed between their hooves and approached the meagre warmth of the fire.

  The tinker was stone-drunk, sprawled out against his pack. Two tall figures sat easily by the flames, each with a face writhing with blue tattoos and matted hair and beards wound with bones and twigs. The taller of the two wore a ruinous billycock hat with the top punched out, around the brim of which was a garland of woodcock skulls arranged with their beaks pointing skywards so that the effect was that of a bony crown. He was whittling a rowan twig into a stiletto-like point. His companion was finishing the delicate work of attaching a sharp bronze metal beak to a hawk’s skull using gut thread sewn through carefully bored holes in the bone. He tied off the gut and leant in, neatly biting off the thread hanging beyond the knot with his front teeth.

  They both stopped as the bone pet edged into the firelight and stood in front of them.

  The one with the woodcock crown nodded and touched it on the head.

  Immediately the beak opened and the voice of the imprisoned Sluagh emerged from it:

  “It is done. They have taken the girl in. I am taken but the bone pet will lead you back to me. Free me soon.”

  The tall man nodded again and looked at the other with a grim smile of satisfaction.

  “Free him.”

  The other leant across and neatly twisted the head off the bone pet. Just as neatly he snapped on the hawk skull. He then tossed the woodcock skull over the fire to the tall man, who in turn threw him the sharpened rowan twig. He held it out and the hawk’s beak gripped it.

  “Go,” he said. And with no more ceremony than that, the bone pet scuttled south again.

  The two Sluagh looked at each other across the fire and shared a smile.

  “Yes,” said the one in the crown. “Now it begins.”

  CHAPTER 18

  FIRST LAW

  Everything, including the stars themselves, hangs on this–the First Law of Motion: a body persists in its state of being, either at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, unless it is compelled to change its state by a force acting on it.

  As above, so below.

  Imagine a child, an intelligent child, an inquisitive child–a child of the Enlightenment. Imagine that child is privileged and rich and denied nothing, least of all the best of teachers. Imagine that child is educated to believe that the world is a scientifically explainable place, a machine governed by provable rules of cause and effect. Imagine that child as he grows and is taught the immutable laws which govern the world in a universe illuminated by the great and supremely rational minds of Galileo, Boyle and, above all, Sir Isaac Newton, the very author of that First Law of Motion.

  Imagine that child who thus knows that the sun, the planets and the very world upon which he stands swing through the cold void according to a grand celestial clockwork. Imagine the child now a youth, a hard-minded product of the Age of Reason, what half a century before would have been called a Natural Philosopher, now become a self-proclaimed Man of Science.

  Imagine his steely eye surprised by a fairy.

  Or rather, specifically, imagine this young man sees another beautiful young person escape both a locked room and his unwanted attentions by calmly walking into a mirror and disappearing as completely as if she had simply passed through a door.

  Imagine his mechanical mind thus presented with another set of rules which disproves the very system by which he held the world works. The young man, little used to being wrong and wholly unused to being thwarted, has two choices: to believe he has run mad, or to understand that the rational mechanism which he thought underpinned the world is no more than a first layer hiding a second, more arcane, clockwork by which the universe is really governed.

  Imagine all this and you have the pattern and model of one Francis Blackdyke, Viscount Mountfellon.

  In his case, befitting a solitary young man steeped in wealth and the unthinking truculence which often attends great privilege, he did not limit himself to one choice. He chose both, embracing madness of a sort, and devoting his life to mastering this other, secret clockwork. He did all this with the ruthless zealotry of a convert: he did not lose the habits of science or the conviction that given the right set of rules and tools he could explain and control the world and what happened in it–he now merely applied that mode of thought to the new system whose occult working he had just glimpsed through the cogs and springs of the Newtonian mechanics. He was possessed of a mind trained to remember and categorise everything he experienced, what in a later era would be known as a photographic memory. He was an obsessive reader, note-maker and collector, and had drilled himself to become a detailed and accomplished draughtsman as well. His fanaticism matched even that of the great Newton, his first and now discarded hero, a man who had the mad rationalist will to stick a steel bodkin into his own eye socket to prove his theories about optics.

  Imagine that the beautiful young person who had escaped into the mirror was the only person Mountfellon had ever loved, and that she was also, infuriatingly, a childhood playmate, the daughter of one of the people who had educated him in the “rational” truths of the natural world, truths which themselves proved that her walking into mirrors was a categorical impossibility.

  Imagine Mountfellon deducing that it might well be possible that the rational world was connected by a secret honeycomb of passages running between all the mirrors across the globe.

  Imagine him realising that what he would have previously called magic actually worked.

  If you think that there are men of science who are happy enough to understand and discover the clockwork which swings the stars in their courses, and are satisfied enough with that knowledge for and of itself alone, you are imagining men who are not like Mountfellon.

  He belonged to the other tribe, those who delight in the hidden nature of that clockwork and in its immense power: the power of the machine is the thing, and they wish to own the very key that winds it. Even in this tribe there are the sane ones who want the key for the greater good of all humanity. The mad ones want the key for themselves.

  And Mountfellon was, perhaps in this way only, the maddest of the mad.

  Taking his experience with the girl in the mirror, a case might be argued that the First Law applies not just to physical objects but to personalities, indeed not only to motion, but emotion: it could be reformulated to state that everybody persists in their state of being, unless they are compelled to change their state by a force acting on them.

  Mountfellon had been acted upon: the child of reason thus became irrationally consumed by the need to control the supranatural world and all of its hidden clockwork.

  Amos Templebane knew none of this as he stood trying to keep out of the worst of the rain. He had been shivering too hard to sleep, but the exhaustion of his journey north had dragged him more than halfway there when the hinges of the iron gates shrieked as the gatekeeper threw them open. Amos had to move fast to avoid getting flattened against the stone walls by the heavy metal bars, and had to leap backwards as six black horses thundered out of the mouth of the tunnel pulling a closed carriage. The coachman roared and threw himself simultaneous
ly back on the reins and the wheel brake.

  “Whooaa!” he thundered, and the coach came to a stop with the shuttered door level with Amos.

  The shutter cracked an inch and Mountfellon’s eye looked him up and down.

  “You are the Templebane’s creature?” he said, voice dry as autumn leaves rustling across a crypt floor.

  Amos met his eyes and did not flinch. He nodded.

  “Speak when you’re asked a question, damn your eyes!” snarled the coachman and flicked his whip so that it cracked an inch above Amos’s head. He jumped.

  Mountfellon scowled at him.

  “Are you an idiot? My man in London told me the Templebanes had a half-breed simpleton or some such…”

  Amos scrabbled inside the collar of his coat and pulled out his brass badge, holding it up to the window. Mountfellon’s eyes skated briefly over it and then he nodded in satisfaction.

  “Ah. I knew it was some species of crippledom. Well, boy, defective though you are, your father would have me return you to him.”

  Amos smiled and nodded. Mountfellon’s scowl only deepened.

  “I am not a common carrier, nor do I deliver packages on instruction. Since I am at present obliged to your father for his continuing good offices, I shall, however, condescend to agree to his request. Have you pissed?”

  Amos’s smile faltered at the unexpected question.

  “If you have not pissed, do it now, for by God I will be in London before noon strikes, hell or high water, and tonight we will not stop for the devil himself, except to change horses at Hertingfordbury.”

  The shutter slammed shut. The coachman looked at Amos. Amos turned to the wall and quickly unbuttoned and added to the downfall drenching the ivy hedge. Then he hurried across to the carriage and climbed in.

  With a yell and another crack of the whip over the lead horse’s head, the carriage lurched into motion and Amos fell back in his seat.

  There was a further flash of lightning in which he saw the gatekeeper closing the entrance to the underground drive, and then all was lost in the spray kicked up by the rapidly accelerating wheels.

  Mountfellon sat opposite him, motionless as a statue, his eyes reflecting the small flame in the lamp mounted at his shoulder. A book lay on his lap, which was wrapped in a blanket lined with dark fur.

  Amos shivered, not so much at the cold but at the unblinking gaze he was now subject to. He looked away but calmed his mind enough to listen for Mountfellon’s thoughts. Amos lacked the ability to speak but he had a secret, one even his adopted family knew nothing of, and this was his ability, sometimes, to hear people’s thoughts. At least that’s what he felt he was doing: sometimes he wondered if he was just imagining what they might be thinking, but imagining it very vividly, since he had never been able to talk to anyone about it. If it was imagination then he felt it was a very accurate imagination, since he usually heard them thinking of doing something and then saw them do it. So it was a skill he relied on, particularly while trying to avoid his brothers when they were in a malicious or spiteful mood.

  Mountfellon’s thoughts were precise and analytical: he’s a strange looking boy. Dark skin, but not too dark. Could pass for a gypsy in some lights. With a different nose. Mulatto? Quadroon? Octaroon? At least half negroid I think. Bright eyes. Green. Not a blackamoor’s eyes. White blood showing through. Too bright. Too much life in them. Not beaten as frequently as he should have been. Children are like dogs. Respond to the whip. Not enough to eat as a young creature. Effects of malnutrition visible. A certain delicacy of bone. Not much meat on him. Nine stone wet, if that. Five feet ten inches at a guess. How old is he? Could be anywhere between fifteen and nineteen. Won’t meet my eyes. Hiding something. Why would Templebanes send a mute? Why should I believe he is such? So I can’t question him? Templebanes no fools. The boy is likely dissembling. Sent to deliver but also to watch. Test him.

  The carriage jolted and lurched and he heard the thrum of the wheels throwing water against the mudguards. When he looked up again he saw Mountfellon was holding his hand out.

  “Give me your hand, boy.”

  Amos instinctively didn’t want to.

  “I am a man of science. I wish to examine your hand.”

  Amos reached across the narrow gap between them. Mountfellon’s cold fingers gripped his hand and turned it palm up. He grunted and switched his grip so that he held Amos’s thumb.

  “Close your eyes.”

  Amos gave him a questioning look. Mountfellon’s face just clenched a little more, like a fist tightening.

  “Close your damn eyes or you can walk to London.”

  Amos closed his eyes. There was a moment’s darkness, and then a sudden sharp agony in his thumb. His eyes flew open and he tried to yank his hand out of the older man’s grip, but Mountfellon was unyielding.

  Amos’s thumb was cut across the pad, ribboning a dark trickle of blood. Something shone in the other man’s free hand. He held it up.

  “Just a penknife. Just a little prick.”

  He folded the blade and pocketed it and then released Amos’s thumb. Amos immediately put it in his mouth and pressed his tongue to it to stop the bleeding. He stared across the carriage in undisguised fury.

  “You did not cry out,” said Mountfellon.

  And Amos heard the rest of the sentence in Mountfellon’s thoughts.

  He really is a mute. QED.

  Amos scrabbled in his pocket and came out with a damp handkerchief that he wrapped tightly round his thumb.

  “I take no man’s word for anything,” said Mountfellon. “I am an empiricist. All that I know I get by experience or experiment. I make no apologies for that.”

  Amos glared at him.

  “Lower your eyes or I shall have the coachman toss you into the ditch.”

  Amos looked away.

  “Good. You are biddable. Your fathers have broken you to the harness, I see.”

  Amos kept his eyes on the side of the road.

  “Your fathers are cunning men.”

  Amos nodded.

  “But are they always trustworthy?”

  Amos felt the eyes on him like heat off a lamp. He neither nodded or shook his head. Instead he just smiled. Mountfellon returned a smile of wintry insincerity.

  “Why are you disloyal to them?”

  Amos shrugged as if it were a thing of no matter.

  “Why?” insisted the older man.

  Amos reached into his coat pocket and brought out the small wood-framed slate he always carried there for such moments. There was a stylus attached to it with a thin piece of twine. He wrote, “Honest,” and showed it to Mountfellon who read it and shook his head.

  “No. I think you are clever. I think the brass plate round your neck is right. No cunning man is entirely trustworthy, for as the world changes he must adapt to it. I think you know that saying they are always trustworthy would have damned them and made you a liar in my eyes…”

  He opened the door. The wet night hurtled past outside.

  “You may travel in the boot with the luggage. I do not choose to be observed as I sleep. And hold on tight, for if you bounce overboard you must swim home by yourself. I will brook no delays this night.”

  Amos took a deep breath and clambered out into the downpour, managing to find straps and handholds by feel alone which allowed him to work his way back along the side of the carriage. The door slammed shut behind him and he spent a very wet couple of minutes trying to worm himself in under the tarpaulin covering the boot without tumbling into the road ribboning away beneath the thundering wheels. When he finally did, he spent the next ten minutes trying to find a way to sit or lie comfortably among Mountfellon’s bags and boxes. Unfortunately they were as hard-edged and intractable as their owner, so he wedged himself between a trunk and a hatbox and jammed his arm under one of the luggage straps so that he would not fall into the wet highway in the unlikely event that he managed to forget his discomfort enough to fall asleep.

 
The sound of the wheels and the irregular bumping of the luggage as they flew along made that impossible, so he closed his eyes and tried to see what Mountfellon was thinking inside his metal-banded carriage.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE REEKING BLADE

  Sara Falk sat talking quietly to Lucy Harker at the corner of the kitchen table, just as Mr Sharp had left them. Cook was watching from her seat by the stove, peeling chestnuts into a bowl held between her knees. It was a warm and welcoming scene after the cold fog of the street.

  They all stopped and looked up at Mr Sharp as he entered and closed the door carefully behind him.

  “And…?” said Sara Falk.

  He placed the bronze blade on the table, and gently put the knotted kerchief next to it. Cook picked up the weapon and examined it.

  “This looks like—” she began.

  “Indeed,” said Mr Sharp.

  Cook looked a question at Sara Falk who sat very still, eyes locked on the red silk bundle.

  “Well, let’s see, shall we?” grunted Cook. She disappeared into one of the alcoves and came back with a carving board on which sat a half-eaten pink ham with a dark brown skin studded with cloves and glazed with marmalade. She took the blade and cut the remaining chunk of meat across the grain.