The True History of the Strange Brigade

by Cassandra Khaw

  De Quincey was not some radical activist—he had little time for politics. Yet he was accused of being a radical, in proposing that any woman of the ancient world had ever had power rivalling a man’s.

  He heard a throat clear behind him. “Professor De Quincey?”

  He turned to face a large bearded man, with jowls that would make a bulldog jealous. His coat was white with snow. He removed his hat to reveal curly grey hair, and a thick moustache bristled beneath a large nose, atop which sat perfectly round glasses.

  “Yes?” De Quincey put down the chalk, automatically put on his Smile for Strangers, and dusted his hands.

  “Good afternoon, professor. I hope I’m not interrupting some, er, some kind of formula?” Even from a distance, De Quincey couldn’t help stare at the man’s large hands, now gesturing at the board behind him.

  “Ah, don’t worry. The point of writing it down is so you don’t forget it.” He stepped from behind the large lecture desk. “Sorry, but who did you…”

  “My manners. I’m Inspector Warren.” The two men shook hands fiercely. “I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but I figured it would be better to come and ask you the questions myself.”

  De Quincey’s brain moved through the man’s position to questions. “I’m… I’m sorry. Questions about…?”

  Warren blinked at him. “Your father, sir. His… disappearance?”

  De Quincey frowned. “I saw my father only last week.”

  Warren licked his lips and cleared his throat. “My apologies, sir. But… I’m sorry, has no one informed you? This… I—”

  “My father is very old, Inspector, and known for his vanishing acts. I’m surprised his nurse didn’t tell you.”

  “She’s dead, sir.”

  De Quincey felt the world slip beneath him. He took several sharp breaths and grabbed the side of a desk. The lights in the lecture theatre seemed, suddenly, only to extend the gloom, instead of creating the comfort he was so used to. He felt a slow, creeping shiver.

  “…of the crime, though no money was missing.” De Quincey realised Warren was talking, or rather reading. The man had not yet noticed De Quincey’s sudden discomfort. “So we—Oh, my, professor, are you quite well? I’m sorry for this news.”

  “No, please, continue. You say Sarah is dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir. I’m afraid this doesn’t appear to be a burglary gone wrong, as I indicated. The body was… well. I suppose it’ll be in the news, anyway: It was vicious. Very vicious. We’ve seen that kind of viciousness before and we suspect… well, there may be a pattern, were it not for the fact that your father is missing.”

  “Do you think he…?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say much, sir. We are concerned for his whereabouts, naturally. Right now we mainly just want him for questioning. I’m afraid I can’t go into much more than that.”

  De Quincey tried to breathe.

  “Alright, let’s go through this… slowly.” De Quincey looked around. “I have a half an hour until my next class. Please won’t you come to my office.”

  After showing him through the dusty halls, dodging students and other faculty members, the two men arrived at De Quincey’s office. He tried to shove tea at the inspector, providing an opportunity to do something with his hands.

  “I apologise again for being the one to bring this to your attention, professor.” The other man took the cup in his hands, leaning back in the old couch, making the leather squeak. De Quincey waved his hands.

  “Please. It is not your fault it happened. I… I just find it strange I wasn’t informed earlier. A week, you say?”

  “Yes.” The detective sipped the tea and De Quincey realised he had not asked about milk or sugar. Too late now, and the other man didn’t pass comment. He looked back at De Quincey through steamed glasses. “Though, forgive me for saying, I had heard you and your father were not on speaking terms.” De Quincey didn’t know whether to interpret this as accusation or not—or indeed whether the observation was of a criminal or familial nature. He had never been the best son.

  “He and I never quite saw… eye to eye.” De Quincey walked to his desk, sitting down and nursing his tea.

  “Even though you took over his old position? My father would be ecstatic if I’d stayed at the factory…”

  “It was never his position,” snapped De Quincey. “Plenty of great professors came before him and many came after.” The other man touched his mouth and looked down. De Quincey closed his eyes, focusing on breathing. “What I mean is… today, my father would not be caught dead near an institution that so dedicated itself to science.”

  The sound of pen scratching filled the room, and for once, it was not De Quincey.

  “I have to ask… what does this have to do with my father’s disappearance?”

  “As I’m sure a man of your intelligence knows,” Warren said, pointing at him with a pen, “knowing more about an individual helps you locate them. After all, isn’t that how you managed to uncover…” Warren flipped through another little book De Quincey hadn’t noticed before. “Ur?”

  “Ur was an ancient city, not a person,” De Quincey said, clasping his hands together. “And, no, I didn’t discover it. I found artefacts there, true, but Ur is not mine.”

  “The point is,” Warren said, shrugging, “information helps discovery, whether it’s ancient cities or elderly academics.”

  “Very well.” De Quincey sighed. “What else can I help you with? And who exactly is looking for my father, while you are questioning me in his old office?”

  “I’m not the only person assigned to this case, professor. Given the brutal murder’s pattern to… other cases you may have seen in the news, it is of high significance to the higher ups.” Even De Quincey’s unconscious provocation withered before Warren’s focus. He was nothing if not persistent, a quality De Quincey had tried to foster in his own students and colleagues.

  After finding out about De Quincey’s whereabouts and more information on his father, the inspector finally stood up, thanked him and left, muttering apologies for the inconvenience and sympathies for his father’s disappearance. De Quincey remained seated after the other man had left. He stared out at his empty office. On the other wall hung a ragged map of a part of Egypt De Quincey knew well, from old expeditions. This map, a copy of a copy of a copy, from a time long passed. Writing, in a jagged script something like cuneiform, coiled around the corners, though mostly lost where the cloth had tattered. His father had put it there; as a boy, he would often enter the old man’s office and find him staring at it.

  De Quincey squinted. He stood up slowly, making his way toward it. Something was off about this giant unfurled map—a map that had haunted him since he’d entered this office years ago, as its new occupant. He had never been able to remove it, for reasons he had not fully understood. But today something… itched. Like noticing the hour hand had moved on a clock.

  He put his face close to the glass. In the corner of the map, ink and writing. De Quincey leaned in close, his breath steaming the glass. His eyes widened as he recognised his father’s terrible handwriting:

  Find me.

  HE GOT TO his father’s house.

  De Quincey looked up at the quiet, empty family house. His mother gone, his father missing. He couldn’t tell how long the police had remained and investigated, but he wanted to return. It was to be his house: his mother had left it in her will to him. While his father had been raised in wealth and lost it to habits and vices, his mother—with her dark skin and unspoken history—had created wealth from ashes in a world that made barriers of her race and gender.

  He unlocked the front door, entering the cold, dark house. He immediately felt the damp. How long had the house been left in this state?

  He closed the door behind him and locked it. His mother had been almost obsessive about security, locking windows and doors, keeping blinds shut. The house was patrolled, and there was never even once an attempt a
t a break-in, but still he would find her peering intently through the blinds at night. It was only now that he thought maybe she’d not been afraid of burglars.

  He lit a candle and began walking through the halls of childhood. The lounge area, with a fireplace that remembered only the ghost of flames; chairs covered in dust; a carpet that had not been straightened for some time. He tried to find lamps to light but saw only their skeletons, knocked to the ground. His mother never entered this room—this was the domain of his father, for entertaining guests. No, his mother dwelt elsewhere, making a life for the family.

  He walked to the large doors on the other side of the floor. One of the ornately carved handles had fallen off, rolled into the darkness and never been put back. How long had it been since someone had been here? He turned the other handle, pushing at the wood, hearing its groan. Light poured into the next room with difficulty, struggling against spider-webs, overturned tables, books, lamps, clothes, maps, globes. It stumbled over statues and busts, stubbed its toe on a bookshelf and eventually dived into a dusty corner. He entered and slowly waved away the webs, raising his candle high to look at his mother’s study.

  Here. This was where she had crafted her legacy: the invisible woman creating a business empire, her great many ships traversing the world, staffed by the most skilled of workers.

  A brown woman was not an entirely uncommon sight in England these days, but a brown woman who was not only married but seemed to rule over a white man was. Of course, his father had been the face of any business aspirations, and spoke on behalf of the hidden empire that grew in this study; but it was not his empire, but that of the woman rarely seen, with the hint of an accent no one could identify. De Quincey poked at the dust on the desk, wondering just how it had begun. How could a woman in this time achieve so much, yet still be regarded so little?

  And now she was gone, lost after one of her many voyages. An entire ship full of people, vanished to the sea, joining a long chorus of forgotten expeditions, swallowed by the tides of history.

  Her legacy still floated to the top of his mind, however. Someone with so little, achieving so much.

  This was central to his book on the woman-kings of Egypt, which his publishers did not like at all. Those who spend their lives digging into the past find themselves first compelled, not by knowledge of the world, but of themselves.

  A sudden sound behind him made him turn. He squinted but could make little out in the gloom. “Hello?”

  No one replied. He walked further, back down into the main hallway. It came again, this time from upstairs.

  “Father?” He ascended the staircase, his light swinging across rotten portraits and old photographs. He avoided one broken stair that for decades they could never fix, due to ‘foundations’ and ‘rot’ and other terms that had a builder shrugging. Now he was on the first floor, curtain billowing, shadows stretching.

  His father’s bedroom. That was the source. His footfalls pounded like a heartbeat as he made his way forward. He opened the door and saw nothing, for a moment; then a shadow by his father’s table. A shrouded figure started, scattering papers. Whoever it was, they had no lantern.

  “Stop! Who are you? This is private property!” The figure froze, and De Quincey felt cold. He looked around and saw that parts of the room were wreathed in… fog? That wasn’t possible. His breath misted in front of him. He reached his hand out and saw cold begin to take it.

  He looked up, then, and the figure was gone. Only moonlight streamed in, covering his father’s desk.

  “Hello!”

  He was sure there had been someone there. He walked to the desk. His father’s large chair was slightly crooked—that’s what it must’ve been. From a certain angle, a certain viewpoint, it had… what? Caused the room to get cold? The fog was gone; his breath no longer misted. It was the dark, and this room, and the memories. His confusion.

  His father’s messy desk had been this way since he had grown up. He wasn’t sure how a man so disorganised had managed to obtain the respect and standing of a professor. His father had never been particularly talented at remembering names and dates; he was undisciplined; yet his proficiency with words, his ability to be amicable with every person of any background, race or gender, seemed to tide him through everything.

  But looking at the desk now, it was not the messiness of a troubled intellect, but a frightened, desperate, lonely man.

  Gone was the large, looping script he always knew, giving way to a hasty, crabbed scrawl. Letters and numbers and strange symbols seemed to dot every inch of a page. Different colours, different pens—and, it appeared, different hands? But why? He scooped up the papers, wondering why the police had not obtained them.

  He took the steps downstairs two at a time. He stepped through the door and closed it.

  SHADOWS FLOWED THROUGH London’s gaslit streets, as horse-drawn carts echoed their way down cobbled roads. Mist swirled around the few people still outside on Fetter Lane at this hour, casting each in an effervescent cage. A figure moved purposefully down these streets, barely acknowledging others. It turned into a grimy building—one of the few well-lit on the street. Two men opened the large doors as the figure approached, and the newcomer swept into a large hall, bustling with papers, machines, people running and shouting. The bookcases lining the walls, reaching from floor to ceiling, would’ve made anyone immediately declare it a library, though that would’ve been an understatement.

  She lowered her hood and cast about, looking for someone; people lowered their gaze or gaped as she swept by them.

  She reached the woman she’d singled out.

  “Has it been found?”

  The other woman—Head of Archives, to use her formal title—took her time acknowledging Webster’s presence. She raised her dark eyes and blinked slowly, but had evidently already concluded who the interloper was, why she was here and what her purpose was. “Yes… Lady Webster.”

  The accent took Webster by surprise. She’d worked with foreigners her entire life, but had not expected one in this post. “Where?”

  The woman jerked her head first toward a man standing close by, clutching three books and visibly sweating, then at a nearby map. It was only a few feet away from her—closer to her than to the man himself—but she seemed unwilling to move from her spot and the man almost dropped his books in his hurry to bring the unfurled map to her hands. Webster half-expected him to bow. She rolled her eyes while the other woman unrolled the map and pointed.

  Webster nodded. “As we suspected.”

  A nod. “We’ve lost contact with the crew I sent.”

  “How many days ago?”

  “Five.”

  Webster sniffed. Too long. Too much depending on this.

  “What are your orders?” asked the archivist.

  Webster removed a glove, squeezing it. Moisture dripped on the carpet, splashing on some nearby papers. “Tell me what you know.”

  The other woman nodded, finally moving. “The crown was located thanks to the documents sent in last month. We took some time to decode the translations, but we had help from… a local contact.” The woman looked away—someone she knew? Loved? Hated? Both? Webster didn’t particularly care. “There is, however, a problem we’ve not been able to solve.”

  She led the way to an office as neat as the main hall was untidy, and closed the door behind them. Webster looked around, but the room gave away nothing about the occupant. Nothing was out of place.

  “What is it?”

  The woman had already begun flipping through files—she wasn’t searching, Webster decided; she knew exactly where the documents were. The archivist pulled out a large folder and handed it to Webster, who untied the string and pulled out several papers.

  “Professor Archimedes De Quincey?” Webster read, thumbing through the man’s life. Impressive, for his age.

  “He’s writing a book on female leaders of ancient Egypt.”

  “So I see. What does this have to do with Dagan’
s crown?”

  “De Quincey thinks he’s found it, and is flying over in the next few days to retrieve it. In fact, he already has a group digging through the location he’s marked.”

  Webster sighed. “I suspected as much when you said he was a problem.” She put the folder on the desk and pointed. “What I want to know is, why is he looking for it?”

  The woman sat in her chair and rocked back on it. “De Quincey has a knack for finding objects his superiors want. I… I don’t think he even cares about the crown. He just needs funding for his book.”

  Webster had to blink. Funding. He just wants funding? “So why have we not reached out? We have the money.”

  “As you have surmised, Lady Webster,” the archivist said, leaning forward and touching the folder with one finger, “he is not dim. If a random benefactor comes out the blue to give him money, he’ll know we’re paying him off. His curiosity is a tiny flame now; we would fan it into a bonfire. He would tear apart the world to know why. That’s his job, after all.” She sniffed.

  “So what do you propose? You appear to know the man well.”

  The woman ignored the probe. “He won’t be bought off. I think he should be brought in.”

  Lady Webster closed her eyes for a moment. Recruitment was not something she’d expected to think about this month. Another one for the Department? A stuffy, vest-wearing professor, no less?

  “I disagree.” Lady Webster stared at the file. “He must be reasoned with. He would jeopardise our operations. Besides, we simply don’t need him.”

  “He has a great mind.”

  The drone from outside barely filtered into the office, but now Lady Webster felt it closing in around her. Despite their respective positions, the woman was not one to knuckle under—she needed to be persuaded, or Webster would make an enemy for life. Webster respected that, but this was protocol, and protocol existed for a reason.

  Still, pushing would be as good as yelling. This woman’s guard was already up; it would become a wall of spikes and thorns if Webster challenged her further.