“Mr. Fox,” said a voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“These are my private quarters, sir,” replied Felix sharply. He wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. “You are here from the Daily Almanac, I presume?”
He sat at his desk and fumbled at the lantern until he’d lit its wick and then he closed the little glass door and peered up. The stranger was standing in the darkness beside the filing cabinet, his face wrapped by a black scarf. Felix swallowed, uneasy. He looked nothing like a small-town reporter. The man was tall, thin, wearing a long black coat or cloak, silk hat low at his eyes.
“Come, sir, state your business,” Felix added, suddenly irritable. He was tired; it was no hour for a person to call unannounced. He fidgeted with his collar. “I have a circus to manage, if you don’t mind. These are my hours of work.”
“You need not concern yourself with this evening’s performance, Mr. Fox. It has been taken care of.” The stranger’s voice was very soft, very low. He had an English accent. Before Felix could ask what the devil he was talking about, the stranger added, “You had a visitor recently, a man from England. Went by the name of Coulton, yes?”
Felix was starting to feel strangely short of breath. “Who?” he said. He looked for a glass of water but there was none.
“Coulton,” repeated the stranger. “A detective.”
“I never met anyone by the name of Coulton,” croaked Felix. His breaths were coming quick now, shallow. “Tell me, sir, is it smoky in here? Shall we step outside?”
“Do not lie to me, Mr. Fox.”
Felix got to his feet. He was feeling dizzy. “Forgive me, I just need some air—”
“Sit down.”
Shocked, Felix sat.
“You will answer my questions, sir.”
Felix felt suddenly afraid. He stared at the stranger. He didn’t know how, but all at once he understood it was the stranger’s doing, this asphyxiating, this choking off of his air.
“The detective,” the voice said again, patiently. “Frank Coulton. Tell me about him.”
“It was a woman,” Felix gasped. “Alice Quicke. Here. For Brynt’s boy.”
“Brynt’s boy?”
“Marlowe. Was working. Sideshow. For us.”
The stranger shifted in the darkness, nodding. “And what precisely did he do, this boy?”
Felix’s eyes bulged, his heart was thundering in his chest. “Nothing. He glowed. Blue. Like a lantern. Please, I never asked—”
“Tell me about the woman, Alice … Quicke. She took the boy?”
“To England. Yes. Halliday. His name. Was Halliday.”
“When did she leave?”
“Last week—”
“I’m afraid you’ve been lied to, Mr. Fox,” said the stranger calmly. “There is no Halliday boy. This child, Marlowe, has been stolen from you. He will be taken to a manor house in Scotland. The Cairndale Institute. They will do things to him there, awful things. I’d hoped to spare him that.”
Felix was scrabbling at his collar, pulling at his tie. The stranger had stepped forward now out of the darkness but somehow it still seemed to smolder up off him, as if ash were coming out of his clothes, out of his very skin.
“What I’d really like to hear, Mr. Fox,” he continued, “is everything you know about this boy. His age, what he looks like, where he’s from, who’s been caring for him. Everything. Leave nothing out. Could you do that for me?”
Stars were flaring at the edges of Felix’s vision. “Yes,” he gasped.
“Excellent,” said the stranger, coming closer. He sat in a chair facing the desk, folded one leg over the other, smoothed out his trousers. With each gesture a curl of black dust, like smoke, rose and dissipated into the darkness. “Let’s not waste each other’s time, then,” he murmured.
He took off his hat, and unraveled the long black scarf, and that was when Felix saw his face.
* * *
Of course that bastard Beecher couldn’t tell her anything, thought Brynt. What did he ever know that didn’t fit in a ledger?
She lowered her powder and horsehair brush, stared into the looking glass Marlowe’d had her nail inside the door of their wagon all those months ago. Marlowe. The looking glass was for him, so she had to hunch on the floor to see. Her stage face stared out, white with powder, eyes blackened and fierce in the flickering light. She was otherwise naked. Her tattoos covered her flesh, each one a memory or a story of where she’d been, who she’d been. A dragon curled around a half-moon from the hand of a Chinese artist in San Francisco. That was the week she’d heard her brother died. A broken tree soared over her left ribs, a gift from a Gypsy artist in Spain. Roma, he called his people. They’d been lovers for two weeks, and then she’d woken one day in a field to find him gone, stolen away in the dark. He’d left her his gold chain. Foxes, phoenixes, pixies, sprites. Between her heavy breasts lay an ornate crucifix, Jesus in his crown of thorns, his sorrowing face turned away. That one she’d paid out her last dollars for in the days just before the reverend’s death. Before Eliza Grey had vanished, and Marlowe became Brynt’s to love. And there was a last space, uninked, just over her heart, which she would one day fill with the silhouette of a shining boy. Her boy. On the little table the candle stub guttered in its dish and she half stood, wrestled into her underthings, into her dress, swept her warmest shawl over her shoulders. She blew out the candle.
Never mind Beecher, she thought. If she wanted to follow Marlowe, she’d have to talk to Felix Fox himself.
At the door she hesitated, glanced back. The little wagon was dim, narrow. There was nothing in it she loved. She couldn’t even stand upright. But everywhere she looked she saw Marlowe and heard him, his serious little voice. She’d packed a carpetbag of clothes and personal effects and she reached under the table and took out the book of engravings that Marlowe used to like to look at and she worked that into the carpetbag too. Then she looked around at the wagon. Let the woman who talked to ghosts have it. Brynt would be gone by morning.
Or maybe gone, she corrected herself, as she went down the juddering wood slats, stepped off squelching into the mud. Hopefully gone. It was night now, the circus was in full play. The air was cold. She could see the colored lanterns of the big top glowing behind the row of wagons. She’d hear what Felix Fox had to tell her first, yes. Then see. Though she’d traveled a fair piece of the world, and though she had little fear for her own safety, she’d still need somewhere to begin, some way of picking up Marlowe’s trail.
She hadn’t gone ten paces when there came a whoosh from somewhere behind her, almost like a sudden great sucking in of air, and then an orange glow backlit the sky. She felt a wall of heat roll out past the wagons, the tents, and turned her head. The big top was on fire.
For a long moment Brynt did nothing. Just stood in the eerie bloom of light and stared, trying to make sense of what she knew to be true. And then she started to run.
There were others running with her, past her. Men, women. Someone was hollering for buckets, for water. The big top was a curtain of flame, the fires blue and white and crawling across the tarpaulin and up the beams like a living thing. The heat was immense. Brynt could hear the screams of horses within, bloodcurdling, awful, and she stalked the perimeter, staring at the faces soot-stained and horrified and hollering at them to get water, to make a line, to start clearing everything out of the way. In the light everything gleamed garish and hallucinatory and weird, the shadows playing across the grass like a peculiar living tattoo. There were men and women from the town, from Remington, some only half-dressed, all of them running across the field to help. Brynt saw Mr. Beecher in his shirtsleeves hauling a bucket in each fist, chewing at an unlit cigar. She saw the muleteer leading a limping horse out of the shine, heard his cussing over the roar. She saw a towering clown in melted greasepaint throwing water on the fire, bucket after bucket after bucket.