by Jerico Lenk
“For the girl’s sake,” Clement spat, “I pray it is something inhuman. Painful, isn’t it, to imagine an act so monstrous might be committed by a mortal man like you or I?”
I cut Clement a secret glance, at war between the part of me that so helplessly admired his fearlessness, even the times without tact, and the stubborn part of me that clashed with the stubborn part of him.
Bridges looked Clement up and down. “Let the woman grow cold before you try to conjure her ghost, won’t you?” he said, voice coarse with contempt. He acknowledged me once more with an absent nod of the head before he stormed off to his men.
Clement glared past the pier at the vast black stretch of the river, his eyes bright with some private fire.
“Well,” he husked. The crowd had dwindled down to just a few children in patched caps, a huddle of working men, a lone figure in a damp cloak nodding to us gregariously as he took leave from the terrible scene. Clement adjusted our knapsack on his shoulders and forced a little laugh. “Doesn’t the Yard sound quite like a bitter old lover to you? All’s well, though.” His eyes drifted to me.
“How did you know she was killed?” he asked.
“She told me,” I whispered. “Not by whom, though.”
Clement studied me a moment, face empty. Then he raised his brows with a wry little twist of the mouth. “At least we’ve got something for our reports, hmm?”
***
“Stop here,” Clement told the driver of our coach on the way back to Portland Place.
I frowned, pulling back the window curtain to squint out into the dark.
“Why?” I asked. “We’re still far from … ”
The words faded away as I realised just how far from the Cross we’d gone while the night’s dreary scenes had distracted me, flitting by again and again in my mind. Significantly south of the Strand, we were stopped in a smoggy, questionable waterside place in the shadow of blackened chimneypots and warehouses.
I cast Clement a doubtful glance as the window curtain slipped from my fingers. “This is not our neighbourhood.”
“No, it’s not,” Clement confirmed. He gathered himself and the knapsack. “It’s Southbank. I’ll pay your fare to go on back, but I’ve another appointment tonight.”
“Here?” My face pinched. “In Southbank. You’ve an appointment.”
“If you’re going to be nosy,” he said, pushing the coach door open with his heel, “just follow me, then.”
“Oh, get out of the cab already,” I muttered, pulling my cap down snug on my head. “I’m coming with you.”
Southbank was hardly preferential in the day, never mind this late at night. God knew what Clement wanted with the industrial waterside. I was apprehensive. What if he was up to something dangerous or depraved?
But I also really did not wish to be alone so far from the streets I knew and admittedly, I was—as he’d said—nosy.
After what had happened thus far tonight, neither of us seemed in the mood to truly have at each other. As the weeks had gone on, I kept trying to be angry with him, but … I just kept giving up halfway.
We dodged a bit of rickety traffic and foot-passengers like ghosts themselves. The whole jumble of streets had a feel as though they kept stubborn secrets from the rest of the city, hardly empty but still quite lonely. Dark, muddy, unnervingly dilapidated, it was a place where there seemed to be no sky, just smut and fog, thick with the noxiously sweet and earthy stink typical of unhealthy air. I flanked close to Clement’s right, bristled and ready for anything even though the moment I met this or that stranger’s eye, I looked away again quickly, head down.
Around a corner and away from others, Clement stuck two fingers in his breast pocket and plucked out a tiny paper packet, not even as long as my thumb. He flicked it with his index finger and raised his brows.
“I’ve powder prescription this month,” he offered quietly.
I didn’t think once to turn it down. All the rotten feelings drained away almost immediately. The scene at Waterloo, the ghastly testimony of the Missing woman, most of the unease about our present perplexing adventure.
“Now we shan’t fall asleep,” Clement reported, head tipped back.
“It’s too cold to fall asleep out here,” I said.
“Oh, is your fashionable coat not warm enough? Where’d you get that thing, anyway? It’s new.”
“Kingsley,” I confessed.
“Ha!” Clement cried. “I thought so.”
“I feel as if your tone of voice implies something.”
“Toff bastard.”
“I’m immune to your impolite and very jealous scorn, you intractable shit.”
“Listen to you! Such eloquence!”
“It’s a tragedy you can’t fit in his coats. You could surely use a new one. You look like a lurker.”
Chuckling, still sniffling a bit, Clement threw down the knapsack and dug around in it.
“You’ll want this,” he said, passing me a kerchief before tying a second about his nose and mouth, knotting it at the back of his head. He caught my baffled look and with a sigh, as he waltzed around another corner into a dismal warren of hidden streets and courts, he reached out to tap a peeling, faded health notice from the Governors and Directors of the Poor, posted on the sagging brick: CHOLERA AND WATER. THE INHABITANTS WITHIN THE DISTRICT WHERE CHOLERA IS PREVAILING ARE EARNESTLY ADVISED NOT TO DRINK ANY WATER …
Promptly, I tied the kerchief on, too, and followed close on his heels.
He took a left into a winding alley-like street, guided by the occasional melancholy gas lamp. Puddles gathered at the seam of the pavement, cramped not only between desolate old lodgings with jutting brick and crumbling stucco to either side but by a mass of dingy people. My heart raced a little harder. I’d never seen firsthand the thorns in the city’s conscience, these shadowy, sad, working-class corners. A real rookery if any. Perhaps not the worst, but the worst to which I’d ever been borne exposure.
As if he knew my discomfort—or, more remarkably, felt responsible for it—Clement took me by the arm and kept me close as he pressed on along the walls towards whatever it was for which the small, buzzing crowd had gathered. A boxing match, perhaps. A dog fight. Something else illicit. Very awake and aware now, I saw no gambling slips in anyone’s hand as we bobbed and weaved around people, but this was a poverty-stricken place, so perhaps they didn’t care about slips …
A charity’s soup kitchen.
The disorganised queue rounded the corner into another shadowy yard called Ladd’s Court, and at the dead end under the tall arched and bricked-in windows of some building’s backside, a sizeable wooden table had been set up, where the unfortunate locals swarmed like flies to a rotting thing.
I tugged at Clement’s sleeve, utterly shocked. But I didn’t know what to say. He just shrugged, sending a sensitive glance it didn’t seem he meant for me to see. And it left me feeling rather fluttery and flustered. A soup kitchen. Clement, the aloof and complacent Clement … volunteering at a soup kitchen.
A handful of better off individuals, masked just as we were, tended to the diners. A few women of the faith, gentlemen in proper coats, two or three ladies in high-necked gowns and lovely little capes, all aproned as they passed out bowls of stew, collected empty dishes, then turned to the next set of hungry hands. At the night’s makeshift hearth, two of the Sisters ladled out servings while another large pot cooked over a street fire. A frame sign stood guard there:
CHARITABLE SOCIETY FOR THE IMPROVEMENT
OF LIFE AND LONGEVITY
SERVING TONIGHT
MRS. BEETON’S SOUP FOR BENEVOLENT PURPOSES
“Mr. Clement!” one of the ladies greeted as we approached. She tugged her mask down with one hooked finger just enough to reveal a full, sweet smile, and I recognised her from All Hallows’, the great gallery upstairs with the music and the lights. The one who had so flawlessly saved Mr. Zayne from Miss Jessica’s contempt.
“I’ve brought a fri
end.” Clement gestured my way absently. “He’ll be splendid help, I promise.”
Sullen light from a gas lamp bounced off the jade brooch at the woman’s throat as she draped an apron around me and tied it at my waist. I blushed, that she should do it for me as if I were a child. “Thank you, miss,” I mumbled sheepishly, still reconciling with what I’d gotten myself into. It was unbelievable how the charity transformed a gloomy, dangerous little place into something almost pleasant.
Affixing his own apron, Clement leaned over and said, “Please don’t stray. I’m not in the mood for an explanation to Westwood and Chesley as to why the Cross’s newest little recruit is black and blue and robbed for every penny he’s worth. Which doesn’t seem to be a lot, but … ”
I pouted though he couldn’t see it beyond the mask. Even with the way his eyes danced, I caught the seriousness in them, as if he teased so I wouldn’t notice how much he did consider my safety.
Such as it was, somehow, I’d found myself right back in my old vocation as a makeshift server. And I really didn’t mind.
Labourers, loafers, street Arabs, surly-looking fellows and half-dead looking fellows, sad-faced and quiet ladies of every age and size—the sorts of people one might hurry by up in Westminster and the West End, with eyes cast away. A baby wailed, but only shortly. A grubby little boy barely tall enough to see above a windowsill struggled to cradle a kitten who seemed to really prefer otherwise. The rain hovered like a mist, tingling on what parts of my flushed face it could touch.
Not but an hour and a half ago, we’d been watching the Yard assess a body found in the river, and now, here, we were surrounded by surprising life.
Two young and plain-looking mill girls hand-sewing buttons onto broken shoes peeped up at me as I handed them bowls of thin stew with chunks of bread plopped on top. Their wide eyes followed me after I moved on, whispers and shy giggles muffled as they huddled together.
“His nails’re so clean, you see that … ”
“An’ his face, I wish Rudy washed ’is face like that.”
Never mind I was unaccustomed to girls admiring me much; in the end, I really hadn’t a thing in my life to complain about, did I?
“Ah, if it isn’t Southbank’s best knocker-up!” Clement said, not far away, with a boyish grin obvious in his voice.
“Look at this rascal,” replied a plump, bow-legged woman with mousy brown hair and rheumatic fingers. “Rowan, you’ll excuse mum, here, my walking’s bad tonight.”
My eyes cut to Clement. Rowan. His first name?
“Have you been well?” the little woman asked.
“Yes, mum.” Clement let her pull him down for a kiss and a pinch. Either he was very good at hiding his distress from our night’s assignment, or this place transformed him into a different person. With the tired old woman, into the child he still technically was—not even twenty yet. Or … the child he used to be.
“But have you been good?”
“Always, mum, you know that.”
“Lies,” the woman scolded, whistling it through her few teeth as she pinched him again.
I wandered up beside Clement, ducking below a gas pipe precariously tunneled out through a cloudy window.
“Eat now, mum,” he said. “The weather’s hurting your knees, yet? I can bring poppy confection powder, mix it right in some mint tea … ”
The woman gave him a dark look as she carefully cradled her food and eased down to sit. “Been long enough since you’ve gone for me to stop worrying ’bout you—look at you, doin’ so well, always said you were cut from different sod’n the rest of us—yet here I am, still worrying.”
Clement slid down his kerchief mask to plant a kiss atop her head before he went off to fetch more soup and bread.
Since you’ve gone …
I hurried after him. “Clement,” I urged, falling in close to his side, “what does she mean, since you’ve gone?”
He stopped short, a defenceless look flashing almost too fast to catch across his face. His brow knotted. He reached into his coat for his packet of tobacco.
“Shall we smoke?” he said quietly.
At the sodden junction of the street, Clement rolled a cigarette. He didn’t look at me. “I was here for a time,” he said. “When I first came to London.”
The match hissed as he struck it in the gloomy lamplight and I gawked at him, brow knotted. Clement, here? Surely not so. He was a somewhat adorable and defiant half-gentleman but nothing like these poor souls, not in morals, not in education, not in health.
“From where?” I asked.
“Northamptonshire.”
“I thought you were Welsh.”
His glance flickered over as he rolled a second cigarette for me, sized me up briefly as though debating whether to be bothered by my knowledge of such. A flat smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I am,” he said. “Port Talbot, originally. But I moved to family in the Midlands after my father died, and came to London to work four or five years ago.”
Our face coverings dropped to our chins, he lit my cigarette for me with the glowing tip of his own, watching the bright little embers of it swell with hooded eyes. He looked so vulnerable, suddenly. Looked his age, soft and tired and in need of a warm dinner, a warm home, a warm, comfortable bed with a fire blazing. Tobacco smoke swirled silky between us as I rolled my lower lip between my teeth, wrestling with the question for a moment.
“Why are you so merciless with the ghosts?” I asked finally.
Clement looked over at me with a sweet pinch of shock to his face. “Merciless?”
“During inspections,” I persisted. “How are you so—so thoughtful and conscious of the suffering here, yet utterly immune to the suffering of the Missing?”
“The Missing … ?”
“The ghosts.”
“How quaint,” he said with a flick of the brow.
“They’re just as unfortunate and dispossessed as these people.” I nodded to the crowd further up the alley. My voice was chalky in my throat where the bitterness from Clement’s powder had finally faded. “Here you are, full of such goodwill, but all you wish on investigation is to burn the bones and ‘get it over with.’ Are you really so unsympathetic to what it’s like to be stuck in the après-monde?”
“The ‘après-monde.’” Clement uttered a scoff that was more like a nervous laugh. “You’ve been in Kingsley’s company a lot, hmm?”
“Della Triviat was sentient, Clement, and you did her away without a thought,” I reminded him crossly, a bit embarrassed to have been caught using Cain’s name for the in-between while also caught in his hand-me-down coat, and somewhat in awe of my own brashness.
“Christ, are you still in a huff about the Triviat case?”
“Of course; I am! And Waterloo tonight, you wanted the corpse’s name before she was even dry.”
“Lord Triviat wished his house be cleansed of spectral activity, as you evidently still do not recall.” Clement heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes. Somehow … it wasn’t very convincing of true indifference. “And we reconnoitered tonight, why shouldn’t I have wanted the woman’s name?”
“But where do you draw the line between spirits we destroy and spirits we let alone? What gives you that right?” I didn’t want to be so spiteful, but I was desperate to understand. I wasn’t sure when, but an overwhelming need to know Clement had broken open in me. I wanted so badly to look up to him. And perhaps I was afraid to consider I shouldn’t want either of those things.
“If the ghosts are intelligent,” I pressed, “why not ask why they do what they do? What it’s like for them?”
“Yes, Virginia.” Clement scoffed. “What do you believe this to be, Will, Wilde’s ‘Canterville Ghost?’”
“Oh, how very droll, because Virginia asked the same of the ghost in the story—Clement, I’m very serious. We could have asked Della things, we could have learned from her!”
Like I might have learned from Charlie and Colette. Like I might now, fro
m Mary Ann back in my room. Della, Jude, Maude, how many countless others over the years … so many questions about the Missing world still unanswered. Yes, and I couldn’t even begin to think about Jude in that sealed bottle. Others like him, kept on a shelf to study.
Clement sighed through his teeth. “My bloody task is to keep spirits away from those who do not want them around.”
“Right, and my worries are trivial and my inefficiency as an inspector is a grand burden.”
“What?” Clement’s face dimpled. “You’re part of the team—”
Suddenly he threw down the end of his cigarette as if the last puff had burned his fingertips, grinding the smouldering paper into the concrete with a toe.
“You know,” he husked, lamplight glinting off that tiny chunk of quartz at his throat, “enough of this. You’re not the only little saint. I grew up with the dead, too.”
“Yes,” I said, frustrated by the ugliness of my own voice but unable to defuse it. “Third parameter psychosensitive, you said. An empath. Though you sure as hell lack some empathy.”
His eyes flashed over me; he didn’t correct me. And ah, I could hear it now in his unflinching indignance, certainly, the soft, throaty consonants typical of the midlands straining against the mostly London of his voice as he spat, “If the dead torture the living, why, I’ll put a stop to it right away. Learning is our duty, but so is that. For Christ’s sake, the ghosts aren’t human, Winchester! They might seem it, but they’re not. They’re electromagnet—aura—ambient, static—something. You’ve got me all worked up and I can’t remember! They’re leftover souls. And the longer they exist in the pale, the après-monde, whatever you want to call it … ”
“The in-between.”
“Sure. As they linger, any remaining humanness fades. Leaves the shell of a soul, in a sense. Time mutates and warps it all until, suddenly, we’ve got entities beyond our control. Daemons, elementals, faeries.”
What’s your burden? he’d asked when we’d first, officially, met. In the music hall, after my interview. Burden.
