The Friday Society

by Adrienne Kress

  Nellie smiled. “Thanks.”

  “What do you want?” It was Michiko from behind them, an edge to her voice.

  “I say, that was a remarkably confident complete sentence there, Michiko,” said Cora, turning around, with Nellie following her half a moment after.

  “Oh, bleedin’ hell,” said Nellie.

  “’Allo girls.”

  Three men, three stupidly large and quite ugly men, were grinning at them. Michiko had her hands on her hips, standing protectively before Cora and Nellie.

  “Just leave us,” said Cora, in a tone of voice that Nellie understood to mean she was not in the mood for this.

  The man in the middle with the muttonchops laughed, revealing a large gap where the front few of his teeth should be. Then he stopped suddenly. “No.”

  The men moved closer, causing Nellie and Cora instinctively to step back, but Michiko stood steadfast, allowing Muttonchops to tower over her.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He stared at her for a moment, then gave a look to his buddies. “Well, seein’ as you asked . . . I’ll take them purses, and that there sword at yer hip. And then . . . we’ll see what else I want.”

  “Sounds threatening,” said Cora. Nellie watched her as she reached into her purse.

  She also saw Michiko kneel down on the cold street, her legs still quite wide apart, and the man before her take a stunned step backward.

  “What the hell’s she doin’?” he asked.

  “No idea,” replied Cora. Her hand appeared from within her purse, empty. “But I’d be just a little bit concerned.”

  * * *

  ENTER EVERY DUEL expecting to die.

  That was hard in this case, since it was so clear she’d easily defeat them. They weren’t even worthy of fighting, really. If it weren’t for the need to protect the other two. The blonde and the brunette.

  Stillness.

  Calm.

  Breathe.

  Time to wake up the Silver Heart.

  Michiko reached with lightning speed to her left side and pulled the hilt of the katana a notch, just a bit, just to let it know it was time. Then it was unsheathed, and she was back on her feet, holding it in both hands before her.

  The three strange men looked a little taken aback at the sight of the Silver Heart. Michiko’s speed was impressive. She knew this. She could make it seem that the katana had materialized out of thin air in her hands.

  They looked a bit like children to her, mouths agape, brains not quite up to speed with what had just happened. What was about to happen.

  She would not kill them. Who kills children?

  Her focus shifted, her mind clear.

  First man. Second man. Third man. Like looking through a telescope, her focus examined each up close.

  Okay.

  She attacked.

  * * *

  THE MEN RAN like wild creatures, holding tightly to their wounds, leaving a trail of blood behind them. If Michiko had been a hunting animal, they’d have been easy for her to stalk, thought Nellie. But there was nothing animal-like in the efficiency with which she’d disposed of her prey.

  “One each,” said Michiko, turning to them with a small smile.

  “One cut, you mean?” asked Nellie.

  “Cut. Yes. Arm, arm, leg. Leg for leader. Bad man.”

  So she’d reasoned the whole thing out, in so little time. In a blink of an eye, it had seemed. In the dark, Nellie had been able to discern very little of what Michiko had done, her black outfit a blur in the fog. Only the blade was clear to see, reflecting the light from the streetlamps, and then, even then, it had seemed she’d made only one move, not three.

  “Thank you,” said Cora, staring at Michiko with the same awe that Nellie felt.

  Michiko nodded.

  The silence now was awkward, and then Nellie started to giggle. She couldn’t help herself. It was nervous energy combined with the awesomeness she’d just seen.

  Cora grinned, too, despite everything she’d been through that night.

  Michiko furrowed her brow.

  “I think it’s time maybe for us to be gettin’ on home,” said Nellie, calming herself.

  Cora nodded, and Michiko, who seemed to understand the word home, sighed a little sadly, it seemed.

  “Everyone comfortable being on their own?” asked Cora in her take-charge kind of voice. “By which I, of course, mean Nellie. Michiko, I think you’ll be just fine.”

  “I’m good. I coulda’ taken them, if Michiko hadn’t.” Nellie wasn’t entirely certain she spoke the truth, but she’d done okay with the creepy eyeball man, and then there was the footman from the other night. Besides, worse came to worst, no one was better at disappearing than she was. “How about you, though?”

  Cora shrugged and produced a tiny gun from her purse. “I’m good.”

  They made their final farewells.

  And then they were off.

  * * *

  THREE GIRLS INTO the night.

  PART THREE

  Investigations

  21

  A Lesson

  THERE WAS NO light to wake Michiko the next morning.

  No physical signal that her body was rested and ready to face a new day.

  There was, however, a knock on the tiny window next to her bed, the window that she’d never been able to wrench open.

  “What?” Michiko pushed herself off her bed, her neck crying out in pain because she had slept on the right side of her face the whole night. Still half asleep, it took her a moment to figure out that the sound was, in fact, coming from her window. But the second she found the source of the noise, she was wide-awake.

  Hayao’s upside-down face was staring at her. He wore a big smile, and when she finally saw him, he waved happily.

  Oh, for crying out loud. Michiko got out of bed and went to the window. Of course, the thought that he was dangling from a roof five stories above the street had occurred to her, but she wasn’t too surprised by this fact. His athleticism was, after all, what had impressed her about him. Exactly this monkey business . . .

  “What do you want?” she asked loudly from behind the glass, for once happy that Callum made her sleep all the way up in the servants’ quarters and far away from him.

  “It’s time for lessons,” he said back.

  Michiko scoffed at this. “You’re not the one who gets to choose when we learn, little monkey.”

  “I just thought you’d probably be busy later, and—”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five.”

  Michiko was suddenly exhausted. Back when she was studying in Japan, early mornings were a regular part of her day, but early nights were common as well. And she’d spent the better part of last night first carting a dead girl around the city, and then, upon parting ways with those very strange and giggly girls, stalking some fog man who never materialized.

  Still, she wasn’t going to let monkey boy out-energize her.

  “Fine. Go to the garden. Wait for me. Sit . . . still.”

  Hayao nodded vigorously and disappeared back onto the roof.

  She didn’t hurry to meet him. Patience was going to be one of the more important lessons for monkey boy. So she took her time dressing in her all-black training gear, thinking that, really, she’d only just removed it a few hours earlier.

  Why had she agreed to this, again?

  Then she lightly made her way down two flights of stairs in the pitch darkness to the second floor, where all the weapons were stored. She took stock of the shoddy choices available to her and decided on two gentleman’s canes. She closed the cabinet quietly and had a look at Callum’s physical therapy equipment, lit by the lamp in the street whose light filtered through the tall windows that ran along the far wall. The various devices looked unnatural and the stuff of horror stories to her, but Callum’s patients paid good money to be treated with them. Evidently he could ease their pains. Renew their bodies.

  It made littl
e sense to her.

  She’d wasted enough time. Hopefully the boy had left in impatience, but she doubted it. He was determined, that one. After all, he’d had no idea where she slept, so he had probably spent a good long while investigating every window of the house to find her.

  She sighed. Time to go outside.

  * * *

  THE COMMUNAL GARDEN that filled the square between the two narrow streets was locked from nine at night until eight in the morning. A high, wrought-iron fence with spikes at the top was enough to enforce the rule. For most people. For someone like Michiko and, she had no doubt, Hayao, such fortifications were little more than a closed door, a slight obstacle that had to be contended with for a moment and then overcome.

  Scaling the fence was nothing for her, and she was quickly concealed from the street in a leafy cover. Michiko had to admit that the garden was pretty nice, a flash of green in the general gloom of the dark, gray neighborhood. Trees and hedges blocked the open space in the middle from preying eyes, and small flower gardens lined the green from one end to the other, all merging under a bubbling birdbath fountain.

  Hayao was sitting cross-legged right in the center of the green. His eyes were closed, and clearly he’d taken her instruction to wait for her quite literally. She approached him in silence and took a moment to observe him.

  Then she struck him on the shoulder with a cane.

  “Ow!” Hayao flinched and opened his eyes wide.

  “Why did you react?” asked Michiko, circling around him to the other side.

  “Because you hit me.”

  “So?”

  “It hurt.”

  “So?”

  “It surprised me.”

  “So?”

  Hayao stopped talking.

  Michiko started.

  “You feel pain. You feel surprise. An unexpected moment happened and you reacted. But why? We can feel, we can think, we can react without having to share this information. Discipline and control allow the samurai to internalize every moment. Distraction can be deadly.

  “Distraction is one of the samurai’s deadliest weapons. We yell when we attack. We wear our masks to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies. We hit you on the left so we may cut you on the right. Do you know of the story of the samurai who sat for four hours waiting for the sun to rise? Did your old master tell you that one?”

  Hayao didn’t respond.

  Michiko smiled. Okay, this was kind of fun. “You may answer.”

  “He chose his position so that when the sun rose, it would be in his opponent’s eyes,” replied Hayao quickly.

  “Yes. An example of using distraction to defeat one’s enemy. Also an example of patience. Both are your lessons for this morning. For the next hour you will stay here and sit. You will keep your eyes open and observe the world around you. Your breathing will be slow and measured. Your thoughts will flow in and out of your mind like water, for a sticking thought can be as distracting as a physical threat. You will not lose focus. You will stay centered. Understand?”

  Hayao gave a little nod, then furrowed his brow in concentration. Michiko smacked the back of his head. “Relaxed focus. Your body should be calm, but alert. Not tight. Tight does not win. Tight causes muscles to pull and tear.”

  Hayao’s brow slowly released. And Michiko nodded.

  For the next hour Hayao did his best to follow Michiko’s instructions as she practiced different katas with the two canes. Once in a while a cane would find its way to Hayao’s leg or hand or arm, a short sharp tap. The boy couldn’t seem to prevent himself from flinching. He would learn.

  Finally the sun rose, and though the leaves sheltered Hayao from its full brightness, the moment wasn’t lost on him. He didn’t squint. He smiled.

  “No,” said Michiko quietly. He immediately stopped. “Not being distracted by the sun this morning is good. But you were still distracted by the memory of the story.”

  With that, the lesson was over. She had to get back to the house before Callum discovered her absence. The last morning she had been lucky. He had not come home until lunchtime. Where he’d spent the night she didn’t know and didn’t care. But she suspected one of his many female admirers had something to do with it. She’d been spared the beating she otherwise would have received had he learned that she hadn’t come home that night herself.

  But he had been asleep in his luxurious four-poster bed when she’d sneaked out last night, and he’d be awake soon. They had a day trip to Cambridge where they were scheduled to give a demonstration in front of an assembly of college students.

  “Come back tomorrow morning. Same time. We shall meet here again,” instructed Michiko.

  “But what about my lesson to you?”

  “What?”

  “My running.”

  Of course. She’d nearly forgotten. And she did want to learn. It would help her so much in seeking out the fog man if she could run along the rooftops instead of navigating narrow streets. She’d intended to go out again that night in her quest, not studying a new skill. But sometimes taking the time to learn, though a seeming step back, could help move a person forward more quickly.

  “Tonight.”

  Hayao smiled and then he turned and bounded up and over the garden fence, using a tree to propel himself upward.

  Little monkey.

  22

  Politics

  IT HAD BEEN almost exactly a year since Lord White had first brought Cora with him to the Palace of Westminster. It was an odd sort of coming-out for a girl, but she was presented to Lord White’s colleagues as his assistant in a way oddly similar to the way a girl of means would be presented to society as a candidate ready for marriage. Cora had found herself surrounded by men who complimented her for little more than existing; the main difference was simply that none of them was interested in courting her.

  Now a year on, she was a common sight walking down the neo-Gothic halls of Parliament. And, where once she had been mocked as one of the only women in the palace, now others were mocked if they didn’t know who she was. She was famous.

  She was also being totally ignored this morning. And not in that usual “Oh, it’s just Miss Bell” kind of way. There was a heightened feeling of tension this morning—something different from the typical anxiety that preceded a vote. Usually the halls were filled with men trying to make last-minute deals with their colleagues, pretending they weren’t remotely concerned about the outcome and sweating through to their topcoats. It was a mix of denial and male bravado. Fascinating in its absurdity.

  Today. Different.

  “Dr. Welland,” whispered Lord White into her ear as they passed between two of the Queen’s guards.

  Of course. The doctor’s murder had been the subject of much conversation in the last day or so. Articles had been appearing in both the morning and evening papers speculating about the murder. The victim had evidently been found by some most clever police officers in the wee hours, his body and head easy enough to recognize. Cora had a faint memory of a young officer speaking with her at the door and wondered if there was a reason her presence at the scene had been left out of the newspapers.

  Dr. Welland wasn’t an MP. He had never been been involved in any particular political doings at all, from what Cora could tell. She’d only met him a handful of times accompanying Lord White and she’d been more focused on her boss than on the doctor. His lordship had found it so hard to conceal his fondness for inventing things, the internal struggle playing across his face in a series of twitches and short intakes of breath. It had been fascinating and a little sad to watch.

  There would be a funeral, of course, and it would be quite the event. Anyone who was anyone would likely be there. Maybe a few anyones who weren’t anyone, even.

  The bell rang. Like Eton schoolboys, the men in the chambers picked themselves up and, in an orderly fashion, started toward the House. Cora stayed close to Lord White’s heels, though she wouldn’t be allowed onto the floor itself, of course. S
he’d go and sit up in the gallery.

  “We’ll send flowers to Mrs. Rawley, but take John Able off the list . . . ,” Lord White said with regard to a completely unrelated matter as she jotted it all down in her notebook. He always just said whatever came to his mind, and she had to sort it all out on her own later.

  Cora allowed her eyes to flick up and take quick stock of her company. She had to find Mr. Carter in this mess. He was usually pretty easy to spot, towering several inches above most of the gentlemen.

  She turned to look upstream, and finally, as Mr. Low scuttled over to plead one last futile time with Mr. Fish, Mr. Carter and his long limbs came into view. Lord White had stopped speaking, and Cora made the decision that he was finished for now. She could have turned and fought her way up to Mr. Carter, but it seemed like a bit of an ordeal to put herself through. So she simply stopped walking.

  Okay, so the man behind her almost fell flat on his face when she did, and she was sworn at as he passed, but it worked remarkably well. In no time, Mr. Carter had floated up next to her and given her a small, tight-lipped smile.

  “Bad news about Dr. Welland,” she said.

  “Indeed.”

  Cora had to jog to keep up with his long strides.

  “A great loss to the scientific community,” she added.

  Mr. Carter grunted back. Odd that he was so uncommunicative. He was usually quite pleasant to her.

  “I met him a few times with Lord White, and—”

  “Must we discuss this, Miss Bell?” asked Mr. Carter abruptly.

  “Oh, uh, no. I suppose not. I just thought you, in particular, would care, that’s all.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, I thought you were a financial contributor to the Medical and Scientific Institute. Thought you’d care that one of its top men had been murdered . . .”

  It was Mr. Carter’s turn to stop the flow of traffic. He seemed unaware of the chaos he had caused and just stared at Cora for a really uncomfortably long moment. Then he grabbed her wrist and yanked her across the flow of men and into an arched alcove.