“Upsets me,” said Armbruster, “almost as much as not knowing who that fellow pretending to be Sharp was.”
“You worry too much,” said Magill.
“Upsets me because we owe her now. And that means we got to help her find that baby she keeps talking about.”
Magill grimaced at Armbruster through chattering teeth.
“Let’s just try and stay alive until morning,” he said. “Finding stolen babies is a whole other story.”
CHAPTER 48
A BLADE TO SHUCK AN OYSTER
Coram Templebane sat perched unsteadily on the tall three-legged stool in the narrow storeroom in which he had previously been interviewed by Sharp and Hodge. He leant back, feeling the rough texture of the protective wickerwork bound around the carboys on the shelf behind him. He rubbed himself back and forth on it, scratching the persistent itch he had been tormented by for the last couple of days. It had coincided with the message that had shaken him badly, in that it came from his past life, the one beyond the relative safety of the hospital, the one containing his Day Father. He still felt betrayed by Issachar, but more than that, he felt scared of him. He hadn’t known how scared until the message had been delivered by his brothers. It had been a simple message, informing him that all would be forgiven if he would just tell Ketch he wanted to say something to The Oversight. He had been told what that something was, and assured that if he did not do it, then Issachar would send someone else to inquire why this was. “Sending someone else” was always a mortal threat in Templebane’s business jargon, and Coram was unmanned by the thought. And yet the spark of resistance was there in his breast, and he had, for a day so far, kept his mouth shut. But it had left him with this damnable itch.
He felt like he was falling apart, and this new affliction of the skin was beginning to erode his already limited ability to think straight about anything other than his growing compendium of ailments.
He’d been left by Ketch propped in a most inconvenient attitude, and the normally helpful attendant had made things even more awkward by taking his crutches. With only one leg, this made his present position somewhat precarious. He carefully craned around to look at the door.
He’s worried about you. He knows he’s here for more questioning. He’s worried you’re going to hurt him.
“We didn’t hurt him last time,” said Sharp.
The two of them were leaning against the wall of the corridor outside the storeroom, where Amos was eavesdropping on his adopted brother’s thoughts.
He’s got a kind of … drift in his mind.
“What’s that?” said Sharp. Amos shrugged.
Can’t really explain. You’d have to feel it. It’s like he’s floating inside himself and not really holding on to the outside.
“The outside?”
Where we are.
“Is he unhinged then? Run mad …?”
He’s terrified.
“Of us?”
Amos hunched his shoulders, as if straining at the great weight of trying to explain the impossible. He gestured with hands, pointing all around them.
Of everything.
Sharp pushed off the wall and turned to the door.
“Let’s put him out of his misery. I’ll ask; you listen to what he’s not saying—there’ll be clues there …”
Can I ask? It would be better if I asked.
Sharp stopped, hand poised on the door-handle.
You told me what you want to know. If I ask, then I think I will be more connected to him if he tries to drift.
“Explain?”
I can’t. If you can’t feel it, it won’t make sense. Like telling a blind man what blue is.
Sharp looked at him very closely. His scrutiny was distinctly uncomfortable. Amos swallowed and tried not to blink too much.
“You want me to trust you?”
Yes.
The deep brown eyes held him. Then Sharp nodded.
“Very well. Remember: first, we must know where Issachar Templebane is hiding; and secondly, why did he cause the loss of the Safe House when it was quite clear Mountfellon wanted to take the contents of the Red Library? Why did that impulse to theft turn to the fact of destruction? What changed? You must find that out. He must tell us.”
Yes. If he knows. But the Day and Night Fathers kept their cards close to their chests. So Coram may indeed not know the answers.
“I may not know what he knows, Amos Templebane, but I have looked in enough guilty pairs of eyes to be assured that he absolutely knows something.”
Coram turned as the door opened, steadying himself with a fumbling hand on the shelf behind. He was expecting to see the two members of The Oversight he met last time. His mouth fell open when not Hodge, but Amos followed Sharp into the room. Sharp leaned against the wall and gave Amos the seat in front of his erstwhile sibling.
“Coram, you remember your brother—”
Amos stared at Coram, equally shocked, eyes and mind trying to find the thick-haired, well-fed bully he had always been so scared of in this cropped, pale, one-legged skeleton in front of him. Coram of the sharp tongue and ready fist had turned into something almost fragile and birdlike.
Coram in turn stared at Amos, then at Sharp, then back at Amos and felt the old panic rising like a tide and decided once more not to fight it but to let go of everything and let it float him away into the safety of silence and insensibility.
Coram. It is me. Amos. This is my voice.
Coram flinched as if he had been stung. The voice was loud, but Amos’s lips had not moved. Yet Coram could hear it clear as a bell, as if it was echoing around inside his skull. The presence of the words, the voice, the very idea that the blasted darkie was inside his head felt like a grotesque violation which made him want to vomit. He decided he must be imagining it. Possibly he had a fever. Perhaps the intolerable itching had been a harbinger of a new illness that came with its own delusional state. He closed his eyes and concentrated harder on dumbly not being a part of whatever was happening in the room.
Coram. Answer me.
The mute’s words were like grappling hooks, sharp barbs cutting into him, stopping his escape on the swelling flood and tugging him.
I did not recognise you. They did not tell me you had lost a leg. Or that you looked so very … diminished in yourself.
Coram screwed his eyes even more tightly shut and began to moan. This intrusion into his head was a violation, a defilement, an outrage—
Open your eyes, Coram. We have questions for you.
“We?” The word burst out of Coram unbidden. He opened his mouth in shock.
We.
Coram flattened himself against the shelf as if trying to squirm back in among the carboys to distance himself from the word he had let escape. And yet more were bubbling behind his clenched teeth, and his jaw spasmed and he heard the incredulity in his own ragged voice.
“You? You are with The Oversight?”
“Yes, he is,” said Sharp. “And now you have decided to talk, we would like you to tell us about the attack on our home …”
Coram shut his eyes again and shook his head.
Coram. You have one leg. You cannot escape. And even if you could, you cannot escape me now. Do you know what they call me?
Coram was outraged. Issachar had ordered him to do something as if he was just a puppet. The Oversight, on the other side, was ordering him to do something else. And in the middle, turning the thumbscrews, was the hateful younger brother Amos.
Something unlatched in his head.
“Traitor? Because you are, you fucking little pickaninny!”
The last word spat itself out like a vile bullet in an explosion of spittle. Amos calmly wiped his face. The name the brothers had branded him with, always preceded by the other two words, the casual obscenity twinned with the specific diminutive, brought back the full fury and the bitterness that had fuelled his decision to try and run from the house of Templebane. The fury was still there, banked up and r
eady to burst out. But because he felt it and because he both now knew what he was capable of doing and how fast he could do it, he kept it latched behind a cold smile. There were other ways to attack.
The Bloody Boy. They call me the Bloody Boy, Coram. And if you like, I will tell you why they call me that, and then you will answer the questions we have, because you will understand how very different I have become, and what I am capable of since you last saw me.
The panicked squirming sent the stool toppling to the ground with a sharp crash, and Coram found himself kept upright only by his shaking grip on the shelf behind. Sharp calmly righted the stool and slid it back beneath him.
“Now,” he said, with a cold smile. “Amos will start again. And you will answer his questions.”
Amos’s smile was just as cold as Sharp’s. In fact, a fragment of Coram’s rational mind realised the tightness in both their smiles was the same: it was the tension of a great mainspring kept in check, a spring that if unleashed would release some hideous destructive power.
Amos leant forward slightly.
You will answer my questions, Coram Templebane. Because you know as well as I do that men have more to lose than legs or life. They can lose their minds and be trapped in a living hell that seems endless. Lie to us? Thwart us? … And this fucking little pickaninny will put you right there. For ever.
Coram whimpered.
Behind the buttress in his own mind, Amos smiled. He had no idea how to make the threat he had just issued actually happen. But Coram didn’t know that.
Where is the Day Father?
And then warmth flooded into Coram’s mind, because there was a way out of the cold hell he had found himself in. All he had to do was answer the question with the information Issachar had been so keen he should plant anyway. Everybody would be happy, and he could go back to his safe, silent routine.
“Irongate Steps,” he said. “He’s going to be at Irongate Steps, with Mountfellon. They’re dragging the river at the lowest tide of the month, see? Now leave me alone …”
How do you know that?
“He got word I was here. He’s been looking for me. He ain’t one to betray ’is family, not like you. Shadwell and Vintry, they came by and said hello, see how I was. Yesterday.”
Amos looked at Sharp.
“Irongate Steps then …”
“Irongate Steps at the lowest tide, which is this afternoon—and not a moment later,” corrected Sharp.
CHAPTER 49
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
Walking through the mirror’d world was nothing like using a Murano Cabinet. There was no immediate transport from Point A to Point B; rather a long and gruelling walk made all the more taxing by the unchanging vista of infinite reflections stretching away on all sides.
Lucy lost her sense of time as she trudged ahead, goaded forward by Dee’s knife whenever she faltered. She walked into a blur of repetition which blunted her senses as exhaustion began to unmoor her from her sense of self. She may have stopped and they may even have dozed for a while, but then again she might have hallucinated this. All she really could be sure of was the ache in her feet and the pain in her heart, because no matter what the other numbing and disorientating effect of the long walk back to London was, the cruel truth was that it never allowed her to forget that Cait was dead, and that it had been by her hand.
And then, when she had given up all thought of ever arriving and had come to believe her future would just be this endless walk, Dee yanked the cord around her neck as the Coburg Ivory gave one last click.
They had arrived.
It happened fast.
Dee turned Lucy to the mirror to her left, and pushed her ahead of him into her own dead-eyed reflection, through the glass.
She stumbled out of the mirror’d world and fell forward as her foot found there was no floor but an eighteen-inch drop onto the soft upholstery of the chaise-longue.
The Ghost, who had been sitting half asleep, sprang forward, a coiled spring finally freed to strike, knocking her sideways with a sharp blow that seemed to punch all the air out of her.
Dee stopped, face horror-struck, half in, half out of the mirror.
Lucy, spun by the blow and not yet aware of any real damage, saw him hesitate and she punched on reflex, open-handed, the heel of her palm catching him under the chin, snapping his open mouth shut with a sharp crack of broken teeth, sending him staggering back into the mirror. In the same moment the Ghost saw him and instantly struck again.
Her blow only hit the glass and smashed it into a crazed star pattern. Dee had disappeared back into the mirror’d world. The broken mirror cut the connection and also severed the thing Dee had been holding in his hand, slicing the handle of the Coburg Ivory so that the interlinked balls fell unheeded on the chaise and rolled onto the floor.
The Ghost twisted and looked down at Lucy in a kind of hushed confusion.
“You. You. But … you are not Francis,” she said, a tone of mild accusation colouring her words, as if this fact were Lucy’s fault, as if she had purposely chosen not to be Mountfellon out of some kind of wilful impulse.
Lucy’s reflexive elation at having finally escaped from Dee had passed almost instantaneously as her body caught up with the seriousness of the blow she had been dealt. She wondered if she had cracked a rib, the pain was so suddenly sharp and intense.
She slumped down, despite herself, and lay awkwardly against the arm of the chaise, staring at this crazed woman with the wild grey hair who had punched her as she stepped out of the mirror. She had punched her so hard that Lucy was too winded to speak clearly, too winded to get a proper breath.
“Who is …?” she coughed. “Who is Francis?”
The Ghost looked around the room, distracted by some new music in her head.
“Mountfellon. I thought you were Mountfellon. He must die.” She looked down at Lucy as though seeing her properly for the first time. “Mountfellon must die. Everybody knows this …”
“Mountfellon is not here,” coughed Lucy. “Why’d you hit me?”
“You were supposed to be him,” said the Ghost.
“Mountfellon’s at Irongate Steps,” Lucy wheezed, remembering the fragment of conversation she had overheard before exiting the closet in the fateful bedroom in Montreal where everything had come undone. Maybe this woman would go away and find him and leave her alone to catch her breath. “By the Tower.”
“By the Tower,” repeated the Ghost. “Yes. Hard by Traitor’s Gate. That’s better. That’s a better place for Mountfellon to die.”
“Why don’t you go there?” said Lucy, wincing as she moved. “I’m not Mountfellon …”
Talking was hard.
“You’re not,” said the old woman.
Lucy looked up at the mirror she had stepped through and was relieved to see the second punch had clearly shattered it and that Dee was trapped on the other side. That was something.
If only she could get her breath.
“ … I’m Lucy Harker,” she gritted.
If only she could stand up and look her attacker in the eye.
The old woman was staring at her, and something strange, something almost painful to see was happening to her face. Her expression twisted as though her face was trying to unpeel itself from her skull; only her wide staring eyes seemed to be holding it in place. And the eyes were filling with some kind of awful realisation.
“He is,” said the madwoman. “Oh, my dear. He is your father.”
Lucy decided she must get to her feet before the crazy woman decided to punch her again. She squirmed away and put her hand on the silk upholstery in order to push herself upright.
The silk was warm and wet. And then she looked down and saw the faded rose colour was dark now, and the darkness was hers. The chaise was covered in blood. And then she realised the dull pain from the punch was not a punch at all, but that the ghost had stabbed her in the side, stabbed her with the cruel-looking surgeon’s knife she held slackly as he
r face writhed in its own circle of hell.
Lucy got to her feet.
“Please,” she coughed, meaning to ask the woman not to stab her again.
And then she fell down and lay on the floor, looking at the ornate gilt plasterwork on the ceiling.
“You weren’t meant to be you,” said the old woman. “You were meant to be him.”
“Help me,” said Lucy, holding her hand over the warm spring bubbling out of her side. “Help …”
“Of course I will help,” said the madwoman. “Why would I not help, my darling, my dear one?”
She knelt beside her and her writhing face paused for one moment and was still and sane and full of love and gentleness. It was a look Lucy had been waiting for her whole life, and in that look she saw through the dirt and the wild white hair and the lines the years had left and saw her mother.
She opened her mouth, but could not speak.
And then the Ghost stood up and nodded and strode purposefully to the door, as if she had never harmed a fly in her whole long life.
“Just stay, my love, just never leave, and I will go and kill your father and then you shall inherit this beautiful house and we shall live here happily ever after.”
CHAPTER 50
THE FINAL CUT
Irongate Steps was the same dank cut sliced at right angles into the bank of the Thames between St. Katherine’s Dock and the Tower where Sharp had gone to find Emmet, the place where they had then sat together and communed silently as they watched the river grind past.
Stuck between two significant landmarks and with its one-time utility as a landing place superseded by the easier access afforded by the neighbouring dock, it was an overlooked, forgotten place, haunted by the deep shadows thrown by its steep sides, and visited only infrequently by mudlarks, guttersnipes and other riparian scavengers. There was a small fan of gravelly beach and the ruin of a wooden jetty at the wider, river end of the wedge, and at the narrow point of the cut where the shadows were darkest there was the ancient iron grating from which it got its name and out of which flowed that combination of underground stream and sewer which made London’s waterway such a sure and constant source of noxiousness and disease.
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