“Get away!” she cried suddenly. “Jooj! Lookit Charlie’s bloody great saw!”
But before the mouselike waif got near, the tall lad, Millard, was pushing forward, grabbing Charlie’s head, turning it side to side. The other kids were crowding round, dirt-streaked faces, big eyes staring.
“Bloody hell,” Millard was saying. “He’s a bloody freak, he is. He’s a monster.”
Charlie pushed him bodily off.
“Charlie’s a monster?” one of the littlest ones said, maybe three years old. She started to cry.
“No—” Charlie whispered.
“He’s Spring-Heeled Jack, he is!” a second kid burst out.
And they scattered from him then, squealing, all except Millard and Gilly, and Charlie himself stumbled backward, pain and anger and humiliation rising in him. He glowered in the dimness at the faces peering out at him from behind barrels, boxes, water-rotted timbers. Everything, the litch, being hunted in the darkness, getting beaten by that bull man just like in his old life in Mississippi, now this, being called a freak, a monster, all of it filled him with something he hadn’t let himself feel, not in a long time.
Rage.
“The hell with you!” he shouted at the ragged faces staring. “The hell with all of you!”
His eyes were wet. He kicked his way out of the warehouse, into the dusk, into the settling fog, running through the chilled cobblestone streets, down shadowy lanes and crooked alleys and across the water-rotted timbers of footbridges. There were torches in brackets over the doors of drinking houses. Otherwise darkness, thickening fog. He felt suddenly uneasy, alone again in the city, thinking of that litch that might yet be out there, seeking him, crawling over the buildings like a pale spider.
He didn’t know how long he wandered. But he came out, sometime in the night, to a wide cobblestoned road, lit by gaslights in the fog, the sound of laughter. Figures passed him. Men dressed in silk hats, ladies in fur stoles, drifting casually along the waterfront. He was back at the river. There were coaches gleaming in the fog. Faces looked disapprovingly at Charlie as he crept past, and he folded his arms over his shirt, knowing how ragged he must look.
Then he was at a bridge, again. He stopped at the railing in the middle of the span. It seemed familiar, but he had no idea if it was the bridge he’d fought the litch on, or if all bridges in London looked the same. The city was a world, he saw in despair; and he’d never find Coulton or Mrs. Harrogate in it, wander it as he would. The fog deepened around him like a living thing, as if it would take him, steal him away.
And then he heard a voice, a voice he knew. A burly bewhiskered figure in a bowler was standing over him, draping a chesterfield at Charlie’s shoulders.
“Mr. Coulton?” Charlie blinked up in amazement. “Is it you? For real?”
Coulton grunted. “I been looking all over the damned city for you, lad.”
“The litch, it—”
“Aye, lad. I know.”
All of a sudden Charlie couldn’t stop himself and he was crying, his back shuddering in great wracking sobs. Coulton held him tight. The dark fog curled around them, drifted past, across the span of Blackfriars Bridge and into the night.
And Charlie let himself be lifted. Charlie let himself be held.
* * *
At precisely the same hour, at Charing Cross station, a stranger stepped slowly down from an express train onto platform three. His boots left sooty prints on the ground. He carried no luggage; his silk hat was without shine, as if coated in grime; his long black coat and his black gloves seemed to suck up all the light surrounding so that porters and travelers alike shrank back, trying not to brush up against him.
He was not alone. Several carriages back, a silver-haired woman in a blue dress and shawl stood glaring. She was enormous, powerful, striking-looking. Her hands and wrists and throat were inked with tattoos. Over the echoing din, she could hear the hiss of steam, the clanking of steel pistons starting up. The man she followed was dangerous, true, but so was she; and as she had done since Liverpool, since embarking in the gritty morning darkness of New York Harbor weeks before, hell, since that blazing night in Remington nearly a month ago now when the big top had burned, she half wished he’d whirl about, and catch sight of her. Because what Brynt wanted was an excuse, a chance to do to him what he’d done to poor Felix Fox. What she wanted was to crush his windpipe with her bare hands.
But he didn’t turn, didn’t see her following, just strode away in the roar, his height accentuated by the tall silk hat, pushing past the crowds at the ticketing booths and along the carrier walk and through the great tunnel and out, into the murky gloom of London. He’d come for her boy, she knew: he was stalking her little Marlowe.
She bit her lip so hard it drew blood. At the Charing Cross entrance she paused, scanning the darkness. Skeletal shapes clattered past. At last she saw him, plunging into the fog.
And Brynt, cracking her knuckles one by one, went after him.
9
23 NICKEL STREET WEST
Alice Quicke and the boy reached London twenty-two days after leaving New York.
She’d been sick on the crossing, breathing the miasmic air, feeling more than seeing Marlowe where he kneeled at her bedside, holding a damp cloth to her face in the splintering light from the porthole. Now, thinner, hollow-eyed, she pushed open the creaking iron gate at Nickel Street West and knocked. She had the address from the papers Coulton had given her, all those long weeks ago on the riverboat out of Natchez.
Mrs. Harrogate answered, triumph in her eyes. Dressed all in black, with her dark veil over her face, the little silver crucifix shining at her throat. She looked past Alice to Marlowe where he stood.
There were workmen behind her, going in and out of the parlor, sawing, hammering, repairing all manner of destruction.
“Redecorating?” Alice said dryly.
The woman turned, clapped her hands, swooped down on the workmen. “Out, out,” she called. “That’s enough for today, thank you, gentlemen, thank you.”
The house was nothing like what Alice had expected. Cheerful, warm, with all the lights burning, its parlor heavily decorated with potted ferns and draped sofas and a clutter of pier tables and even a piano in one corner, ankles dressed. It looked like the workmen had been replacing a pane of glass in a street-side bay window. The caulking was still wet. There were holes in the walls, gouges in the floor. Alice read the struggle as it must have unfolded, writ large in the ruin around her.
The day was dim as it always was in London and she didn’t see Charlie Ovid where he sat, his quiet face watching her, didn’t see him there at all until Marlowe let go of her hand and went right over and sat next to him, swinging one leg and looking shyly up at him.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said, taking off her hat. “It’s good to see you here.”
He managed a weak nod.
“Mr. Ovid is rather tired,” said Mrs. Harrogate smoothly, stepping between them. “As must you be. I’d expected you here earlier, Miss Quicke.”
She shrugged. “Slow crossing.”
“Mm. It would appear so.”
With the workmen gone, Mrs. Harrogate took off her veil. She crouched in front of Marlowe and took his chin in her hand and turned his face side to side.
“Marlowe,” she murmured. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time, child. My name is Mrs. Harrogate. It is my job to see you safely back to where you belong.”