The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  Ketch, on his part, was not playing any game he was aware of. He had not had an alcoholic drink since Sharp had raised the bloodstone ring to his forehead and worked his punishment on him. His brain, rendered “wet” by the previous three decades of almost constant inebriation, worked slowly but it worked true. He was not—freed from the curse of the gin that had ruined his life—a bad man. And because the drinking life had taken place in a cloud of forgetfulness in which even those memories that did remain were distanced and blurred, he was not haunted by his past. Sharp had enjoined him to find happiness helping others, and this he did. He had been rendered temporarily mute by Sharp as a further punishment for sticking Lucy Harker’s mouth shut with a plaster made from tar and sacking, but now the period of enforced silence had passed, he was as amiably garrulous as he was helpful.

  “Mr. ’Odge,” he said, opening the wicket gate to let Hodge and his companion into the courtyard of the hospital. “Werry nice to see you and Mr, er, I’m sorry, sir, I seem to know you but have forgot your—”

  “Sharp,” said Mr. Sharp. “I believe we met during your earlier career as an inebriate.”

  Ketch took no offence at Sharp’s referring to his past; indeed as he looked into Sharp’s eyes and was struck by how many warm shades of brown seemed to tumble in them like the golden leaves of autumn, and he remembered how very, very much he liked this gentleman.

  “Mr. Sharp,” he said. “Yes, indeed, my memory’s leaky as a sieve, but I have the sense you done me a kindness, so I thank you for it. ’Ave you come to see our peg-leg pal then?”

  He addressed the last part of this to Hodge, who nodded.

  There was an understanding, though nobody could quite remember who had authorised it, that when Mr. Hodge or his associates wished to speak to Coram, a private room would be made available to them. In this case, it was a clean storeroom with a high window lined with racks neatly stacked with blankets and sheets on one side and dark wicker-bound carboys of various mysterious but presumably, from the smell, disinfectant liquids on the other. A deal table stood between the racks, and a single stool.

  Sharp and Hodge waited on one side of the table, leaning on the shelves as Coram was shown in by Ketch.

  “Here we go, me old mate, here’s Mr. Hodge and Mr. Sharp come to inquire after your progress,” he said, helping Coram negotiate the narrow gap between shelves and table, pulling the stool so he could sit on it, and helping him lean the crutches neatly to one side.

  Coram’s guts had turned to water when he saw the two members of The Oversight waiting for him. Hodge was bad enough, not as terrifying as The Smith, but bad enough in the way he tore at Coram’s silence, trying to shake it apart, like a terrier worrying a rat. Coram knew his inability to speak protected him, as if his body automatically doing things that his mind was too broken to accomplish. He recognised Mr. Sharp from the many times he had seen him during the long surveillances of the Safe House which Issachar and Zebulon Templebane had ordered their sons to undertake. He carried an air of cold danger about him that was quite different to Hodge’s ferocity or the walking thundercloud that was The Smith. Coram knew he had come to make him talk, to explain why he had rolled the grenadoes into the sugar factory, to atone for the crime of destroying the Safe House, Sharp’s home. He did not know how many members of The Oversight had died in the conflagration, and indeed had assumed the fact he had only seen The Smith and Hodge meant that the fat Cook and the white-haired girl and all the others were dead and that their deaths lay heavy on his charge sheet.

  Saying nothing seemed to be the only thing that had kept him alive so far, and so he let the rip tide grip him once more and sat mutely, ears open, mind racing, but tongue still as the questions began.

  Sharp began without ceremony, giving the interrogation a chilling intimacy, as of an ongoing conversation between intimates being abruptly resumed without any need for formality.

  The questions rained in on him like an artillery barrage: the fact he did not and could not answer them did not mean that he did not have the corresponding answers exploding in his head as each question landed. The only way he could escape the bombardment was to let the rip tide take him and pull him deeper and deeper into the sea of protective silence. He had done this before, and it had worked, the pain of detonating memories provoked by the questions being not much different to the waking nightmares he was constantly assailed by.

  But this time he felt less safe, because as the questions continued to pound at him he was aware that a different assault was simultaneously in progress. The sea of silence was less warm and protective than he had become accustomed to; in fact some part of him became aware he was colder and more uncomfortable than he usually was. The chill had a lot to do with the fear he was trying to ignore. Sharp’s questions were much like those he had been posed by The Smith and Hodge, except for a new line which seemed concerned with a personage Coram genuinely had no knowledge of, a Frenchman called The Citizen. Sharp was clearly obsessed by this character, and distracted by the new line of interrogation, it took Coram some time to realise that, while Sharp held his attention with words, other non-verbal questions were present in his head. It was as if he was being whispered to, and though the sound of the whispers was all but drowned by the onslaught of Sharp’s words, they seemed to be lessening the protective pull of that rip tide and making it more and more likely that Coram would finally find a way to speak.

  And then, blessed relief, Sharp leant back and looked at Hodge and the pressure relented.

  “He knows something,” said Sharp. “But damned if I can get at it. You?”

  Hodge shook his head.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know anything.”

  “He knows enough to be terrified of us,” said Sharp. He crossed to the door and opened it.

  “Mr. Ketch. You will need a mop and pail: Mr. Templebane has pissed himself.”

  Coram looked down. There was a pool of urine surrounding his one foot. He realised the cold he had felt was the wetness in his groin cooling against his skin. He had been pulled so deep into the sea of silence that he had not known what fear had made his body do.

  He looked down at the tabletop, not willing to meet either of the pairs of eyes boring into him.

  “We may need a sturdier blade than either of us to shuck this particular oyster,” said Sharp resignedly.

  The mention of oysters brought a flash of memory to Coram, of his father Issachar sitting in his carriage casually eating oysters and dropping the shells out of the window into the very gutter that months later would be soaked with Coram’s blood. He choked involuntarily, the first noise he had made since entering the room.

  “Did you get that?” said Sharp, looking at Hodge.

  Hodge shook his head.

  “Just a shape,” he said. Ketch bustled in and looked at Coram.

  “Ho dear,” he said. “We’ve had a little accident, have we? No worries, matey, we’ll have you cleaned up and in dry drawers afore you know it. No shame in an accident when you’re an invalid, is there, gents?”

  And he looked at Sharp and Hodge for confirmation.

  “None at all,” murmured Sharp.

  He smiled at Coram, who made the mistake of looking up at that moment and meeting his eye.

  “We will return.”

  The thought of this and the promise in Sharp’s eyes caused a new spasm in Coram’s guts.

  Back in the street and walking briskly towards the distant Tower, Sharp and Hodge discussed the failed interrogation as Jed bounded ahead of them, dodging handcarts and carriages and milling pedestrians.

  “I hoped you’d get into the back of his mind while I stood pounding at the front door,” said Sharp.

  Hodge hawked and spat into the gutter.

  “Wishful thinking, as it turns out. Worth a shot, but I can ride an animal’s mind, not a man’s,” he said.

  Sharp nodded.

  “Yes. And we can both bend a man’s mind, but not read it, more’s the pity.”
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  “Once upon a day, we had them as could talk without speaking within The Oversight. But now we barely got an Oversight, let alone a full complement of skills,” said Hodge. “Reading men’s minds, hearing their thoughts—why, that requires a horse of quite a different colour.”

  CHAPTER 32

  BLOOD CRIES OUT

  There is a silence to an empty house that is quite different to the quiet of a house with people trying to keep silent within it. Ida, as a born hunter, was especially tuned to the noise silence made when it was tenanted. She could hear people and animals keeping still like a disturbance in the air itself. It wasn’t quite a vibration, more of a thickening of the atmosphere: the air in the Templebanes’ counting-house was thin with abandonment.

  It also smelled of decay. The front door had been closed but, on testing, it was found to be unlocked.

  “Funny,” said Charlie. “We tried that when we first came for a look-see, and it was locked.”

  “Let us take care then,” said Sara.

  They had entered without knocking and listened very carefully.

  Ida shook her head, and pointed at the stairs. Sara nodded. Archie had trotted ahead of them into the counting-house. Ida had drawn her crossbow from under her loden cloak and swarmed silently up the steps.

  As they walked towards the high double doors to the counting-house, Charlie stopped and put his hand on Sara’s shoulder. She turned.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “But there’s a man in there.”

  She realised he was seeing through Archie’s eyes. His nose wrinkled.

  Sight was not the only sense he could share with the young dog. She noted with professional approval that he held a long knife in his hand.

  “He’s dead,” he said, relaxing.

  “How dead?”

  “Ripe and not pretty,” he replied. He in turn noticed she had the boarding dirk in her fist, something he had not seen her draw, nor could imagine where she had been carrying it.

  “Archie says there’s nothing bigger than a rat alive in the house, bar us.”

  They edged into the barn-like space of the counting-house and stood beneath the towering reefs of dusty papers reaching to the ceiling. The first thing she noticed was a bullet hole which had starred the glass in a store-cupboard opposite and clearly smashed a large ink bottle, from the star-shaped splatter of green on the white wall behind it. And then she saw the dog.

  Archie was standing by the pot-bellied stove, wagging his tail.

  The body was next to him, lying half on its back, head cocked at an awkward angle. It wasn’t freshly dead, and there had, as Archie had communicated to Charlie, been rats.

  “That’s … hard to look at,” gulped Charlie, shifting his gaze to the skylights.

  Sara crouched over the body, concentrating on not inhaling anything through her nose.

  “Ever see him before?” she said.

  “Don’t know,” said Charlie. “Though if I had, he’d have looked different. With a nose and eyes and all, I expect.”

  The rats had been hungry.

  “Think this is why the place is deserted?”

  Sara went quickly through his pockets and found nothing except a couple of percussion caps and a bullet. She looked at the bullet hole in the store-cupboard glass, then down at his hands, and then around the surrounding floor, wondering if he had dropped a gun, but none was to be seen.

  She was about to ask Charlie what he made of it when Ida came into the room from the far end, evidently having found another staircase which led back via the half-glassed supervisor’s office.

  “There is no one here,” she said. “But there’s a strong smell of someth—”

  And then she saw the body.

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, I was right first time. No one home.”

  “Yes and no,” said Sara, peeling the tight leather glove from her left hand. “There is no one in the rooms. But in a house this old, there are multitudes hiding in the walls.”

  “What are you doing?” said Charlie.

  “Glinting,” said Sara, handing him the glove. “We can start by finding out what happened here.”

  She walked to the side of the room and splayed her hand, then took a breath, a deep one, barely having time to notice she’d forgotten about not using her nose and starting to gag at the smell of the corpse when

  Time jolted

  as she felt the past smack into her.

  She saw a dark-skinned young man, a boy sleeping at one of the sloped desks—head down on his arms, face pressed on a sheet of paper.

  She saw a woman sprawled on a bench in front of the pot-bellied stove, grey hair hanging off the edge like a ragged banner, rose-tinted by the fire in the grate.

  And then time jerked and a taller man was standing behind the sleeping one and jabbing a horse-pistol into the back of his neck.

  She heard him speak

  “Quiet now, young Amos Templebane, we don’t want to wake your lady friend, do we?”

  The dark-skinned man called Amos turned.

  Sara now saw he was younger than she’d thought, but before she could examine his face more closely time jagged again

  and the sleeping woman was on her feet, pointing a finger at the chinless man with the gun, then time sliced straight to the impact as he smacked her back into the bench and from where she bounced onto the floor, landing in a tangle of limbs and hair like a broken doll

  “You can mash that noise, you old bitch, or you shall have another—”

  And then the time jags went slow as the true violence hit and Amos was reaching behind him

  Without looking

  Hand closing around a steel-nibbed pen

  Twisting away from the gun barrel as the man turned it on him

  Moving strangely sluggishly compared to Amos

  As if he was already dying

  And everything became curves and lines

  As fatal geometry took over

  Amos blurred

  She saw the sharp nib track a silver-blue semicircle like a scratch in the air as the steel pen arced into the gunman’s neck

  The gun fired

  Gout of flame, a bright straightness stabbing in the gloom

  Bullet splintering the store-cupboard window

  Shattering a pint bottle into a circular starburst of green ink

  Amos pirouetted, reaching for another pen

  Ready to attack again

  But the gunman was already falling, corkscrewing as his legs twisted and collapsed in shock

  Blood spraying in a curiously elegant fan

  Settling around him like a matador’s cape

  And then the clean geometry of lines and curves collapsed into something broken and choppier and brutal as he scrabbled desperately at the three inches of blood-slick pen-shaft sticking out of his carotid artery

  Fingertips slipping and sliding

  Until he landed

  Awkwardly

  pen first

  the force of the impact driving it through his slippery grasp

  punching it deeper.

  Even as she watched horror-struck, unable to close her eyes or look away, Sara realised that the steel nib must have found the gap between two vertebrae and severed the spinal cord, because the man’s hands stopped working instantly and everything below the neck went limp.

  She watched two more slices of time as the horrified face fish-mouthed and the bulbous eyes rolled right and left in shock and terror, the head arching against the floorboards as if he was trying to inch-worm his slack body away from something terrible

  And then mercifully the something came and took him and the eyes settled and rolled back and he was still.

  The one called Amos stood shaking over the ruin of his assailant, eyes bright with unshed tears.

  The woman got off the ground and then—and this almost the worst thing in the whole brutal scene—threw back her head and laughed.

  “‘And he said, “What hast thou done?”’” she cackled
gleefully. “‘“What hast thou done?” the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’ Book of Genesis, Bloody Boy, Book of Genesis”

  Amos gripped the second pen. He looked at the still body on the floor one last time. And then he walked out of the room without a second glance.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted. “Don’t go there. The Oversight can’t help you. I told you …”

  The woman bent and rifled the dead man’s pockets, taking coins and a jack-knife, laughing as she did so.

  And then time sliced and the woman was coming back into the room from the door to the back corridor carrying a pair of man’s boots

  Still laughing as she jogged towards the front door

  “Blood cries out, Amos Templebane, blood cries out!”

  She followed the line of his exit, eyes bright, seeming to stumble so close to where Sara was transfixed, watching it all, that she could see right into the gleeful eyes.

  And she saw they were quite mad.

  And then the past let go of Sara and she slumped and sat on the floor, her legs unsteady, breathing hard, aware Charlie and Ida were watching her.

  “You saw what happened?” said Ida.

  Sara nodded.

  “I always see what happened,” she said. “And it’s never good.”

  Ida reached a hand down and Sara took it, strangely touched by the matter-of-fact way the girl offered it, and grateful for the strength with which she pulled her to her feet.

  “Must be a burden,” said Ida. “I’m glad it is not my gift.”

  Sara took her glove back from Charlie, and as she put it back on she told them what she had seen of the death of Abchurch Templebane.