The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  . . . parent’s gift . . .

  . . . responsibility . . .

  . . . duty . . .

  . . . show no weakness . . .

  . . . tell no lies . . .

  . . . a child that screams is contrary and difficult . . .

  . . . stories . . .

  In his empty tent, Mr Majestic drifted through a world of green forests and endless eyes, and for a moment, remembered a time when he wasn’t a child in a man’s body, when he had a name, a real name, just for a moment. Once upon a time . . .

  Sissy Smith twitched on the edge of her bed and for a moment she dreamed of. . .

  . . . of . . .

  . . . run away . . .

  . . . run away . . .

  . . . run away . . . to . . . to . . .

  No.

  Nothing there . . .

  . . . not any more . . .

  CHAPTER 16

  Poisoned

  Fire had happened.

  Thomas was vaguely aware of running, screaming, angry animals and the usual and largely predictable consequences of unpredictable exothermic reactions, particularly, he couldn’t help feel, particularly when they were being caused by someone quite so gleeful about such uncivilised notions as ‘blast radius’ as Lin Zi. But there was more.

  He remembered looking into the bright green eyes of Greybags and seeing a child, just a child, a snotty little boy with sleeves far too long for him, and knowing, in that instant, that this child had been the young man who had served poisoned cake to the children in the tent, and more, that this child was wrong. He was a broken limb bent backwards on itself, the general who drank tea while his men were massacred on the field, the moon rising in the wrong place against a background of foreign stars, he was just . . . wrong.

  And then there was Mister Lyle.

  Thomas didn’t think he’d ever seen Tess move so fast, catching her would-be mentor as he slid towards the earth, eyes too wide, skin too pale, the word ‘poison’ on his breath and the smell of something untoward on his lips.

  Greybags had run. He’d taken one look at Lin Zi, all tastelessly dressed furious vengeance, taken one look into her bright green eyes and seen her fingers moving for the bronze blades hidden, most literally, up her sleeves, and run. At his feet, chemicals had mixed and fire had happened but Greybags was already running, hair smoking, clothes in tatty shreds on his back, thin white blood trickling down from a tear across his shoulder. Thomas had known, sensed, felt, that Lin wanted to follow him, that it was her duty, her responsibility. That was somehow why she was here, hiding in this circus. But then she too had seen Lyle and heard the word ‘poison’, and for the first time, for the very first time, Thomas had seen a look on a Tseiqin’s face that hadn’t been derived directly from the 100 Snooty Noses catalogue of the House of Lords. But she’d already broken the bottles together, the circus was already starting to blaze, Greybags was running, Tess was crying and Horatio Lyle was in no fit state to do anything about any of it.

  Lin had for a moment, just a moment, hesitated. Thomas had seen that too in her face, as the lion screamed and flames spat across the carpet and the circus had broken out into that very special kind of confusion and chaos that only a really interested London mob with not enough to keep it occupied could manage. Thomas had seen the look in her eye. She’d looked at Lyle, she’d looked at the retreating back of Greybags, and for a moment, just a moment, she’d considered leaving them there.

  Then the moment had passed, and Lin was grabbing Lyle by the crook of his arm and hauling upright and, somehow, despite being both a woman and, worse, not one of us, Lin Zi had taken charge.

  Park Lane was a freshly cobbled road up and down which rich carriages progressed for largely illicit purposes. Occasionally reckless young men out to impress even more reckless young women would race their open-top carriages round the edges of the road and onto the grasses of Hyde Park, but usually, traffic was sedate, owing in part to congestion, and in part to the thick quantities of the inevitable waste product of having a transportation system entirely dependent on well-fed horses.

  On the side of this road, the most and least glamorous in all London, stood a lady-demon in tasteless, so-called oriental trousers, a child pickpocket, an extravagantly tatty dog, a boy in fine but torn trousers, and a deranged, gabbling scientist.

  Maybe not deranged. Not when all Lyle had to say was, ‘Poison . . . pudding . . . poison . . .’

  They’d leant him against a lamp-post, while Lin stamped her foot and raged.

  ‘Five hundred years ago,’ she shrilled, ‘this was what Beijing was like! Ignorant Western barbarians and their ineffective transport solutions!’

  Thomas, sensing, without knowing, that Lin was casting aspersions on Victoria Regina and all works made in her name, suggested, ‘Maybe we could find an omnibus?’

  ‘Miss Lin!’ Tess’s voice was full of fear. ‘Mister Lyle’s falling asleep!’

  In a second Lin was at Lyle’s side. She grabbed him by the chin, pulled back a drooping eyelid, peered deep inside. Businesslike, she slapped him across the jaw. He jerked, half opened his eyes, and mumbled, ‘Please don’t do that.’

  ‘Mister Lyle!’

  His eyes drifted into focus on Lin’s face. A frantic, bewildered grin spread across his features. ‘Lin? What the hell are you . . .?’

  ‘What did Greybags give you? Did you eat anything, drink anything?’

  He nodded.

  Lin hissed, ‘Sai jai!’ the meaning of which Thomas was grateful not to know. Then, ‘Mister Lyle, do you trust me?’

  Lyle hesitated, then nodded again.

  ‘Sort of,’ muttered Tess.

  ‘I need you to look straight into my eyes.’

  A pause. Another nod. Lyle looked. He’d been told before, so many times, don’t look at the eyes, not the eyes of the Tseiqin. To look was to drown, to fall for ever. But this was Lin. And Lin was different, in her way. In every way that mattered.

  ‘You are not going to close your eyes, do you understand?’ she murmured, taking his hand and pressing it between her fingers. ‘You are not going to fall asleep unless I permit you. You are going to obey everything I say. Do you understand me, Horatio Lyle?’

  ‘Bigwig,’ hissed Tess at Thomas, ‘are you sure we should go an’ let Mister Lyle be ensorcelled like this?’

  ‘If he sleeps, he won’t wake up!’ snapped Lin, half turning her head from Lyle’s wide-eyed stare. ‘Not as you know him. Everything that was Mister Lyle will be gone and all that stays will be a mewling, distorted infant. Like the people you saw at the circus.’

  ‘Poisoned,’ whispered Lyle. ‘In the pudding. Poisoned.’

  ‘Is there an antidote?’ demanded Thomas. ‘He can’t just not sleep for ever!’

  Lin hissed in frustration, turned back to the thronging street, searching the gloom for a cab. A hand fell on her sleeve and pulled her back. Surprised, she looked straight into Lyle’s wide eyes. ‘I need . . .’ He groaned, his other hand pressed against his head as if it were going to explode. ‘I need . . . I need salt water, a lot, and I need it fast. I need . . . Mama . . . I . . . I need . . . Oh, God . . .’

  ‘This is good,’ muttered Lin, ‘this is good! What else do you need, Mister Lyle. Tell me!’

  ‘Charcoal tablets, milk, a needle, a microscope, uh . . .’

  ‘We have these things!’ exclaimed Thomas. Then his heart sank a little. ‘At least, we had them in Lyle’s house.’

  ‘Wanna play, wanna . . . wanna . . . Tess, you mustn’t eat the . . . God . . .’

  ‘Lyle!’ barked Lin. ‘You are not going to fall asleep! You are going to be a good English scientist, chop chop, what ho, dammit! Tell us everything you need!’

  ‘Salt water. Sugar water, sodium bicarbonate, charcoal, uh . . . belladonna, in case it gets too slow, opiates if it gets too fast. Potassium to counteract the sodium, and as many coffee beans as you can find.’

  And then, perhaps because overall it had been a trying day, Hor
atio Lyle raised his head to the darkening sky and wailed, ‘I want my mama!’

  The sun set over London.

  It set across the semi-rural village of Hampstead, and spilt its last rays into the bedroom at the top of Milly Lyle’s house, where a mother, whose son had long since left home, turned down the sheets on an empty bed and remembered nights when she had told stories to her child, back when you were allowed to begin with once upon a time. Before an excess of time, learning and, above all, the desire to be free of all childish things, even the good ones, had taken Horatio Lyle away from home and the fairytales of youth.

  The sun set over the crowded streets of Mayfair, where street vendors yelled abuse at coppers trying to organise the mess of carts and carriages. It dribbled into the thieves’ alleys of Soho, told of rising darkness, and rich pickings for nimble fingers, promised close brick walls and long thick fogs in the narrow alleys of Whitechapel, warned the factory master to light his lamps and draw his shutters, summoned fishermen back from the sludge-filled Thames estuary, whispered children asleep.

  In the hospital in Marylebone, Miss Chaste sits alone in the middle of the ward, opens her book as she does every night, clears her throat and breathes, ‘Once upon a time . . .’ Because this, as she sees it, is one of her many motherly duties, to be kindly done.

  Horatio Lyle’s house was a blackened, shabby hulk of its former self. Pipes had burst free from their brackets inside the walls, sticking out like broken bones from torn skin where they’d been burst by the pressure of the gas that Tess had pumped through the guts of the house the day before. Walls had been turned brownish-black by sticky substances in the filthy noxious air. Windows had been smashed, doors hung crookedly from their frames. Even the local thieves, usually quick to pick over the remains of any injured building in the city, and for whom the price of the smallest silver fork might feed a family for a day, had kept away, frightened of the stench and the hulking shadows. Anything that had stood on a table, had now fallen on the floor. Anything that had been upright on a shelf, now inclined against its neighbour. Thomas had never seen a house so abused, and felt his heart twist in his throat at the pity of the sight.

  Need pushed them into the gloomy carcass of the place. Tess rummaged in Lyle’s pockets until she found a box of smelly yellow matches and a ball of tinted white glass. The flame from one ignited the powder in the other, and gave off a bright hot white light that illuminated the twisted remains of the stairs. Lyle’s face, in the unforgiving glare, was a sickly shade of green. With Lin’s arm round his waist supporting him, his eyes flickered erratically from side to side, like someone already half lost in a dream.

  They got him as far as the blackened stairs before he slipped from Lin’s grasp and dropped to the floor. As he breathed, his lungs seemed to rattle and wheeze. ‘Salt water,’ he hissed. ‘Salt water, quick, salt water.’

  Thomas was already running, stumbling through the dark, down towards the kitchen. He pulled open drawer after drawer and tripped over buckets and chairs in search of what he needed. At Lyle’s feet, Tate whined. By Lyle’s side, Tess’s face was almost as pale as his. Lin looked like a cheap iron etching, all angles and frozen poise.

  In the kitchen, Thomas found a bucket of water, old, drawn yesterday from the pump, and, at the back of a cupboard, a bag of salt. He seized one in each hand and carried them upstairs.

  On the stairs Tess poked Lyle in the arm. He half jerked, slowly turned his head, seemed to see her and gave the weedy smile of a tired old man relieved at the thought of an ending. ‘Pickpocket,’ he said gently.

  ‘Bigwig aristo pinchpenny,’ she retorted, feigning, without much effect, sharpness in her voice.

  Thomas reached the head of the stairs. ‘How much salt to how much water?’ he asked. But Lyle had already grabbed the whole bag of salt, tipped it to the last grain into the bucket, stirred it with one hand and then, without a sound or word of apology, buried his head like a dog into its bowl, straight down below the water’s surface to drink. He drank like a desert wanderer saved from the sun, seeming to breathe the water as much as drink it. He gulped down so much, Tess thought his stomach would burst. Then lifting up his head, swallowing a last gulp, he took in a great heave of air and, staggering to his feet, ran towards the door.

  He nearly reached it, got to within a foot of the dark outside world before, dropping to his knees, Horatio Lyle was violently, unforgivably and unforgivingly sick.

  When Mrs Hobbs, the banker’s wife, went to find Mister Lyle on a cold, dark London evening, a bundle of papers tucked into her bag and an umbrella raised ineffectually against the rain, she was perhaps a little bit surprised to discover that her destination was missing its door. Or rather, its door was still attached to the house, but by a single screw whose hinge hung off the frame with the slouch of a thing too tired to care.

  Neither, for that matter, did the cutting smell of vomit and the occasional stain of blood on the floor of the front hall, fill her with a resounding confidence about the genteel qualities of this gentleman’s abode. But Mrs Hobbs was not one to question the habits of her clientele, so long as her clientele demonstrated financial prudence while indulging said habits, and so she drew her shoulders back, stuck her chin out and marched determinedly into the house in the happy thought that if anything bad did happen to her, then the full force of the fiscal system would be at her back, and pity anyone who got in the way of money.

  There was a glimmer of candlelight coming from downstairs, from where there also issued a series of unlikely and unusual sounds.

  The sounds went as follows:

  ‘You wanna do what with it?’

  ‘Try injecting directly into the vein.’

  ‘That’s ’orrid!’

  ‘Miss Teresa, I think we may have to resign ourselves to the thought that medicine is ’orrid.’

  ‘You can do it. I ain’t sticking nothin’ nowhere where it weren’t meant.’

  Mrs Hobbs crept down the stairs, which, in defiance of all the care she took, creaked like the cracked old bones of a hanged man suspended in a gale. She reached the bottom of the stairs, eased back the kitchen door, and felt a tiny shiver of movement by her side. A brass knife, old-fashioned and slightly curved, appeared in the vicinity of her left eye; behind it, a voice hummed like a weary panther, ‘Now why would a lady of your nature be in a house of such ill-repose?’

  The dagger filled Mrs Hobbs’ world. She gabbled, ‘I . . . I’m looking for Mister Horatio Lyle, and how dare you accost me with—’

  If it were possible for the dagger’s point to move any closer without actually shaving off her thin grey eyelashes, it managed it. A pair of green eyes blinked calmly behind the hand that held the blade, and that voice, soft, female, foreign, breathed, ‘Mister Lyle is indisposed at the moment.’

  From beyond the voice a younger one, that of a child, said, ‘Oi! Miss Lin! I think he’s fallin’ asleep again!’

  The green-eyed woman let out a weary sigh. ‘I am tormented,’ she complained, ‘by evolutionarily inhibited companions who fail to appreciate the concept of “lingering menace”. I don’t suppose you’d mind quivering in fear at my inexpressible and quaintly charismatic presence while I just deal with this?’

  ‘Um . . . I suppose not,’ whispered Mrs Hobbs.

  ‘You are most understanding,’ breathed the female voice, and without a sound, the dagger and the woman who held it were gone, vanished into the candlelit glow of the kitchen beyond.

  Mrs Hobbs, her heart fit to burst from her throat, eased the door further back and beheld, strewn across every surface, a scene of chemical chaos. Containers of liquids or slimes, samples of flowers, finely ground powders, old dried mushrooms, strange blackened twigs, peculiar pink glands from long-dead foreign animals, needles tipped with she dared not think what, smears and stains of every colour preserved in every form, covered the floor so densely that its four inhabitants - a woman with green eyes and a terrible fancy-dress jacket and trousers, two children and
a dog - had to pick their way on tiptoe to avoid knocking over the throng of bottles.

  Yet if that was enough to alarm the usually unflappable Mrs Hobbs, the sight in the middle of the room shocked her to her very bones for, stretched out across the kitchen table, his feet dangling off the edge, was Mister Horatio Lyle. His eyes were red, his skin as pale as new snow, and his head lolled and his eyelids sagged as if he were falling asleep - only to be woken by a sharp slap from the green-eyed woman and a cry of, ‘No sleeping, Mister Lyle! No sleeping yet!’

  Mrs Hobbs had seen human creatures look so pallid, and shake so feebly, back when, as a young lady of charitable bent, she had helped tend the victims of a cholera outbreak. This was not cholera; but it might as well have been for the way Lyle looked.