Truth, she’d thought in disgust. What did the word even mean?
Truth: she’d survived as a pickpocket on the streets of Chicago from the age of fourteen. Truth: she had a mother incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally deranged whom she had not seen in nearly twenty years, and no other family in all the world. She was eighteen when she picked the wrong pocket and the hand that seized her wrist turned out to belong to Allan Pinkerton, private detective, railroad man, intelligence agent for the Union cause, but instead of turning her in he took a shine to her and invited her to his offices, and to her own surprise she went. He trained her in the art of undercover operatives. She did that for eight years and you could ask any of two dozen bastards sitting in jail somewhere if she was good at it and they would spit and wipe their mouths and concede it by the hate in their eyes. But when Pinkerton’s sons rose to power she was let go, all because she was a woman, and therefore delicate, and therefore not right for detective work. She put her fist through the wall of William Pinkerton’s office when he fired her.
“Your fucking wall is delicate,” she said to him.
But after that she could only get work at racetracks up and down the Eastern Seaboard and when that too dried up she bought a ticket on a liner bound for London, England, because where else and why not. There she discovered a city so dark with vice and cutthroats and foggy gaslit alleys that even a female detective from Chicago with hair the yellow of murky sulfur and fists like mallets could find plenty of doing needing to be done.
The sheriff and his deputy came down the hot street, nodding politely as they neared. The deputy was whistling, badly and off-key.
“Mr. Coulton,” said the sheriff. “We could’ve walked down together. And you must be Mrs.—”
“Miss Quicke,” said Coulton, introducing her. “Don’t let her fine looks deceive you, gentlemen. I bring her for my protection.”
The sheriff seemed to find this amusing. The deputy was cradling his rifle, studying Alice like a strange creature washed up out of the river, but there was no contempt in it, no hostility. He saw her watching and smiled shyly.
“We don’t get many visitors from overseas no more,” said the sheriff. “Not since the war. Was a time we saw all sorts of folk, Frenchmen, Spaniards. Even a Russian countess lived here for a time, ain’t that right, Alwyn? She had different customs, too.”
The deputy, Alwyn, blushed. “My daddy always said so,” he said. “But that was before my recollection. I ain’t married neither, miss.”
Alice bit back her retort. “Where’s the boy?” she said instead.
“Ah, yes. You’re here for Charlie Ovid.” The sheriff’s face darkened with regret. “Come on, then.” He stopped a moment and adjusted his hat and frowned. “Now, I don’t know I should be doing this. But seeing as how you come all this way, and you’ll be talking to Judge Diamond later, I don’t know that it’s a problem neither. But I don’t want you talking about what you see. It’s kindly a sore point around here, this boy. He’s the damnedest thing.”
“An abomination is what he is,” muttered the deputy. “Like one of them things in the Bible.”
“What things?” said Alice.
He blushed again. “Satan’s minions. Them monsters he made.”
She stopped and faced him and stared up the length of him. “That’s not in the Bible,” she said. “You mean Leviathan and Behemoth?”
“They’s the ones.”
“Those are God’s monsters. God made them.”
The deputy looked unsure. “Aw, I don’t think—”
“You should.”
The sheriff was unlocking the heavy warehouse door, lock by lock. “England, you said,” he murmured. “That’s a distance and a half to come for a little old black boy.”
“Aye,” said Coulton at the sheriff’s elbow, offering nothing more.
The sheriff paused at the last lock, glanced back. “You know, there ain’t any way the judge is going to let this boy go,” he said pleasantly. “Not with you or with anybody.”
“I hope you’re mistaken,” said Coulton.
“I don’t say it to be personal, now.” The sheriff offered a smile. “I always did want to see England someday. The missus, she says, ‘Maybe it’s time you hung up your spurs, Bill, and we took ourselves a voyage.’ Her parents come over from Cornwall once upon a time, you see. Now, I don’t know if I’m just too old to go wandering about the world like a tinker. But it seems a distance and a half, you ask me.”
The warehouse was dark and smelled faintly of sour cotton and rust. The air was stifling, thick. Just inside the door on nails in the wall hung two old lanterns and the deputy took down one and opened its glass door and lit it with a flint and then they shut the door behind them. The light swung loosely in the man’s fist. Alice sighted the outlines of great machinery in the gloom, hooks and chains hanging in long loops from the rafters. The sheriff led them across the warehouse floor to a grimy corridor, its walls punctured with holes as if from bullets, daylight streaming through. There were the outlines of doors along the opposite wall and at the end a single thick iron door with several locks and here the sheriff paused.
The deputy set down the lantern, swung the butt of his rifle against the door. “On your feet!” he shouted through. “You got visitors, boy. Straighten up.”
He turned shyly to Alice. “I don’t know that he’s all there, miss. Don’t be alarmed by him none. He’s a bit like an animal.”
Alice said nothing.
The door swung open. Inside all was darkness. A terrible stench wafted out, a stink of unwashed flesh and filth and feces.
“Good God,” muttered Coulton. “This is he?”
The sheriff held a handkerchief to his mouth and nodded gravely.
The deputy held the lantern out before him, entering cautiously. Alice could make out the figure of the boy now, hunched against the far wall. He was tall and skinny. She could see the glint of light on the manacles at his wrists, the chain at his ankles. As she slipped inside she caught sight of his ragged trousers, his shirt crusted brown with dried blood, the terror in his eyes. But his face was smooth, fine-boned, unbruised and unswollen, his eyelashes long and dark. She’d been expecting a terrible damage; it was strange. His small ears stuck out from his head like little handles. He raised his hands in front of him, as if to ward off a blow, as if the light pained him. The chains rustled softly as he breathed.
“I never saw nothing like him in all my life,” said the deputy, almost with admiration. He was talking to Alice. “Wouldn’t none of us believe it if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes. All that blood’s his own, but you won’t find a mark on him. You take a club to him, he just gets back up. You take a knife to him, he just heals right in front of you. I swear, it’s almost enough to make a man believe in the devil.”
“Yes it is,” muttered Alice, glaring at the deputy in the bad light.
“Go on, Alwyn,” said the sheriff. “Show them.”
The boy cowered.
“By God, Mr. Coulton—!” Alice said, too loudly.
Coulton held out a hand to stop the deputy. “That won’t be necessary, Alwyn,” he said, in his calm way. “We believe you. It’s the reason we’re here.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew the letter with their instructions, written from their employer in London. He unfolded the papers, held them to the light. Alice could see the Cairndale crest, stamped prominently upon the envelope. The wax seal like a thumbprint of blood.
Charles Ovid was staring at the envelope too, Alice saw. He had gone very still, watchful like a cat, his eyes shining in the darkness.