The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway

by Karina Cooper

  I must have touched a nerve, perhaps made him realize the gravity of his own situation, for Strangeway went still. The skin about his eyes tightened, and he seized my arm in his ungloved hand. So grasped, I had no choice but to stumble in pace as he dragged me to the table, beyond, and all but tossed me into a carved chair. I bit back a yelp of pain as the abrupt settling of my backside against unyielding wood jarred my wound. “Tell me everything you know,” he ordered sternly.

  Hugging my side, I met his gaze, a simple dark hazel with none of the devilment he’d displayed only moments ago, and weighed my options.

  I had none, naturally. Hawke was right.

  I slumped, fighting back tears of frustration as they welled behind my gritty eyes. I was tired, the ache of my injury battered at the fringes of my concentration, and I truly had no conception how to deal with these men. “Very well,” I said, not graciously. “Since you are obviously no more a popinjay than I am a boy, I suppose I’m curious enough to help.”

  As if I’d been given a choice. Hawke’s arched eyebrow suggested as much.

  Try as I might later, I would never be able to master the art of lifting a single eyebrow in such a derisive fashion. I deliberately ignored him. “What do you care to know?” I asked, as politely as if I were serving tea.

  Fanny would have been so very proud.

  “Your name?” Hawke asked, only to shrug his shoulders when Strangeway deftly interrupted with, “Unimportant.”

  I did not like the feeling of relief that caused me. In defense to the unwelcome softening of my dislike, I volunteered a different bit of information. “Your name was given on the collection wall, Mr. Strangeway, as well as the knowledge that you make your home in Chelsea, as—” I almost added as I do, and caught it in time. “As well as,” I amended, “enjoying the company of the stews.”

  He did not look pleased. “So the role I’d chosen was fashioned,” Strangeway said.

  “Did you not intend to play the reprobate?” Hawke asked. “A job well done.”

  “Too well, obviously. I’d meant to be taken in to the fold, not collected by it.” My quarry looked to me with none of the proper deference he should have for his collector. I bit back a sigh. “You say for debts?”

  “Enough debt that Mr. Chattersham is willing to accept payment of your skin. The notice claimed you are to be taken dead or alive.” And because I could not bear the skepticism in either man’s face, I added sharply, “I would choose your life.”

  “You are too kind,” replied Strangeway, his voice so understated as to be practically dust. “Have you the notice?”

  I frowned. “Why would I have it?”

  For a moment, Strangeway could only gape. It was a unique sort of expression, one torn between incredulity and dismay. “You did not remove it from the wall?”

  “Of course not, ’tis not my wall.”

  To both men’s credit, they did not laugh. I would have, which suggests something rather unkind about myself. Instead, Hawke returned to the map, to stare at the lines in silence. If his shoulders moved suspiciously, I could not be sure of it.

  Uneasily, I attempted to keep both men in my direct line of sight. Difficult, when Strangeway gave up on looming over me and instead moved to the carved mantel and its pale green figurines arrayed along the top. Whatever it was he sought among them, he did it in like silence.

  I wriggled in my chair, uncomfortable. “Was I supposed to take it?” I finally asked, my voice too small in the thickened quiet.

  Neither answered. I was left with the distinct impression that I had disappointed them, somehow. Flushing, I tried again. “I would like to know what happened on the train.”

  “And I would like an elephant,” Hawke muttered to the table he studied. “Yet I am left with none.” A fact that would not change. Lions, yes. Elephants were never part of the Menagerie.

  I pulled a face that I am not proud of. Especially when Hawke glanced up in time to see my tongue protruding from between my lips, my nose wrinkled and one eye larger than the other.

  The unholy amusement that filled his gaze must have been a trick of the firelight. I did not hold his stare long enough to know for sure.

  “It was an unfortunate act of timing and opportunity,” Strangeway said, unaware—or perhaps deliberately taking no notice—of my childish behavior. “My...brothers are woefully impatient, and too bloodthirsty, besides.”

  Brothers? “What brothers?” I demanded.

  “It is a complicated measure,” he said slowly.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I suspected the collector, but you? You’re an agitator of the Fenian Brotherhood, as well?”

  “Not as such. To be honest, I’d expected more of a hand from their London sources. Apparently, brotherhood only carries one so far.” His mouth tightened, a grim edge. “Perhaps if my need had promised mayhem...” Whatever black thoughts had taken him—a quarrel I was sure he would no doubt take to his brothers one day—it cleared on an added, “And you are treading on dangerous ground. Lass, are you at all aware of the shite you’ve strode through?”

  I resisted the urge to grin at the language spoken so openly in my company. Thrilling as it was, there was too much at stake to lose the thread. “I understand that you were masquerading as a toff in Chelsea,” I said, proud when his eyebrows rose. I had ears, and a brain. I knew what I’d heard. Obviously, Strangeway had taken on a role that had turned on him, somehow. His intent culminated in a collection notice, rather than whatever it was he’d wanted. “And that though you may or may not be wealthy, you appear to have gathered debt after debt in pursuit of some affected role.”

  “Very good. What else?”

  “You keep boorish company,” I said flippantly, and pushed on when Hawke straightened, “which includes the very fiends that set a terrible explosion upon a train filled with people.” My flippancy died, tone terribly serious as I levied upon him all of my judgment. “People who had not done anything to you, might I add.”

  His features, so often set in lines of indifferent amusement, blackened. “I am well aware and carry that burden, believe you me. That we were too late to find the dynamite is no balm at all.”

  I hoped he lived with that forever; a cruel thought from one whose memories were often shrouded and vague. “Why you pulled me from the train, I do not know. Why you keep company with a self-titled captain with a taste for Irish girls, I also don’t know.”

  Strangeway tipped his head back, to look at the ceiling instead of me. It bared a swatch of leather at his throat, hidden beneath his shirt collar. “So you conversed with my compatriot, did you?”

  I blinked. “In a manner of speaking. He was too busy searching. Ostensibly for your Fenian parcel.”

  “And he simply had to mention the Irish lasses, did he?” Something in the way he asked the question warned me that it was rhetorical at best, and unhappy at the worst. With me?

  “He mentioned that he was looking for some,” I said slowly. “I thought it for tupping.”

  “Did he mention American lasses, as well?”

  “No, I rather gained the impression he preferred Irish skirts.”

  He winced, a full expression of reproachful dismay.

  “It would not be the first I’d heard of a man’s particular tastes,” I pointed out—rather reasonably, I was sure. “And not the most peculiar, either.”

  “Lass, you frighten me.” Not, unfortunately, in the way I’d hoped. “What else did he say of it?”

  “Nothing. Mr. Smoot was rather closemouthed.”

  Hawke’s head lifted from his map. “Smoot is here?” A level demand, and it carried a dark menace his deep voice had not borne before.

  My mouth closed, fear a sudden shard of ice in my spine.

  “Not here,” Strangeway replied, leaving the mantel as if idly. It was a nonchalant wander, but one that placed him between Hawke and myself. Not accidentally, unless I missed my guess. “He knows better, Hawke. As do I.”

  “You know his debts
are beyond forgiving,” the Menagerie ringmaster replied, and in that warning, I saw the man that he would one day wholly become. Cruel and powerful, and strangely tolerant in ways his current conceit did not allow. How five years have changed us all.

  “And that is why he has not stepped foot in the Veil’s sight,” Strangeway replied. “Hawke, you know I would not risk his help but for the need.”

  I watched this byplay with my mouth open, sure I resembled more a fish than the girl in boy’s clothes that I was. So Smoot’s debts really were that deep. I wondered what it was he’d spoken of before I’d so weakly succumbed to my wound. Something that could be smuggled in a ship. Opium? Slaves?

  Treasure, perhaps?

  I could only speculate, for I knew without being told that these men would share nothing with me.

  Hawke leaned against the table, as casually poised as a gentleman on walkabout. “Will you take on his debts, then?”

  I did not expect Strangeway to laugh, but laugh he did. Outright, and with no expectation of agreement. “Don’t be daft. His debts are his own. Besides, I rather think he enjoys the promise of a chase.”

  “So he would.”

  I boggled at the two of them, dancing this verbal waltz about debts rather than what I saw as the greater issue. “I beg your pardon,” I interrupted, my tone making it very clear that I begged nothing. “Why aren’t you more concerned about the train?”

  Hawke’s gaze flicked to me. Hardened. “Do I look a constable to you?”

  I blinked. “But...all those people.”

  “They are people,” he replied, utterly without feeling. “They will live and die as everyone else. No one, not even the Fenians, dare to walk on my ground without the Veil’s knowing, and that is all that concerns me. Strangeway, if you won’t sell her, get rid of this stray cat before we continue this.”

  “Wait, how can you be so cruel?” I demanded, refusing to be so left out.

  Strangeway stirred. “Best not to engage a flesh-peddler on questions of morality,” he said to me, wry in tone and laconic of feature. “And leave when he demands it.”

  It took effort, but I ignored the demand to battle Hawke’s pitiless principles, my skin prickling with the exertion. Oh, how I wanted to dress him down right good.

  I did not. “Mr. Strangeway.” I turned to him, instead, resolved to plead if I must. “Back to our business, if you please. I am in dire need of this purse. You cannot possibly understand my circumstances. Mr. Chattersham is offering a large bounty for your skin and I need it in order to live.” There, a twitch of Mr. Strangeway’s groomed whiskers, a tic at his jaw. I’d touched a nerve. “Sir, I’d prefer you kept your skin on and paid your debts instead. Therefore, I am willing to bargain.”

  Strangeway frowned. “I am sorry, lass,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ve no interest in your troubles, save that your injury be tended. That much is done, and I will take on the responsibility for that debt.”

  “Fool,” Hawke muttered.

  “But—”

  “So ends your involvement in my affairs,” said Mr. Strangeway over me. “And the necessity of your presence here. I apologize that you were caught in the mess, and I regret your injury—”

  “To say nothing of the others in that train,” I cut in with no small amount of insolence.

  “—but now I am bored with you,” he continued. And to give truth to his mild words, I saw that his eyes had lost their sparkle, and his posture once more eased to listless boredom. “Hawke?”

  As if that were his cue, Hawke abandoned his indolent lean, wood table creaking as his weight shifted away, and rounded the heavy piece. His intent was clear.

  I shot to my feet. “Bored,” I repeated. “I don’t care if you’re bleeding dead with boredom, sir, you will come with me.” In a move I would come to be woefully familiar with, Hawke seized my arm, grip tight enough to force a small sound of pain from my lips, and dragged me to the far door. “I cannot fail my first collection,” I cried, “I simply can’t!”

  “You are no collector,” Hawke said grimly.

  “I am so! I will prove it.”

  “You will not.” Hawke’s features remained implacable. “You will, however, be escorted out.”

  “You cannot stop me,” I shouted, now entirely unworried about making a fuss. Let them all stare, those servants who may be about. “I will catch my mark!”

  Wordlessly, in part due to my smaller stature, he swept me under his arm, one hand propped against my trousered backside for support. I swore a streak learned at the elbows of the finest abram men outside London, but it earned me no credit. “Cease your foul prattling,” he said, “or I will show you what happens to little black birds who cannot keep their feathers clean.”

  I hissed, anger pulsing against my skin in hot waves of embarrassment and fury. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  The room rotated briefly as he turned me upright, depositing me outside the door with a suddenness that sent shocks through my ankles and knees. Pain detached my intent from my physical ability, and I pitched. He did not catch me.

  Instead, as I fell to the hardwood floor at his feet, his eyes shredded the remains of my composure with knife-like disdain. “You are a child,” he told me, in tones that warned he did not care for children. “You have no sense and even less hope of achieving whatever it is you claim to want.”

  I scrambled to my feet. “You—”

  He turned his back. “Go home, wash the black off and be a good girl. These matters are not for you.” The door closed on his final words, leaving me in stunned, bitterly angry silence.

  Thus did my first meeting with the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie set the tone for subsequent visits.

  Chapter Ten

  I am not ashamed to admit that I cried. Sheer frustration conspired to strip me of my composure, and I sobbed in anger, embarrassment and an increasing amount of pain. I had received my first collecting wound, I had run into the obstinate wall that was Hawke’s cruel indifference, and I had lost my quarry.

  I was a terrible collector.

  And this too brought tears to my eyes.

  Once more, I found myself feeling lonely between the worlds I had been forced into. I had been a thing all my remembered life, bound to a different sort of master than simple servitude. Though the bonds were prettier, it seemed that I would remain in oppression. I was not strong enough to be the collector I had demanded of myself. Gilded cage or otherwise, this new Society life would never fill the hole I felt.

  A hole that the night’s dosage of pain-relieving opium only diminished. It could not heal the ache I felt.

  I am not sure how long I sat in the lane the Menagerie’s footmen had deposited me in, mired in shadow and the thick, choking fog, choking under the weight of my aching heart, but I was not approached, and if I was watched, I did not know. A mess of black soot, smudged filth, tears and terrible frustration was I—convinced that my life was over.

  This point, the lowest I can recall clearly enough to remember it as something other than a dream, became the match that would light the wick of my aspirations. For this was the moment in which a deliberate disregard for the expectations of others overwhelmed the inner voice of the young girl who sobbed for help.

  Purposefully goaded or carelessly delivered, I chose that moment to accept Hawke’s unspoken challenge.

  Dusting myself off did little more than smear the black soot about in a cloud of gray particles, but the act made me feel briskly resolved. There was one clue I had not considered, a hint that seemed to me as obvious now as if it were lit by an aether glow.

  Mr. Chattersham’s name had earned a reaction from the mysterious Mr. Strangeway. So much so that I had easily noticed the difference, cracking his shell of supposed ennui. Mr. Chattersham, whose address for purposes of claiming the bounty placed him in Spitalfields, would have answers for me.

  Perhaps through him, I might learn the nature of Mr. Strangeway’s debts—and what tied him so clearly to the pleasur
e gardens below the drift.

  Find a weakness, find my answer.

  As Big Ben’s bells tolled the ten o’clock hour, I made my way out of London’s Limehouse district, avoiding all I could by way of back streets and careful maneuvering. I was not sure whether Mr. Chattersham would be available, or whether I would come upon an empty abode, but I would wait all bloody night if I was forced to.

  I would not be bilked of my bounty.

  Spitalfields was north and west of Limehouse, once known for its bustling factories and prominent textile industry. Since French silks had proven so much cheaper, however, the whole of the borough had declined, leaving much of it in wallowing in poverty.

  Passing through Whitechapel—years before the notorious murders that would find me hunting on these very streets—left me with a sense of surreal uncertainty, as if I walked as a ghost through the fog-shrouded streets. The occasional body, most often men and occasionally a knot of younger sorts devoid of obvious gender, passed like mirages. The fog shifted around us, fingers of mustard-streaked soot, and rife with the smell of smoke, damp, and occasionally, a bit of moldering rot.

  As the low houses cleared from the all-encompassing shroud, squatting tightly in close lanes, I found my location by way of a sign all but blackened into uselessness. Mr. Chattersham’s written address placed him just south of Flower and Dean Street, which was a great deal more fortunate than I had known to give credit at the time. The common lodging houses on Flower and Dean Street were among the meanest and most dangerous of the borough, a center for the prostitutes that inhabited the area and all the many picker men working with, for, or over them.

  I was too fresh for Flower and Dean Street, easy pickings even with all the know-how I’d accrued in my strange childhood. The cough I muffled, the constant clearing of my throat and reddened eyes would give my game away so much quicker than even opening my mouth, and heaven only knew what sort of fine fettle that would land me in.

  So it was that I passed under the eaves of the worst the impoverished Spitalfields had to offer, my naiveté of London gone unnoticed by eyes much sharper than mine, at this age.