Nettleblack, page 10
Lemons. This was a hole, and I was actively leaping into the abyss. I staggered through the same puddle she’d kicked up earlier, stagnant rainwater stinging at my ankles. “I – erm – I’m sure I could – find some – ”
She snagged to a halt, so abruptly I stumbled into her, lashed about to glower me down. “You really don’t know a thing. D’you even care just how much you don’t know?”
“Yes!”
I’d blurted it without thinking, it seeming about the only answer that might go some vague way towards mollifying her. Then, of course, I heard myself, and even now I can’t but wince. Did I care? Do I care? Can I care, with sheer terror leaving so little room in me for anything else?
“I – well – I know my spontaneous – manifestation – in the Division – has been – erm – somewhat unorthodox – but – ”
“Unorthodox!”
She twitched as she said it, and I panicked. “Oh – as in – unusual – unprecedented – not – not something you might have expected – ”
“I knew what it meant!” she snarled. Of course it shamed me quite as much as it should have. “And I know it don’t even begin to cover all the allowances that’ve been made for you! You don’t even care how unprecedented – and I know what that one means too, so don’t you patronise me! – it is for a new Divisioner with no experience and no idea who we are to be out in the uniform at all!”
My blazing feet petrified in my boots, pinned me to the spot. I ought to have – apologised, at the very least! – but she’d frozen me quite beyond anything of the sort. I could only stare at her, my gullet twisting like a wrung-out handkerchief, too tangled in her unanswerable argument even to wish myself through the floor.
“And it ain’t only unprecedented – it’s dangerous for you, and it’s unfair on me! What if we meet the Sweetings down an alley, and I can’t protect you? What if someone else gets hurt – or burgled – or worse – because I can’t get there fast enough? What about me and the rest of the Div, who had to fight for our jobs, up and against and over everyone who thought it weren’t seemly we should have ’em? I earned my rank, and my bicycle, and my independence – and now I’m losing it, just to make room for you!”
She was so incandescently menacing – and so utterly correct on every point – that what little there was left of my nerve shattered, until every fibre of me was weak and slumped as my waist without its corset. “I – I’m sorry – I – ”
“Just let me do my job,” she snapped. “For all our sakes.”
She whipped round and stalked off down the street. I swallowed hard – I was halfway to tears – and trudged after her, the agony in my feet crackling up my legs. The rest of the walk was as silent as the morning’s had been, but for my ragged half-stitched breaths, and the rattle of my heart in my ears, and the stab of her boots over the cobblestones ahead.
Everything hurt: my limbs and my chest and my paltry pride in equal measure. I was far too queasy from the pain to notice much about our route. I had just enough wit left to register that the red-brick housefronts were getting more extravagant, growing extra floors and steep front steps, their large windows flashing with glimpses of grey sun. The shouts and squawks of the market and the main street grew fainter, gave way to soft new sounds – the drip of last night’s rain from the roofs, the burble of a robin darting between cobbles and windowsills, the distant splash of the river at its muddy banks. There quite wasn’t a flower to be had at any turn, for all that this street unfolded larger and neater than the dormouse cottages and tottering tenements. Flat empty gardens sat under front windows like doormats. The best by way of intriguing foliage was to be had at one house, skinny and tall with a glossy black brougham parked at its side – there were glass cases poised precariously on every windowsill, bristling full of perfect feathery ferns, raindrops studding their grey-tinted enclosures like the proverbial jewels on the tortoise.
Septimus glanced them over with a scowl. “Stupid plants. Stupid cravat designer. ’Course Pole Place is expensive, you idiot.”
Sweet green figs. If anything could jolt me out of my weary misery, it was decidedly this.
“Pole Place?”
She glared back over her shoulder. “Yes. Mr. Adelstein and Nick live at the other end of it. Hurry up.”
The other end – and this I remembered, just about – the other end of Pole Place led straight into Catfish Crescent! In a few steps we’d both be strangled by the wretched nettle-crest!
“I can’t,” I spluttered. “I’m sorry – I – ”
I’d not even devised an excuse before she snatched my arm, marched us past the ferns and the front steps and the ever-more-elaborate housefronts. I gasped – not that her grip hurt me much more than sheer exhaustion already had, but she really was painfully strong. We were up the steps of the largest house in three jolting bounds, and she was rapping flakes of paint off the elegant olive-coloured door, her fingers digging in above my elbow.
“Mr. Adelstein’s a detective,” she muttered hastily. “He’s part of the Div. Nick’s his lodger. There – you’ve got a bit less ignorance to flaunt now.”
The door sprang open, promptly transformed into a butler. He was – I quite don’t know how else to describe it – at least thrice more butler than the sullen man Edwina employed, with a suit crisp and unyielding as a boot-scraper, and professional scorn to match. Septimus whirled about, her hands springing to notch in the small of her back – stern, and resoundingly determined to look it.
“Division Sergeant Septimus for Mr. Adelstein,” she declared. “Div business.”
“Of course. Do come upstairs.”
The butler inclined his head to her, clipping his consonants to perfection. She stiffened; the contrast between his mock-genteel monotone and her brusque twang couldn’t have been more pronounced, and he was clearly relishing it.
The door snicked shut behind us, not that the temperature changed much. Mr. Adelstein’s house was a smaller, draughtier mirror of my own: the same sweeping central staircase, the same tall back window (though without the foliage-splattered stained glass), the same dizzying upward spiral of floors upon floors. His taste, admittedly, was far less gloomy than Edwina’s. The floorboards were lighter in colour, curdling into Persian rugs wherever space allowed, and the walls were papered the politest shade of crimson I had never known to imagine. He didn’t even need his gaslights, not when his large windows heaped in piles of cold autumn sun. Those panes alone were infinitely more pristine than every garment I presently possessed.
Upstairs became a drawing-room, stretching the length of the house, full of burgundy carpet and disconcertingly austere chaises – and, peculiarly enough, the bristling scent of tobacco. These walls were hung with more storm-ridden landscapes than it seemed feasible for one room to contain, painted thunderclouds and ragged trees looming over an assemblage of leather-topped desks. Perhaps the desks were the most startling thing: there was a veritable herd of them, lined up against every wall, covered with impeccable stacks of paper. There were maps, letters, files, huge ledgers with gilt monograms – in short, a level of nightmarish order that could not have shamed Cassandra’s jumble of ledgers more if it had tried. Figs, it probably was trying.
The papers fluttered as one when Mr. Adelstein swept into the room, sharp-browed and fierce-eyed as a goshawk. It was a look (and a flawless herringbone suit, and a stern russet hair-parting) to vivisect a suspect at twenty paces. He seemed to stare me quite out of existence, without even glancing in my direction. Currently, he was endeavouring to blaze a hole straight through Septimus’s forehead. Judging from her expression – stiff, unblinking, rather pale at the lips – she wasn’t precisely overjoyed to be the subject of that inquisitorial stare.
(Well – he certainly wasn’t her sweetheart.)
He nodded coldly. “I assume this is the letter, Division Sergeant.”
She fumbled for her notebook, extricated the former mechanical dove and held it out to him without bending her elbow. “Delivered to the Div yesterday.”
“I see.” One seamless eyebrow flicked towards his hairline. Plums, he must have drawn that hairline with a ruler. “Did it arrive with the unusual folding and the – ah – annotations?”
“Not exactly.” Her teeth dashed along her lower lip, a quick uneasy twitch. “But it weren’t me – Cassandra and Gertie – ”
“Ah.” He pinched the letter from her hand, ran two sharp fingers over it to smooth the creases. “If the contents are as vicious as the last anonymous letter to the Division, doubtless Cassandra and Gertie were unable to resist. If you’d wait?”
He’d read it twice through in a matter of seconds. Somewhere – lost amongst the canvas storms and the innumerable papers – a clock’s faint ticks kept him strict to time. I watched his eyes lash across the page; they weren’t pure yellow, were they? Surely it was the light?
“Yes, it’s the same as the last one. The same content, the same conclusion, the same call for the Division to be disbanded. Go back to your husbands – evidently they didn’t witness Tom Ballestas fixing your log-shed last week – stop pretending that anyone wants you to protect them – and ah, yes, here I am once more, your Jewish lackey. The Director, once again, receives the harshest criticism, if one could call these ill-articulated ramblings anything of the sort. Has she read it? Did she read the previous one?”
Septimus managed a brusque nod – only to flush, the moment she realised he was still examining the letter, and snatch for a verbal affirmative. “Both of ’em. Cassandra and Gertie were all for making sure she never found out the letters existed, but the Director was too clever for ’em.”
“Indeed,” Mr. Adelstein agreed absently, frowning along the page. “She’s too clever for much of Dallyangle to understand or condone, and this correspondent of ours doesn’t like it. We can only hope that this attack on the Division remains confined to letters until I discover their identity.”
The alarm jostled up my ribs. The Division – the handful of peculiar individuals with whom I’d rather thrown in my lot – did he mean to suggest that they were under some kind of attack? But – it couldn’t be – it wasn’t Edwina’s doing? And even if this letter was nothing to do with her, what then? If something was undermining the Division, that could well mean further investigations into the Division – into those who made up the Division – into those, more to the point, who made up their very characters just to hide in the Division –
“What’s this?”
Mr. Adelstein, hawk-eyes on the hunt again – oh, plums, for me. Cross and across my face, as if he intended to split me in two with his stare alone.
“We have a new recruit?”
Septimus frowned, cleared her throat. “Well. Yes. My assistant.”
He was still staring at me, but he spoke to her. Perhaps he’d sensed my fear, somehow deduced that it would cripple my words; perhaps he simply didn’t regard me as worthy of being questioned directly. “Is this a recent development?”
“Very recent,” Septimus admitted, glancing back at me with sudden wariness in her scowl. She’d caught his tone, his implications – his suspicions – it was all horribly evident on her face –
Figs, I wanted to shriek at her, you know I couldn’t have written that letter! I didn’t even know who you were! You can’t believe I’d want to undermine the Division!
But hadn’t she just lectured me, quite rightly, for doing precisely that? Hadn’t she snarled about how much I’d upset everything with my sudden arrival – wielding my lavish education, impossible to refuse? Hadn’t she already complained of how I’d stepped on the other members, and made a mockery of their self-betterment? It hardly seemed much of a leap to assume that I’d complement my disruptive activities with a spot of anonymous letter-writing.
I gasped – purely for the sheer horrendous logic of it – which only made my wretched trembling self look guiltier than ever.
“I see.”
Mr. Adelstein sliced me open once more, narrow-eyed, then caught Septimus on a meaningful glare. He presumably meant to be surreptitious, but how could I be anything less than hellishly attuned to his meaning? In that glare, he was discreetly recommending that she say no more about the matter – that he’d investigate it – that she mustn’t let on that I’d abruptly become the most threatening force in Dallyangle short of the Sweetings, as far as he was concerned.
“Anyway. I do have an additional message for the Director, but – well, it requires absolute discretion, and – ”
At which juncture the door nigh-on fell in.
Nick Fitzdegu whirligigged into the drawing-room in bare feet, swirling papers off the desks, quite oblivious to the freezing tension he’d just catapulted into. His wiry shoulders were bristling with rats – persimmons, live rats! – dozens of scrabbling rats, blotched with brown patches or unnerving albino, clinging on for dear life to the worn linen of his shirt, skinny tails swinging. Their presence shunted his relentless exuberance into supernatural intensity, until his very appearance seemed more than enough to set the lightning crackling in the painted storms.
“Matty! I’ve done it! Vernon Vibbrit’s already appealing to the Rodent’s Gazette! – ”
Then he crashed headlong into Mr. Adelstein’s pointed stare, spasmed into a nervy giggle, dashed a lean brown hand through his hair. Not entirely to anyone’s surprise, he dislodged a rat in the process.
“Ah. Aha. Sorry. Didn’t realise you’d another meeting. Makes sense you’d start mocking up a search party, the way they were all on at you this morning, and – Septimus! Hallo again! And Henry too – back for rats, eh?”
“Nicholas!” Mr. Adelstein snapped. It seemed incredible that this finicky young man, whose hair and features were as meticulously tailored as his suits, could bear the chaos of Nick Fitzdegu lodging under his roof. “We established my meetings as rodent-free zones, if you would care to recall.”
Nick blinked, enviably unfazed. “Timothy hay vengeance campaigns wait for no detectives, Matty.”
He sauntered over to us, a satyr in stripes with faintly squeaking shoulders, snatched up the smallest of his rodent legion and proffered it to me with a jaunty grin. “Sure I can’t tempt you, Henry? Not even for Henry the rat? This one’s called Henry now – closest I could get to a fieldmouse, for your fieldmouse eyes, and your terribly twitchy fieldmouse smile! And you’ll need another one to go with her – a lady, of course, ’less you want a whole score of them on your hands – here, what d’you think of these two together? Have a hold, go on!”
“Nicholas, this is not the time!”
Mr. Adelstein was almost at a splutter – figs, I didn’t think I’d ever hear him splutter – but Septimus beat him to it, glowering Nick and his rats a full step back from me. “She already said no!”
I blushed quite through my hairline: wasn’t Nick her sweetheart? And – oh, persimmons – to accept an inexplicable pair of rodents from her sweetheart, even if said acceptance was fuelled purely by abject fear – it really rather was the height of appalling manners, wasn’t it?
Nick, the possessor of both a functioning voice and an unshakeable nerve, threw himself at once into salvaging the confusion. “Alright, you two! No harm done! What’re we talking about in here, then? Don’t worry about me, Henry, I know everything. Lodgers do, eh, Matty?”
Mr. Adelstein gritted his teeth. “Very amusing, Nicholas.”
Nick winked at him. “’S it still absolute discretion we’ve got today?”
“It’s the consequences of this morning,” Mr. Adelstein explained irritably, nudging at his hairline, as if a strand of that slick pomade had fallen out of place (grapes, of course it hadn’t). “Division Sergeant, unless you can vouch for your assistant’s trustworthiness – and capacity to refrain from distracting the room by fawning over Nicholas’s rodents – I suggest you have her wait outside.”
My jaw quite dropped.
Pomegranates, I’d not said a word since we crossed this man’s threshold! Not a word – not even a fruit! As if I wanted Nick to flail rats at me – as if I didn’t know that Nick had an understanding with Septimus! And – just to compound the bewildering insult – the detective seemed infinitely more infuriated by my moment in the rat-breeder’s orbit, than by the entire suggestion that I might be out to destroy the Division on every conceivable front!
Septimus glanced down at me. It was all there, sharp in her sharp scowl. Exasperation, impatience – and now, thanks to Mr. Adelstein, the slightest twinge of suspicion. D’you even care just how much you don’t know?
But then she spoke, eyes on mine, her voice brusque and terse and defiantly unanswerable. “I’ll vouch for Henry. I’m training her, and it ain’t training if she’s just stood out on the steps.”
I’ve not the faintest what Mr. Adelstein’s orderly face did. I’ve not the faintest whether Nick held his rats, or dropped his rats, or dipped in to nod his agreement. There was quite one thing in my known world, and it was Septimus’s expression. She was still scowling, but the corner of her mouth had twisted into a grimace, a silent warning. Whatever I may have been – and she clearly wasn’t sure – she’d decided to trust me, and to make me take note of it. If I betrayed her now, I’d do it in flat scorn of her stern appeal to my better nature. If I betrayed her, she’d make me feel it, and all her exasperation with the mysterious Pip Property would be nothing next to the war she’d wage on me.
“Tell them, Matty,” Nick urged, years and worlds away.
Mr. Adelstein cleared his throat, and Septimus broke our stare. All at once, she was back to attention, her hands folded neat against her spine, her face as perfectly motionless as her chestnut chignon.
“I was summoned on a house call this morning by a private client.”
“Two sisters,” Nick added. “Just like the ballad. One dark and one fair, and both worried half out of their wits.”
