The litch was just leaving. But it paused to pick up a battered old bowler hat from where it had fallen from the body, and with an eerie delicacy it turned it, turned it, as if lost in reverie, and then dreamily put it on.
Only then did it step out, into the murky night, and turn north. Despite the fog it walked quickly and decisively over the mud and trenches of filth. But it’d pause from time to time, and crouch smoothly to sniff the air, before again standing and pouring forward. All the while it was trying to remember something, something important, but it could not do so.
Jacob, it thought. Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob—
The air changed; the litch had reached the noisy darkness of White-chapel High Street. Here the scents intermingled and bled together, the reek of unwashed bodies and rotting food and animals and excrement so that it had to raise its face, and turn slowly, sniffing; but then, rising like a solitary high note above an orchestra, the litch found it again, that scent, the smell of who it’d been sent to find, and it turned east and slipped between the hansoms and the passing horses and the figures like specters in the fog.
The lighting was poor and above the pub doors hung ancient greasy lanterns illuminating the fog and the litch slid like smoke through the darkness. On the far side of Commercial Street it turned north, and crept down a deep alley with arches and slick brick walls, picking its way over the huddled forms asleep in the doorways.
Then east again, and north, down passageways and lanes and up alleys and across courts, until at last it came to stand, absolutely still, in the drifting fog. It crossed to a shadowy doorway, where a man was sleeping; he raised his elbows in irritation, and the litch—without so much as a thought—crouched and clutched the man’s forehead with one hand and smoothly drew a single sharp nail across his throat. The fellow’s shirt bloomed red; he kicked out, shuddered, fell back, and was still.
Across the lane, scarcely visible through the mist, a door was opening.
Two women stepped out onto the stoop, talking to a third still inside. The shorter woman was dressed in black and wore a veil at her face; the taller, in an oilskin coat, scanned the fog with dangerous eyes.
The litch faded back into the shadows.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, in the muffled fog, Alice Quicke could hear through the thick silence the sound of her own boots scraping across the cobblestones—a sad, grim sound, like chalk on a coffin marking the newly dead. She strained to make out any other sound. Something made her anxious, uneasy. Mrs. Harrogate walked beside her, head bowed, a silhouette lost in thought. In the older woman’s handbag lay the two heavy keys, but it was not the keys that worried her. Every few feet Alice would glance over her shoulder, the hairs at the back of her neck prickling.
Something was following them.
She was sure of it, sure as anything. A cutthroat, maybe; maybe worse. She thought of what Susan Crowley had said about Henry Berghast and smoothly cocked the hammer of her revolver in her pocket and held it tight. But nothing emerged out of the fog, and she said nothing to Mrs. Harrogate, and they walked on until the older woman waved for a hansom and a cab stopped creaking in the soupy dark and both women climbed up. Then the cabman slashed his whip and the skeletal horse rattled and lurched on.
Back at their lodging house, with the window firmly shut and locked, Alice wrestled out of her long coat and slung her hat on the unmade bed and frowned.
“We weren’t alone,” she said. “Leaving Susan Crowley’s rooms. There was someone following us.”
Mrs. Harrogate, unpinning her veil, then removing her shawl, stood very still. She looked at Alice as if weighing a purchase, considering its worth. Alice didn’t like it. “Did you feel anything, in your side?” Mrs. Harrogate asked curiously.
“No.” She put a hand to her ribs. “I haven’t sensed anything since we arrived here. What if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t find Marber?”
“You won’t need to. The keywrasse will do the finding.”
Alice sat on the edge of the bed in the yellow gaslight, she pulled off her mud-encrusted boots. She wasn’t sure the woman’s meaning but decided to leave it. She had more pressing questions. “Why is Marber so interested in Marlowe?” she said. “Why would he kill the parents at all?”
“Because the child is powerful. And because the drughr is interested.” Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes were lost to shadow where she paused, folding her shawl at the wardrobe, and Alice saw the older woman’s reflection in the looking glass pause also. Her tone softened. “Forgive me. Miss Crowley’s account was … disturbing. Much of it I did not know. And I do not like to be surprised.”
“You believe her, then?”
“You do not?”
Alice thought about it. “She wasn’t telling everything, but that doesn’t mean what she said was a lie. She made it sound like Berghast scares her most. Not Marber or the drughr.”
“Only one who does not know the nature of the drughr would believe that.”
Alice took this in.
“Remember,” Mrs. Harrogate went on, “it’s not Henry Berghast who hunts children, who seduces away talents, who betrays and murders the likes of Frank Coulton. We are here for one purpose only. We shall see it through.”
“Crowley said Berghast’s real work lay in that other world. Why?”
Mrs. Harrogate sat primly in the velvet chair, adjusted her skirts. Her face was troubled.
“Son of a bitch. You don’t trust him either,” said Alice softly, beginning to understand. Then she thought of something else and her face darkened. “Why have we been collecting children, Mrs. Harrogate? What are they used for?”
“Calm yourself, Miss Quicke. You will have our good landlady listening at the keyhole.”
“I left Marlowe and Charlie in Berghast’s care.”
“And they are quite safe behind the walls of Cairndale,” Mrs. Harrogate said. “Henry may be misguided, but he is not mad. The same cannot be said of Jacob Marber. I am certain their sudden proximity to him would result in a rather different fate.”
“You keep saying Cairndale’s safe—”
“Because Jacob cannot enter. The perimeter is protected.”
“But he got through before. Isn’t that what Crowley was saying?”
“Its protections have been changed,” said Mrs. Harrogate smoothly. “No one—absolutely no one—wishes for a repeat of what happened when your Marlowe was a baby. But the only way the children will be safe, truly safe, will be to kill Jacob Marber.”
As Mrs. Harrogate spoke, she took out the folded handkerchief from her handbag. Alice felt once again the sudden dizziness but she forced herself to look at the two keys as the older woman unwrapped them. Mrs. Harrogate put them on the pier table. “They affect you strongly,” she said.
Alice swallowed. “They feel … wrong.”
“Excellent. Yes. It is because you are a sensitive, Miss Quicke. That is the injury from Marber affecting you. I had hoped for this. These are called weir-bents.”
Alice, who had a long knowledge of keys, studied the weir-bents. “They’re old. I don’t recognize their like. They’re not for a safety box or a vault. What do they open, a room somewhere? Where do we find the thing?”
“What thing?”
“The weapon. To kill Jacob Marber.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes glittered. “Ah,” she said, smiling a patronizing smile. “You are mistaken. This is the weapon.” The older woman lifted the leather cord carefully, studied the weir-bents where they dangled in front of her. “There were three once,” she said. “Now there are two. Someday there will be only one, and when the last key is lost, there will be no way left to fight the drughr.”
“What are they?”