“And whether you mean harm is something entirely open for debate.”
He raised his right hand and pointed something at Cait. It was a long-barrelled pistol of a kind Lucy had never seen before.
“If you and your friend would step inside, I’d be much obliged.”
Cait straightened slowly, her hand beginning to quietly flex towards the razor she kept holstered in a discreet pocket in the cuff of her dress.
The pistol in his hand made a definite metallic click as he thumbed back the hammer, making a sound like a trap being set. Cait stopped moving.
“And if you’d keep your hands away from your blades, then we won’t be having to mop any bits of you off the Tittensors’ nice clean porch.”
Cait looked him in the eyes.
Lucy prepared to run, knowing her friend was going to work on his mind to fuddle him and buy them time enough to escape.
“And that won’t work, missy,” he said. “Not on me. I’m not some innocent lamb for the shearing, not like the captain.”
“Who are you?” said Cait.
“Who don’t signify,” he said. “What I am is a Proctor.”
Lucy thought she might have a chance if she threw herself sideways and jumped off the porch into the dark street beyond.
Cait reached back and gripped her arm as if she’d heard the girl’s thoughts.
“No, Lucy,” she said. “Look at him. Look at him properly. He’s going to be fast. Fast as you. Fast as me. Maybe even as fast as Sharp.”
The Proctor smiled and nodded his head slowly. It wasn’t a cheering smile. And the gun barrel didn’t waver as he raised it and pointed it at Cait’s forehead.
“And I’ve five lead slugs in here even faster than that, ladies. This is the Paterson Colt revolving pistol. It’ll make a hole about the size a navy bean going in, but it’ll blow one the size of my fist coming out.”
Cait and Lucy exchanged a look.
“Then I think we’ll accept your kind invitation,” said Cait.
“Good,” said the man, stepping back and making room for them to enter.
“That’ll be quieter, and whole lot less messy than the other way.”
CHAPTER 8
THE LUSTS OF ABCHURCH TEMPLEBANE
Issachar Templebane had wreaked his revenge on The Oversight. On the one hand, it had been everything he hoped, in that he had destroyed their house beyond any chance of repair, but on the other hand it had also become the very thing he feared, in that some members had not only survived but had also probably identified him as the hidden hand that moved against them.
The reaction and retaliation had been shockingly immediate, for no sooner had the explosions taken place than he and his son Coram had come under retaliatory attack by, of all anomalous and hatefully unexpected things, a fusillade of crossbow bolts which had done for his erstwhile favourite son and nearly brought his own life to an abrupt and final full stop.
He had consequently and precipitously taken flight from London, closed up his counting-house and bunkered down at what was his family’s ancient and ancestral bolthole in the country, far from the city. He was reasonably sure that The Oversight would not know of it, and even if they did, he was prepared. His sons, on the other hand, were not so sanguine about the enforced bucolic retreat.
Abchurch Templebane, for example, cursed with over-protuberant eyes and an almost complete absence of chin, did not like the enforced exile from London that had followed the destruction of The Oversight’s premises on Wellclose Square. He didn’t like the countryside one bit and wholeheartedly mistrusted the smells, the wildlife, the absence of crowds, the fresh air, the open spaces, the oppressive greenery by day and the even more intolerable silence at night. He abhorred every single thing about it that was not London, bar three: of the three things he did like, the first was that the pain of the exile he was forced to endure was mitigated by the fact that the closest rival he had for supremacy among the other sons of Issachar Templebane had been removed by a crossbow bolt.
He assumed Coram was dead as mutton, since the betrousered hellion who had shot him and then had near as damn shot Issachar through the back wall of the retreating coach would undoubtedly have got him. Poor old Coram, knee blown to splinters, wouldn’t have had a dog’s chance. It was a notion that made him grin every time he thought about his rival brother, writhing on the ground, screaming at him for help as the coach separated them.
The second thing he liked about the country was the heavy horse pistol that Issachar had given him. He had never carried a gun in the city, they being noisy, cumbersome things and much less handy than a blade, such as the well-honed jack-knife that bumped along with him in his coat pocket wherever he went, or the leather sap, loaded with heavy lead shot, which he kept stuffed in his back trouser pocket, a thing he had carefully sewn himself. The gun, however, made a wonderfully loud noise, and the sense of power as it kicked in his hand was almost sexual. Issachar, ever parsimonious with anything that required the dispersal of cash money, was surprisingly liberal in his approach to powder and shot.
“Take the gun and practise, boy,” he’d said as he handed it over. “Practise like the very devil, for devils indeed may be after me before things get back to normal, and you’d as well be able to knock ’em down before they get their hooks in us!”
So, much time was spent in the old orchard adjoining the even older house as Abchurch took it upon himself to drill the other brothers in the use of their own guns. He took pride in the fact that of them all, his was the biggest and the loudest, and though it might not have had the longer range of some of the others’ weapons, there was no doubt that at close quarters the horse pistol had no rival in the damage it could inflict.
“Ain’t a horse pistol,” Abchurch would crow. “’S’a bloody elephant gun, cos I reckon I could kill one of the big grey bastards with one shot of this beauty.”
And while they had great larks in the orchard, noisily obliterating flowerpots and bottles and anything they could think of as they competed for inanimate things to smash and perforate, he had a great and growing hunger to see what a full load of buckshot would do to flesh and bone. He had several attempts at birds in flight, which he merely succeeded in frightening, and one carefully aimed shot at an unwise rabbit that overshot the creature’s long ears and blew an ugly hole in what had previously been a well-kept bit of lawn. It was a secret source of great irritation to him that the next youngest brother to him, Garlickhythe, was every bit the natural sharpshooter that Abchurch was not. He was very jealous of Garlickhythe’s skill, but was cunning enough in the ways of inter-fraternal politics never to show a bit of it to anyone else.
The third thing he liked about the countryside was the maid who came and cleaned the kitchen, daughter of the normal caretakers. She was called Dorcas, and was not a bit as timid as the gazelle for which she had been named. She seemed in fact to be “froward and accommodating” according to the other brothers, who either did not understand the meaning of the first word or missed their grasp on the one they had been reaching for, since otherwise they were—as Issachar had pointed out when overhearing their gossip—branding her a positive oxymoron. The brothers had later debated as to what the father had meant and decided it must be that she was bovinely stupid. In fact, she was neither; just direct and unfussed by the sudden arrival of all the young men who had attended Issachar’s appearance in the house. Since they did not sound or act like high-born gentlemen, she had decided to treat them with less deference than she might have had they spoken and acted better.
Abchurch had decided that, as notional principal among his companions, he should be the first to allow her to accommodate him, and had decided the best way to do this was to invite her to watch him fire his gun in the orchard. This treat was planned for the golden hour before dusk, and Abchurch had instructed his brethren to “hang the fuck off and leave me alone with the doxy” in order that he might have neither competition when displaying his marksmanship, nor witnesses
should the young lady be as accommodating as he fondly imagined she might be.
His brothers had nodded and understood and been very biddable, which he took to be a sign of their acceptance of his position as primus inter pares. Ill-favoured he might have been, but Abchurch was vain enough to imagine what was evident to him was also obvious to others. Unfortunately, what was obvious to the others was only that he thought himself first among equals, and had, as a result “been coming it some.” In the competitive self-levelling fraternal ecology that Issachar and the late-lamented Zebulon had set up, “coming it some” was a condition that inevitably led to “being cut down to size.” And so when Abchurch stepped out into the glory of golden hour in the orchard, with the setting sun gilding the now bare branches of the fruit trees and sending long shadows across the soft grass, he was unaware that the young lady he was so proudly escorting was about to be treated to a succession of humiliating misfires, since his brethren had disobligingly doctored his ammunition.
This fact and the culprits behind it were revealed as a line of heads popped up over the orchard hedge after the sixth or seventh failure of his weapon, and a series of ribald voices rang mortifyingly across the evening stillness.
“What cheer, Abby? You shooting blanks, or you just going off half-cocked?”
“Half-cocked! That’s the ticket!”
“Half cock? He wishes! Ain’t even that—I seen it! Three-quarter of an inch shorter and you’d be calling him Fanny!”
The last voice was, to make things worse, clearly the voice of the hated marksman Garlickhythe. The laughter that followed his final sally was infectious, and Dorcas could not help but giggle.
The next thing she knew she was seeing stars and had tumbled back into the chilly waters of the thin rill which flowed through the meadow, roughly dividing it in half. She tried to get up but found Abchurch standing over her. He reached down and ripped the front of her bodice open, and then stepped back.
Dorcas was no coward. She let her dress gape open and laughed at him.
“Fill your eyes, you foul-breathed, chinless get! See what you’ll never have. Because if you lay one hand on me, I’ve five brothers that will find you and bloody geld you with a blunt sickle.”
He snarled and pointed the pistol at her.
“I’ll give you something to laugh at, you cu—”
“ABCHURCH!”
His face jerked up to see Issachar storming over the grass towards him.
The line of heads along the hedge miraculously dropped out of sight and disappeared.
“Help her out of the stream, apologise profusely—profusely, I say—and then come find me,” said the Day Father, turning on his heel. “I’ve an errand to be run back in London, and you just identified yourself as the lucky runner.”
CHAPTER 9
AN UNEXPECTED DIVERSION
The man who called himself the Proctor led them straight through the house to the kitchen at the back. Lucy had the impression of a clean, well-ordered set of rooms with polished floors and plain wood furnishings, and then they pushed through a door to find Prudence Tittensor sitting waiting beside an iron range that for a moment reminded her of the much bigger one that was Cook’s pride and joy back in London, far away on the other side of the ocean. And then she focused on the waiting woman, and not one but two dogs sitting beside her, and all thoughts of cosy familiarity fled from her head.
The two remarkable things about the captain’s wife were firstly that she was dressed for the road in a bombazine cloak which made her look like a squat crow that had just perched by the fire, and the second was that she held two pairs of manacles in her hands.
Cait stood staring at her.
“I’ll not be wearing those, thank you very much,” she said with an air of calm finality.
Mrs. Tittensor looked at the man in the doorway behind them.
“You’ll do what the Proctor tells you to do.”
Cait sniffed and looked at the woman as the dog Shay padded in between Lucy and herself. The two other dogs, who looked younger, sat up and watched alertly.
“Should have bought more sausages,” said Cait.
The two sitting dogs growled, low and threatening.
“Digger, Robber. Be still,” said Mrs. Tittensor.
The larger dog lowered itself onto its haunches. Lucy watched it sit and gaze at them both, its liquid brown eyes strangely impassive.
“You sent that dog for this Proctor creature,” said Cait. “At the harbour.”
“What I did or do is no matter of yours,” said Mrs. Tittensor.
“No, no, missus, you’d be about as wrong as you could be there. What you’ve done is precisely my business,” said Cait, turning her head to look at Lucy. “You get what she is, right?”
“They’re both …” began Lucy.
“Exactly,” said Cait. “She’s some kind of animal shifter, like Hodge.”
“And you’re fiagaí,” spat Mrs. Tittensor. “Venatrix or some such, here without let or licence.”
“I need no licence,” said Cait. “I cut my own way.”
“That may be how things are in the old country,” said Mrs. Tittensor. “You’ll find it isn’t how we do things here.”
“Ah,” said Cait, as if something was beginning to make sense, though Lucy had no clue as to what that might be. “And how pray do you do things here in this fine new country you have?”
“We like things regular,” said the Proctor. “That is to say, regulated.”
“And here was I believing all the brave talk back home about this being the land of liberty,” said Cait.
“Plenty of liberty to go round here,” said the Proctor. “Regulating things is how we keep it so.”
“Well, you’ll pardon the freedom of my language, but it sounds to me like you’re talking out of both sides of your arse,” said Cait.
“Just put your wrists out, ladies,” sighed the Proctor. “Time enough for talking once we get there.”
“Oh, and where’s that?” said Cait, keeping her arms at her sides.
“Out to Marblehead way,” said the Proctor. “The Guardian’s going to want to see you.”
Cait turned to look at him without flinching at the blued steel still pointing unwaveringly at her face.
“Do you mean us harm?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Which is to say, not yet, perhaps. But that would be contingent.”
“On our behaviour?” she said.
“That and what the Guardian makes of you,” he replied.
Cait closed her eyes as if doing a complicated calculation in her head, then she opened them and nodded decisively.
“Right. Here’s the thing of it: I’ll come with you, give you my parole for the journey, be meek as a lamb. But I’ll not wear shackles. Try and make me, we’ll find out if you’re really faster than I am. Likely you may be, but I’d rather try it than wear any man’s iron, and there’s the end of it.”
He looked at them both.
“They’re dangerous,” said Mrs. Tittensor, voice shrill with barely repressed tension. “You should do your job. You should—”
The Proctor’s face ticked slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Lucy caught it and read the suppressed moment of irritation. This was a man who did not like to be told what to do. He took a deep breath and then clearly bit back what he was about to say, instead letting out a long hiss of air.
“Your blades,” he said, nodding at Cait. “Shuck ’em and any weapons the Glint there’s carrying on the table now. Do that and I’ll take your parole for good behaviour until we get to the Mansion.”
Cait tossed a couple of razors on the table and reached under her dress for the thin knife she wore in a boot sheath.
“Hear that, Lucy-girl? He knows you’re a Glint and we’re going to a Mansion, no less.”
The Proctor tilted his head at Lucy.
“Your word stand for her?”
“It does,” said Cait. “Isn’t that right, Lucy Harker?”
Lucy saw the warning look in Cait’s eyes, swallowed what she wanted to say and nodded.
“She armed?” he said.
“I never thought it polite to ask,” said Cait. “But the world being what it is, she’d be a fool as a woman if she wasn’t.”
Lucy reached under her jacket and slid out the slender dagger she wore in a horizontal sheath sewn into the waistband of her dress.
She put it next to Cait’s weapons.
The eyes on either side of the heroically broken nose looked into hers, without blinking.
“More’n one way to be a fool,” he said.
Lucy sighed and reached into the wrist of her gloves. She had begun carrying a small cutthroat razor there in direct imitation of Cait’s habit, and found her face colouring at having to expose what now seemed a callow and revealing instance of hero worship.
She was surprised to see Cait grin in approval.
“Nice to see you’re learning something at least,” she said. “Nine times out of ten razors get the job done better than a knife. Hope for you yet.”
There was a carriage waiting at the back of the house, with two matched bays which looked more like hunters than draught horses, and a coachman who was too muffled against the evening chill to register as anything more than a hunched shape in the gloom.
He seemed entirely unsurprised to see two women led out at gunpoint and ushered into the carriage. Mrs. Tittensor and the dog Shay followed, and by the time the door was closed the space inside was more than crammed. Cait and Lucy sat beside each other, and the Proctor and the captain’s wife sat facing them, with the dog sitting at attention on the floor between them, her eyes locked on the two parolees.
As soon as the door clicked shut, the carriage lurched into movement. There was a certain amount of rocking and pitching as the driver negotiated the close-built streets of the neighbourhood, but in five minutes they had descended to the coast road and the horses opened out into a brisk trot that made the going smoother.
Through all this, Lucy noted the Proctor’s gun and the dog’s eyes had remained steadily unmoving, aimed directly at them as if mounted on gimbals.
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