Bloodied, exhausted, Alice somehow managed to drag Mrs. Harrogate clear.
The drughr was long gone by then, Jacob Marber and Coulton gone with it. The weird shimmering gash in the air had closed over.
Alice wrestled Mrs. Harrogate through the dying glow of the lantern, their shadows crooked in the smoke. The black dust in the dark was choking. Mrs. Harrogate’s feet left long dark streaks like a trail in the grime. Alice went back for the lantern and walked ahead and set the lantern carefully down and then went back and dragged Mrs. Harrogate farther. In this way, bit by bit, she made her slow return back up through the damp and the muck of the tunnel, toward the trapdoor and the warehouse and the world of the living.
They were maybe twenty feet from it when the lantern died for good and Alice, sweating, wheezing, her own wounds bleeding freely, just left it where it stood and hauled Mrs. Harrogate on. The keywrasse was padding alongside in the darkness, its one white paw seeming to glow as it went. There was a faint crack of daylight where the trapdoor didn’t seal and she left the older woman moaning weakly and, because the ceiling was not high, she reached on her toes and pushed. The trapdoor opened lightly; no one had blocked it, thank God. Alice, grunting, hauled herself heavily up into the storeroom.
She could hear men moving about in the warehouse beyond, already at work. She was peering around for something, a rope maybe, something to help her get Harrogate out. Then she spied it: a ladder.
What she was thinking, as she grimaced and dragged the older woman out of that tunnel, back into the world, was how hopeless it all seemed now. Jacob Marber had escaped, with the help of the drughr; if Marber was a monster of terrible strength, the drughr was infinitely worse. Alice did not know fear but she’d known it when the drughr screamed. Coulton, poor Frank Coulton, had been made a litch; he seemed not to know her, let alone himself. Worse, Marber had vanished into thin air, through some kind of portal, and if he could move in such ways, how would she ever find him, corner him, destroy him? The only weapon she had was the keywrasse, and Marber had escaped with one of its weir-bents. Soon the creature would cease to obey Alice’s commands; soon it would leave them, or turn on them, or both. Mrs. Harrogate feared it, and if Alice was learning anything, it was that what Margaret Harrogate feared, she too ought to fear. She thought of the monsters out there, stalking Marlowe and Charlie, and she bit back her fury. She could do nothing.
She sat a long time, just breathing, there in that storeroom. At some point Mrs. Harrogate lost consciousness. That was probably, thought Alice, for the best. At last she got up and somehow got the older woman over one shoulder and, with the keywrasse at her ankles, she staggered out into the roar and whoosh of the warehouse, a bloodstained and ragged figure carrying a body, her face streaked with muck.
Men stopped at their blocks of tackle to gape, men held a hand to barrels still suspended in the air to stare. The hell with it. Alice just set her jaw and stumbled past, out to the docks, and from there into the gray haze of morning carriages.
The first hansom refused on account of their appearance and the second refused to take the cat. The third was shabby and stained and charged her double but it took them directly to 23 Nickel Street West. Alice got out, ignoring the driver’s disapproving look, the way he knuckled back his cap and sniffed, as if she and Mrs. Harrogate had been out drinking or worse. The driver didn’t offer any help. Alice hauled Mrs. Harrogate through the iron gate and inside.
The house was dim, still. The keywrasse sniffed at a table leg, then vanished into the spill of shadow from the hall beyond. A door stood open. A stuffed boar’s head on the wall hung undisturbed above a curtain. Alice waited a moment, listening. Then she carried Harrogate up and settled her in her bed, and at a basin she washed her own face and greasy hair, and then she went back downstairs and out into the street. She found a crossing sweep in front of Blackfriars Bridge and she gave the shivering lad two shillings and told him to fetch a doctor fast as he could. She held a third up between her fingers and told him it was his when the doctor arrived.
Then she went across to their rented room and collected up their things and settled with the landlady and dragged everything, roughly, through the intersection to No. 23.
Her head was aching, her knuckles were sore, the pain in her ribs was worse. She sat downstairs and waited for the doctor. He was an old man, Irish, out of breath even before climbing the stairs, and he sat with Mrs. Harrogate and pulled out a pocket watch and took her pulse and lifted her eyelids and frowned. He felt her knees; he turned her legs carefully at the hips. The crossing sweep lurked in the doorway, all eyes and grime, the third shilling in his fist.
“It was a fall from a horse,” said Alice, standing. “She can’t feel her legs.”
“Some fall,” the doctor grunted. He ran a hand over his whiskers. “And all these scratches?”
“Twigs. She was thrown in the park.”
He picked something from his tongue. Tobacco. Then he unhooked his spectacles, tired. “She’ll not walk again,” he said bluntly. “I’m sorry.” He took from his bag a small vial of medicine. “For the pain,” he said.
Alice was past weeping. Weariness was all. She didn’t know what to do; it was a feeling she wasn’t used to, and she didn’t like it. When Harrogate awoke, moaning, Alice administered the medicine, and the older woman fell back again, and slept again, and Alice washed the blood and dirt from Mrs. Harrogate’s face and throat and left her. The last night she’d spent in this house, Coulton had still been alive, and she’d spent it sitting upright in the little room down the hall watching Marlowe’s and Charlie’s faces as they slept. That was in her too, and she didn’t know what to do with it.
The keywrasse came to her all that day and rubbed against her ankles and leaped into her lap, purring. She would run a hand along its fur and scratch behind its ears and look down at it, a long wiry creature, its four golden eyes narrowing, and she would suppress a shudder, remembering what she had seen in that underground chamber, the size and many-legged frenzy of it.
“What are you?” she would murmur, stroking it. “You know Margaret is scared of you? Yes she is. Maybe I should be too, hm? What are we going to do, little one? How can we stop Marber now? I don’t even have both your weir-bents anymore.” She stared out the window at the poisonous yellow fog. “Margaret said you’ll get strange if we can’t lock you back away.”
She was just talking, murmuring to herself. But something came to her then, almost like a sound, except it was in her mind. A flash of pain, an image all red in color, a sudden quick flare of understanding. I am, I am, I am. The voice was in her head, soft, accentless, insistent. Then it was gone and there was something else, a kind of knowing: somehow Alice understood that the keywrasse was not only trapped by the weir-bents, made captive, as Margaret had explained, like a fish in a bowl—but also that it was wrong, deeply wrong, and that the poor creature oughtn’t to be locked up. It ought to be free.
Her hand fell still. She was staring down at the keywrasse in shock. “What— Was that … Is that you?” she whispered. “Are you talking to me?”
The keywrasse flicked an ear, purred.
She stood abruptly and the creature leaped down, padded to the corner of the sofa, paused. Its tail stood high.