“He’s looking for us,” she said. “The one called Amos Templebane.”
“We know the Templebanes are after us,” said Charlie.
“No,” said Sara. “He’s different. I think he’s looking for us for … help.”
“Why would we help a Templebane?” said Charlie.
“We wouldn’t help him because he’s a Templebane,” said Sara. “We’d help him because he asked. And more than that …”
“What?” said Ida.
“More than that, I think he’s one of us. But I don’t think he knows it. Like Lucy Harker didn’t. Because no one had told her.” She shook herself. “Right. Go to Wellclose Square and look for him. He’s your age, and he’s at least half black.”
“Black?” said Charlie. “Like he’s from Africa?”
Sara nodded.
“Like he’s from Africa. Him or at least one of his parents, at a guess. But he has green eyes, which I do not think occur naturally in those of pure African blood, though I may be wrong. I do not have much experience of that. But they are striking eyes. You will know him if he still watches the ruins of our house. As you will know him if he still travels with the madwoman. If you find him, leave Archie watching him and come get us at the Tower. Don’t approach him, but don’t lose him.”
“Fair enough,” said Charlie. “What are you going to do?”
“Ida and I will search the rest of the house, not for people but for clues as to where they may have relocated to and what they have been involving themselves with,” said Sara. “Now get going. He sat on that chair, and that’s his coat.”
Charlie led Archie to the stool by the desk, let him have a good sniff and then allowed him to bury his nose in the coat.
“He’s got it,” he said. “If he’s skulking around the old place, we’ll find him.”
And he left Ida and Sara to search.
“What do we do now?” said Ida.
“All this paper,” said Sara, looking around at the towering shelves crammed with files. “If we had time enough to read it, maybe we would discover a web of connections. But I doubt it. I think that safe held anything important, and it’s empty. I think Issachar Templebane is a cunning man and has not left anything that would help us find him.”
“We could burn it,” said Ida. “It would make a nice fire. Same as he did to your house. There’s lamp oil in that storeroom by the stairs and we could warn the neighbours so no one got hurt …”
“You’ve a tough and ingenious mind, Ida Laemmel. With a good instinct for practical vengeance,” said Sara. “I like that in a girl.”
“Well,” said Ida. “Nothing wrong with a little pyromania if you keep it under control.”
Sara grinned regretfully and shook her head.
“Warning the neighbours would save them, but fires in this city have a bad habit of jumping from building to building. We’d save lives but be responsible for them losing their homes and businesses and livelihoods.”
“Then … we could just leave by the front doors and leave them open?” said Ida. “I mean, I am just a simple country girl from the mountains, but I hear cities are places full of thieves and those who cannot be trusted. There may be nothing in here of interest to us, but I’m sure it would not be too terrible to leave the Templebanes open to a little mischief.”
“There’s the body,” said Sara.
“I know,” said Ida. “That would be part of the mischief, no?”
“Well, it would certainly not bring credit to the house of Templebane,” said Sara. “And it might bring the magistrates and the constables sniffing about, which would do us no harm. Very good. We will leave the doors wide open and let what mischief may come, come. I can see why Cook likes you. You’ve got just the right kind of nasty streak running through you, same as she does.”
“I don’t like the Templebanes,” said Ida.
“It’s good of you to take our enemies on as your own,” said Sara.
“It’s not that,” said Ida. “I mean, you can do your duty, but I’m not sure you can hate just because of duty. I don’t like them because I was raised a hunter: to kill what you need and do it clean and fast. You don’t kill for fun, or carelessly. When the Templebanes set their trap, they parked the wagon of oil outside your house. They left the horse harnessed to it. They could have unhitched it, ja? They want to murder you, that’s one thing. That’s personal. That’s the game we are born to. But when the oil caught fire, so did the horse. It wasn’t born to be part of our struggle. Even in the kitchen as the house was falling on top of us I heard the horse screaming. There was no need for that. It was just a horse.”
Sara looked at her.
“As I said. Just like Cook. Hard as nails yet soft in all the right places.”
“I’m not so soft, Sara Falk,” said Ida. “You Britishers are much too sentimental.”
CHAPTER 33
THIEVES IN THE NIGHT
Amos and the Ghost no longer haunted the hitherto deserted area from which they had initially kept watch on the house on Chandos Place opposite. The owners of the building had returned inconveniently, preceded by a flurry of servants and baggage. The harassed servants had shooed the unwanted tenants from where they had become ensconced in the sunken area between the basement door and the pavement and had then proceeded to open the house with much clattering of shutters, throwing open of sashes and energetic beating of rugs hung from the windows. For a frenetic couple of hours, the previously blank-faced house became a hive of activity more akin to a Turkish bazaar as a procession of tradesmen made deliveries to both the front and back doors while the increasingly harried staff tried to clean and polish around them.
Finally the owners arrived in a smart phaeton that bore the tell-tale mud spray which strongly hinted of a journey made from the depths of the countryside, and a closed carriage drew up in convoy, from which a sickly child with a whey-coloured pallor was helped by a nurse and a footman up the steps, and then the front door closed behind them and the house resumed its stone-faced impassivity.
Amos and the Ghost found new lodgings in a nearby alley which had the advantage of being subject to ongoing but neglected repairs to a sinkhole which had alarmingly dropped a section of pavement into the drains beneath: a three-foot crater had been covered by a ragged tarpaulin and surrounded by a protective wicket to stop unwary pedestrians from inadvertently dropping into the noxious hollow below, but there the protective maintenance seemed to have stalled. With only minor adjustments to the tarpaulin, this fenced-off area made a reasonably weatherproof hide, though he felt it would be cold enough if the weather turned to snow again, and though the improvised shelter had no straight line of sight along which to view Mountfellon’s home, if one of them loitered in the gloom at the mouth of the alley, it was possible to keep a good watch while the other slept or foraged.
Amos began the new regime by alternately loitering in the alley mouth and sauntering innocently past Mountfellon’s house, circling its boundary in a kind of dismal patrol, but as time progressed he lost the impulse to keep doing it, partly because he was aware that the whey-faced child was always leaning against the upper bedroom window, face pressed against the glass, observing the area with a hungry look that told of her desire to be out and about and healthy. It was like having a watchman keeping tabs on whatever passed in the street, and it unnerved Amos, especially when she started tapping on the window and waving at him with a tentative, friendly smile. He found this heartbreaking for reasons he could not understand, but more than that, he found it dangerous. He didn’t want anyone, even the whey-faced invalid child, taking notice of him and his comings and goings or thinking of him as a “regular.” So he stopped walking past her vantage point and spent most of the time in an increasingly glazed stupor, propped in the shadows, watching the house and trying to ignore the mephitic odour emerging from the hole in the ground behind him. He didn’t find it too hard to ignore, but this was due to the fact he didn’t seem to mind much about anything any mo
re. He was becoming deadened to everything around him, and the vigil had become a necessary routine upon which he could at least hang his continuing existence. Without the demand it put on him, he knew he would crawl into the depression beneath the tarpaulin one night and not bother to get out again. And in the few clear moments of thought his traumatised state allowed him, he did know that he was at the bottom of something he should climb out of. “Later,” said a weasel voice, “tomorrow, maybe.” And the weasel voice drowned out the other voice quietly pointing out that tomorrow was a comforting illusion which kept him stuck in the unending gloom of today, since tomorrow was always moving beyond his reach, always full of a promise of relief which remained ungraspable. He was now eating even less then the Ghost, and since she ate barely anything, he was getting weaker and thinner too.
He was sitting in the shadows in the mouth of the alley at about midnight, hunched over himself as he pulled his belt tighter, trying to see where he should make a new hole to stop his trousers hanging off his hips, which they had begun to do in a way that threatened his ability to walk properly, when the tail off his eye caught something he had almost forgot he was looking for.
Movement outside Mountfellon’s opaque-eyed house. Movement like shadows made visible.
He kept very, very still and watched.
The last time he had seen darkness used as camouflage like this it had been with the Sluagh. He had no desire to be found by them again. And because he was suddenly so busy not moving and wondering why everyone in the sleeping street could not hear the pounding of his heart, he did not step back and wake the Ghost, who was fast asleep, tucked snug beneath her blankets and the tarpaulin.
Charlie’s heart nearly stopped beating at least three times as he watched Ida attempt the sheer façade of Mountfellon’s house.
It had been decided that if the building was to be breached it was likely to be easiest to do so from the top floor, but that getting there was nigh on impossible, the house being detached from adjacent properties by a chasm too wide to jump or bridge.
Ida had volunteered to scale the smooth cliff of grey stone as nonchalantly as if she had been proposing to climb a stair.
“What you going to use?” Charlie had said with a derisory tone he now, watching her, regretted. “A ladder?”
She’d asked if he had a ladder that tall and, when he replied in the negative, she had shrugged and said she’d better just climb it then.
At this point, all the others had piled into the discussion, explaining the lack of handholds, the height of the building and the sharp and lethally unforgiving railings below. Ida had listened patiently, tightening and re-tying her pigtails in a business-like fashion as she did so, and then she thanked them for their advice and politely pointed out that they were city-folk and she was, among other things they were not, a mountaineer.
“I promise you I can climb it,” she said. “I climbed the Hochkönig from the hard side when I was a child. This is what I do.”
“What’s the Hochkönig when it’s at home?” Hodge had asked.
“Tallest mountain in the Berchtesgaden,” she said. “Means the High King. And I took his crown when I was twelve.”
“Watch yourself, Trousers. Pride goes before a fall,” Cook said.
“No,” said Ida with a grin. “Losing your grip goes before a fall. And I never lose my grip. And I never try to climb something I can’t.”
And she certainly could climb. Charlie and Sara had walked with her to the front of the house on Chandos Place and then Charlie had taken her loden cape, which she had worn through the streets to hide the crossbow slung around her shoulders. She had tightened the strap, clamping it tightly to her back so it wouldn’t slide around, and nodded.
“Sehr gut,” she grinned. “See you in a minute.”
“Good luck,” Charlie said, immediately feeling a fool for saying something so clunky and pedestrian.
“Ida,” said Sara, reaching out a hand. “Take your time.”
“This is my time,” said Ida, and then she spun and ran straight at the front of the house. Charlie’s heart nearly stopped for the first time as she leaped up onto the railings and surefootedly sprang up onto the side of the pillared portico, almost seeming to fly as her outstretched fingertips found a handhold he thought far out of her reach. Without pausing, she swung herself up onto the roof of the portico and ran to the wall of the house. The first floor was particularly high-ceilinged as befitted the formal rooms to be found on that level; the windows were correspondingly tall, and there was no way a normal person could reach the top lintel and swing any higher, even if they could safely jump for it, which was not possible at this height. Ida climbed the stone face instead. She seemed to stick to the wall like a fly as she found hand- and toeholds which allowed her to reach the seemingly inaccessible strip of protruding sandstone between the first and second floors. She hoisted herself up on it as if her body weighed nothing, and from there reached higher and swung up into the window recess above and stood for a moment, motionless on the relatively secure window ledge. She rummaged inside her short leather hunting jacket and seemed for a terrible instant to fumble and drop something.
Charlie’s heart almost stopped for the second time as she appeared to reach out into the void to try and catch it, and then he breathed again as he saw she was paying out a thin rope from which dangled a small grapple, swaddled in some kind of cloth.
She steadied herself in the window embrasure, her feet firmly braced against the counter-pressure of her free hand pressing upwards against the top of the recess, and then she leaned even further out over the now certainly fatal drop and swung the grapple.
It looped up and over the overhanging parapet above her and landed with a muted thump.
She immediately pulled the rope tight and tugged it, making sure the grapple was holding against the inner wall of the parapet.
Charlie was suddenly acutely aware of how easy it might be for the grapple to slip, or for the treacherous sandstone of the parapet to crumble, or even—and this he was just noticing—how thin the rope was, scarcely thick enough to be used as sash cord, more string than rope in fact …
He wanted to shout, to warn her, but instead just forgot to breathe as she swung herself sideways out of the window embrasure and leant back, walking up the side of the building, pulling herself hand over hand up towards the vertiginously high lip of the wall—a lip Charlie now realised was sharply cut, and likely sawing through the perilously insubstantial rope. And then she seemed to take an extra forceful tug on the rope and use it to somehow spring herself up in the air as she let go with both hands—here Charlie’s heart bumped alarmingly for the third time—and reached out to grab a double hold of the top of the parapet. He heard the slap of flesh on stone, and then saw Ida hoist herself nimbly up and out of sight onto the roof beyond.
“Blimey,” said Charlie, allowing himself to breath.
“Blimey indeed,” murmured Sara. “I do see what you see in her, Charlie Pyefinch.”
“I don’t …” blurted Charlie, glad the darkness was hiding the treacherous blush he could feel colouring his cheeks.
“Yes, you do,” said Sharp who had materialised out of nowhere and was now standing beside Sara. “And I don’t blame you one bit.”
“Hodge?” said Sara.
“At the back of the building, all quiet. Though Jed’s on edge about something he can’t quite get a hold on.”
Sara swept her eyes around the surrounding street. A late-night hackney carriage was debouching two tipsy gentlemen onto the corner, but apart from that it was quiet and no one seemed to be noticing them in the shadows.
“Keep an eye on the door,” she said.
“And a hand on your knife,” murmured Sharp.
Archie stood up and started to whine, low and insistent, his back legs quivering.
“What?” said Sara.
Charlie drew the knife from the scabbard he had taken to wearing in the small of his back and held the long
blade low at his side.
“I don’t know,” he said reaching for the dog’s mind with his own. “And neither does he …”
“He’s a terrier,” said Sharp. “They’re always either asleep or on edge about something.”
“Well, he’s not asleep now,” said Charlie.
Up on the roof, Ida worked fast, using the burglar’s kit Cook had provided her with: a circular glass cutter, a small bottle of dark treacle and a square of stout brown paper. She centred the cutter on a pane of the opaque glass and in two precise movements cut a perfect circle. She poured the thick treacle onto the paper and pressed it against the pane. She then tapped the glass sharply and pulled the paper back with the broken-out circle of glass held by the stickiness. She had practised this deceptively simple-looking feat back at The Folley to the point where the midden behind the yard was now full of glass shards as a permanent memorial to her many failures to achieve the present neatly turned trick.
The milky opacity of the window now had a perfect round of blackness in it. Ida reached in the hole she had made and found the window latch, which she undid, and carefully slid the sash open.
She stepped into what had obviously been a servant’s room, and a servant who had left the premises with some despatch, from the untidy state it was in. She climbed over the bed and stood in the dark, letting her eyes adjust. Her night vision was more than good, its unnatural acuity being one of the qualities that made her such an effective huntress. And as she stood, letting her pupils dilate, she listened. The house was silent, and she sensed no human presence, at least not close.
She loosened the strap on her crossbow, primed and nocked a bolt in it, then walked quietly through the warren of rooms in the attic, checking they were as empty as her senses told her. She did this because painful experience had taught her there were some things, some unusual and dangerous beings, which could mask their presence from even her heightened senses until they got much too close for comfort.
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