“Come on down when you’re ready,” he said. “Get a bite to eat for the road, and then we’d best be on our way.”
She watched him disappear and then listened to the quiet house. She wondered if she might just get out of that window and climb down and run away and be shot of all this, and then she looked down at the ring The Smith had made her.
She couldn’t decide if it was the ring, or not being quite ready to say goodbye to Cait that stopped her, but she didn’t run. She washed and tidied herself, laced her boots tight, and went downstairs to see what this new day would bring.
CHAPTER 42
A DEAD DAY AFTER
Amos slept for most of the day following his long night under Cook’s scrutiny. The Green Man slept all of it, and the injured Sluagh hovered between life and death like a guttering flame that would not see tomorrow.
Ida was sent to check the Templebanes’ counting-house to see if it remained undisturbed and untenanted, and Charlie was sent to the Tower. No matter how bad things were, it had to be ratted and the ravens protected, and Hodge had a council of war to sit at with Sharp, Sara and Cook. He knew he and Ida were being sent away so the elder members could go over what they had found out at Chandos Place, and he didn’t particularly mind. He was more excited by Hodge’s instructions which were to bring back the oldest of the remaining ravens, since he was now convinced that the Raven was as unlikely to return any time soon as The Smith was, and so wanted Charlie to begin training an understudy. Charlie had ridden inside a raven’s head before, watching as it swooped and circled around the Tower, and he found the aerial perspective especially exhilarating. He didn’t enjoy talking to the birds as much as he did to his dog since they were less communicative and somehow scratchy in his mind where Archie was a warm and comfortable fit, but he still thrilled at the experience. Hodge told him it was time to “bring on the understudy” and have the new raven start to watch the city with them as the Raven had done.
Charlie asked if this new bird would one day become “the” Raven, and Hodge had snorted and shook his head, assuring his apprentice that the Raven was at least as old as The Smith and hopefully as unkillable. The new bird would merely be a poor substitute. But with things as they were, beggars couldn’t be choosers and it was time for all hands to man the pumps …
Charlie’s spark of enthusiasm for the new job with the substitute raven was the only bright spot in what was otherwise, for all of them, a sad, lost day, as if they were all mourning something they could not or would not name.
Ida checked the door to Templebane’s chambers and found it was still unlocked. She cracked it open and didn’t bother to enter, as her nose told her clearly that Abchurch’s body was undisturbed and thus undiscovered.
She jogged off towards Chandos Place, unaware that she was right in the first instance, but wrong in the second. Abchurch had been found by Vintry and Shadwell Templebane only an hour and a half earlier. They had filtered back into the city with the rest of the brothers, who were billeted discreetly elsewhere as Issachar was moving his pieces into position for his great final stratagem, and he did not want to risk its success by alerting any watchers to the fact the house of Templebane had returned.
Vintry and Shadwell had been horrified by what they had found, and left very quickly, making sure they were neither seen nor followed. They had debated whether this was a sufficiently important bit of news for them to abort their next errand and report back to Issachar. After some thought and several pints in a dingy corner tavern in Half Nichols Street they decided telling him they had not gone on to Bedlam and planted information with their diminished brother Coram was perhaps the only thing that could make sharing the news about Abchurch worse. So, their sinews stiffened by the hops and ale, they headed for the hospital.
Shown into the day-room by Bill Ketch, they were horrified by what had become of Coram, not through any residual affection, but as a more general reminder of the vulnerability that all flesh is heir to.
“You been being asked questions by The Oversight,” said Vintry.
“From what we hear,” said Shadwell, eyes darting around the room. “And you know old Issachar, he’s got eyes and ears all over the shop where you least expect it.”
Coram had sat quietly, trying not to look at them, trying not to hear them, waiting for the moment they would leave; he didn’t want to talk to them. He wanted to bite their faces off. He wanted to scream. He wanted to burst out of the room and run and run and run until he met the horizon. However, he had but the one leg, and so he just waited for them to be gone.
Vintry leant in.
“Thing is, old son, Issachar’s been looking for you high and low. And now he’s found you, he wants you to come home so you can be looked after as you deserve, you being a loyal son. He wants you out of Bedlam and back in the bosom, but before that, there’s a bit of business he’d like you to do for us.”
“’E knows you been silent as a nun’s fart so far, and he loves you for it, but ’e does wish you’d decide start flapping your trap and pass on one little bit of tittle-tattle, like it’s something you got off us, your loving brothers,” said Shadwell.
Coram had nodded, knowing they’d go away if he did so, and also knowing that it’d be a cold day in hell before he did a favour for Issachar Templebane, who had left him crippled when he might have saved him.
“Lovely grubbly,” said Shadwell. “We’ll tell that Ketch feller you told us you wanted to speak to those chaps what have been speaking to you, shall we?”
When Charlie returned after dark, he told Ida, out of the hearing of the others, of his sense they were all grieving something they wouldn’t talk about.
“Maybe they’re mourning something that hasn’t happened yet,” she said.
“You’re a ray of sunshine and all,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Cook’s making the steak and kidney pudding again, and I shall have to pretend I like the kidneys in case she gets all offended like last time.”
“Give them to Archie under the table. He’ll be happy to destroy the evidence.”
But even the pudding failed Cook, collapsing as she carefully turned it out of the steaming bowl.
“It’ll taste just the same,” said Hodge.
But it didn’t. And whatever the council of war had discussed, it was clear to the younger members that nothing had been decided and that things were, if anything, gloomier than they had been before the secrets of the house at Chandos Place had been revealed, for reasons they could not quite fathom.
“We don’t know enough,” said Sharp, clearly continuing a line of earlier conversation as he watched Cook tutting as she spooned a glutinous mess of meat, gravy and tattered suet pastry onto a plate.
“I think maybe we don’t know enough to know we should give up,” said Hodge.
“Knowing we shouldn’t ever give up is all I do know,” said Sara.
Of all the suppers they had shared, each felt that this—though none said it—was the gloomiest, as if an ominous and ill-starred future was, impossibly, casting its shadow back into the present.
No one slept well that night.
FOURTH PART
THE LOWEST TIDE
vulnerant omnes,
ultima necat
Every hour wounds,
the last kills.
ON THE GOLEM
On the making of a golem, in which enterprise I have the honour of being the only man in Britain to have succeeded, I will say no more than that if you follow the directions used by Rabbi Eliyahu, Ba’al Shem of Chelm, informed by a close reading of the Sefer Yetzirah, success may be yours … the only additions I myself made were in the matter of materials, not process … concerning myself with how to stop the clay from which the golem is made from drying out over time and prolonged exposure to the sun, I came across a passage reproduced by Wm. Caxton in 1481: “This Salemandre berithe wulle, of which is made cloth and gyrdles that may not brenne in the fyre.” Pliny, Augustine and Isidore
of Seville all attest to the salamander’s ability to quench heat, and so I dried salamander skin, powdered and added it to the four clays from which I formed the golem. It has yet to dry out and is as limber as the day it was formed … and in this way I hope the unpleasantness that occurred latterly in Prague can be avoided …
From The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr. Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)
(In the margin of the page bearing the above, the rabbi has left a handwritten addendum beside which a different hand, possibly a much later reader, has left their own comment. The rabbi’s handwriting is as follows:
The snake is not a snake but a dragon, and the dragon not a dragon but a salamander. The key is not a key but a holder. And the holder holds not a key but the fire.
The second hand—possibly a woman’s—writes:
Stuff and nonsense!)
CHAPTER 43
THE EXCHANGE
He wakes looking up at the first light of dawn as it filters through the small canopy of leaves which tickles his face in the light breeze coming off the Thames from the marshy land beyond. He inhales deeply. It smells of the deep green.
He has slept for two nights, and has healed faster than they knew was possible, because although they know much, they do not know everything. They do not know as much as their fathers and mothers once did either. They are lesser than they were, this Oversight, he sees this; he saw this even as they carried him here to heal.
But the dog man knew enough to put twigs of oak, ash and thorn in his hand and to leave him in the open, and what is better, under a rowan tree. And, from the neat pile of jacket, shirt and trousers resting on a pair of boots at his side, someone was kind enough to believe he would heal eventually. He puts the foliage still gripped in his fist to one side, removing the small canopy of leaves, for it is the once bare twigs that have budded and sprouted in his grasp as he slept, a whole lush spring in two nights.
There is a gentle ripping noise when he sits up and gets to his feet as the grass that has grown and woven itself over him like a blanket against the chill gives way.
He looks down at the clothes as he feels the scars on his lips. They have scabbed over and, though they smart a little, he knows they will soon be gone. He strips off the rags he was wearing and walks naked to the river’s edge, crossing the towpath and lowering his body into the flowing water without flinching. For him, the water is never cold nor warm. It is always as it should be for the season. He ducks his head beneath the flow and for a long moment there is no sign that this green-skinned man was ever on the face of the earth.
And then he emerges, long hair slicked back like a raven’s wing with an emerald sheen on it. He smiles, white eyes and teeth, and then laughs, a short chop of delight, and if there had been anyone to see this, they would have seen the startling flash of red made by the inside of his mouth and the tongue behind the teeth. But no one sees him as he pulls himself out of the water and strides back towards the copse.
He does not get dressed immediately. Instead he stands looking at The Folley and the wisp of smoke emerging from the smoored-up fire beneath the forge’s ancient chimney. Finally, when the wind has dried his bare flesh, he gets quickly dressed in the worn white shirt, the brown jacket and the buff stovepipe trousers that Hodge left for him and sits on the ground, his bare feet plunged deep into the thick grass which slowly begins to twine around his toes in a tickling way that makes him smile once again.
He begins neatly stripping the fine young twigs from the unseasonably leafy boughs he discarded earlier, and then quickly and methodically sets about plaiting them into triple-wood bracelets. When he has made nine, he puts one on his own wrist and then retrieves his feet from the gentle embrace of the grass, and puts on his boots. He nods in satisfaction. The dog man judged his size well.
He stands and looks down at his clothes. Buff, white and brown have been banished by the colour that has leached itself from the grass into his body and garments. He is, once again, a truly Green Man.
He bends and picks up the blanket they brought for him. He folds it neatly and then walks towards The Folley, blanket in one hand, triple-wood bracelets in the other.
He will be gone before they wake, but he will leave his thanks.
CHAPTER 44
OUT OF THE GLASS CLOSET
In the end, the leaving of Marblehead was a swift and business-like thing. Breakfast eaten, their bags hefted—bags which had been returned to them by the Proctor who had disconcertingly found their hotel room without having been told where they had left them—they lined up in front of the cabinet.
Cait had made to take the dog Digger’s leash, but Lucy had got there first. It was a mulish thing to do, since Mrs. Tittensor was not there to witness it, but she had given her word, and told Cait so.
“Oh, and now you’re all for keeping your word,” said Cait, roiling her eyes. “Well, it’s a little late to be playing Little Goody-Two-Shoes, but crack on then.”
Lucy looked at the cabinet and grimaced, trying not to remember the time she had fallen out of the Safe House and into the showman’s tent, taking Sara Falk’s hand with her.
“Now you’ll be arriving in a dark closet,” said Armbruster, eager to get on. “He ain’t expecting us so soon, but there’ll be a bell if the door’s locked on the side wall. Just rattle it and he’ll come running … or I can go first if you like.”
Because there was something kind in his voice, as if he knew she was scared, Lucy shook her head and made herself go stony inside.
“I’m fine,” she said and, without looking back at Cait, she gripped the dog’s lead and stepped through the mirror. She felt a familiar light popping sensation, as though piercing the skin of a bubble. The doors of the cabinet were indeed closed, letting in just a pencil-width of dim candlelight, so she stopped and blinked for a moment as her pupils adjusted from the brighter light of the room she had just left. The dog too went very still, but for entirely different reasons. It froze at her feet, hackles raised, bristling with tension.
Had she not had the dog with her, she might well have just pushed the door open and stumbled into the room beyond, but the dog saved her.
Back in the room she had just left, Cait turned and blocked Armbruster and Magill from following.
“One word,” she said. “The girl Lucy. If my quest is as full of peril out there in the west, I do not want her coming with me. I do not want to put her into unnecessary danger, and she is reckless enough to insist. So give me your word that if Jack Sharp vouches for me, as he will, we then leave her behind. She’ll bridle and hate me for it, but I like her and would rather leave her safe.”
Armbruster and Magill exchanged a look.
“Deal,” said Magill.
“If Sharp vouches for you,” said Armbruster. “Now let’s go.”
“He will,” said Cait, turning to face the mirror. “He owes me a favour …”
Lucy stood in the dark closet holding her breath, listening to two voices that were and were not strangely familiar to her. She could put no name to them, yet they rankled in her mind like the fragments of an almost remembered melody she could not quite piece together.
“Everything in London is arranged,” said the first voice. “Mountfellon will be dragging the Thames at Irongate Steps today, I believe. Once he hooks the Wildfire out of the depths, the broker Templebane has arranged a surprise for him, and we shall have it delivered into our hands.”
“And The Oversight?” said the other.
“If The Oversight interfere, there is not one but two ambushes laid on. They will walk into a killing ground but they will not walk out. The Oversight is finished, once and for all.”
Although she didn’t know who the voices were, she did know neither of them were Sharp. The dog at her side also knew something was wrong.
In the room beyond the closet in which Lucy was hidden listening, Dee and The Citizen were sitting opposite one another across the fireplace.
“God rot the damned Oversight,” said The Citizen. “They have been a festering thorn in my side for too long now.”
“The Wildfire will cauterise all old wounds,” said Dee.
“And then we shall purge the mirrors, and all will be ours, and none to stop us,” smiled The Citizen, finishing loading the pistol with a snap as he closed the mechanism.
“This is a thing of true beauty, this American gun. Truly we are living in an age of machines now, when we put our powers together with the fruits of new industry.”
Dee was about to reply when he stopped dead, sure that he had heard a creak from across the room, from the Murano Cabinet. He held a hand out to silence The Citizen.
He grabbed the candlestick and drew a long knife as he rose from his chair and moved slowly towards the cabinet.
As he moved, he came into view for Lucy, framed in the narrow slit of the imperfectly closed doors.
And that is when she should have run. Because the tall figure with the blade in one hand and the light in the other was one she had seen before, a long time ago in a sad county town when she was travelling with showmen, and it had been walking towards her as it was now, only then it was a vision glimpsed in the mirrored doorway of a shop in which she was crouching, recovering from another horror, that of glinting the centuries-old death by fire of a young witch. She had had the sense to run from the reflection of the nemesis walking through the mirrors then, but now that the reality of what had clearly been a presentiment was made flesh, it was paralysing her.
The horror of it robbed her of the ability to do the one thing she knew she should do, which was turn and leap back into the mirror out of which she had just come. But she couldn’t. And then it was too late.
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