Sprat held out the lamp. ‘You take this, my lady. He don’t like light. Keep to that side,’ she gestured to the left, ‘and move real slow.’
Helen hooked her fingers around the tin handle on the side of the lamp, the metal still warm from Sprat’s grip. The candle within was little more than a stump, the flame close to its end.
Sprat stepped into the dark, stinking cell. ‘Lookee, Lester. I got some bread.’
Helen followed, shielding the light from the panting young man.
Sprat inched closer, holding out the bread. ‘You gotta sit down if you want it.’
Slowly Helen sidestepped to the chest, the lamp casting long shadows of Sprat and Lester upon the back wall. The chain clinked.
Helen stopped, muscles tensing, ready to pull the girl out of harm’s way. ‘Be careful!’
‘Don’t worry, my lady. Me an’ Lester is good friends. I do this all the time,’ Sprat said as Lester sank down onto his haunches. ‘There you go.’ She passed him a piece broken off the bread.
Helen crouched beside the chest. Made of cheap wood and no lock. Apparently a madman was guard enough. She placed the lamp on the floor and, with a formless prayer made of hope and need, lifted the lid. The lamplight caught flashes of silver poking out from dirty calico wrappings — a spout and the dome of a sugar shaker. Someone’s treasures. Or more likely, their haul. But where was the journal?
She shifted the wrapped teapot, and a gilt candlestick below it. Ah, something encased in leather, slotted between the wrapped flat shape of a tray and the side of the chest. She slid her fingers down the narrow space, hooked them around a leather thong and pulled out a book. No larger than her own hand and bound in stained green leather.
‘I’ve got it,’ she said.
Sprat looked over her shoulder again. ‘Are yer sure, my lady? Yer don’t wanna nab the wrong thing.’
Good point, Helen thought. She had never actually seen the journal, only the post bag that Lowry had carried it in. She had to check. There was time — no one knew they were in the cell — and if it was the journal, then she could rip out the precious pages about the Comte. Please let them be there, she prayed. She untied the thong and opened the book, turning the front page to the lamplight. The scrawled words were written in a pale rusty ink. Even as she thought blood, a deep, roiling nausea hit her, like one of Martha Gunn’s waves, slamming her onto her knees and hunching her around a hard retch.
‘My lady!’
She forced her head up.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sprat was slowly backing away from Lester. Coming to her aid.
‘Do not come any nearer,’ Helen gasped. ‘It is alchemy.’
Now she remembered. In the Lewes tavern, Lowry had told her that reading the journal had made him puke. But this was way beyond mere sickness. She felt as if her innards were being ripped from their moorings.
Sprat stopped her slow creep. ‘Alchemy? Ain’t that magic?’
‘In a way. It is written with murdered people’s blood.’ And, if Lowry had been telling the truth, the blood of Deceivers. ‘It is making me sick.’
‘Dead’uns’ blood?’ Sprat gave a sniff of disgust. ‘I’d reckon so.’
Helen slowly straightened. It did not matter if she vomited out her internals, she must find the information about the Comte. She drew a shaking breath and, squinting through the mounting pain, turned the pages. Each had a title at the top: a person’s name or a notation like Rumour or Myth. Benchley had method in his madness. Although one page seemed to indicate nothing more than madness: it was entirely filled with the legend GD2, over and over again. Was it someone’s initials?
Her stomach heaved again, sour bile burning her throat. She would have to be quicker. She flipped more pages. The names were written clearly, but the rusty scrawl below them was in some kind of code. Initials and abbreviations and …
She retched again and again, the spasms deep and unforgiving. Her heartbeat thundered from the strain, the power of the blood alchemy scritch-scratching in her mind like a nest of rats.
She heard the chain shift and rattle.
‘It’s all right, Lester,’ Sprat sang. ‘It’s all right.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘You all right, my lady?’
Helen nodded and wiped her mouth, her chest and diaphragm aching. Maybe she was flipping too fast through the pages. She slowly turned the next page: Hallifax. Another: Dempsey. She felt a sudden heaving lurch, her vision blurring from the violence of the hard convulsion. One more: Pike.
She blinked, clearing the blur from her eyes. Holy star! Benchley had written about Pike. She had to read that entry, whatever it cost. Taking a deep, stomach-steadying breath, she held the pale writing up to the lamp again.
12 March 1807. Messenger came 7 of evening. I Pike killed Sir D in botched reclaim. Fool desperate to cover up. Obliged. Told him one day I would call in the vowels.
As she finished reading the last word, the spasms slammed through her body, the journal falling from her grasp. There was nothing left in her guts to bring up. Every wrenching gasp was dry and deep, pushing her onto her hands and knees.
‘My lady, stop readin’ it!’ Sprat pleaded. ‘I think it’s doin’ somethin’ bad to Lester, an’ it’s makin’ me feel sick too.’
‘Not too much longer,’ Helen said. She slowly drew herself upright, back onto her knees, as stiff as an old woman.
Lester’s one good eye was fixed upon the journal, his thin body rocking, fingers shredding the bread into tiny crumbs. Sprat was right: the book clearly disturbed him too. It seemed the blood alchemy affected everybody, but especially any kind of Reclaimer or Deceiver energy, be it Lester’s vestige or Lowry’s fading Terrene power. And for a full Reclaimer like herself, it was like poison.
She shook her head, trying to bring what she had read about Pike back into focus. He had killed his own Reclaimer and enlisted Benchley to help hide the fact. No wonder he had been desperate to find the journal: he knew Benchley would have recorded such a damning piece of information. Even so, Benchley had written a botched reclaim. Surely that meant it had been an accident. Why did Pike feel compelled to hide it? He had clearly placed himself at Benchley’s mercy by doing so: the phrase the vowels meant IOU. Without a doubt, Benchley would have called in that debt many times over.