“Then you know it must be important. Susan Crowley was in possession of something most rare, something I cannot proceed without. A tool, you might say, left in her care. I am certain Jacob Marber will be searching for her also.”
Ratcliffe Fang’s bulging eyes lit up in sudden understanding. “That’s why Jake Marber’s in Limehouse,” he whispered. “She’s got what can kill him, an he knows it.”
“Indeed, Mr. Fang. And I must take it from her first.”
Ten minutes later, she left Ratcliffe Fang’s rooms, satisfied. An address was folded up in the wrist of her glove. Cold fog seeped in through her shawl. Her bull’s-eye lantern was tightly shuttered so that its beam turned this way and that, shining off the slimy bricks of the tenements. She adjusted her veil. She’d been surprised at how Fang had aged; but then, she supposed, she too was no longer young. She walked deeper into the alley, holding her petticoats out of the muck with one hand, keeping close to the walls.
Whitechapel, she knew, was not far.
But she’d not gone twenty paces when something materialized in the dark fog ahead, at a dead man’s corner. A silhouetted shape, lurking in the mist.
She opened her lantern and held it high but it was no good, the fog had thickened, and she could see only the drifts of fog turning and shifting in front of her.
“Who are you?” she called. “Give me passage. I’ll not ask twice.”
She heard the figure’s boots scrape on the cobblestones, coming closer. Carefully, slowly, Margaret reached into her handbag for her small pistol.
It wasn’t there.
She cursed and gripped the lantern and prepared to swing it hard at whatever cutthroat approached. The stones underfoot gleamed in the weak light.
“You’re looking for this, I guess,” came the voice.
Margaret stared.
And then the figure emerged out of the fog in an oilskin coat, hat drawn low over her killer’s eyes, holding in her open palm the little silver-plated pistol. Margaret shook her head in anger. It was Alice Quicke.
“What?” said the detective. “You thought I wouldn’t follow?”
“I’d have thought,” said Margaret, taking back her weapon, “you’d have more sense.”
Miss Quicke gave her a quick sly grin from under her hat.
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
* * *
Whitechapel was darker, more crowded. Hansoms creaked past like apparitions, drunken men weaved and hollered, swarms of pale children in rags crowded under the weak gaslights while their mothers, exhausted, stood in the doorways with their petticoats showing. Margaret went carefully, following Mr. Fang’s direction. If it was the fog or Miss Quicke’s dangerous look she didn’t know, but they wandered unaccosted and unharmed. But the lanes were crooked and the muck soft underfoot, the puddles reeking, and they had often to duck past shreds of rags and linen strung up on lines in the miserable courts and alleys. Margaret felt better for Miss Quicke’s company, grateful even, and when she realized this she was surprised, and made no further complaint.
At last they came to an unmarked door, dripping, slick with mold. It was the third doorway in, on the second alley up from the Black Fox drinking house. Margaret knocked, stepped back.
The door opened a crack. Eyes peered suspiciously out.
“Miss Crowley?” said Margaret matter-of-factly.
“What is it you want?”
Margaret removed her veil. “You will not remember me, but I am a friend of Mr. Fang’s. I’d hoped we might speak. I have news about the child.”
She seemed to know at once who was meant. “Where is he?”
“At Cairndale. But I fear he’s in danger.”
After a moment, the woman opened the door. She was tall, big-boned, but her cheeks had hollowed as if she’d fallen ill and never quite recovered. Thick black hair, astray under a bonnet. Her hands were wide and strong-looking. Visible across her collarbones was the stippled roughened skin of old scars, as if she’d been burned long ago. She was younger even than Miss Quicke but hard living had aged her badly and there was a stoop to her walk and a tremble to her chin.
“You,” said the woman slowly. “You’re the one who rescued me, from out that train car. You brought me to Mr. Fang. After the wee babe was attacked. After I … lost him.” She put a hand to her scarred collarbone, as if remembering. She looked past, at the dark street. “You’d best come in.”
When they were all three crowded into the meager sewing room, Margaret told about Marlowe, and how Henry Berghast had searched for him, and how Miss Quicke had taken him to Cairndale. And she told, too, of Jacob Marber’s return.
“Then Cairndale isn’t safe,” said Susan Crowley, at once. The dim candlelight played across her features. “Jacob Marber will find a way inside. He always could find a way. He knew the child was special, right from the very first, that was why he did what he did. He will come for him again.”
“That is my fear also.”
Susan Crowley hesitated. “Why are you here?”
“I have questions,” said Margaret. “And I must ask you for something. I mean to stop Jacob Marber before he can hurt the boy again.”
“But he did not hurt the boy before, Mrs. Harrogate.”
“Because of you. Only because of you.”
“Yes, perhaps…” The woman looked away, her green eyes uncertain. “What do you know about Jacob Marber’s history? You know that he disappeared, on a voyage back from the East?”
“Some said he’d drowned,” said Margaret, trying to hide her impatience. “But Mr. Coulton said he’d fallen under the influence of the drughr and been spirited away by it.”
“Yes. Into the other world.”
Margaret blinked. “But that isn’t possible, surely? His talent would twist. He’d die.”
“And he should have done. But he did not.”
“A living being in the land of the dead,” said Margaret, thinking. “There has never been such a thing. I do not know what it would mean.”
The woman picked at a piece of needlework, nervous. “But he is not the first talent to walk among the dead, Mrs. Harrogate. There have been others.”
“What others?”
“Dr. Berghast’s experiments.” Susan Crowley paused. “I thought you knew.”
Margaret felt a heat come into her cheeks.
“I do not know the particulars,” Susan Crowley went on. She drew her ragged shawl tighter. “It began long before I arrived at Cairndale. Dr. Berghast was sending talents through the orsine. Into the other world. He did it for years. He was making a map, a map for his own purposes. That is how it began, using that poor glyphic to open the orsine just enough for his talents to go through. He had acquired something, an artifact, that allowed the talents to enter and return. But then, one day, a talent did not come back out. He was lost. The artifact was lost too. Something had been disturbed, awakened in that other world, something had hunted him down and eaten him before he could—”
“The drughr,” whispered Margaret.
The young nursemaid raised her frightened eyes in the candlelight. She nodded.
“But the experiments didn’t stop,” she went on. “They were just the more dangerous after that. Dr. Berghast needed to find the artifact that was lost inside the orsine. If it fell into the drughr’s hands…” She shuddered. “But without the artifact, the talents he sent in came back sick, or aged, or … deformed. And the drughr just kept getting stronger. Eventually, after Jacob disappeared, Dr. Berghast stopped looking. He gave up.”
Margaret had heard rumors of experiments, all those years ago. She’d refused to believe them. She felt a sudden deep shame. “Because of Jacob?”
“Because of the baby.” Susan Crowley’s lips thinned. “It is an awful part of the story. The last talents Dr. Berghast sent through were the baby’s young parents. She was in the family way, though she didn’t know it yet. While in the other world, she gave birth.”