He set out across the country, a dark solitary figure in city clothes. The sun was bleeding in the east. Brynt moved warily, anxious. She couldn’t imagine his purpose. They were following the railway tracks across the countryside, and at a blind curve around a low grassy hill, she saw the man stop suddenly. He stood in the long grass, his arms dangling at his sides. Brynt, fifty yards away, sank down in the undergrowth.
There were insects buzzing in the grass. The breeze was cool. The morning sky turned blue, without cloud. Trains passed at intervals. The afternoon came, darkened into twilight. And still the monster stood.
Brynt would shift her position from time to time, first her legs cramping, then her back. The night turned cold. She slept badly. She was half-afraid when the night at last started to fade that she’d find the monster gone. But he wasn’t; he still stood on the knoll, a shadowed figure overlooking the tracks, patient, unmoving.
It all made her very uneasy. Then in the early morning, under a blue sky, she saw the smoke of an approaching train beyond the curve, above the trees. Something felt different to her, though she couldn’t say what. Soon she could hear it, the steady mechanical thrump of its rush, and then she heard the shriek of its whistle, alarmingly close, and she turned suddenly back and saw the monster had walked down the cut and up onto the tracks.
The train came into sight around the curve, a passenger express, tearing past at unbelievable speed, a great fury of fire and smoke and gleaming green and gold lettering. Brynt’s heart was in her throat.
The figure, she saw, was standing in the middle of the ties, staring down the thundering train, his long black coat twisting around him. Calmly and deliberately he unwound the scarf from his face.
The train came on, its whistle shrieking.
He opened his arms wide.
Brynt got to her feet.
He didn’t move, didn’t leap away. And then—in a tremendous burst of black smoke and soot—the locomotive tore through him, tore through where he’d been standing, smoke pouring out around it like a great dark wing, then curling back into its airstream and enfolding the train and its coal car and its ornate wooden passenger carriages in darkness, before gradually dissipating out into dust, and Brynt saw the monster was gone, just gone, as if totally obliterated, and the whole screeching length of the train was roaring through the space where he’d been with sparks flaring in the wheels and the engine casing shuddering and the great brakes grinding down to a stop some fifty long yards farther on.
She started running.
* * *
At 23 Nickel Street West they’d all risen sleepy and irritable and stumbled through their ablutions and a meager breakfast downstairs and then out into the waiting carriages. Miss Quicke was the first awake. Margaret had been cautious and hired a second coach where Walter, smuggled darkly inside, would ride; but Charlie saw, and she saw that he saw, and his expression was all fear and betrayal.
The train departed on time. They were maybe an hour outside of London when it happened. The carriage jerked, groaned to a long shuddering halt. There was a crash of trunks and cases falling to the floor, a long squeal of brakes. Margaret grabbed at the windowsill for support, alarmed, and looked sharply at Walter. But he was still drugged and drowsing on the facing seat, gray and sickly-looking in his ropes, and he didn’t so much as stir. She checked the knots, just in case. Then she went to the window and pulled aside the curtains. They occupied a sleeping compartment near the back of the train, just in front of the baggage carriage. She had also engaged a second compartment, clear at the far end of the train, at the very front, for the children and Coulton and Miss Quicke to ride in.
The train had come to a stop on a curve of track, and she could clearly see the gleaming locomotive at the front, the distant figure of the engineer in his coveralls as he jumped down, the cloud of black smoke drifting away from the fire stack. She hoped very much it was not a derailment. There were schedules to keep. A minute later she heard a rap at the compartment.
It was Coulton, of course. Glaring in past her, at Walter in his ropes.
“Everything all right?” he said.
“You’re supposed to be with the children,” she told him. “Your task is to keep them safe until we get to Cairndale.”
“Aye.” His gaze slid past her, again, to the litch. “I know the task. But we need to talk.”
“Not here.” She pushed the gruff man back out, into the side corridor, and slid the compartment shut behind her. She locked it, folded the little brass key into her palm, interlaced her fingers in front of her.
“Well?” she said. “If this is about Walter Laster, I do not wish to discuss it. The matter is closed, Mr. Coulton. Why have we stopped?”
Coulton blinked. “I don’t know. Listen—”
“Did we hit something? Was there something on the tracks?”
“I don’t know. Margaret—”
“If we are late for our connection, I shall be most displeased.”
“Goddamnit, Margaret,” he snapped. “Let a man speak.”
She frowned in disapproval, glanced the length of the side corridor, then met his eye. “I believe I’ve let you have your say already, Mr. Coulton,” she said in a deliberately quiet voice. “And such language is hardly appropriate.”
“But you haven’t,” he said.
“I haven’t what?”
“You haven’t let me have my say. Walter said to me that Jacob’s on his way. He said Jacob knows how to find him.”
Margaret flared her nostrils in displeasure, lifted her chin. “I doubt that.”
“You don’t reckon it’s possible? Or you don’t want it to be?”
“Walter’d been smoking opium, he was quite drunk on it. You said it yourself.”
“Don’t mean it ain’t true.”
“We’re on our way to the institute, Mr. Coulton. Jacob Marber couldn’t get to him, even if he knew how to. He isn’t on this train.”
She watched Coulton glower.
“Aye,” he said reluctantly.
She started to go, then paused. “Was there something else?”
Coulton flushed. “It ain’t too late to change tack. If Jacob’s looking for that bastard, he’s like to have a way of finding him, if you take my meaning. He’s like to follow him north. Why not let me escort him on a different train?”
“I think not.”
“Or you, then. If it ain’t too dangerous. It don’t matter. But get him away from the children. You saw what happened with Charlie.”
Margaret felt a flicker of regret at that. She had thought the opium stronger, the ropes more powerful. She’d been careful, this time, to increase the dosage and the restraints both. And she’d not leave the litch’s side the entire way. It ought to be safe enough. More to the point, she didn’t know how long they had until Jacob Marber came hunting, and she wanted Walter locked away behind Cairndale’s walls before he did.
Through the windows she saw a conductor in his blue uniform and box cap walk slowly through the long grass, waving to someone up the line. Some of the passengers had got off, were standing on the slopes of the cut, smoking pipes, chatting in the sunlight. She shook her head.
“And what do you propose we do, Mr. Coulton?” she said softly. “Drag Walter off the train, here, and carry him to the nearest station? And who would do that—you? You would abandon the children? Or perhaps me, with my tremendous physical strength? No, I fear it is too late entirely to change tack, as you put it. Go back up to your carriage, sir.”
Coulton rubbed at his whiskers. There was something in the way he was looking at her that she didn’t like, a disappointment.
“Anything happens to those children,” he said darkly, “you’ll have to live with it.”
* * *