The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  Mountfellon stalked impatiently behind the knot of constables as they moved through the house, his eyes tracking and scanning everything they passed, recording everything for later appraisal, but when they reached the landing and he saw the great doors to the library, he stiffened and was still.

  “Ah,” said Mr Sharp, who had appeared behind him. “That’s what you want.”

  Mountfellon turned a little. Their eyes met.

  “Who are you?” said Mr Sharp very quietly, so quietly that no one but Mountfellon noticed.

  “You may try as hard as you like to turn my brain to your way,” said Mountfellon, “but as you see I wear smoked glass and I should warn you, if you do not already sense it, I wear cold iron.”

  He flicked his waistcoat back a little to reveal a thin metal corset beneath it.

  Mr Sharp’s eyes widened and glittered in amusement.

  “Cold iron!” he said, pantomiming a step backwards. “Why, I see you have the measure of me…”

  “I do. I am a man of science and have provided myself with an antidote to your powers,” said Mountfellon, matching Mr Sharp’s whisper, and then, in a loud, public voice, “And you have what is mine, by God, and I will have it returned. Open that door!”

  “It is locked,” said Mr Sharp.

  “Then BREAK IT DOWN!” bellowed Mountfellon.

  One of the constables looked at Bidgood, who nodded. He raised a crowbar and then felt his hands lighten as it was taken from his hands by Mr Sharp who had appeared at his side very suddenly.

  “Oi!” he began.

  “My apologies,” said Mr Sharp. “It is a library full of very valuable old things, and so we keep it safe. But if you wish to enter,”–he reached into his pocket–“you will do less damage to Miss Falk’s doors if you use the key.”

  He handed one over. The constable looked at it, then at the door and shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said and reached for the lock.

  “Wait!” shouted a strangled voice, and before he knew what was happening he was again looking in surprise at an empty hand.

  Bidgood had sprung forward and snatched the key. The magistrate was suddenly humming with energy as he reached excitedly inside his coat and pulled out his glasses.

  “My lord,” he said. “My lord, we have it!”

  “Have what?” said Mr Sharp, looking at Bidgood hopping from one foot to the other in excitement.

  “St Vitus’s Dance, by the look of it,” said Cook. “Or maybe a general pruritic discomfort of the nether extremities.”

  Bidgood held up the key.

  “My lord!” he said. “Your drawing, if you please!”

  Mountfellon stared at the key in Bidgood’s hand and slowly pulled his papers from his own coat. As if unable to credit what he was seeing he unfolded them, revealing the detailed sketch of the cobra-headed key.

  The same key that Bidgood held so excitedly in the air.

  “By God and Newton, you have it, sir!” he breathed, and the papers slipped forgotten from his grip as he stepped across the landing and took it in his fingers.

  “And now I do,” he whispered.

  “Have what?” said Cook. “It’s just a key…”

  He looked at her for a brief irritated moment, and then his eyes were drawn back to the key in his hand.

  “A very poor stratagem,” he smiled. “Very poor indeed to try and hide it in plain sight.”

  “He wasn’t hiding it,” said a voice from above.

  Sara Falk stood on the stairs in a long silk robe, holding on to the rail for balance, white as ash, her mutilated wrist hidden in a sling of scarlet silk holding her arm tightly across her body.

  “He gave it to you,” she said.

  “And well he might, for it is mine,” said Mountfellon. “And mine alone. You stole it from me.”

  “What do you think it is?” she said as Cook hurried up the stairs to steady her. “It is just an old key, but I assure you that you are mistaken, for it is mine.”

  “It is priceless,” he hissed. “And it is not yours. It is unique and more valuable than anything a normal man might imagine!”

  He looked at Bidgood, his eyes hot and hungry.

  “We must search the house, for they will have more stolen items, I am sure.”

  “Unique?” said Cook. “As in only one?”

  “Yes,” said Mountfellon. “As you well know.”

  “Oh,” she replied. “Only if that’s unique, what are these?”

  And she held up the bunch of keys normally chained to her apron.

  Every one had a cobra head.

  “Or indeed those?” said Mr Sharp, pointing to the door on the opposite side of the landing, a door with a cobra-headed key sticking out of the lock.

  “All the keys in this house are like that,” said Sara. “My grandfather, who built the house, revered the cobra as a symbolic and ancient guardian of secrets. He was a fanciful man. Please feel free to check the truth of what I say.”

  “But,” said Mountfellon, a vein bumping ominously on his temple as his face began to purple. “But…”

  “But if you want one of your own, you might try Mr Chenevix, the locksmith on Ratcliffe Highway,” said Sara. “He makes all our keys.”

  “Ah!” said the constable who’d tried to crowbar the library. “That’s right. I knew I’d seen one like that before. Old Chenevix does do keys like this, and ones with little brass suns on the end, and horse’s heads and shells, right pretty they is! I knew I’d seen ’em before.”

  “But the girl!” exploded Mountfellon. “The girl may be behind those doors. Why, this is a palpable ruse—!”

  “Open it,” said Sara. “There is no girl. Search the house from cellar to chimneys. You are mistaken.”

  And with that her legs gave way. Cook caught her and lowered her to sit on the steps.

  Mr Sharp waved at the door.

  “As Miss Falk says, go where you will. You will find no occupants of this house save the three of us.”

  Mountfellon stepped forward with the key, but Mr Sharp stepped in front of him and spoke quietly again.

  “I do not know who you are, but if your irruption into this home has caused Miss Falk any damage whatsoever, I warn you openly that I will find you and demand satisfaction.”

  Mountfellon sneered back at him.

  “How quaint and antiquated of you. Now let me pass.”

  Mr Sharp took the key from his hand and opened the door himself.

  “Be careful,” he said. “There is a snake loose in there.”

  Mountfellon stopped on the threshold, whereas the constables all took three steps backwards as if they were being choreographed.

  “A snake?” squeaked Bidgood.

  “Mr Sharp,” said Sara. “Do not tease them, pray.”

  “There is a cobra in the glass cabinet,” he said. “It escaped its cage which is being repaired.”

  “And not just the cage,” said Mountfellon, stepping into the library, his eyes again hot with anticipation. “You appear to have had an accident.”

  The largest table in the centre of the room had been cleared of its customary clutter of books and papers, and instead a scrabble of broken mirror shards had been laid out at one end like a giant jigsaw puzzle waiting to be made from the tiny sharp-edged pieces.

  “Seven years bad luck,” he smiled.

  “A baseless superstition,” replied Mr Sharp.

  “Or in your case, an underestimation, I fear,” said Mountfellon, turning up the gas lamps and feasting his eyes on the library and its many treasures. He saw the black obsidian block that had held the cobra and the key, and noted the shards of steel that had been woven into the cage neatly piled beside it. He walked to the bookshelves and the cabinets piled with curiosities and gazed at them with a naked greed which he didn’t try to hide. He ran his hand over a carving of a Green Man’s face which looked as if it had been hacked from the wall of some long-forgotten church roof, and then he reached for a book on the shelf above. Hi
s eyes drank everything in, recording it all. With his back to the room his face relaxed and something close to a smile fleetingly played across his lips.

  “How big is the girl?” asked Cook.

  He turned. Mr Sharp was gone.

  “A normal-sized girl,” he said. “With reddish hair.”

  “So not small enough to hide in that book,” Sara said, walking unsteadily into the room and waving off Cook’s disapproving cluck. She sat on a hard upright chair by the door and drew herself straight. “Be kind enough not to touch anything you do not need to.”

  As she spoke, Mr Sharp was moving with unnatural speed through the house.

  He entered the secret passage and sped down it without bothering to take a light to guide him through the long black tunnel beneath the city. He passed the door to the Privy Cells and felt the ground beneath him rise slightly as he approached the door beneath the wall on Tower Hill.

  Mountfellon stood in the centre of the library under Sara’s watchful eye. She saw his hands flex with greed and the almost ungovernable desire to touch or take the objects ranged around the room, and she saw how he controlled the urge by gripping one in the other and thrusting them behind his back and holding them there. She saw from the muscles clenching on either side of his jaw and the prominent vein bumping in his temple that the restraint cost him a great deal of effort. But she also noted that his eyes never stopped moving as he applied the proto-photographic quality of his mind to the array, storing it all in his head for future unpacking and mental perusal. The rabid hunger in his eyes may not have been actual theft, but was quite enough of a violation in itself to feel most uncomfortable, not to say dangerous.

  By the time the constables had carefully but politely searched Sara Falk’s room, Mr Sharp had raised Hodge from his bed in the kennel house and told him in the shortest terms about what was happening. By the time the constables had decided the attic held nothing living beyond a possible mouse, Mr Sharp was running back downhill in the dark, and Hodge, acting on Mr Sharp’s instructions, had found the Raven beneath the south wall of the White Tower and was communicating them to it. By the time Mr Sharp was back in the kitchen in the basement, the Raven was carving an invisible tunnel through the morning air which roughly matched the trajectory of the underground passage the man had just twice run the length of.

  The search proceeded with speed and thoroughness, and once the constables had returned to the library and reported that no girl was to be found in the house, and been sent to look again, there remained only one possible place unsearched.

  “Then she must be in the glass cabinet,” said Mountfellon. “The snake story is another lie to prevent us finding her.”

  “You are free to open it,” said Cook. “But I’m going outside and closing the door before you do. Snakes give me the screaming abdabs.”

  The constables looked nervously at Bidgood.

  “Open it,” he said. “But carefully.”

  “I’ll open it,” said Mr Sharp, who was suddenly there as if he had never left, although only Mountfellon noticed this.

  Mr Sharp walked to the cabinet, yanked the door open and caught the snake as it lunged into the air, aimed like a javelin, straight at Mountfellon.

  For an instant it remained rigid, like an accusing finger, and then Mr Sharp shifted his grip and held it behind the head, whispering something into the depression in the side of its skull where ears would be if cobras had ears. The snake’s mouth stretched wide and pink, its angry ruby eyes glittering, and then it flopped as limp as a rag in his hand.

  “Interesting,” said Mr Sharp. “He doesn’t seem to like you.”

  Mountfellon pushed past and opened the double doors of the cabinet wide open. There was nothing but four mirrored walls and doors, with one wall conspicuously bare where the broken mirror shards had been removed.

  Mountfellon turned with a convulsive snarl, that vein again bumping in his temple.

  “I want everything in this house seized,” he spat. “There is trickery here.”

  “The only trickery,” said Cook, “is the pretence which you have used to gain entry to a private house.”

  She held out the papers he had dropped on the floor outside.

  Mr Sharp smiled at Bidgood.

  “I think if you are satisfied that nothing illegal has occurred here, we must not detain you any longer, Mr Bidgood.”

  “No… no… perhaps,” stuttered the unfortunate magistrate, caught between Mountfellon’s power and Mr Sharp’s persuasively warm eyes. “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps indeed,” said Mr Sharp, steering him to the door. “Perhaps this has all been a great misunderstanding. Perhaps someone wishes Miss Falk harm and has libelled her with some false evidence.”

  He looked back at Mountfellon.

  “Indeed perhaps someone has worked on your friend here too.”

  “I am not his friend,” barked the noble lord, unable to tear himself from a room whose every object his fingers itched to possess. “Nor am I yours, I assure you.”

  And with a further visible convulsion, as if his mind had to struggle with his body, he tore himself away from the room and stumbled towards the door.

  “Until we meet again then, Mr—? I did not catch your name…” smiled Mr Sharp as he passed.

  “I did not give it and I do not, damn your eyes!” hissed Mountfellon. “But meet again we will, and you shall not best me a second time.”

  Cook and Mr Sharp watched the constables and Bidgood follow him out into the street. They saw him enter his coach and saw the coachman whip the horses into a fast trot which took them out of the square as fast as possible.

  “Who is he?” said Cook.

  “An enemy,” said Mr Sharp. “But perhaps not the enemy.”

  “You should follow him,” said Cook.

  “We are,” said Mr Sharp, and pointed to the sky, where a raven wheeled in the morning sunlight and set off in the direction the coach had taken.

  CHAPTER 33

  A PYEFINCH FOR BREAKFAST

  Lucy woke in the first light of dawn, drawn from sleep by the smell of frying bacon and the sound of a muttered conversation somewhere outside her field of vision. She was lying beneath a canvas roof, on a bed of dried bracken stuffed inside an old miller’s flour-sack. The blanket covering her kept some warmth beneath it, and her exposed nose was quite cold enough to make her lie still and enjoy it while she thought about what to do next.

  She would have to run, that much was clear.

  She always had to run.

  But her head was not quite as clear. One of the few fragmentary memories of her life which survived since losing her mother in Paris was of a time many years later, drinking brandy: it had been fiery stuff which she’d stolen from a lecherous farrier in Etaples who had been so intent on drunkenly trying to fumble her dress open that he had not noticed her picking the bottle out of his coat pocket and then hitting him with it. The bottle had been of thick enough glass not to break, though the crack she had heard as it connected with the side of his head suggested that his skull was not so lucky. She had kept the bottle as she fled through the night and the town until she hit the sand-dunes and then the moonlit sea beyond. When she had stopped running, she’d drunk the contents to try and stop the trembling and erase the memory of his hot breath on her neck and his hands on her body. The brandy had made her throat raw and her head spin. It was the only time she had ever been drunk, and the next morning she had spewed into the sand on the cold beach where she had passed out and spent the night. Spewing seemed to cure the hangover, but only for a treacherous few minutes, and she had spent the rest of the day recovering, lying in the long grass atop the dunes as the sun slowly warmed things up, watching the fishermen coming and going and wanting to die.

  That’s what her head felt like now: hungover. One other thing that having got herself drunk had done was to give her worrying blanks in her memory, lost hours that she could never recall no matter how hard she tried. She had had no idea how
she had got from the farriers to the beach, or how long she had been lying there. Similarly she realised she still had holes in her memory about the recent past. They were disconcertingly large ones, too large for her to concentrate on right now.

  Of last night she remembered the sack and Ketch and all the events which had taken place in the house on Wellclose Square, though she didn’t quite remember the bit between drinking warm milk and being put to bed and then waking to find herself holding a snake and having to hide in a hurry. With a shudder she remembered tumbling through the mirror without breaking it and the pig-headed woman in the circus tent and the confusion and the clown, and above all the hand, the black hand crabbing towards her like vengeance. It had been a nightmare.

  The impact of this recollection bounced her to her feet and she made her way towards the light at the end of the low tent, ignoring the grunts of protest from the sleeping people she trod on as she went.

  She stumbled into the new day and stared about her.

  It was not a nightmare. It was a water meadow laid out in the early morning light, the pale sun beginning to drive away the dawn mist. There was a small cooking fire right in front of her at which a youth of about her own age was sitting and steering rashers of streaky bacon around a blackened cast-iron frying pan. His face turned to look at her and cracked into a guileless and appealingly lopsided smile.

  “Why, bongjoower again, mamzel,” he said. “And common tally-voo, if I might make so bold?”

  “I ‘allez’ very bloody well, thanks,” she said after a pause.

  His smile grew and evened out.

  “You’re not a Frenchy.”

  “No,” she said. “Not exactly. You’re the clown.”

  “No,” he said. “At least not when I got the blessed greasepaint washed off of me I ain’t a clown: I’m just Charlie.”