So Charlie and Sharp set off and walked back west into the city, avoiding the deeper puddles and the overflowed drains with the young dog Archie ranging around them like an inquisitive scout, alertly sampling interesting smells and sights, but always looping back to check on them as he kept up his mobile patrol. The Sluagh were not visible at the bridge over the Gut, but the sun was high and the shadows they had been standing in were now gone.
“They’re still watching,” said Sharp, his hand inside his coat, close to the grip of his new knife.
“I know,” said Charlie. “Feel it like an itch on the back of my neck, but I’ll be damned if I can see where they are half the time.”
Sharp smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.
“I have the self-same itch when being watched. I think we have a lot in common, young Charlie Pyefinch. Now tell me news of your parents. I haven’t seen Rose and Barnaby in an age. Is he still telling tall tales?”
“Oh yes,” said Charlie. “And making a good living at it at the fairs: you should hear him on the Battle of Waterloo—makes your hair stand on end and feel like you were there …”
And as they stretched their legs and kept a fast pace which each found easy to maintain, they talked, and by the time they reached the eastern edge of the Tower, Charlie found he had decided Mr. Sharp wasn’t so forbidding and dry as he had thought, and Sharp had confirmed his opinion that his new young companion was definitely made of the right stuff and could see why Hodge had taken him on and honoured him with what was clearly, to anyone with half an eye, one of Jed’s pups.
“Just down there,” said Charlie, pointing over the line of pilings which ran up Irongate Steps, a steep-sided narrow cut leading down to the river with a treacherous-looking series of steps dropping down to the water. The tide was low and a small strand of mud and pebbles was exposed at the end as the river flowed greasily past beyond it.
“There’s a couple of old mooring chains just round the corner,” said Charlie, leaning out and pointing. “Out of sight from up here, anyway, the oldest one with all the green weed on it’s the one you’ll be wanting. You all right if I cut away and see Hodge now, Mr. Sharp?”
Sharp nodded, his eyes on the river, as if imagining what lay beneath the weight of water flowing inexorably past on its way to Gravesend and the cold North Sea beyond.
“My compliments to him, Charlie, and tell him I congratulate him on his choice of apprentice. I think the ravens will be in good hands for another generation.”
He looked casually around to make sure nobody was close or interested enough to notice him, and then he slipped rapidly through the pilings and negotiated the slimy steps down to the river’s edge.
Moments later, he emerged from the cut and turned right towards the forbidding mouth of the Tower’s river gate, further down the bank, pebbles graunching against each other in the sandy mud beneath his boots. He found the weed-choked mooring chain Charlie had described, a massive, ancient thing he could well believe had been fixed to the embankment a hundred or more years past, and he drew his knife and tapped it against the metal, a series of raps and pauses that were the repeated secret knock by which he had formerly identified himself to the golem when he had used to return to the Safe House late at night, when Emmet’s duties had merely been to act as gatekeeper and guard the door.
The signal was transmitted down the intervening links and on downwards beneath the water, following the chain all the way to the riverbed to where a large clay hand was patiently gripped around it. The tell-tale knock vibrated through the hand, whose owner, previously sitting immobile as a rock against one of The Smith’s lead caskets partly submerged in the ooze at the bottom of the river, cocked his head and looked blindly up through the great weight of water.
Sharp sat on a discarded beam of wood which had at one stage probably been part of the jury-rigged buttressing holding back the walls of the cut before falling off. He watched the Thames pass by, and he waited.
Emmet hauled himself doggedly up the chain like a mountaineer in a gale, using it to brace himself against the pressure of dark water trying to sweep him away.
Sharp stood as the great clay head broke the surface; the golem simply walked out of the river and came and stood in front of him, the familiar hollow eyes looking down at him from either side of the heroically hooked nose. It was one of the peculiarities of the golem’s construction that although he was a hollow clay statue, made in a perfect facsimile of a man in every respect, he had no eyes, so that the void within him was always apparent. But the unsettling lack was strangely offset by the fact that he still blinked as if he did have eyes. It was one of the things that Sharp felt made him much more than the automaton the others saw him as. In fact, he almost was sure that when he had been a young boy, Emmet had not blinked, but had begun to do so at some time in the intervening years, as if mimicking human behaviour: he again felt that this was evidence that the golem was much more sentient and capable of independent thought than was generally believed.
“Emmet,” said Sharp. “I am so very pleased to see you.”
Emmet stood and blinked at him. Sharp put out his hand. Emmet, after a pause, did the same, and the great clay hand folded gently but firmly around Sharp’s, and they shook.
“Let us …” began Sharp. “Let us sit here a while. In the sun.”
He squatted back down on the beam of wood. Emmet looked at him. And then he reached inside the dripping greatcoat in which he was clad and removed something which he carefully pulled onto his head, before lowering himself to sit beside Sharp, also facing the river.
“Ah,” said Sharp. “You have a new hat.”
Prior to the fire that had consumed it, Emmet had worn a tricorne hat, the relic of a bygone era. He now sported what had once been a coachman’s hat, but prolonged immersion and storage within his coat had reduced it to a battered and lopsided ruin. Sharp was pleased that one of the others had gone to the trouble of finding it for the golem. He reached out.
“May I?”
He took the ruined hat and did what he could to straighten and re-block it into a more respectable shape, and then handed it back.
“Here.”
Emmet looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. Then he placed it carefully back on his head and blinked at Sharp.
“I’m sorry you have to be beneath the water,” said Sharp.
Emmet shrugged, or at least Sharp was sure he made the ghost of a shrug.
“We could just sit and enjoy the light,” he said, pulling his coat tighter around him at the chill of the day.
Emmet blinked at him. Then he very slowly turned his face to the pale wintry sun and they sat together in companionable silence for a long time, as the river ground its relentless way past them. What Emmet thought of, if he thought, remained a secret: Sharp thought of duty and failure and the threats hanging over all their heads. He thought of Emmet’s long confinement under the river and how he had no real idea how to shorten the golem’s entombment, and then he turned from contemplation of the water and found he was looking at the ominous, barred river gate to the Tower, the one used to bring in those who were to be imprisoned for failing most wretchedly, those guilty of betrayal, and he thought how bitterly appropriate it was that they had sunk the Wildfire opposite Traitor’s Gate.
He was still under a cloud of self-recrimination when he climbed back up the greasy river steps, having watched Emmet walk uncomplainingly back down the chain to take up his blind guard post at the bottom of the Thames.
If he had been less self-absorbed, he would probably have noticed the clearly rentable lady who spotted him as he slipped back through the pilings and onto the street.
“Why, Mr. Sharp! What cheer? Ain’t seen you up Neptune Street nor round the square since your ’orrible fire. What you been doing down there? You given it all up and turned mudlark, ’ave you?”
He looked up and saw a smiling face with a little too much powder on it.
“Hello, Ruby,” he said.
“You are well, I trust?”
“Mustn’t grumble,” said Ruby. “But you look hipped and cold as a brass monkey’s you-know-whats. I could warm you up a bit if you like?”
“Thank you, Ruby,” he said, this being a familiar offer, as was his customary demurral. “You are very kind, but no thank you.”
“Oh, I’m not just very kind, Mr. S,” she said, winking. “I’m very good value. Ask anyone.”
He smiled and bowed and walked on. And Ruby watched him until he turned the corner, and then her smile dropped and her brow crinkled as she tried to remember who it was that had offered cash money for any news of a sighting of Mr. Sharp or his companions. And then it cleared as she remembered, and she turned towards the pub where the man in question was usually to be found.
And ten minutes later she had coins in her hand, and the news of Sharp’s return and the riverbank spot where he had been loitering was filtering through the complex and informal intelligence network of informers, scouts and tale-bearers so carefully nurtured by the Templebanes over the long years, and by which Issachar, even in exile, kept his eye on the city.
CHAPTER 23
THE DEATH OF HOPE
The blood-spattered memory of what he had done to Abchurch rode Amos so hard that he vomited three times on his dogged walk to Wellclose Square, though the third time was really just a painful dry retching into the edge of a giant pool of water caused by a blocked culvert outside the Garrick Subscription Theatre in Leman Street. Beneath a playbill advertising a revival of When Claudia Stoops!, he jack-knifed appropriately over the already filthy water and added a thin stream of stomach bile to the effluence below, his gut now being empty of anything remotely solid. Then he unthinkingly wiped his mouth with his sleeve, straightened and continued towards Wellclose Square.
The half-drowned city was putting itself back together after the unwonted assault of the thunderstorm, shopkeepers sweeping puddles from the pavement into the brimming gutters and backed-up drains that gurgled and roared as they overwhelmed the sewers and hidden streams beneath the streets. Amos, normally sharp and aware of his surroundings to an unnatural degree, barely noticed the torrents flowing along with him as he too headed downhill towards the river. He was still blank-eyed with shock, but he was driven onwards like a sleepwalker, his limbs powered by the conviction that only The Oversight could save him now: he hoped they would welcome him for the things he could tell them of his father’s machinations, but he was aware that he in fact had little to say other than that he and his brothers were deputed to watch the Safe House on a continual rota, and that he believed his journey to Mountfellon was in some way connected with a plan of which he had known almost nothing. He was painfully aware that this was not a very strong introduction, and so was not going to lead with it, rather intending to tell them of the Sluagh and what he had witnessed and heard about them: this being a subject he did know a lot about. He had listened to the Ghost speak of The Oversight and their concerns, and based his hopes on her assertion that they were bound to help protect normal people from the depredations of the supranatural. Well, he thought, he might not be entirely normal, but he had certainly been most viciously depredated upon. Even as he finally stumbled into the top of Wellclose Square and, saw the familiar outline of the Danish church in the centre of it and the gold-pillared doorway of Wilton’s Music Hall beyond, he could feel the itch of the white tattoo around his neck as strongly as if he was still under its geas, which was the word that Badger Skull had used, meaning curse of obligation. He raised his hand to scratch it, his mind almost dizzy with the relief of having made it to the very door of The Oversight’s Safe House without further trauma, and then he stopped moving, fingers stalled a bare inch from his neck, the fiery itch of the departed tattoo forgotten.
The very door he had thought he had reached was not there. Neither was the wall it had stood in, nor the house to which it had given entrance; the plot where it had stood both in life and in his mind was a flattened rubble pile. The empty lot was like a tooth which had been abruptly snapped out of a known smile—wrong, painful and fundamentally unbelievable.
“What?” said the Ghost as she caught up with him. “Oh …”
And she saw it too. Amos felt he might break if she laughed. As she would laugh. As she always laughed at his setbacks and surprises. But she didn’t: she stepped past him and also seemed dumbstruck by the enormity of the absence.
He looked around to his left, registering the pull of another void, something he must have seen with the edge of his eye, because he hadn’t been looking at it, and there was another ruin where the Sugar Factory had been, although it was being actively rebuilt behind a new palisade of scaffolding. He had sat on the bench outside the building on many a cold night, smelling the seductive warm smell of caramelised sugar wafting from within. The bench was gone too.
What happened?
She shook her head slowly.
I don’t know. But it was very final, I’d say.
The absence of any of the expected exultation in her voice made it much worse. The lacuna at the bottom of the square had not just taken his hope away, it had somehow removed her cheery malice. She hadn’t looked at the factory. She was staring at the hole in the square’s southern rampart as if trying to recreate what had stood there in her mind. But it would only ever exist in memory now, because where there had been a regular, foursquare façade and a solid, fortress-like building behind it was now an area of raked-over wreckage. Burned remnants of joists and floorboards had been thrown in a pile on the bottom, riverward boundary, like a giant’s game of spillikins and someone had made a half-hearted attempt to salvage bricks by making a pile of them against the shared wall of the adjacent house. It looked like they’d just given up, for the stack was itself half tumbled down.
It was desolate, final and—for Amos—the complete death of hope. He felt it physically: he suddenly desperately needed to piss; his mouth was dry and tasted of stomach bile; and his leg began to shake uncontrollably. He stamped his foot to stop it, and stared around for something familiar to focus on.
And there he was—walking towards them, a bundle of important-looking papers under one arm, nose in the air as if sampling the new smells released by the rain-washed city and finding them rather splendid: the diminutive and visibly self-important figure of Magistrate Bidgood, one of the several local worthies whose comings and goings Amos and his brothers were tasked to keep an eye out for.
Amos nudged the Ghost and pointed at the approaching Bidgood with an infinitesimal lift of his chin.
This man. Ask him where they’ve gone.
You want me to speak to him?
I can’t.
I haven’t spoken out loud to anyone except you in years. Maybe decades. I lost count.
Please.
They’ve gone. You can see that.
Bidgood was only a couple of yards away now.
Please. Ask. I must know.
A pretty please?
A trace of her cheery malice resurfaced in the word “pretty.”
What do you mean?
I mean deeds not words, Bloody Boy. What will you do for me if I ask?
Just please ask him. He’s a magistrate. He’ll know what happened. This is his parish …
The diminutive officer of the law sailed past without seeming to notice them. He was in fact looking at the sky and congratulating himself on both having missed the deluge and having had the forethought to direct his cook to make him a steak and oyster pie for his supper, to which he was now returning. He was very much in a humour for a steak and oyster pie. Amos nudged the Ghost more urgently. She looked at him with a calm, questioning eye that he found inexpressibly provoking, given the urgency of the situation.
And … ?
Amos jiggled from one foot to the other, pointing at the magistrate’s back with exasperation.
And I, if they are truly gone … I’ll come with you. To find Mountfellon!
And you will use your new skill, you
r wonderful speed?
Yes! No. No. Not to kill him.
The thought was suddenly awful in him that she might, given his sudden rudderless state be able to manipulate him to do the thing he had forsworn. The thing he kept doing, no matter how endlessly he seemed to be foreswearing it.
She cocked her head on one side, considering his proviso. He was sure he would burst with frustration, and Bidgood was nearly at the corner … and then she nodded.
What’s his name, the strutting little man?
Bidgood. Lemuel Bidgood.
She strode after him, her voice like cut crystal, clear and commanding.
“Magistrate Bidgood, excuse me, sir, if you please.”
Bidgood turned, conscious of the quality of the voice hailing him, a patient smile forming on his lips as he did so, a smile ready at any moment to grow into something even wider and more ingratiating. Amos could hear the thought in the magistrate’s head: he was initially surprised and excited by the voice; he was sure he was being approached by some fine lady, a personage of evident culture, wealth and distinction. As his eyes discovered the waiting figure of the Ghost standing there, wrapped in a pair of blankets draped over a distinctly well-worn dress, with matted grey hair that had clearly been a stranger to any brush for a considerable passage of time, Amos felt Bidgood’s mind falter and panic as he attempted to readjust his demeanour appropriately: he had thought to see a great lady, and now he feared he was going to be “touched” for a few coppers by a beggarwoman.
“Er—” he squeaked.
The Ghost could obviously hear the same confusion within the magistrate’s mind because she smiled and held up a hand that was, in the circumstances, oddly gracious and commanding.
“No, sir, by your leave, I want nothing from you but some local information. Would you be so kind as to tell me what happened to the fine house and the occupants which were once situated in that derelict lot over there at the bottom of the square?”
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