The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “What can you do to me? Here? Now? In front of all these innocent, unaware people? All these… witnesses?”

  The Alp smiled, a disturbing sight, not least because it had no teeth at all, just expanses of pink gum, so that the inside of its mouth was more like that of a fish or a baby than a grown human, a toothlessness which also explained the severity of its lisp.

  “Out of the road, silly little doggie, or you shall have the kick you so richly deserve.”

  Hodge looked round at the crowded street, at the girl holding the Alp’s arm, her eyebrows rising into a taut curve of incomprehension.

  “See,” said the Alp. “So much people. What can you do?”

  “This,” Hodge said, and raised his ring to his own forehead as if wiping his brow, and pressed the seal into his skin.

  “Ic adeorce,” he muttered, and then attacked without a hint of warning.

  He didn’t even lose his smile. In fact it widened as he leapt across the scant yard separating them and hit the Alp full in the throat with both of his hands which closed like steel traps around it as he bulled it backwards across the road, heading for the mouth of an alley.

  No one noticed. No one commented or raised their voice or pointed. No one saw them. It was not that Hodge had become invisible. It was not that kind of magic, which only exists in fairy-tales: it was the other real kind, the sort of workaday sleight which just makes coincidences happen at the right time. The simple thing which happened was that as soon as the old Anglo-Saxon words came out of Hodge’s mouth, everyone in the immediate area had their attention taken by something else. They weren’t all looking at the same other thing; they were each distracted by something different, the things which caught their eyes being as dissimilar as the eyes themselves. In fact the only thing that all these disparate momentary distractions had in common was that they were not Hodge.

  The force of his attack tore the Alp from the girl’s tight grasp and left her literally spinning in the middle of the street.

  Hodge attacked like a terrier, straight in, no preamble, determined to be at it and done with it as fast as possible.

  There was a horse trough in the alley and he ran the Alp back until the lip of the trough caught the breath-stealer behind the knees and it went over backwards.

  Hodge went with it, shoving it under water and holding it there as the Alp’s hands flailed at his face. Hodge bunched himself up and jammed a knee into its solar plexus, and was rewarded by a great bubble of air belching up from the gagging mouth below him.

  “By the Powers,” Hodge gritted. “By Law and Lore, for lives taken–your life.”

  The Alp stopped struggling.

  After a clear minute, Hodge let go his grip on his throat and looked down at the motionless face beneath the water. As the ripples stilled he peered down at it as if somehow the memory of it would obliterate the other memories of the two dead women in their beds.

  The face below him did not move. The eyes stared back at him, unblinking.

  Jed growled from the side of the trough. Hodge shook his head as if to clear it, then stood, knee-deep in the water, legs either side of the Alp’s body.

  “Your kind cannot die while there is a vestige of breath left in you. That I know,” he said, and stepped up onto the Alp’s chest.

  There was a final stream of bubbles as he bore down on the breath-stealer, and then with a final convulsion the Alp truly began to expire, its hair going grey and lines appearing on its face as age claimed its true portion before death took it for ever. It aged twenty years in a moment.

  Hodge stepped out of the trough and looked into the street. Without surprise he saw The Smith saying something to the girl who sneezed and then just walked away, face blank with forgetting. The Smith walked into the alley, clapped a hand on Hodge’s shoulder and looked down into the trough.

  “He’s gone,” he said. “And so that’s that.”

  “I’d thought he would wither and betray his great age once dead,” said Hodge, sounding strangely hollow even to his own ears.

  “He was a young ’un. That’s all,” said The Smith, taking a second look. “And you killed him, just as you said you would.”

  “He was a killer. And Law and Lore…” began Hodge.

  “Killing him was right enough by Lore and Law,” agreed The Smith, cutting him off. “Just might not have been the other thing you don’t like.”

  Hodge met his eye.

  “Sensible, you mean?”

  The Smith shrugged and put an arm round his shoulder, leading him back out into the light.

  “Well. It would have been nice to know how he got here, or what he was doing, since the Raven says there’s a connection with the house on Chandos Place…”

  They walked east for a while, through crowded streets that Hodge wasn’t really seeing. Jed trotted beside him, looking up every now and then to check up on his friend.

  “Better now?” said The Smith as they passed the City of York tavern. He jerked his head at the ancient door. “Better enough for a restorative ale? To celebrate?”

  Hodge shook his head.

  “Doesn’t feel like a victory,” he said.

  “Death never does, old friend,” said The Smith. “Death is no one’s victory but its own.”

  FOURTH PART

  THE FIVE PEBBLES

  “… David took just five pibbles out of the Brook against the Pagan Champion”

  from The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)

  “This night is my departing night,

  For here no longer must I stay;

  There’s neither friend nor foe of mine

  But wishes me away.

  What I have done through lack of wit,

  I never, never can recall,

  But know you’re all my friends as yet,

  Goodnight. And joy be with you all.”

  An additional verse to The Parting Glass (traditional song), known as

  Armstrong’s Farewell (added c.1605)

  INTERLUDE

  She had screamed all afternoon, from lunchtime to supper. She had sat in the empty Itch Ward and hoarsened her voice with the screaming, listening to it echo off the scuffed plaster walls as she watched the dust motes drift through the sunlight. The M’Gregors had been ignorant of the noise for most of the afternoon since they had been about their business in Andover, but come teatime Mrs M’Gregor had returned and was being put off her crumpets and dainties by the keening coming across the yard to the Private Quarters, and had told her husband she must be allowed some peace.

  M’Gregor had rung the bell for one of the under-wardens and explained that if he, M’Gregor was to have any peace, Mrs M’Gregor must be given her own quiet, and directed that if the Ghost of the Itch Ward–as they all called her–was not amenable to reason or controllable by means of a belt or switch (which she never was), she must be taken to the Eel House on the other side of the water meadows and penned in for the night, this being the only way they had ever contrived to keep Mrs M’Gregor free from the infrequent but piercing screaming attacks the Ghost was prone to.

  “Does her no harm, a night with the eels, but don’t leave her with a blanket, mind, for ’tis my belief she benefits from the bracing chill and the turbulence of the stream. She always comes out subdued and tractable.”

  The under-warden was a kinder man than M’Gregor so did not lay about her with switch or belt, knowing that this occasioned nothing but doggedly endured cuts and bruises on the person of the Ghost. Instead he rounded up the sub-under-wardens and strapped her wrists together prior to leading her from the workhouse across the water meadows and into the small red-brick shed that was built straddling the chalk stream on the far side. The under-warden deputed the sub-under-wardens to escort her, and went in search of a hot sweet cup of tea of his own.

  She screamed all the way across the meadow, the sound sending the normally lazy cows trotting off to the furthest corner beneath the elms, from whose deep shadows they watched with deep bov
ine suspicion as the procession jerked its way across the grass in the low evening sunlight.

  The sub-under-wardens did not have the kindly streak of their immediate superior, and their progress was punctuated by several hard slaps across the face and repeated injunctions of the “shut up, you mad old bitch” variety.

  Conscious that their tea was getting colder the longer the exiling of the Ghost took, they shoved her inside the Eel House with no more ceremony than roughly unstrapping her hands, and slamming the door on her.

  Inside the house she stood in the gloom and looked around. And though she carried on screaming for form’s sake, she smiled happily as she did so. And when she judged that the sub-under-wardens had walked out of earshot she stopped screaming and just carried on smiling.

  The Eel House was built to catch eels as they moved downstream to the sea. There was a walkway over the stream and three arches on which the house sat. Each arch had a metal grille through which the river sieved itself, leaving the eels behind until someone came with a scoop to harvest them into the rush baskets hanging round the ceiling. The basket, once full of eels, would be put back in the stream on the other side of the walkway to keep the creatures fresh and alive until the carter came to take them up to London.

  It was the time of year when the eels ran, and consequently the traps in front of the grilles were a seething mass of brown snake-like bodies. The Ghost looked down at them.

  “Hello, my dears,” she said, hitching her threadbare dress up and knotting it at her hip. “Hello, my dear ones.”

  And with that she stepped very daintily off the walkway, being sure not to tread on any of the creatures, slowly lowering her foot until it found the chalk bed of the stream below.

  Then she just stood there, up to mid-thigh in the cold water as the eels roiled and tumbled round and around her legs, her fingers reaching down to let them brush against them as they passed in an increasing vortex that would certainly have led any watcher–had there been one–to think she stood in a small whirlpool of her own creation.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Now,” she whispered, “where have you been and what have you seen?”

  CHAPTER 70

  CLOSE QUARTERS ON BLACKWALL REACH

  Cook clanked as she stepped from the culvert onto the boat. The Smith looked at her and held his finger to his mouth. The fog hiding the city and the river around them muffled everything but sound, somehow amplifying it, perhaps because the ears had to do double duty now that the eyes were handicapped by the viscid, almost semi-solid murk and the encroaching evening.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, putting her heavy canvas sea-bag on the deck. “Grappling hooks.”

  “Why did you bring grappling hooks?” hissed Hodge, who was holding the mooring rope with the look of a man who wanted to be about his business quickly. Which was the truth: Hodge was a man happiest with his feet on the ground, and least comfortable when afloat. He wanted this to be over soon so he could get back to the Tower with Jed and do a little light ratting to calm his nerves. Being afloat was the only thing he feared, perhaps because the little mongrel he had lost in the collapsed bank on the Isle of Dogs all those years ago had died struggling for air. Hodge was not especially frightened of dying, but did not want to drown.

  “Grappling hooks are always useful,” said Cook, pulling things out of the bag which were equally clanky but not the hooks in question. They watched her remove two cutlasses, a dirk and a boarding axe which she stowed–respectively–in the red sash she was wearing as her belt, the top of her sea-boots and alongside her place at the tiller.

  “We are just going to drop downriver on the tide and sink these caskets in the river, Cook,” said The Smith quietly, watching her present her broad beam end again as she bent to pull more vicious-looking ironmongery from the sea-bag. “We’re not going a-pirating.”

  “I know,” she said, straightening and handing him a heavy metal sphere.

  “What’s this?” he said suspiciously.

  “Cannon ball,” she said. “It’s my last one, so don’t drop it.”

  “But we haven’t got a cannon,” said Hodge, looking at The Smith.

  “Put it in the bows,” said Cook to someone behind him. He turned to look.

  Emmet stood in the culvert mouth, cradling what was, unmistakably, a smallish cannon in his arms. He seemed a little sheepish.

  Cook felt the silence of the very pregnant look passing between The Smith and Hodge.

  “It’s not really a cannon,” she said. “Not as such: more of a swivel-mounted carronade. I’ve been on the wrong end of enough privateering to know any lubber that goes to sea without protection’s just asking to get a-pirated themselves.”

  She pulled two more cutlasses from her bag and held them out.

  “Keep them handy and get ready to cast off.” She sniffed the air. “Wind’s changing and the tide’s on the turn.”

  Hodge looked at The Smith.

  “We’re not going to sea,” he said. “We’re going for a short trip down the river, no further than Smith’s Folley where we’ll tie this lighter up for the night, warm ourselves at the smithy fire and then come home by dog cart, on dry land, like normal folk.”

  Cook took a look back in the direction of Wellclose Square.

  “Perhaps one of us should stay with Sara,” she said. “I do not like leaving her alone in the house.”

  “Emmet can return the moment the caskets are safe on the bottom of the river,” said The Smith. “We discussed this. He can run back. She will be alone for less than an hour, and what needs protecting most is in these caskets, not any one of us.”

  “Cast off then,” grunted Cook with a look which said that though he might be right it was anything but fine with her.

  As Hodge loosened the hawser attached to the mooring post, a gap widened between the boat and the land, and soon enough they were drifting with the tide into the centre of the river.

  Unseen by them, as they moved away from the land, a thin length of tarred twine that Garlickhythe Templebane had attached to their boat stretched out and became taut.

  Six hundred yards away, upriver, close to Traitor’s Gate, a small paddle-wheel launch sat waiting. The three Templebane boys–Coram, Garlickhythe and Bassetshaw–had pride of place next to their Night Father, Zebulon, and were thus sitting closest to the fire-box. Around them, a crowd of toughs hunched in, trying to get some of the warmth into their bodies. They were a murderous-looking bunch, and had been recruited en masse from a drinking den in the darkest reaches of the Seven Dials rookery. They were known as the Wipers because they roamed after dark with spotted handkerchiefs (“wipers” in thieves’ slang) pulled over the lower half of their faces to hide their identity as they robbed, beat and often as not dispatched their victims to the next world. Used to knives, razors and cudgels, they looked a little self-conscious with the guns and pistols they had been given for the day’s work in their hands: self-conscious but not at all uncomfortable. They had been hired on the understanding that the job involved blood and plunder, and plunder and blood was their business.

  Their leader, a sharp-eyed bruiser who went by the name of Magor, jerked in surprise as the twine looping out of the fog went suddenly taut and jangled the small bell Garlickhythe had attached to the funnel.

  “Blimey!” he said, covering his surprise with a leer. “Shop!”

  “Coram,” said Zebulon. “Now.”

  Coram patted his brothers on the shoulder.

  “Good hunting,” he said as he jumped to the bank and untied the waiting horse. “I’ll get Mountfellon, Father; don’t you worry. You bag the boodle.”

  Zebulon let the familiarity pass and checked the blunderbuss he held across the blanket wrapping his knees. As Coram cantered off into the murk, the other brothers pushed off and the paddles began to churn. Magor sat on the bow, reeling in the tarry twine as they made way.

  “Just like fishing, this is,” he leered. “Only hope we don’t catch us a measly
little tiddler on the end of this here line.”

  “It’s no tiddler,” said Zebulon. “You get us what’s on that boat and you’ll be getting your just desserts, have no fear of that.”

  “We don’t want just dessert,” said Magor grimly. “We want the ’ole bleedin’ banquet, from soup to nuts, as what you promised.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Garlickhythe, sharing a look with his brother. “You’ll get what’s coming to you. Never heard of anyone complaining about the Templebanes cheating anyone, have you?”

  The look shared between the brothers and their Night Father was one of close understanding: once the deed was done and whatever was being shifted from the Safe House was in their possession, the Wipers would come to collect their pay: they would be shown the money and offered food and drink in celebration. They would eat, they would drink, they would not notice any strange flavours, because the Templebanes had learned well from the herbalists they had persecuted in the fens all those years ago, and then they would never be seen again. The money they had pocketed would never leave the premises, being reclaimed and returned to the Templebane vaults.

  This had happened before. This would happen again.

  This was the reason no one ever spread word about being short-changed by Issachar. It was also the reason the Templebane boys never, ever ate anything from the pie shop on the corner of their street. They knew where the filling came from and why the meat was of such a changeable quality.

  Downriver, Cook held the tiller and peered into the fog.

  “How am I meant to navigate in this soup?” she said.

  The Smith pointed to the Raven, which was flapping with its eerie slowness just ahead of the bow. At this speed, it seemed to hang in the air in contravention of any of the more generally accepted laws of gravity, beating its wings out of form, rather than function.

  “Follow the bird,” he said. “He knows where we’re going.”

  “Well, you just keep a sharp lookout forrard,” she said. “And sing out if we look like hitting anything.”