The reverend collapsed in the rain one night, while weaving sickly on a crate, hollering to the passersby on Wentworth Road for the salvation of their souls, and Brynt carried him in her arms back to the rookery. The rain came in through the roof in several places and the wallpaper was long since peeled away and mold grew in a fur around the window. It was in that room on the seventh day of his raving that Eliza and Marlowe heard a soft knock at their door and she rose and opened it, thinking it might be Brynt, and she saw instead a strange man standing there.
A corona of gray light from the landing beyond haloed his beard and the edges of his hat so that his eyes were lost to shadow when he spoke.
“Miss Eliza Grey,” he said.
It was not an unkind voice, almost gentle, the sort of voice she imagined might come from a grandfather in a children’s story.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“Is it Brynt back?” Marlowe called. “Mama? Is it Brynt?”
The man took off his hat then and turned his face sideways to see past her and all at once she caught sight of his face, the long red scar over one eye, the meanness in it. He was wearing a white flower in his lapel. She started to shut the door but he put out a big hand, almost without effort, and let himself inside, and then he shut the door at his back.
“We haven’t yet been acquainted, Miss Grey,” he said. “I do believe that will be rectified in time. Who is this, then?”
He was looking at Marlowe where he stood in the middle of the room holding a little brown stuffed bear close to his chest. That bear was missing one eye and the stuffing was coming out of one leg, but it was the boy’s only treasure. He was staring up at the stranger with a blank expression on his pallid face. It was not fear, not yet. But she saw that he sensed something was wrong.
“It’s all right, sweet,” she said. “You go on back to the reverend. It’s only a gentleman what wants some business with me.”
“A gentleman,” the man murmured, as if amused by it. “Who might you be, son?”
“Marlowe,” said the boy sturdily.
“And how old are you, Marlowe?”
“Six.”
“And who is that on the mattress back there?” he said, waving his hat at the reverend where he lay, sweating and delirious, face turned to the wall.
“Reverend Walker,” said Marlowe. “But he’s sick.”
“Go on,” said Eliza quickly, her heart in her throat. “Go on sit with the reverend. Go.”
“Are you a policeman?” said Marlowe.
“Marlowe,” she said.
“Why, yes I am, son.” The man turned his hat in his fingers, studying the boy, and then he met Eliza’s gaze. His eyes were hard and small and very dark. “Where’s the woman?” he said.
“What woman?”
He raised his hand above his head, to Brynt’s height. “The American. The wrestler.”
“If you wish to speak with her—”
“I don’t,” he said. There was a crooked chair at the wall and he set his hat down and caught his reflection in the clouded window and paused and ran a hand over his mustache. Then he looked around with a measured eye. He was dressed in a green checkered suit, and his fingers were stained with ink, like a bank clerk’s. The white flower, Eliza saw now, was wilted.
“What is it you want, then?” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice.
He smiled at that. He folded his jacket back and she saw the revolver at his hip. “Miss Grey, there is a gentleman of some doubtful provenance, residing at present in Blackwell Court, who’s been asking all across Spitalfields about you. He says you are the recipient of an inheritance, and he wishes to locate you.”
“Me?”
His eyes glittered. “You.”
“It can’t be. I got no kin anywhere.”
“Of course you don’t. You are Eliza Mackenzie Grey, formerly of Bury St Edmunds, under notice as a fugitive from the law for the killing of a man—your employer—are you not?”
Eliza felt her cheeks color.
“There’s a considerable reward out. No mention of a child, though.” He looked at Marlowe with an unreadable expression. “I don’t much imagine the gentleman will want him too. I can find a suitable position for him somewhere. Apprentice work. Keep him away from the workhouses. It would be a sight better than here, with your dying reverend and his crazy American.”
“Brynt isn’t crazy,” said Marlowe from the corner.
“Sweet,” said Eliza desperately, “you go on over to Cowett’s and ask for Brynt, all right? Tell her the reverend wants her.” She went toward the door to usher him out when she heard a hollow click, and froze.
“Step away from the door now, that’s a girl.”
The man had leveled his revolver in the faint gray light leaking in through the window. He put back on his hat.
“You don’t much resemble a killer,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
He had taken out a slender pair of nickel-plated wrist irons with his free hand from the pocket of his waistcoat, and in a moment he was alongside her, grabbing her roughly by the arm, fastening the irons at her right wrist and reaching for her left. She tried to resist.
“Don’t—” she tried to say.
Marlowe, across the room, got to his feet. “Mama?” he said. “Mama!”
The man was pushing Eliza toward the door, ignoring her boy, when Marlowe came at him. He looked so small. She watched almost in slow motion as he reached up and grabbed the man’s wrist with both his little hands, as if to hold him back. The man turned, and for what seemed a long moment to Eliza, though it could not have been more than seconds, he stared down at the boy in amazement and then in wonder and then something in his face twisted into a kind of horror. Marlowe was shining. The man dropped the revolver and opened his mouth to scream but he did not scream.
Eliza in the struggle had fallen back against the wall. Marlowe’s face was turned from her so she could not see him, but she could see the man’s arm where the boy held it, could see how it had begun to bubble and then to soften like hot wax. His neck twisted, his legs gave out, and then somehow he was pouring down around himself, gelid, heavy, thick like molasses, his green suit bulging in weird places, and within moments what had been a powerful man in his prime was reduced to a lumpen twist of flesh, his face a rictus of agony, his eyes wide and staring from the melt that had been his head.
In the stillness, Marlowe let go of the wrist. The blue shine faded. The man’s arm stood rigid out from the frozen mess of flesh.
“Mama?” said Marlowe. He looked over at her, and he started to cry.
The shabby room was very cold, very damp. She went to him and held him as best she could with the wrist irons still locked, feeling how he shook, and she was shaking also. He buried his face in her shoulder, and no part of her had felt before what was in her just then—not the horror, not the pity, not the love.
* * *
But she was not afraid, not of her little boy.
She found the keys to the irons in the man’s waistcoat pocket. She rolled Marlowe in their good blanket and lit the last of the coal in the scuttle and rocked him to sleep at the reverend’s bedside, the ruined body of the bounty hunter on the floor beneath the window. The boy slept easily, exhausted. Brynt was still away, working, maybe, until morning. When Marlowe was asleep Eliza rolled the misshapen body into their other blanket and stuffed the revolver in too and then dragged him with difficulty to the door and down the creaking stairs, his heels thumping at each step, thumping even as she struggled over the stoop into the black of the alley behind.