Bringer of Dust, page 10
They had spent the afternoon on errands. Now was just one last thing to be done: a meeting with a notorious pickpocket and forger, to acquire transit papers for her little ones.
She hitched up her skirts, and hurried on.
* * *
Charlie, stumbling along in Mrs. Ficke’s wake, said nothing of the girl behind them.
She’d been following them through the darkening streets for some time. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t draw it to the old alchemist’s attention. Maybe it was just that she kept her own counsel, had her own secrets. Maybe he was just stubborn that way. Komako certainly thought so. But he turned his chilled face and fumbled the parcels in his arms and tried to keep a silent sidelong eye on the girl. A kitchen maid perhaps, nothing more, younger than he was. But she moved like smoke in the twilight, her long hair in dark braids spilling from the hood of her cloak, and the scarlet gloves on her hands were too fine for her station. She was being careful, or trying to be, and it was this that unsettled him. She kept some thirty yards back with her cowl low.
What he didn’t know was why.
They would depart south as soon as the glyph-twisted children had their papers. There was some urgency to it now, of course, after the discovery of Jacob Marber’s dust, what it could do. That ethereal, electric blue of its shining. He’d felt a revulsion, learning what it was, what he’d brushed up against, even if only briefly. A living poison that fed on a talent, that ate them away from the inside. A part of the very evil that had hunted Marlowe all his life. Worse: the seed of its power, which could bring the drughr back to strength, even now.
He caught the sharp profile of Mrs. Ficke as they passed a lighted public house, the downturned nose, the prominent brow, the way her chin jutted forward and her gizzard-like throat trailed after. They splashed through a sunken puddle and turned up a nameless court. They came out in the thick of Old Town on the Royal Mile and shouldered their way through the crowds of clerks until they’d reached the square at St Giles’. Mrs. Ficke’s fist held one half of her skirts, her other hem dragging with water. Under her artificial arm she carried a parcel; in her petticoats was a bundle of banknotes she’d tried to keep Charlie from seeing. Payment, he supposed, for whatever came next. She wasn’t much forthcoming, for a woman who wanted his trust.
What would Alice say? He had a good idea of it. If your head tells you one thing, Charlie, and your heart tells you another—listen to your heart.
Yes.
The old woman stopped at the statue of Charles II, shifting the parcel to her other elbow, grimacing. Charlie took off his bowler and wiped his forehead and scanned the square. The servant girl who’d been following them wasn’t there. He looked back down at Mrs. Ficke.
“Well?” he said.
“I need you to wait for me here,” she said. She reached into her cloak and took out the vial of corrupted dust, folded in a handkerchief. “Hold this for me. Keep it safe. The man I’m going to meet has … clever fingers.”
Charlie took it, feeling a sudden apprehension. As if he were holding something impossibly precious. He screwed up his face. “The man’s a thief?”
“Among other things, yes. A rather gifted one.” Her little eyes were made smaller by the cold. She gestured past the cathedral to a pillared edifice. “Those are the Goodline shipping offices. I’ll meet with a Mr. Pillins there, when the first business is done. If we can arrange passage from here, all the better. You watch the parcels. Buy yourself a pie if you get cold.”
Charlie peered around the darkening square, uncertain in the chill. “You want me to just stand here, until you’re done? How long will you be?” He took the old woman’s elbow, concerned. “Will you be safe with this thief of yours? Can he be trusted?”
“Oh, I’ll be safe enough,” Mrs. Ficke replied softly. She reached up and patted Charlie’s cheek with a cold hand. “Don’t you worry. I’ve known him long; he’s no different than the rest of us. Trustworthy from a certain point of view. And no more violent than the world what made him.”
* * *
Jeta Wajs watched the old woman stride away into the dusk.
The last light shone slickly over the setts, all dazzle and umber. She started to follow but the apparition didn’t. An old distrust of the gadjikane world was in her, a fear from her uncle’s tabor, a fear of so many strangers all around. Narrow-minded and vicious and filled with hate for what she was, if ever they knew. Even with Ruth’s tincture still in her, she could feel their bones tugging gently at her, a wind plucking at her skirts.
It’s for Claker, she told herself, to steady her nerves. He needs this.
The ghost of the child was staring not at the Ficke woman’s retreating figure, but at the companion she’d left behind. It was a young man, almost a boy still, tall, dark-skinned. Half-black, he seemed. The old woman’s servant, maybe. But then he took off his hat and ran a hand over his hair and put his hat back on and she thought he didn’t seem like a servant, somehow. The ghost child wavered, translucent as the skin of a bubble, his black eyes peering with an undisguised hunger.
“What is it?” Jeta murmured. “Shouldn’t we follow the Ficke woman?”
The dust isn’t with her now, whispered the boy. It’s with … him.
He pointed. Jeta bit at her lip, trying to think. Something didn’t feel right. She’d do nothing untoward, she told herself. Not until she’d seen the corrupted dust, held it herself, made sure of it. And then? She thought about the dead assistant at the mortuary, the quiet stillness in his body. The apparition squatting monstrously over the corpse on its slab, its twisted features. Ruth’s vitriol.
“If you’re mistaken,” she whispered to the ghost, “if there’s no dust—”
He has it. A hint of impatience in his child’s features. Go. Take it from him.
Jeta crossed the square. The young man was taller than she’d thought, and looked thickset in his heavy wool coat, though his neck was slender. He turned as she neared, betraying no surprise. Even in the gloom she could see his open, trusting face, the handsome eyes, the long dark lashes. He would be a foreigner in the eyes of all in this city, just like her. An outsider. The sadness around his mouth gave her pause.
“You’ve been following us,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m a … friend,” she replied, from within the hood of her cloak. She took a gamble. “I come with a warning, about what you’re carrying. What Caroline Ficke gave you. The dust.”
He looked startled. “What—I don’t have…” His eyes hardened. “How do you know Mrs. Ficke?”
“Please,” she said. “We can’t talk out here. Come.”
She took her patchwork skirts in her fist and led him across to the great doors of St Giles’. An elaborate carved arch, fallen into shadow. A greasy lantern on a metal rung, unlit. The cathedral was closed for renovations but she’d seen the stonemasons filing out ten minutes earlier and when she tried the door it opened easily.
“In here, if you please,” she said, and stepped aside. “It’ll be safer inside.”
It had started to rain, a faint cold webbing blowing in over them in the settling dark. He wiped his big hand over his face where the mist was catching in his eyelashes, as if deciding something.
“Safer than what?” he said.
But he went in anyway, to her satisfaction. She caught the smell of wet wool and old pipe smoke as he passed, like a scent from some distant part of her life, and then she was closing the heavy doors behind them both. The apparition of the little boy, already somehow within, shimmered faintly in the gloom.
Jeta? it whispered suddenly. I think … I think I know him.
“Forgive me,” she said, drawing her wet hood back. Her voice echoed in the stony darkness. “What is your name?”
The young man was quiet only a moment. “Ovid,” he said firmly. “Charles Ovid. But where I come from, it’s impolite to ask. Not without offering your own name first.”
There was something about him that made her want to answer. But she knew it would be madness. Charlie, she thought suddenly. The ghost child had mentioned a Charlie, back at Cairndale. She saw he’d drifted close to the stranger, a faint blue crackling in the gloom, and he was leaning his little face near as if to breathe in the smell of his damp. His eyes were utterly black.
Charlie? he whispered, but there was no recognition in it. He’s … changed, I think. Different. What’s happened to him? He scares me, Jeta.
Jeta scanned the darkness; they were quite alone.
The apparition, she thought, didn’t sound scared.
* * *
Caroline chewed at her lips as she climbed a stair and stumped into the black garden at Dunedin Close, just beyond a kirk. The roar of the Royal Mile faded, the clatter and bustle of Old Town. An ancient stillness closed around her, like a fist. At a blackened oak she stopped, and sat savagely, and glared all around. The small gardens were empty.
At last a figure came between the hedgerows, worn silk hat on his head. He sat gingerly on the bench, turned a bespectacled eye upon her. “Mrs. Ficke,” he said.
“I come about the papers. For the little ones.”
He nodded. “I can’t say for certain they’ll be good at an English port. But it was the best your money could buy. You’ll see they’ve been completed according to your instructions.”
She waited.
“You have the payment?”
She took out the banknotes. He gave a quick dark glance around, then unbuttoned his greatcoat and withdrew a thick packet of letters, tied with yellow string.
“If they are refused,” Caroline Ficke said calmly, taking them from him, “you will answer for it.”
“I would expect no less,” he replied, unruffled. “Safe passage to you, Mrs. Ficke.”
And he touched his hat, and rose smoothly, and walked off into the coming darkness. After a moment she too rose, and walked back the way she had come. She gave little thought to Charlie, waiting with their parcels outside St Giles’. She was thinking, instead, about this city she’d known for so long, its invisible web of connections. She would lose that, soon. It filled her with an unexpected melancholy.
The door to the Goodline shipping offices was located off a stub of a lane, so narrow as to seem an alley. A mist was blowing in against her face sidelong and Caroline turned her bad shoulder into it. The man she sought within was no friend of hers but he was happy to ask few questions in exchange for a higher fee and that, she understood, was the best she could hope for.
He was working late, bent over a small desk, a candle in a dish burning low. He wore a checkered waistcoat and a cheap-looking watch on a chain and his hair had been brushed greasily flat on his head. As she came in he looked her way, waved a hand, then continued with whatever it was he’d been writing.
She sat and withdrew the packet of papers and set them on the desk.
“That’s for all of them,” she said. “I expect you will complete the paperwork now?”
The clerk grimaced. “You’ll be sailing on the Bad Chance. Never mind the name; she’s a fine vessel. She’ll get you straight to the port of Palermo, no questions asked. Unless there’s any trouble with the port authorities in London.”
“When does she sail?”
The clerk gave her a wink. “Within the fortnight. I’ll send word of your coming, of course.”
“Will she wait for us?”
“She’ll wait on the tides. I can’t promise more than that.” His hair had been pomaded and there was a faint reek of perfume coming from his clothes. “You’d best be in London and at Miller’s Wharf within the fortnight.”
When she left the shipping offices she did not go back in search of Charlie outside St Giles’, as she had promised. She went, instead, to the Police Chambers in the adjoining street. She stood at the counter and asked the receiving officer if Mr. Tooley was on duty, and then sat on a hard bench across from a rather forlorn-looking man clutching a hatbox.
Mr. Tooley was an old acquaintance, small, sober, gray. His hair once had been as orange as an oak in autumn. He’d been a friend of Cairndale’s, in his way. He came out with his polished buttons winking in the light and his fine blue uniform soaking up the dark and he beckoned her through.
At his desk he said, “Can I get you a cup of tea? I never thought to see you in here, Mrs. Ficke. What is it I can do for you? Mr. Albany is all right?”
She furrowed her brow. “Well, Mr. Tooley sir, it’s Mr. Albany I wanted to see you about. I’ll be leaving shortly on a trip. I won’t be back for a long while.”
“Leaving Mr. Albany on his own?” said Mr. Tooley in surprise. “Is that wise?”
“Oh, he’s clever enough in his way. He knows his business and how his days ought to look. But all the same, it’d be a relief to me if you could look in on him, now and again. Just to see how he’s getting on.”
Mr. Tooley paused. “Is there some sort of trouble?”
“Ach. It’s nothing like that.”
There was an open newspaper on the desk and now Mr. Tooley ran one hand over it, as if smoothing out the words. He looked up. “You know I’d be glad to look in on him. He’s a good one, your brother. Heart as big as a four-poster.”
Caroline smiled at that. “Yes he is, Mr. Tooley. And I will take that tea now, thank you. Just a quick drop against the weather.”
* * *
Charlie’s boots scraped. A weak glow was coming in through a stained glass window, casting the scaffolding and the stacks of lumber and worked stone in a red and blue light. The air was cold; the cathedral smelled of dust and waterlogged wool and lantern smoke. He could make out thick stone pillars in the half-light, row upon row, and white sheets laid over objects in the darkness. A clutter of workmen’s buckets and trowels and a mess of tarps to his left.
The girl, whoever she was, was already halfway up an aisle but Charlie stopped. He took off his gloves and folded them together and stuffed them in the same pocket as Alice’s revolver.
“Who sent you?” he said.
He saw now, as she walked slowly back, that she could not possibly be anyone’s servant. She wore a strange patchwork dress that might have been sewn by a madwoman; her two braids were entwined in a pattern he’d never seen before; she wore a coin at her throat like payment for the ferryman. Her eyes, her expression were too old for her face, as if she had suffered horrors and survived them. Her face was dark in the darkness and her thick eyebrows were drawn low. On her hands she wore scarlet gloves of a very fine material. He understood she was a talent or had been once but there was a wariness about her that he did not know what to do with and he was surprised at the feeling that was in him.
“You’re like me,” he said quietly. “You’re a talent, aren’t you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me what I am. You don’t know me.”
“That’s not … I didn’t mean that. I just meant, you’re alone too. Like me.”
He saw it then, in her dark eyes: the person she was maybe when she was alone, unguarded, pensive, saddened. Then it was gone. She glanced to one side, as if a third stood there. But there was no one.
“I’ve been out to the ruins,” she said briskly. “You’ve not been back, not since the fire, I take it?”
This surprised him. “Cairndale? There’s nothing there now. Just … memories.”
“But there is. Or, was. Something important, I think?” She let her eyes go up and down his person. “It was taken from Loch Fae to William Macrae’s mortuary, where Caroline Ficke acquired it. But it does not belong to her. I’ve been sent to retrieve the dust, Mr. Ovid. I’d rather take it gently. I don’t wish to hurt you.”
Charlie said nothing. He’d fought the drughr, worse; this girl did not frighten him.
“I work for a man named Claker Jack,” she continued, slowly peeling off her scarlet gloves. In the dimness he saw the two yellowing bone fingers, curling there. It wasn’t something he’d seen before. “You may have heard of him. He is master of a community in London, a community of exiles, sent down from Cairndale. If I return without Jacob Marber’s dust, he will send others to retrieve it. They will not be so … polite. Please.”
He didn’t know why he did it; later he would think back and wonder if something had compelled him. But nothing had; it wasn’t anyone’s doing but his own. He wanted to show her the vial of dust; he wanted to see where all this would lead.
He withdrew the handkerchief and unwrapped the glass vial. He held it delicately in his fingers. The dust within began to whorl and shine with that same blue luminescence he’d seen at Mrs. Ficke’s. The blue shine was reflected in the girl’s face, casting it into eerie relief, so that she looked suddenly distorted, frightening. She seemed unable to speak, unable to look away.
Charlie said, “This? Is this what you want?”
She nodded slowly.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked.
“The dust of the drughr,” she whispered.
He watched her carefully. “And did your Claker Jack tell you what it does? No? It’s dangerous, more dangerous than you imagine. It’ll bring the drughr to you. Whoever carries it is like a beacon for the drughr. And you’re a talent; you’re exactly who the drughr would be drawn to. You should leave this, leave me. Go.”
“The drughr,” said the girl. “I used to think it was just a story.”
Charlie closed his fist around the vial. The blue light died away.
“I’ve seen it,” he replied. “It’s real.”
