by Mark Morris
Contents
Cover
Also by Mark Morris
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One: Deep and Crisp and Even
Two: Acrobats
Three: Black Dog Alley
Four: Night Terrors
Five: The Dear Departed
Six: Strategy
Seven: Heart of Darkness
Eight: Fingerprints
Nine: The Seven Dials Mystery
Ten: To the Bone
Eleven: Goose and Bacon Pie
Twelve: Fever
Thirteen: The Thousand Sorrows
Fourteen: The Sandman
Fifteen: Broken Heart
Sixteen: Primal Sources
Seventeen: Beside Myself
Eighteen: A Shadow Across the Moon
Nineteen: Heart to Heart
Twenty: Sick Girl
Twenty-One: The Visitor
Twenty-Two: A Whole New World
Twenty-Three: Dirty Money
Twenty-Four: Healing
Twenty-Five: What Might Have Happened
Twenty-Six: Proving It
Twenty-Seven: Coffee and Cake
Twenty-Eight: War
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MARK MORRIS AND TITAN BOOKS
OBSIDIAN HEART
Book One: The Wolves of London
Book Three: The Wraiths of War (coming October 2016)
Obsidian Heart Book Two: Society of Blood
Print edition ISBN: 9781781168707
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781168738
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2015
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Mark Morris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Morris
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To Tim and Tracey Lebbon, with love.
“Get away from her, you bitch!”
ONE
DEEP AND CRISP AND EVEN
The little girl with the mechanical arm reached for the brightly wrapped package that was almost as big as she was. Then she paused and looked up at me.
‘It’s all right, Hope,’ I said gently. ‘It’s for you. Merry Christmas.’
A radiant smile appeared on the girl’s pinched and delicate features – she still looked under-nourished despite devouring every last scrap of food placed in front of her over the past three months – and then she dragged the package out from beneath the tree. She had eyed the tree warily at first, watching from the top of the stairs as Hawkins and I had manoeuvred it through the front door, its piney aroma causing her nose to wrinkle with suspicion. When Clover and I had dressed it on the night before Christmas Eve, bedecking its green-needled branches with trinkets and strips of coloured paper and small cloth bags containing fruit and nuts and sweets, she had sidled into the drawing room and stood silently beside the log fire for a while, eyeing us in bewilderment.
‘What are you doing?’ she had asked finally.
It was Clover who answered. In her long coral-coloured skirt and matching fitted jacket over a high-collared blouse and black, buttoned-up boots, she looked like a kindly schoolteacher or governess. Her formerly maroon hair was now a deep chestnut-brown, and held in place with various pins and grips and a tortoiseshell comb.
‘We’re decorating the tree,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you seen a Christmas tree before?’
Hope thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.
‘Would you like to help?’ Clover asked.
Hope considered the question carefully. We waited. We had learned to give her time, and that to rush her was often to panic her.
‘What is its purpose?’ she asked eventually.
‘Its purpose?’ At a loss, Clover glanced at me.
‘Well, it’s… traditional to bring a tree into the house at this time of year. Especially an evergreen like this one.’ My fingers brushed the tip of one spiny-needled branch.
‘Why?’
I glanced towards the row of windows on the far side of the room, but the heavy damask drapes had already been drawn, shutting out the night. ‘You know how cold and dark it is outside, how all the flowers are dead at this time of year, and how all the trees have shed their leaves?’
Hope nodded.
‘Well, the evergreens keep their leaves all year round. And so we bring them into our homes as a reminder of renewal and rebirth.’ To be honest, I had no idea if I was making this up or if I’d read it somewhere. ‘Also it reminds us of the birth of baby Jesus in Bethlehem.’
Hope looked at me blankly. ‘Who is baby Jesus?’
‘Blimey, you really do have a lot to learn, don’t you?’
Smirking, Clover said, ‘Baby Jesus was born a long, long time ago. His mother and father followed a star to a place called Bethlehem, and baby Jesus was born in a stable on Christmas Day, and that’s why we celebrate Christmas.’ Under her breath she murmured, ‘Or so the story goes.’
Hope frowned. As she involuntarily flexed the muscles in the stump of her skinny right arm the metal pistons and pulleys in the artificial limb began to creak and move, causing the pincer-like claw that served as her hand to open and close.
‘Why do you decorate the tree?’ she asked.
‘To make it look pretty. Don’t you think it’s pretty?’ said Clover.
Another moment’s thought, then Hope nodded. ‘Yes, but not as pretty as you.’
Clover laughed. ‘What a little charmer you’ve become.’ She shook a tiny bell, which she’d been about to hang on the tree, making it tinkle. ‘So – do you want to help?’
This time Hope nodded eagerly.
As Clover lifted Hope up so she could hang decorations on the higher branches, I reflected, not for the first time, what an open book this little girl was, and how much her naivety and lack of knowledge shocked me.
It wasn’t her fault, of course. For as long as Hope could remember – or was prepared to remember – she had lived in a tiny cage in a basement laboratory beneath a hospital, her existence as a living subject for the vile experiments of a surgeon called Dr Tallarian dominated by misery, pain and fear.
When I’d rescued her and brought her home (though in truth it had been Hawkins who’d done that; I’d been overcome by smoke inhalation, having attacked Tallarian’s henchman with an oil lamp and inadvertently set the laboratory on fire), she’d been all but feral, tearing up sheets and clothing to build nests in cupboards and under the bed we’d provided for her, and using the corner of her room, instead of the chamber pot, as a toilet. She couldn’t dress herself, had barely been able to speak, and had gone crazy at the feel of soap and wat
er on her skin. She’d been terrified and mistrustful, spitting and snarling and lashing out at anyone who came near.
But in the three months since then her progress had been remarkable. Hope was like a sponge, absorbing knowledge, responding to the kindness and patience shown to her not only by Clover and me, but by the rest of the household staff (particularly Mrs Peake, the housekeeper, and Polly, one of the maidservants), and latching on quickly to whatever was required of her. She’d learned to speak, or at least had found her voice, since when she had barely stopped asking questions. She had begun to dress herself, to wash regularly, to sleep in her bed instead of under it, and to use a fork or a spoon to eat with – which, of course, she held in her left hand, as her right, the pincer-like claw, was little more than an encumbrance.
But it wasn’t the claw’s inefficiency that bothered me. The real concern was the artificial arm to which the claw was attached, and not only because it was heavy and impractical. Where the metal was grafted into Hope’s flesh, halfway between her shoulder and elbow, the skin was red and inflamed, prone to infection. Mrs Peake and her staff fought a constant battle to keep the wound clean, though there was a danger in that too, because we were all aware that if the metal became too wet too often it would start to corrode, which could, if the rust seeped into Hope’s bloodstream, cause septicaemia.
In my view, Hope’s metal arm was therefore not all that different to having a bomb attached to her body – one that was currently dormant, but that might start ticking at any time. The obvious solution would be to have it amputated, but in this day and age such an operation was too risky. Anaesthesia, in the form of ether, chloroform, even cocaine, was hit and miss, and the body trauma to patients was often considerable. It was still common for patients to die of shock or blood loss or of later infections contracted during surgery. Of course, if we’d had twenty-first century techniques at our disposal it would have been a doddle. But we didn’t.
I watched Hope opening the largest of the Christmas presents we’d bought for her – to be honest, we’d spoiled her, but if there was ever a child who deserved to be spoiled, it was her – and tried to put my anxieties out of my head, at least for today. Admittedly it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just Hope I was worried about, but my youngest daughter, Kate. Kate had been abducted by an individual or group who were after an artefact in the form of a small obsidian heart, which until recently had been in my possession. If I didn’t recover the heart, which I’d last seen in the hands of DI Jensen, the detective leading the enquiry into my daughter’s disappearance – or, more likely, a shape-shifter in the form of Jensen – I would never be able to get back to my own time. And if I didn’t get back, then the likelihood was that I would never see Kate again.
But even if I did recover the heart, I knew it would still be only the first step on the long road towards a reunion with my daughter. Of course, the fact that the heart was no longer in my hands could mean that, in the twenty-first century, Kate had been released by her captors. On the other hand it could be an entirely different group that had snatched the heart – but I had no way of even beginning the process of finding that out until the thing was back in my possession. But who was to say the heart was still even in this time period? Whoever possessed it now had the potential to use it to travel in time, in which case it could already be permanently beyond my reach. There’d been periods in the past few months when my problems had seemed so insurmountable that I’d sunk into despair. It was at these times when Clover’s calm, reassuring presence had been invaluable.
‘Forget about the bigger picture,’ she’d said to me more than once. ‘Take it one step at a time.’
The first time she’d said that I’d lost my rag with her, had accused her of being insensitive. ‘It’s not your daughter who’s missing,’ I’d snapped. ‘Every day that passes feels like a day where she’s getting further away from me.’
‘Except she isn’t, is she?’ Clover said calmly. ‘Think about it, Alex. Just because time’s passing here doesn’t mean it’s passing at the same rate for Kate. If you get the heart back, even if it takes six months, you could theoretically use it to travel back to the moment after you left.’
It was true, and her words were a comfort. The knowledge that the heart could make the passage of time irrelevant, that somewhere, in the future, Kate’s existence was not necessarily continuing without me, but was, to all intents and purposes, suspended, was, I think, the only thing that kept me from going mad.
Using both her real hand and her metal claw, Hope was now tearing the paper from the parcel. Beneath was a doll’s house, a real beauty, lovingly hand-carved and painted, breathtaking in its attention to detail.
‘Do you like it?’ Clover asked. The doll’s house had been her idea.
‘Yes,’ said Hope automatically. Her nose wrinkled. ‘What is it?’
‘What does it look like?’ I said.
‘A house. Like this one. But little. Too little to live in.’
Clover knelt on the carpet beside her and leaned forward, dragging another couple of smaller parcels out from beneath the tree. ‘Open these.’
Obediently Hope tore the paper from one parcel, and then the other. The first contained miniature items of furniture – tables and chairs, beds and wardrobes, a bath on four tiny clawed feet, a dressing table, a foot stool, a writing desk, a pair of washstands – and a bunch of even smaller items, all carved out of wood: bottles, hairbrushes, a joint of meat, ornaments, paintings, chamber pots, houseplants. The second parcel contained the house’s occupants: a mother, a father and three children (one boy, one girl, one indeterminately gendered baby), plus a number of servants, including a chauffeur and a gardener.
‘It’s your very own house,’ Clover said. ‘And all these things are for you to put in it. You’ve even got your own family, look.’ She held up the little girl and jiggled her from side to side. ‘Hello, Hope,’ she said in a squeaky voice.
Hope was fascinated. She reached for the wooden figure Clover was holding, but then paused, her hand hovering in the air. Uncertainly she said, ‘Aren’t you my family?’
‘Well… yes, of course,’ said Clover. ‘We’re your real family. But this is a pretend family for you to play with.’
‘But what do I do with them?’
‘Whatever you like. You’re in control, so you can give them names and decide who they are. You can use your voice to make them speak to each other, and your imagination to make up stories about them and send them off on wild adventures.’
‘Remember what we said about imagination?’ I prompted.
‘It’s when you make up things that aren’t real. Not lies,’ Hope added hastily. ‘Lies are different. They’re bad.’
‘That’s right,’ said Clover. ‘But imagination is good. Because making up stories is fun. And it forces you to think.’
‘It exercises the little grey cells,’ said Hope solemnly, repeating something I’d told her, making both of us laugh.
‘Exactly,’ said Clover. ‘And the more you think the quicker your mind works and the cleverer you become. Because you need to think to make decisions, to decide what’s right and wrong. You see?’
Hope nodded slowly, looking at the doll’s house. ‘So do I decide where all these things go in the house?’
Clover nodded. ‘You can put things where you like. And if you decide afterwards you don’t like them where they are, you can move them around.’
‘Same with the people,’ I said. ‘You can decide what sort of people they are. You can decide whether they’re happy or sad, or nice or nasty, or…’ I floundered.
‘Brave or cowardly,’ Clover offered.
Thoughtfully Hope picked up the father and brought him up close to her face, staring at him as if trying to read his personality in his painted eyes.
‘Can he be an explorer?’ she asked.
I smiled. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘What are you going to call him?’ asked Clover.
Hope looked at me. ‘I shall call him… Alex.’
My smile widened. ‘And what about the mother?’
‘Clover,’ Hope said without hesitation.
Clover glanced my way, raising her eyebrows in amusement. Since finding ourselves here, we had decided, for the sake of decorum, that it would be best if we posed as husband and wife. To live together under any other circumstances would have been regarded as dubious at best, scandalous at worst. It would have led to adverse attention, unneeded hostility, maybe even a downturn in my business interests and investments – all of which had been set up before I got here, and which thankfully managed to tick over quite nicely with the minimum of involvement from me.
But even having established a veneer of respectability, Clover and I still occasionally caused eyebrows to be raised. I’d known vaguely before finding myself here that the Victorian era was an age when gender equality was still in its infancy, when women didn’t yet have the right to vote, and when Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragettes, their movement still very much in its earliest days, spent most of their time battling against an overwhelmingly hostile tide of public opinion. But it wasn’t until I was actually living among the Victorians that I realised just how chauvinistic a society it was, and how entrenched was the notion that women were second-class citizens in all departments. It was honestly believed among the majority of men – or at least the ones I’d encountered – that women who refused to conform to the expected role of being a demure housewife were thought to be suffering from an ‘affliction of the brain’.
Clover had adapted to Victorian society quickly and was well aware of the need to rein in her usual garrulousness, but even so, she could not exactly be described as demure, at least not by the standards of the day. Several of my business colleagues who had visited the house had been shocked when she had answered questions directed at me. One of them, the managing director of a shipping company in which I had shares, had even taken me aside and suggested I encourage my wife to make house calls on other ladies in the neighbourhood, or perhaps become involved in charitable work, in order to curb what he described as her ‘tendency towards vulgarity’.
