by KJ Charles
“Oh, not man.” Mr. Sweetly shook his head. His wrinkled hand came up to touch the scar on his neck. “Not man at all.”
“And nobody may speak of these matters. You believe Peggy was, what, taken because she spoke?”
“Mustn’t speak,” Mr. Sweetly muttered. “Brings ill luck. Asking for trouble. I should know.”
“What ill luck had you?”
“Plenty of luck, but not in love. My first, she died in childbed. My second, she gave me six brats, one piebald. Good woman, she was, but fell off a wharf and a barge crushed her. God rest her soul.”
I murmured agreement. Simon observed, “It seems to me they had the ill luck, not you.”
“Aye, but I didn’t talk, did I? I caused offense another way, never mind what but I had to pay for that, see. I did well enough, though. Kept my nippers fed and clothed, and grandchilders too. I had the luck and I never talked. But still she took my Peggy.” Mr. Sweetly’s voice quavered on that, gnarled hands clutching the threadbare sheets.
“You made a bargain,” Simon said. “And you believe the entity with which you bargained has now taken your granddaughter. Because she’s a piebald girl, which brings her under this entity’s authority?”
Simon was, it must be said, extremely good at his work. Mr. Sweetly was nodding, expression hopeful.
“Can you tell me why you think a piebald girl ought to marry a tosher?” I asked.
“Her nippers won’t drown,” Mr. Sweetly said. “No son of a piebald girl’ll die by drowning, and that’s a fine thing for a tosher to know. It’s hard in the drains, see. You’re under the earth, in the tunnels. You don’t hear the rain starting, don’t hear naught but the splashing of your feet, and her folk rustling around you, maybe the echoes of yer own voice. It can be cats and dogs above, and you don’t know. But the rain’s pouring down through the drains and pipes, into the sewers, and then, of a sudden you hears all the water coming at once. That’s when a tosher hopes she’s watching, see. That’s when it’s good to know you can’t drown.”
Simon glanced at me, back to Mr. Sweetly. “Can you tell me anything about her?” He gave the word the same stress as the old man had.
“No. No.”
“She,” Simon said thoughtfully. “And her folk in the sewers…”
I looked around, sharply. Simon glanced at me. “What?”
“Nothing.” I had, in fact, heard a faint scuttle, the sound of vermin. Hardly surprising, in this house or this part of London, but never pleasant.
Simon was regarding me with narrowed eyes. I felt a well-founded sense of apprehension. “Ask your question, Robert.”
“What question?”
“The one you want to ask.”
I ought to be used to this by now, yet it always came with a sense of wrongness. I settled myself more firmly on the stool. “Mr. Sweetly. How did you get your scar?”
He may have answered. I never heard.
Usually what Simon calls my awareness, that sense of a story that was sharpened by the touch of a ghost, comes as fleeting visions. Fancies, impressions, random thoughts and feelings. I had become used to those over the last years.
This was something else. What I saw then, what I felt—
A boy, or young man, or something in between. Fifteen or so, a handsome youth with a wickedly charming smile, and a woman pulling him by the hand, giggling, through the darkness. They pass a man with a lantern of the sort used fifty years ago, and her eyes shine briefly, flat and blank in the light. Then they are inside some echoing space, crashing down together onto a heap of rags. Dust in my nose, dark in my eyes. The grunts and groans of intimacy, his urgency and hers, his hands on her breasts, he at worship between her legs, which do not bend quite as one would expect. He does not see her toes, with their long, crooked nails, or claws. Both of them are crying out with increasing volume, and around them, in the shadows and the edges, black bead eyes glint. Pink claws scrabble, naked tails stiffen into rigidity. The boy throws his head back in climax, drops it down, and her white, white teeth sink into his neck.
I opened my eyes with a gasp. Mr. Sweetly was staring at me with some alarm. “Sir?”
“You, uh, you made love to a woman,” I said. I felt a little shaky. “In a rag warehouse. She bit you.”
He gaped. “I never told you that. I never told anyone that.”
“I think she just told me.” I wiped a hand over my face. My fingers were trembling, and there was sweat on my top lip. “The rat woman.”
“The Queen.” Mr. Sweetly mouthed rather than spoke the word, relief and fear warring on his face.
Simon was scowling. “And this lady demands silence of you, but Robert was permitted to see her secrets. I think we need to look for Miss Flowers. Urgently.”
That was easier said than done. Simon and I are not the police. We have no resources, no “Fetter Lane Irregulars” or troop of loyal street urchins to be our eyes and ears. And there was no calling on Simon’s skin.
“At least that means she’s not dead,” I observed.
“Yet,” Simon said.
We were standing by the river. The tide was going out, leaving its cargo of grease and filth along the dirty strands. Mr. Sweetly, galvanised now, had insisted on being carried downstairs (a task Simon had performed without flinching) and had sent out a summons for toshers. He would direct his men—sons, grandsons, cousins and friends—to search for the missing girl. Nobody in my hearing had observed that the decision might have come too late.
I rested my forearms on a rotten paling, looking out at the wide stretch of water, its waves flashing blinding white reflections over its grey-blue swell. Over the river, the foursquare shape of the Tower. We avoided going near there, for Simon’s sake. Too many stories, too many deaths.
“What can we do?” I asked him. “We can hardly contact the police, with no witness prepared to speak. But if Miss Flowers has been abducted, rather than the victim of supernatural interference, how are we to help?”
“I don’t know.” Simon’s hands were knotted together, betraying tension. “We must, though.”
“Because it’s Cornelia’s case?”
“And because a young lady may well be in serious trouble. But also… Tell me again what you saw.”
I went over it, giving my impressions in detail, watched his frown deepen. “Do you know what we are dealing with? Who is this woman?”
“I doubt she is a woman in any sense that we use the word. I suspect this is a dea civitatis.”
I called upon my schoolboy Latin. “Goddess of the city?”
“Indeed.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Well, ‘god’ is a loose term,” Simon said dismissively. “If you would prefer to say ‘spirit’…”
“I should, yes. Considerably.”
“A spirit of the city, then. The tosher’s life is dark and dangerous. They turn to one another, make their community and buttress it with stories, and you know the power stories hold.”
“But this is a story that can’t be told,” I objected. “Except…they all knew it, or knew of it, didn’t they?”
“Sacramental secrecy. Not quite the same as the real thing. The—let us use the name—the Rat Queen serves as a local deity to the toshers. Luck and fertility. She is taken with a handsome young man; he does her service for a single night; from then on he has good fortune in his work. Many dangerous occupations have such stories.” Simon smiled at my expression. “There are all kinds of gods.”
“Good Lord. Do you suppose there is one for our sort?”
“Perhaps, were you a tosher, you would have encountered a Rat King instead,” Simon said. “It would be a foolish rodent who did not select you.”
I looked up at him, startled. He was looking out over the vista of the grey Thames, but he unclasped his fingers to place one hand lightly on mine.
“Simon?”
“When Robey spoke of his sweetheart, I could only think, if you were taken from me like that.” Simon�
��s voice was low. “If I did not know what had become of you. If I lost you.”
Considering how often I had seen him risk his own life, this statement rendered me briefly speechless. But that was Simon. Ever concerned for my well-being, so rarely thinking about what I might feel, the obtuse, awkward fellow that he is. But his hand was warm on mine, in public too, and the emotion raw in his voice.
“I’m very hard to lose,” I assured him.
“You stick like a burr.” Simon’s hand tightened on mine. “Let us find Robey’s young lady and go home.”
“Where you will be the Rat King to my tosher?” I suggested. It was innuendo for the sake of it, but I had a blink of awareness again, the physicality of that long-past coupling, that sent my blood southwards, and suddenly the prospect of Simon playing god in the bedroom was decidedly compelling.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, a laugh in his voice, and a huskiness too.
“How very much I want you. This morning seems a long time back.” I had woken to his caresses, one hand on my prick, the other exerting pressure on my hip that pushed me to my back. He had worked me till I pleaded and babbled, then climbed over me, hands on my shoulders, driving me into the mattress with his weight, eyes intent on mine. I imagined him biting me, leaving a mark on my neck forever, a brand of ownership, and I shuddered at the thought.
His hand was pressing mine down, hard, his fingers spreading the bones of my hand wide as he had spread my body so often. That force, that weight, that need. “If I could bend you over this rail,” he said, low and husky. “I should take you here and now, and make you cry out to the whole of London.”
I could imagine it, and I was painfully hard at the thought. I had no doubt he was too, though our only contact was the touch of hands. I could hear the rasp in his breath.
So often we worked at night in solitary places, where the risk might have been worth taking. I should have let him do it, let him ride me, all need and no care, and muffled my cries against his skin. Should have thrilled to have him slake his lust and leave me unfulfilled and aching with arousal for the rest of the night till at last he deigned to allow me relief…
But, of course, it was broad daylight in a crowded area. Of course it blasted well was.
“Damn it,” I said, somewhat strangulated, and Simon grunted frustrated agreement. We stood together for a long moment, breathing deeply, and he relaxed his hold, though still he did not move his hand.
“There are things we must do,” he said at last, reluctantly. “Work.”
“Indeed.” I forced my rebellious thoughts back to the path of duty. “There are, I suppose, three possibilities. That the girl has met with an accident, that this is foul play unrelated to her birth, or that it is foul play because of her birth.”
Simon nodded. “In the first two cases, we have nothing to offer and the family must rely upon the police or their own resources, as they now are. But it seems highly unlikely that you had such a powerful reaction for no reason. I think we must work on the assumption that Miss Flowers has been abducted because she is a piebald girl.”
“But why? What is to be gained?”
Mr. Sweetly had told us a little more of the piebald girls, feeling as though he had been given permission. After a young man had done his service to the Rat Queen, his human partner would bear him a piebald girl, one only. Their hearing and night sight were exceptional, Mr. Sweetly asserted, and none of their offspring could drown; there was nothing else to mark them out save that each would bear one piebald girl among her own children. It was not a great deal to go on.
“And they are not the Rat Queen’s children,” I mused. “Not by blood.”
“But there is influence there, still. Do rats take care of their young?”
“Good Lord, Simon, how do you expect me to know that?”
He shrugged. “You are a fount of unlikely information. I don’t know, and I am greatly afraid that time is pressing. I think the best course is to consult Theodosia.”
I was very rarely privileged to see Miss Kay at work. She was a deeply solitary woman, who found other people tiresome and draining. She and Simon were capable of sitting in the parlour for hours without exchanging a single word, and considering that a relaxing evening well spent. I tended to flee to my club on those nights. Her affection for Simon was unquestionable, but I am quite sure it was a relief to her when I came upon the scene and she could pursue her studies alone.
Studies, rather than cases. She was an academic occultist, if I may so put it, where Simon was more the practical kind. Yet when she applied her knowledge, the results were terrifying.
We were in the drawing-room, seated on the floor. Simon was stripped to the waist, with a couple of mirrors strategically positioned around him. This process was not intended to summon spirits in his way, but if messages came, they would be read. We had other things too: a set of bone dice with uneven sides she used for casting lots, a detailed map of London, a slate and pencil. The rug had been taken back to reveal the floorboards, upon which she had chalked two intersecting lines, the simple form augmented with strange sigils. She sat at point east, Simon at west, I at south, each with a candle before us. The north point was occupied by a cage containing a large brown rat, and a lock of dirty-blond hair secured by a ribbon lay at the cross-point of the compass, in the centre of the device. It was Peggy’s hair, a keepsake reluctantly handed over by Skip Robey.
Miss Kay consulted a huge tome bound in some sort of dry-looking leather that I felt a strong desire not to touch, and put the book down. She lit the candles and began to murmur.
It comes to my nose. I suppose I am fortunate; one poor fellow of my acquaintance is afflicted in the stomach, and has to keep a chamberpot to hand during occult summonings. It takes Simon across the skin, of course, Miss Kay through her left hand—she does not complain, but her fingers curl into claws, the bones showing white. But I have it in the nose.
The smell first. God knows what the candles are made of; I have read human fat, and never asked in case that should be true. The smell is cloying, sticky, contaminating. It gets inside your breath and stays there. I was vividly conscious of the handkerchief in my pocket, and my urgent desire to use it.
Then the pressure. It comes to the bridge of my nose, along the sinuses, spreading outwards to ring my eye sockets, down to my teeth. It builds, as though the air is becoming heavier and thicker. It feels harder to breathe, and I do not wish to breathe because the air tastes, now, tastes of sour spice and old dry skin, and when I inhale I can feel it curling into my lungs like fog.
Miss Kay speaks on and the pressure builds. My eyes seem to darken a little, and now it feels as though there are thumbs pressing on my eyeballs. Not painful, but it would not take a great deal for it to become painful.
The runes are wild on Simon’s skin, writing over themselves in jagged haste. I do not look at the mirrors, have no desire to read them. I want to be able to touch his skin again without fear.
The world dwindles to a point. There is nothing but Miss Kay’s voice and candlelight, and the smell of spice, and the summoning has only just begun and lasted forever, and then—
Then at once, all around us, the air listens.
Simon inhaled sharply. Miss Kay said, “Ah.” In the cage, the rat stretched slowly and deliberately up onto its haunches.
“Peggy Flowers.” Miss Kay spoke to the emptiness. “Piebald girl. The Rat Queen’s child.”
Pressure, remorseless, behind my eyes. I could taste rot in my mouth. Rot and the sump.
“Peggy Flowers. Margaret Ann Flowers. Where?” Her eyes were intent on nothing, or something I couldn’t see and didn’t want to.
She leaned forward and put her hand down over the lock of Peggy’s hair.
Simon gasped. I bit my tongue. The rat screamed, high and childlike.
Miss Kay bent over her flattened hand, staring into the deep pools of space at the end of her fingers. With her other hand she groped for the slate, took up
the pencil. The rat was thrashing in the cage, convulsing, so hard it was lifted off the ground by its jerks. The pencil screeched on the slate, the stench of burning hair crept into my nose, the rat wailed, higher and higher. I wanted to clap my hands to my ears, to get up and run. Simon’s teeth were drawn back from his lips, and the scratchmark juddery writing on his skin looked like nothing so much as rodent tracks. Miss Kay jerked her hand away, leaving nothing but a smouldering ribbon behind, and—it stopped.
It had to be closed, of course, whatever gateway she had opened. She performed that duty as I sat nursing my painful tongue and making my tense muscles relax. Simon’s head was bowed. The rat lay in its cage, very still.
“It’s dead,” Simon said at last.
Miss Kay inspected the beast. “So it is. Looks like its back broke.”
Simon raised a brow: What the devil? Miss Kay opened her palms in silent answer: I’ve no idea. There was a burn mark on her skin where the hair had been.
“I have impressions. Give me an hour.” She left the room without ceremony. Simon grasped my hand, pulling me upright, and led me to the bedroom in silence. I followed, feeling as though I had been cudgelled. That always happened, and the only sensible thing was to lie down and rest, perhaps have a restoring nap.
Be damned to sense.
I pulled Simon’s head to mine, kissed him hard. There was blood in his mouth too.
“Robert,” he whispered, and lifted me off my feet, pinning me against the wall. I wrapped my legs around him, drove my mouth and my hips against his. The need of earlier was back, and stronger.
“Now,” I said. “Now.”
He was stripped to the waist already, I only in shirtsleeves and braces. It was the work of seconds to pull clothing out of the way—not off, no time for that—and then he grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me round, pushed me so I was bent face-first over the metal end of the bed frame.
No words, no preparation. He snatched up the oil, spilling it in his haste, slicked himself, took hold of my hips, and I could have come then, could have spent in that moment from sheer raw need.
