Curse of the Midions

by Brad Strickland

  In a quick, breathless voice, Jarvey said, “Take the message to the watch sergeant at the Holofernes Street police station. Wait for a reply and bring it back quickly.”

  For a frozen moment Mr. Hawk stood frowning at him, as if vaguely dissatisfied. Then, slowly, he lowered the envelope so that Jarvey could take it. “Thank you, sir,” Jarvey said, and he turned and hurried out as fast as he could.

  The guard at the gate stared at him. “Why are you bringing that box back, then?” he demanded.

  “Other shirts, need mending,” Jarvey said. He held up the envelope. “And Mr. Hawk gave me this to deliver.”

  Without another word, the guard opened the gate and let him out. Jarvey ran along the wall, turned the corner, and ducked out of sight. Holofernes Street? He’d never heard of it. But if he could deliver the letter and return with a reply, at least that would get him back into the palace. Jarvey fell into a jog, and when he reached the fountain, an idea struck him. He made his way to the Broad family’s house and rapped on the door.

  Red-faced Mrs. Broad answered his knock, her arms dusted with flour and her nose smudged with what looked like butter. “Why, what’s the trouble?” she asked, her eyebrows arched in surprise. “Wouldn’t they let you in the palace, dear?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Broad,” Jarvey said, “I’m in terrible trouble. I’m to take this note to the Holofernes Street tippers’ station, and this is my first day as an errand boy, and I don’t know where that is!”

  Mrs. Broad’s faced crinkled in puzzlement. “Don’t know that? Why, it’s not far past Oldcastle’s, love. Look, the quickest way is down Palace Street here across the arched bridge, then left onto Lime Street, and that will run into Holofernes. Just turn left again there, and you’ll find your bearings right enough. After you pass Oldcastle’s, just straight on for a quarter mile, and there you are.”

  “Thank you!” Jarvey called back over his shoulder, because he was already off at a trot.

  The arched bridge led not across a river, but over a green parklike stretch of lawn and trees where a dozen Toffs strolled and chatted. Lime Street was a row of shops, and Holofernes a broad cobbled street lined with better shops and thick with Toffs. Jarvey saw the tailor shop of Oldcastle and Son, a grand building with a gilded hanging sign, and he hurried past it before someone could notice his package and ask him about it.

  He came to a rubbish bin and disposed of the box of rags. Then he examined the envelope. It had not been carefully sealed. A round blob of wax over the point of the flap held it loosely closed, but a little pressure of his thumbnail would, yes, pop it free. Jarvey darted his eyes around, but Toffs never noticed errand boys. He slipped a single sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it.

  The handwriting was old-fashioned and looping, but he could read it clearly enough:

  To Sergeant Wilkes:

  His High Honor, the LordMayor, directs and charges you:

  Our informer has sworn that a boy named Jarvis Green is a danger to our good interests.He is about twelve, with reddish brown hair, and an odd manner of speaking. His eyes are blue. If found, care is to be taken not to harm him before he can be turned over to the palace for the question direct. Particular care is to be taken to secure him and all his possessions, as one of these may be of some interest.

  The boy is believed to be in company with a gang of street urchins led by the girl called Betsy. You are directed and commanded to make a particular search for any members of this gang, with an eye to capturing the boy Jarvis Green. You may use methods of pain, but take care not to damage the children so much that they cannot give us information.

  Jarvis Green is believed to have been in communication with Lord Zoroaster, who has been decreed a traitor against the interests of His Most High Excellency Tantalus Midion. The palace wishes to locate and capture Lord Zoroaster, as you know, but you are directed not to question the boy regarding Lord Zoroaster’s whereabouts. I shall attend to that questioning myself.

  I charge you to carry out these orders, standing to account for any failure at your own peril.

  —Standridge Hawk Captain, City Constabulary

  Jarvey refolded the paper and tucked it back into the envelope. He pressed the blob of wax hard, and it adhered almost as well as it had before he had pried it loose. Well, he thought, Hawk wasn’t as sharp as he might have been. He’d written the description, but he’d looked right at Jarvey without recognizing him.

  Of course, Jarvey thought bitterly. A street urchin wore rags, and an errand boy wore a kind of uniform. He hesitated for only a moment, then jogged on. He had to get back into the palace. No sign marked the police station, but a uniformed tipper stood beside the door.

  Jarvey hurried up to him. “Message for the watch sergeant, from Captain Hawk.”

  The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Sergeant Wilkes you’re wanting. Straight in with you.”

  Jarvey pushed through the door. Five or six tippers looked up in idle curiosity. “Sergeant Wilkes?” Jarvey asked.

  “That’s me, boy,” a fattish, balding man said.

  “Message for you, sir, and I’m to wait for a reply.”

  Wilkes took the envelope, ripped it open, and read the letter. “Another note about those blasted young’uns. All right, let me tell old One-Eye that we’re pursuing all leads, making inquiries, the lot.” He folded himself into a chair at a green-topped table, reached for a sheet of paper and a steel pen, and laboriously scrawled a response. He blotted this, looked up keenly and asked, “Can’t read, can you?”

  “Me, sir? No, sir,” Jarvey lied.

  “Won’t bother sealing it then. Back to old Hawk with you then, and take it at a run if you want him to leave you with a whole skin. Impatient man, our Captain Hawk.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The scrawled reply told Jarvey nothing that the sergeant had not said aloud, except that it noted that Betsy’s full name was probably Elizabeth Dare.

  Charley had been right. Some rat had been talking to the tippers.

  Jarvey didn’t have time to wonder who the rat might be. He had other, more immediate worries.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Wolf’s Lair

  Jarvey was streaming with sweat by the time he reached the palace. He gasped up to the nearest gate guard and said, “Message from the Holofernes police station for Captain Hawk. Will you take it?”

  “Not me, snipe,” the guard said with a wicked grin. He unlocked the front gate. “In with you, and nip to the back. Careful of the dogs!”

  Jarvey followed the path around the house to the back door, accompanied by the two growling dogs. Again he lifted the heavy knocker, and another servant admitted him. Jarvey followed him down the hall, through the big carved double doors, into a wide parlor, almost big enough to be a dance floor. It had a high, domed ceiling, and halfway up, a railed gallery ran around three of the walls. Beneath that, in the shadows, many dark wooden doors pierced the walls to left and right, and the servant led Jarvey to one of these. He tapped respectfully, and Captain Hawk opened the door. “In you go,” whispered the servant, giving Jarvey a shove in the small of his back.

  “Your answer, sir, from the sergeant,” Jarvey said. He could not stop his heart from hammering at the foreboding one-eyed stare.

  Hawk twitched the paper from Jarvey’s hand with a delicate move of his fingers and said, “Come with me.”

  He led Jarvey down a familiar arched hallway and through another door. It opened into the library, this time bright with daylight streaming through a wall that was almost all windows. It looked different from the library that Jarvey had seen in Siyamon Midion’s house—that room had had no windows at all, just floor-to-ceiling shelves of crumbling, ancient books.

  Tantalus Midion sat in a tall chair, bent over a huge volume resting on his desk. He glanced up as they came in. “What now?”

  “The answer from the station, my lord.” Hawk gave the old man the folded paper.

  Midion read it, his shaggy brows
coming down in a fierce scowl. “What’s this? ‘An informer has told us the girl Betsy’s name is Elizabeth Dare’!” He chuckled in a nasty way. “Well, well, I think we shall be all right, then, in time. Captain, make sure your men do not bungle this. It is of capital importance, I tell you. For weeks now I have known that something is not quite right, something in the very fabric of the city. This Green boy seems to be the key to it all. Fetch him to me, and soon, or I’ll have your skin.”

  “We shall do everything in our power, my lord,” Hawk said quietly.

  Jarvey, without being obvious about it, gazed at the two walls of bookshelves on either side of the room. Volumes tall and short, fat and thin, jammed the shelves. Maybe one of them could tell him—

  “Any further orders, my lord?” Hawk asked as Midion turned back to his book.

  “Eh? No, no. Give the lad a copper or two and kick him on his way.”

  The hard hand of Hawk closed on Jarvey’s shoulder, turned him around, and marched him out of the room. “Here,” he said, and dropped four big coins, thin copper pieces with Tantalus Midion’s face engraved on them, into Jarvey’s hand. “Now back to your business. Next time you’re sent to the palace, take care not to be seen by his lordship. He does not like to bother with servants.” Unsmiling, Hawk added, “He could boil the flesh off your bones with a word, or turn you into something nasty.”

  “Y-yes, sir,” Jarvey said. “May I go, sir?”

  Hawk waved a long, bony hand toward the door, threw back the tails of his black coat, and sat at a table spread with sheets of handwritten notes. He did not look up as Jarvey let himself out into the big room.

  Jarvey left by the back door, went down the lane and around to the front, and headed for the block of flats where Betsy waited in the attic.

  Since he wore the uniform of an errand boy, he chanced walking up to the front door and banging on it. If someone answered, he would ask directions. If the house was empty except for Betsy, maybe she would creep out onto the stairway and peek down from the front window. He knocked loudly, then stood back so she could see him.

  Nothing happened. He tried again, without success, and then gave up. He’d have to wait until dark.

  Jarvey loitered around, moving when anyone seemed to notice him, walking fast and with his head down, as if he had an urgent message to deliver. His stomach began to growl, and he found a stall selling fried fish. “How much?” he asked.

  “One for a copper, three for two,” the woman at the counter told him, and he gave up two of his copper coins in exchange for three hot fillets of fish. He wolfed these down, got a drink at the pump, and so made it through the day. Fog rose with the coming of night, dense and clinging. The chattering servants came home in a long, straggling line, and one of them, a plump, middle-aged woman, unlocked the front door. She stood as the others filed in, asking irritably, “Where’s Alice and Penelope, then?”

  “Late, as usual,” one of the women said with a laugh. “I think our Alice is chatting with Mr. Blake, the groom, and Penelope will be there as chaperone.”

  “I’ll leave the door unlocked for them,” the older woman grumbled. “If that girl is going to marry, I wish she’d marry and have done with it!” The door closed on her quarreling voice.

  Jarvey had been hiding behind the hedge bordering the front of the house. He slipped out, opened the front door slowly, slowly, allowing no creak, and then silently stepped inside. He heard voices down the hall to his left, more, fainter ones from upstairs, but he risked tiptoeing up the stairway. He took off his shoes before he reached the second landing, then hurried up past a hallway where clusters of women still stood chatting. Up to the top of the stair, through the trapdoor, and then as he was closing the trap, it slipped and swung down with a muffled thud.

  “There’s the ghost!” one of the women cried from below. She did not seem particularly frightened.

  “Maybe Alice will come home and marry it,” another one said, to a general laugh.

  Jarvey breathed in relief. “Betsy?” he whispered as loudly as he dared. “Bets?”

  No answer. Daylight was long gone, and the enveloping fog cut off any glimmer of gas light from the ventilators. The attic lay in absolute darkness. Jarvey slowly, carefully, groped his way behind the barrier of trunks and boxes. “Betsy!” His whisper became more urgent.

  She wasn’t there. Worse, he could not find the Grimoire. Feeling as if his world were on the verge of ending, Jarvey curled up and tried to rest. What if Charley had been right? He had warned Jarvey not to trust Betsy.

  And if Betsy were the informer—if she had turned the Grimoire over to Hawk, or worse, to Midion—he couldn’t even think about that.

  If she had, his world had ended, and he was stuck here forever.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fighting the Odds

  Betsy did not return over the next days. Though he was nearly frantic over the loss of the Grimoire, Jarvey didn’t know where she had gone or how to reach her. He spent the time either sleeping in the attic or slinking through the streets, stealing food whenever he could. He had found a butcher’s shop not far from the local pump, and he slenked odds and ends of raw meat from their refuse bin, but not for himself.

  He had found a way inside the brick wall, the route he had spied on his first visit. The old oak tree near the wall drooped a branch down just low enough for him to scramble up, when it was dark enough for him to get in without being spotted. He could drop into the lane between the wall and the wrought-iron fence from there.

  The two dogs must have been kept starved. They snarled and threatened him—until he began to toss them tidbits of raw meat. The first night they gobbled the meat, then growled and muttered. He sat in the tree until the dogs barked, then dropped back over the wall to safety. The same thing happened the second night, and the third, but then the dogs came running over not with rumbles of anger, but whimpers of anticipation. Jarvey found he could crouch in the dark and extend the meat to them. They let him ruffle their ears and even tried to stick their snouts through the fence to lick his face. “Good old boys, good old boys,” he said in a soft voice. “Hungry, weren’t you, guys?”

  When a week had passed, Jarvey was sure the dogs knew him and would not tear him limb from limb if he had to get into the palace grounds by way of the tree. Well—reasonably sure.

  A day came when he heard the maidservants in the flats eagerly chattering about their holiday—“A whole week, fancy!” one of them said. Jarvey listened hard, learning that Midion was planning to be away in the country, taking some of his chief advisors with him to have a governmental conference.

  That night he slipped away from the apartment house and climbed up into the oak tree. The big stone house lay in quiet and darkness. Below the tree, the two dogs circled, whimpering and whining. Jarvey crouched in the branches, but he knew the dark house was bound to be locked up, and at last he dropped back over the wall, not sure what to do.

  He no longer had the Grimoire, but he did have the art. Or sometimes he had it. Jarvey thought it over. Siyamon Midion had seemed to say that if someone had even “wild art,” he could be trained to use it. But how did you train to use magic? If there were how-to books, the one place, the only place he could find them in Lunnon had to be in old Tantalus Midion’s library. And maybe—he hated to think it, but the thought would not go away—maybe if Betsy had betrayed him, the Grimoire was kept inside the library too. The thought of sneaking back into Bywater House, into the library where he and his parents had been tricked, made him feel sick, and yet he could think of nothing else.

  His errand-boy clothes were beginning to look shabby and dirty, and he no longer dared to show himself boldly on the streets. Jarvey had hoped to do this on his own, no longer trusting even Betsy. He had to face facts: He needed help. He needed the Free Folk.

  The next day he went hunting. No one was in the old Den in the alley, and he wasn’t even sure he could find the basement where he’d first met Betsy and the others. He rememb
ered Charley’s bunch had been sent to the butcheries. On a rough, narrow street called the Shambles, he found big butchers’ shops where animals were slaughtered and their meat dressed. At one end of the street stood dozens of ramshackle stalls, where the tougher, less palatable cuts were sold to the poor. Jarvey hung around these, keeping an eye open.

  He was almost ready to give up after two days of this when a group of three boys boiled out of a shop doorway and pelted around the corner. He recognized two of them, and one was Charley.

  They had a good start, but desperation gave Jarvey an extra burst of speed. He ran as if he were trying to steal second in the last inning of a close game. Charley’s head swung around, his eyes narrow, as he heard Jarvey’s footsteps, and a broad brown-toothed grin spread itself across his grimy face. “Hold up, you two,” he said, tossing his head to get his black hair out of his face. “Here’s a turn-up! Old Jarvey Green! What cheer, Jarv?”

  “I need some help,” Jarvey gasped as he broke out of his sprint. “Listen, where’s Bets?”

  Charley frowned and scratched his head. “Dunno, mate. Dropped out o’ sight, she has. Run into Puddler some time back, he said he seen her talkin’ to a Toff near the palace, if that’s any help.”

  Jarvey felt his heart sink. Betsy had kept the Grimoire. If she had taken it to the palace—

  “You were right,” he told Charley. “There’s a rat. Listen.” He hastily filled Charley in on what he had learned running errands for Captain Hawk. “So they’re looking for us,” he finished. “And they know Bets by name. Elizabeth Dare, the note said.”

  “Go on!” said one of the other boys, one Jarvey vaguely remembered as Bumper. “That’s the same as—”

  “Shut it,” Charley said in a low voice. “Come on.”

  They went down to the river, where Charley made sure the coast was clear before leading the way into a boathouse built onto a wharf. The light inside was strange, cool and green, with ripples from the water crawling over the walls and ceiling. Once they were inside, they all sat on the edge of the wharf, dangling their feet. “Listen,” Charley said, sounding reluctant. “I dunno if this is worth it or not to say, but I never knew Betsy’s last name before. Dare? You sure it was Dare, mate?”