The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway

by Karina Cooper

  “If there were any other place,” I heard Strangeway say over my head, “I’d go there, but you know as well as I there’s none.”

  “Blame it, you know I’m not welcome here. You expect me to just leave you?”

  Here? Where? I shifted my weight, groaning what I’d meant to be a question, yet came out on a painful sound of denial. I hurt; as if I’d been rolled across a canvas-top tent and bounced on hard ground.

  “Bloody tinkers,” rumbled in my ear.

  “She’s waking,” Smoot said, his flat accent easy to remember. “If you go in there, you know I’ll have to clip.”

  “I’m well aware.” Strangeway sighed. “You and your thrice-damned debts.”

  “Where...” I clutched at the fabric just by my cheek. It smelled of smoke. “Hurts.”

  “Easy, lass,” Strangeway murmured, but did not spare for me any greater attention. One large hand came to press my face against his shoulder, even as he lowered his voice. “Hawke will help me at least patch up, and take this bird off my hands.”

  I struggled, but even bending an inch set my side afire. “Don’t you dare,” I gasped.

  “Quiet, guttersnipe, the adults are talking.”

  I clenched my teeth, a fresh bloom of sweat peppering my skin. “You’re...a right bastard, Smoot.”

  “That’s Captain Smoot to you, Bessie. What makes you think the Veil will let her go again?” he continued, his frown apparent in his voice.

  I peeled open my eyes, blinking hard as fresh tears of pain pricked at my lashes, yet all I saw was the pale arm of a coat and the edge of a bloody stain speckled with black. Even that swam.

  “I will make sure of it,” Strangeway said. “Stop struggling, lass, you’ll bleed again.” He jostled me some, the better to gain a grip on me, and I sucked in a harsh breath. It hurt like the very blazes of hell had come to rest upon me.

  I could not let it matter. I planted an elbow upon his chest, the better to struggle upright in his grasp, and succeeded only in forcing a grunt from him and causing his arm to shift too far. I yelped as he let go of my legs to steady us both, then locked back worse as my feet swung to the ground and stretched my side.

  The world went spotty. Smoot’s hands grasped my shoulders for balance and Strangeway cursed.

  An awkward set of dancers, we three.

  “All right,” Smoot said, but not happily. “The piece of calico has made your point. But if you value your skin, don’t tell Hawke that I’m in London. It’s going to be damned difficult enough shaking whatever spies the Veil’s got near the docks so we can leave.”

  “If you’d paid your debt—”

  “If I’d paid my debt,” Smooth said curtly, “my ship would be at the bottom of the ocean with a hold full of tar and bones. I’ll be at the Nunnery. The quicker you hightail it out of the Veil’s sight, the better.”

  Strangeway grunted again, but this one a sound of impatience. I swayed against his chest, the blood leaching from my head.

  Another hand touched my forehead. “Mind yourself, Bessie. This is hot blazing water you’re in.”

  I smiled faintly. “I like baths,” I murmured, closing my eyes against the world that would not stop blurring.

  “Bosh,” Smoot snorted. Then, lower, “Your word, Strangeway.”

  “I’ll make sure she leaves,” Strangeway said, just as quietly. “You’ve my word.”

  “Find me when you’re ready to get back to it.” Footsteps vanished into quiet. I opened my eyes to find Strangeway looking down at me with concern, his arm firm against my back and supporting my flagging weight.

  We stood in front of great gates, heavily wrought and strangely clear of fog, closed this early in the evening. The smell of rotting fish and the acrid pong of the lime kilns in the district named for them was fainter here, yet noticeable even injured.

  I recognized the location: the Midnight Menagerie. A haven of flesh and favors, entertainments the likes of which could be as posh as the opera or as unseemly as the auction tables in the stews. I had never been.

  I had wanted to visit since first hearing of it, but the mere thought of such a place was enough to give my governess a fit of the vapors.

  Why in heaven’s name had Strangeway come here? I grasped his coat, intent to ask.

  He looked down at me with weary regard. “Save me from stubborn captains and bloody-minded girls.” Too late, I thought. “Lass, take it from me. Never leave your debts unpaid.”

  “Been...” My skin felt prickly, hot and cold flashes rippling up my body. “Been trying to...tell you,” I mumbled. “Debt...collection...”

  “Collector, you said. Of course.” I did not hear belief in his dry acknowledgment. “Up you go.”

  This time, when he swung me into his arms, the strain proved too much. The black spots I battled overwhelmed my vision, and the pain took what was left of my vigilance. I fainted, cradled in my bounty’s arms.

  These were the circumstances under which I first visited London’s fashionably unfashionable pleasure gardens. Not my finest hour, nor the position of confidence I’d hoped to provoke when I first strode through those gates.

  As chance would have it, I would not be striding at all.

  * * *

  I came to under the ministrations of a calm, plain Chinese girl clad in drab cotton trousers and long tunic, who understood only a little English and spoke less. A hasty inventory of my aching body and associated limbs revealed that I had been bandaged around the middle, where something sharp had scraped a ragged tear through Booth’s coat. Though it hurt when I moved a certain way, I had been given opium direct to ease the pain—I did not need to ask to know the flavor of it on my tongue.

  They had not bathed me, which was a fortuitous chance, and one I gratefully accepted, as the black residue from the train’s fire hid my telltale red hair and masked my features enough. This would become the seed of a disguise I would use for years to hide my identity.

  As the girl chattered at me in her foreign tongue, I struggled from the settee I’d been left on. I was in a beautifully arranged parlor of some kind, its walls draped in silks and furniture boasting embroidered print, with folding screens arranged just so.

  The door was polished to a wicked gleam, carved in designs I had no patience to pick out. Through it, I heard two voices, both masculine, each too quiet to make out more than the impression of gravity.

  I threw open the panel, my erstwhile nurse’s pleading tones shrill in my aching head, to find one man hunched over a lacquered table. Reminiscent of the Chinese table piece in my own home, it sported mother-of-pearl inlay and something that glinted like gold. Atop it, a map.

  The second man, Strangeway, lay sprawled upon a chaise lounge, its heavily embroidered pattern starkly opulent against the dirt and coal smeared simplicity of his fine clothing. His greatcoat was discarded, a bandage obvious around one forearm, bared by his rolled sleeve. In his hand, a glass of something that gleamed like warmed amber.

  I wouldn’t mind for a drop of the stuff, myself.

  Two sets of eyes lifted to stare at me. The chatter behind me ceased.

  “What is going on here?” I demanded.

  Had I been in a better frame of mind—which is to say, uninjured and not made to feel quite invincible by dint of the opium administered for pain—I might have better thought out my first introduction to Micajah Hawke, ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie and whose guest I had unwittingly become.

  For all I feared Oliver Ashmore—in my nightmares likening him to a demon intent on devouring my girlish soul—it was the Menagerie’s ringmaster that worried me most upon first glance, and this even before I knew his name. With his lean build, broad shoulders and narrow waist displayed in a crisp white dress shirt the likes I had seen only in the galas above, and his swarthy skin at such odds to the pristine white of the cotton, he seemed both out of place in this bizarrely foreign study and immorally comfortable in it.

  His black hair was longer then, plaited into a b
raid as thick as my wrist and left to hang nearly to his waist—an affectation for the exotic, I presumed. The unforgiving fashion drew attention to the sharp curvature of his cheekbones, the arrogant slant to his mouth and the bold slashed black lines of his eyebrows as one arched. His eyes were that unique shade of shadowed brown, as if one had lit a candle behind a tawny screen and then muted it until it was no more than an ember.

  An ember that turned the blue swath bisecting his left eye into a river of unholy light, an azure gleam as wicked as the heart of a flame.

  Whatever Garden of Eden I had been brought to, with its lamplight thrown back in reflected sheens of crimson, gold and ebony black, this man was obviously the Devil that tended it.

  Though Strangeway made no effort to rise from his indolence, swirling his glass absently, my quarry’s existence seemed to pale in comparison to Hawke’s very presence. The Menagerie’s ringmaster has always been like that; a creature crafted to dominate every room, every conversation, all things. Time has only refined the effect.

  “So, the little sparrow is awake,” came my quarry’s greeting, one whose dry-as-toast tones did little to pry my wide-eyed stare from the black glower of his companion.

  Strangeway noticed, for he ran a bare hand through his mussed, close-cropped brown hair and turned his aggrieved exasperation to the side. “Hawke, for God’s sake, do refrain from frightening this one into a stupor.”

  “Her, you say.” Hawke’s derision as palpable. “How can you be sure, under the grime?” He gave me no chance to mount a defense, for his gaze slid somewhere past my shoulder, and he clipped off a few short, sharp syllables.

  The girl under whose gaze I awoke answered back, but whatever it was they discussed, I could not decipher its intent. If Strangeway knew the foreign gibberish they spoke, he did not share, his heavy-lidded gaze studying me with mild interest over the rim of the spirits he imbibed.

  Awkward, I stood in my too-big clothing, aware that I resembled a chimney sweep from crown to boots. Yet I could not resist the lure of the fireplace stoked in the open study, or the glint of gold beneath the map.

  Or the map itself, with its London streets outlined in stark black ink.

  Part of this fascination stemmed from the opium I had been given. It paints a trilling symphony along the brain, gilding much of one’s senses in delight—or allowing the insidious thrill of imminent danger to turn to something guiltily provoked.

  I seized upon their communal disinterest. “I demand to know what has happened,” I declared, striding fully into the warmed study.

  Hawke’s gaze once more shifted, this time to pin mine.

  I cupped a hand around the wound in my side, feeling suddenly defensive. Yet I raised my chin. “I’m on collector’s business, you know.”

  Strangeway’s sigh stung no less than Hawke’s derisive laughter. “That again,” the former muttered, his lilting accent doing little to ease the hurt. He stretched out his long legs, utterly unconcerned by the trace remnants of station dust and dirt clinging to them. His booted feet crossed at the ankle, without a care in the world.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Hawke added, earning my ire with an immediacy that bit deep. “You’ve lost whatever little game you attempted to play.”

  My teeth set as I matched glower for glower—though that I matched wills with two grown men, and one much more forceful than the other, caused sweat to sweep across my already filthy skin. “I am playing no game,” I retorted, “and if I were, I would win.”

  “Not even should you bring help,” Hawke replied. The cutting edge of his arrogance, less polished than it would become, was no less sharp. “Which you should have, obviously.”

  I scowled. “You would not say that if I weren’t female.”

  “I would say it even if I had not been assured of your sex,” he replied in glib dismissal of my apparent deficiency of notable curvature, “for you obviously lack all sense.”

  Allowing the byplay, Strangeway used the opportunity to drain his glass. Then, as if he had not borne witness to the jibes between his companion and I, he asked lazily, “What’s your name, lass?”

  My attention turned abruptly to him. It had been a very long time since I had been forced to think so quickly at a push, and this time, I stumbled. “I—That is...” Names, garbled and unfamiliar, cluttered in my opium-riddled thoughts.

  Hawke’s arms folded over his chest.

  “Naturally,” Strangeway drawled in his languid lilt, as if he’d come to a conclusion amid my stuttering. “You said that you were hunting on that train. What is your notice, then?”

  My gaze narrowed. Did I tell him that he was it? “Why?” A hedged demand, seeking time to think.

  Hawke’s gaze did not leave my face, his eyebrows now knotted in thinned patience.

  “Momentary interest,” Strangeway assured me, his smile slow and ultimately bored. The man could barely be buggered to sit upright, much less give me the time of day.

  The rules of this kind of gathering eluded me. Was I to be intimidating? Polite? Should I evoke deference or fear?

  I could take no cues from the abrasive man called Hawke, for he said nothing, shared nothing, his posture that of an iron wall which would not give.

  “You are Mr. J. F. Strangeway, are you not?” I asked, closing the distance between myself and my quarry.

  “And you are no guttersnipe,” Strangeway replied in the same disinterested tones.

  A chill knotted in my belly. “What is it to you?”

  Was it then that I imagined the first bit of interest? A flicker of something sharp and cunning in the popinjay’s dark hazel eyes.

  I planted my hands on my waist. “I am a collector and you are on my notice, sir. For debts owed,” I added, as if this would allow me legitimacy.

  “Debts?”

  I nodded. “Owed and demanded repaid,” I told him with a finality that belied my complete ignorance on the subject. “Always pay your debts, isn’t that what you said to me?”

  The barest whisper would have echoed as a scream in the silence that followed my taunting echo of his earlier advice.

  Hawke stirred, arms unfolding, and he placed one hand upon the map. “Well done,” he said, not to me, but to the man who very gently put down his glass. “You have played the peacock entirely too well.”

  “Bloody bells,” was my quarry’s resigned sigh. “I’ve no time for this.”

  As if I did. “So, if you’d be so kind to come with me, Mr. Strangeway—”

  “Shall I have her removed?” Hawke’s question, so idly spoken, halted me in my tracks. He directed it to his companion, but it was me his gaze pinned, candlelight reflecting in that vivid blue streak.

  “For God’s sake, Hawke, the lass has already been injured enough tonight.” Strangeway’s sympathy, ultimately indifferent though it was, earned him a touch of my struggling goodwill. However, it dimmed when he added, “’Tis your Menagerie, mind, do as you like.”

  Both men watched me, as if awaiting my next move. When none came—what could I possibly do?—he added, “She’s obviously not Irish and no factory girl. I rather doubt she can harm a leaf, much less anything about my person. I doubt she’s worth the skin she has.”

  Any liking I may have been cultivating for the man evaporated.

  “Right,” I snapped, and slapped both hands atop the table. It stung, earning an echoed ache in my side. I winced; but I’d been hurt worse under Monsieur Marceaux’s demands and I could not bear to show weakness now. “My place of birth aside—” A rural estate in far-flung Scotland, but he did not need to know that. “—it does not negate my purpose. Mr. Strangeway, if you will not come willingly I will be compelled to acquire your company by force.”

  When Hawke came around that table, I realized the error of my impatience. And the invalidity of my power. He moved like a tiger only barely caged, each step a leashed promise of violent intent. That women London over find the man fascinating does not surprise me now, but he certainly baffled and f
rightened me then.

  His tones were polite. And rather very unyielding. “You are just a child,” he assured me, “and so I will afford you a luxury you would not get were you even a day older.”

  “I am fifteen years old,” I corrected, with all the confidence of my almost-worldly experience. “I am no child.”

  The derision he displayed me could not have been more clear than if he wrote it on a bit of parchment and hand-delivered it. As if I should have taken the excuse he offered me with grace. “Wherever you call home,” he said softly, “you will go there, and you will never darken my door again. Do you understand me?”

  Chapter Nine

  I backed away, but he did not slow, making his point with every measured pace closed between us.

  My heart pounded, dry and hard in my throat. “You cannot lay a finger on me.”

  “This is my garden.” Hawke’s eyes filled my gaze as he leaned closer, his even white teeth bared in a smile that I would have sworn contained the fangs of a viper. Opium could be so ambiguous on a body’s senses. “Collectors operate here with my goodwill. Patrons attend because I choose to allow them. I may do exactly as I please, when I please, for as often as I please. Never mistake that again.”

  “Hawke.” A hand curved around his arm, and I did not dare look away from Hawke’s measured stare to weigh Mr. Strangeway’s features, a pale blur over my captor’s shoulder. “Leave her, mate, she’s no risk to me.”

  “She’s a nuisance.”

  I held my tongue, but barely.

  “Nuisance, perhaps, but she’s too young for your brand of attention and too British for mine.”

  I winced. “Why are you so focused on my place of birth?”

  Hawke did not touch me, turning away with an impatience I could all but feel lashing off him in razor-sharp edges.

  Strangeway frowned at me. “You are no factory girl, am I right?”

  “I told you, and I cannot make it much plainer.” Now I displayed impatience, more than I should have, given my injured status. “I am a collector, working for a Mr. Chattersham, to whom your debts are owed.”