Issachar produced a handkerchief and calmly wiped his neck.
“I would simply like to know if it was your Lordship who undertook the spectacularly ill-advised attempt to blow up the house on Wellclose Square belonging to The Oversight,” he said.
“Why the deuce would I blow it up, you cretin?” bellowed Mountfellon. “Blowing it up has deprived me of valuable items! Things that might help me in my present, intolerable position? I should have you thrashed and pitched back out into the high road for your damned insolence! I received note of this catastrophic fire from that wretched little magistrate you involved in your first woefully unsuccessful scheme, Bigwell or Bedwet …”
“Bidgood,” said Issachar calmly.
“I do not choose to know his exact name,” said Mountfellon. “He is a man clearly trying to curry favour with his betters by keeping me informed of a ‘property in which I had shown such a close interest.’ As if I should be pleased to hear of all those irreplaceable treasures gone up in smoke? And you know what, tradesman? I don’t see why you coming here now is a whit different from his damned presumption.”
“Then you would be a fool, Lord Mountfellon,” said Issachar. “And we both know you are not. So I repeat: do I have your word that it was not by your hand that the house of The Oversight was attacked?”
“Why the hell should I deign to give my word?” said Mountfellon, shaking the bone club in his face. “What the blazes is it to you?”
Issachar, a lifelong wheeler and dealer, knew that the old axiom to the effect that more was got by honey than vinegar was not an infallible truth. He was canny enough to know that on occasion—and this was one of them—only vinegar will turn the trick. And with this in mind, he ignored the bone cudgel and appeared to lose his own temper.
“What is it to me, my lord?” he hissed in a fine simulacrum of cold fury. “What is it to me and my whole enterprise to have been discovered to have attacked The Oversight? To have had to curtail my business and remove myself physically from London itself, as you have done?”
He shook his head, appearing to get himself under better control with great difficulty.
“It is a great deal, sir, and I will not leave, or say more about a certain opportunity, until you tell me if I am bearing the punishment consequent on your ill-advised activities!”
Mountfellon stared at him with the stunned inability to recalibrate the current interpersonal equation common to all bullies who are unexpectedly stood up to.
“It was none of my doing,” he said curtly, and then noticed the bait Templebane had dangled, doing so in order to move quickly on from a moment that was, to his noble self, uncomfortably close to a capitulation.
“What opportunity to remedy things?” he said.
Issachar stared at him. The fly was in the mouth of the fish. All that remained was to time the strike and embed the barbed hook.
“No, sir,” he said. “I see my presence is an irritant to you, and that we have clearly reached a point of mutual disharmony that would render the retrieval … well, that is to say, sir, that I do not think our interests any longer … coincide.”
He bowed slightly and turned.
Mountfellon grabbed his arm.
“Retrieval, sir?” he said. “Retrieval of what?”
Templebane’s face was smoothly impassive as he turned back to look at Mountfellon. It gave no hint that the fisherman within felt any satisfaction that the hook was now set.
“They salvaged enough of value from the fire to have had to sink it again as a means of hiding it from us,” he said.
Mountfellon’s face went very still.
“The devil you say!”
“The devil I do,” said Templebane. “And I know where. And all it will take this time is grappling hooks thrown from the shore and a long day or night to work in.”
Mountfellon’s face worked visibly, and he looked down at the bone cudgel in his hand. He straightened and held it discreetly behind his back.
“Mr. Templebane,” he said, his voice measured and soft. “Mr. Templebane, you will excuse my intemperance, I hope, but the nightwalking gentlemen have subjected me to the most heinous and destructive depredations, and that has undoubtedly put me on edge. If I have been overly defensive, I apologise. Their new freedom from any fear of iron has forced me as you see, to live protected by running water, and to shun going abroad at night.”
He took a pace back and indicated the stairs behind him with the bone club.
“Will you step upstairs to my salon and take some refreshment after your long journey while we discuss the import of your news?”
Templebane the fisherman relaxed inwardly. Now all that remained was for the fish to land itself. He waited a beat, for effect, and then visibly swallowed his justified affront and permitted himself a not ungracious smile.
“As your Lordship wishes,” he said, and followed him up the great staircase.
Nothing on his urbane exterior betrayed the fact that as he climbed he was inwardly repeating five words in a cockerel crow of celebration.
“Three birds with one stone! Three birds with one stone!”
He would perhaps have been in less of a celebratory mood, and Mountfellon less composed than he was endeavouring to be had they both been aware that the Herne was sitting in a dense thicket of blackthorn on the slope facing Gallstaine Hall, where he and his dogs had been lying up and watching for days now as the Herne waited for Mountfellon to cross the safe cordon of running water with which he had surrounded himself. The Herne was patient, but he was also a pragmatist. The prey was clearly too protected to be taken head-on. It might simply be that the fat man who had just arrived in the mud-spattered coach could be used as bait to lure that prey into the open. And there was something strangely familiar about him. He put his hand on the bones running down the spines of each of the dogs lying patiently at his side, and nodded at the dew-pond behind them.
“Drink, dogs,” he said, “for we may have a long run ahead of us this night.”
CHAPTER 28
PLANS AND DECISIONS
A sound two days and two nights’ sleep—and whatever Cook had put in Sara Falk’s drink—had undoubtedly done a miraculous power of good. Charlie and Ida were sitting at the table in The Folley’s kitchen having breakfast when the door swung open with a bang and she strode in like a small and barely controlled tornado. She was also barely dressed, bar her underclothes, a situation she paid no attention to, a feat Charlie was less successful in achieving. Until now, having only seen her very ill or dropping with exhaustion, he had thought of her as being the same age as his mother, more or less. Now her natural fire was re-kindled, he couldn’t help realising she was perhaps closer to his age than Rose Pyefinch, and this, her surprisingly well-muscled arm and the flash of leg beneath her petticoat made him inexplicably self-conscious.
“Good morning,” she said, neatly taking the newly buttered slab of bread which Charlie was holding halfway to his mouth. “May I?”
He watched her carry on towards the fire where, chewing happily, she poured herself a large cup of tea which she drained in alternating gulps as she devoured the bread. She looked up at the drying rack hanging from pulleys over the range from which hung her meticulously washed and ironed clothes, which Cook had put up to air the night before.
“Good bread,” she said. “I’m ravenous. Would you do me the kindness of buttering me another slice please, Charlie Pyefinch?”
She reached up and pulled her oiled silk dress from the airing rack. As she did so, her camisole and corset parted from the waistband of her petticoat, exposing a scandalous view of the finely curved small of her back.
Ida kicked Charlie under the table. He tore his eyes away from the naked flesh and saw she was raising a very knowing eyebrow at him.
“Er yes,” he said. “Um, of course.”
Sara dressed herself with speed and a complete lack of self-consciousness that Ida, herself a workmanlike dresser, wholly approved of. In fact, she th
ought that Sara looked as if she was buckling on armour or donning a uniform. Sara found her newly polished boots standing in front of the warming oven and put her foot on the chair as she bent to cinch the laces tight, exposing another glimpse of her legs which Charlie tried not to see.
“You polished my boots?” said Sara, catching his eye before he could shift it.
“Er,” he said.
“I mean Emmet normally does boots, so someone must have,” she said.
“It was Hodge,” he said, wondering why his voice felt so unaccountably thick in his throat.
“Must remember to thank him,” she said. “Now, that bread …”
He handed her a second slice which she proceeded to devour with just as much alacrity as its predecessor. Archie appeared from under the table and licked his hand. He ruffled the young dog’s fur with a gesture that was clearly so familiar now as to be automatic.
“You seem rested,” said Ida.
“I’m angry,” said Sara, and Charlie thought he’d never seen such a dangerous smile as the one that flashed across her face. “Gives you a lot of energy, being this angry. I intend to use it. Where are the others?”
“Sharp went to where his, er, friend is,” said Ida. “The golem.”
“Emmet,” said Charlie. “He saw him yesterday too. While you were sleeping off Cook’s draught. He’s going to come back with Hodge, he said. Cook said you’d be up this morning.”
“I suppose Emmet is his friend,” said Sara, taking the third piece of bread and butter. “Never thought about it like that. Emmet’s just Emmet. Well, we’ve no time for visiting. Be so kind as to go and hurry them back. We have things to do—”
“Not before you’ve had eggs and a nice piece of beef steak,” said Cook, bustling in from the yard where The Smith, among other things, kept his chickens. She was carrying fresh eggs in a bowl which she brandished at Sara.
“I don’t need eggs and steak,” said Sara. “I need new weapons and the others brought here now. Please go and fetch them, Charlie.”
“There’s blades in The Smith’s cabinet, back of the forge, you know that, and you may as well eat because it’ll take some time for Charlie and Ida to go and hurry the others along,” said Cook. She looked at Charlie and Ida and jerked her head in the smallest but most freighted of gestures.
They took the hint and evaporated out of the door.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Ida dug a sharp elbow into Charlie’s ribs.
“Ouch,” he said. “What?”
“You,” she said. “Blushing like a choirboy because a lady walks past in her undermentionables.”
“I wasn’t—” he began, but she just grinned and set off at a jog, efficiently re-tying one of her pigtails as she ran. She had a quality when in motion that he had begun to notice and admire, which was a kind of efficient physical dexterousness, a bodily grace which made it hard not to watch her, and in watching he forgot all thoughts of Sara Falk.
Sara had gone into the smithy and had unlocked the cabinet behind the Holtzapffel Rose Engine with the key Cook had given her.
The cabinet was of age-darkened oak, and quite some age at that, given the fact that the wood, once a pleasing yellow was now black as a freshly japanned deed-box. Inside there were drawers protected by further locks, but the inner face of the doors were each fitted with racks of knives of different shapes and sizes in a startling variety of designs. The effect, with the doors swung wide, was of a triptych, and she stood in front of it for a long moment quite as still as any devotee in a church. But she was not making a prayer. She was making a choice, and once it was made she moved briskly, taking three knives, a long thin misericorde, an ivory-handled seaman’s dirk and a brutal-looking push dagger with a T-shaped handle and a short stub-like blade.
She returned to the kitchen and proceeded to strap the weapons to herself beneath her skirt and jacket as she watched Cook making her breakfast with equal briskness.
“Why did you want them both to go?” she said, nodding towards the door Ida and Charlie had left by.
“Because you and I need a chat, and it’s best not to discourage the young ones,” said Cook, turning and sliding a plate onto the table in front of Sara. “Now you stop talking and eat.”
“What’s in it?” said Sara.
“Eggs, beef steak and a slight seasoning of don’t-ask-questions,” said Cook, her eyes flicking to the well-worn box of Chinese medicines which she evidently had salvaged from the ruin of the Safe House. “It’ll do you good.”
“If it was in the drink you gave me before I slept, it’s already done me good,” said Sara, “but I know your powders. They do you good, but take too much of them and you have to pay on the other side of the coin sooner or later.”
“This is later, Sara,” said Cook, sitting in front of her. “Right now, right here is later. It’s nigh on as ‘later’ as later can get by my reckoning. That’s why you may as well take all the help the powders can give you, because the devil knows we need it, and there’s plenty of time to—”
She stopped herself, and then found one of the giant spotted handkerchiefs that had been jammed up her sleeve and proceeded to blow her nose. Sara, who had been raised by this sturdy block of a woman knew she only blew her nose if she had a genuine cold or she was hiding some treacherous emotion behind the theatrically loud nasal honking she was muffling in the billowing red cotton which hid her face.
“—plenty of time to rest when we’re dead?” said Sara. “That bad?”
“So bad you can’t hardly smell good, let alone see it from where we are,” said Cook. “Now eat your breakfast.”
Sara sat and cut into the strip steak. It was, she noted, nice and bloody. She couldn’t help but feel that was going to be appropriate for what lay ahead.
“Go on,” she said, round a mouthful of meat and egg yolk. “Talk.”
Cook settled forward into the chair opposite which gave an alarming creak of protest as she leaned in across the table.
“Smith’s gone north on some of his ancient business, and what with one thing and another he should have been back long ago. Either things are worse than he feared, or something’s gone awry. Now we were lucky that young Trousers agreed to stay with us, because that gave us the numbers for a Hand when Lucy Harker took off with the Irish girl. Now Smith’s gone absent, well, it’s a good job you and Sharp came back when you did, because Hodge and I have been talking about how the sum don’t add up to five if Smith stays gone.”
“You think The Smith can die?” said Sara. “Really?”
“Don’t know,” said Cook. “But I do know he can stay gone for a long, long time. At least, that’s something I heard a long, long while ago, in passing, from one of the ones that went missing in the Disaster. And I was too young or busy to ask her what she meant. Suppose I thought there’d be time enough to find out later on. Except there wasn’t, of course …”
“You never asked him?”
“Seemed rude,” said Cook. “It’s not something that comes up in normal conversation, is it?”
“We’re The Oversight,” said Sara. “We’re expected to have abnormal conversations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Means I’m wondering if we’ve been stupid. If we’ve been so busy clinging on to the idea of surviving, no matter how few we are that we … I don’t know. But I do wonder if we’ve got lost somehow.”
“I’m lost most of the time,” said Cook. “Life isn’t a map you can navigate. It’s a journey. You make your trail by walking it. We’ve done the best we could with what we came across …”
“And with what’s come across us,” said Sara. “We’re not just stumbling on bad things. Bad things are moving against us. Now we know The Citizen is the one moving against us, for I saw him in the catacombs in Paris when I glinted the past. There is no guarantee he is dead, and indeed the gory ritual with the darkness that I saw seemed designed to ensure that he exceeded a natural span. So we must assume he has been m
oving against us for a generation and we’ve been so busy clinging on by our fingertips, trying to preserve the Last Hand that we forgot to go find him and destroy him.”
“We didn’t know it was him—”
Sara smacked her hand down on the table and smacked it so hard the plates jumped.
“We should have known!” she said. “We were weak!”
“We were surviving,” said Cook.
“No,” said Sara. “You and Hodge and Smith stayed when others who survived the Disaster left us, others like Charlie Pyefinch’s parents. And we thought they had betrayed us, but now I think they were just realists. I think they saw what we … what you were doing was wrong, that The Oversight was too weak to protect anyone. And that because it gave the illusion of protection, it was actually worse than no protection at all. They saw the way to survive was to spread out and live as normally as they could. Because protection that is illusory is as dangerous as a pasteboard shield.”
“We maintained the Last Hand,” said Cook, “because we had to.”
“But history tells us we don’t have to,” said Sara. “We know The Oversight has failed and dispersed in the past! Smith has told us. It disbands and scatters until there are enough strong new members found to gather new Hands. That is what The Smith does. That is why it endures.”
“What are you saying?” said Cook. “That we shouldn’t have tried?”
“You stayed together, the three of you, because I was a child and so was Sharp. You stayed as parents to me who had lost mine and him who never had them. If you had not had the care and raising of us, I think you would have dispersed.”
“You had to be raised somewhere,” grunted Cook. “Made sense to do it in your own home.”
“No,” said Sara. “It only made sense in terms of kindness, for which you have my life’s gratitude. In terms of our duty, it was folly or pride, or both. And The Smith, if no one else, should have known better. It made us sitting ducks for our enemies. We should have dispersed to rise again.”
“When we disperse, things happen that we’re sworn to stop,” said Cook.
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