Nettleblack, page 11
It was quite as if he’d thrust a rat down my throat.
Even then – it was too soon – I’d barely had half a day! –
“They were most anxious to discover the whereabouts of their sibling. She appears to have been spirited from her bedroom – at what time and to what purpose, they are at a loss to conjecture.”
I gasped. They all ignored me. The story – my story – was far too gripping.
“Though my attentiveness to the matter of the anonymous letters remains unwavering, we ought not to pass up this new opportunity purely to fret over our own concerns. The Division, in short, has been offered this case.”
If I could just – nobody was looking at me – if I could make it, alive and relatively implacable, to the end of the briefing –
“And guess whose case it is?” Nick cried delightedly. “Edwina Nettleblack, the soap baron!”
“Tincture,” Mr. Adelstein muttered, seconds before my own lips twitched it.
“Tincture baron! Not an actual baron! But you do know the one – the heiress! That mad Welsh lot that made good on their family medicine! The Div’ll be in the money if you sort her out, eh, Matty?”
Mr. Adelstein sighed. “Well, Nicholas, I can hardly deny that it would be very much in the Division’s interests to attract her support, as I’m sure the Director is all too aware. Miss Edwina Nettleblack is unswervingly eager to find her sister. The missing girl is apparently rather young, likely to stumble into all manner of dangers – and she is on the verge of marrying into the nobility, as Miss Edwina was extremely keen to inform us. With the Director’s permission, I shall take the lead on this case, and find the youngest Miss Nettleblack before – ”
Saints, plums, and Septimus forgive me, but I couldn’t. I was as truly guilty of this as I’d ever be guilty of anything – and, accordingly, my legs gave way.
For heaven knows how long, there was nothing but panic, swirling semi-conscious panic and a ghastly dearth of steady breaths. I could have been anywhere – I think I was anywhere, and everywhere, pinwheeling in my head from Gower to Cambridge to Catfish Crescent to the Division, strung up on the neat brown plait that had been my hair, until something cut me loose and hurled me shrieking into every place at once –
Then the panic shattered, and the dregs of it crushed themselves together like rags into paper – only they made a ceiling instead, pale and poorly plastered, with a large crack wriggling out of one corner. I was staring at that ceiling from a bed, upon which I seemed to be sprawled (persimmons!), a spindly wrought-iron thing that rattled when I twitched, its neat-made bedsheets either threadbare or knitted, the smell that clung about it thick and distinctly not human. My boots were still laced, my uniform as stiff and scratchy as ever. The posy, crushed of half its petals, was still pressed beneath my belt.
I’d not been dipping my toe in these observations for more than a moment before something brushed at my temple. There were rats, at least five of them, and they appeared to have made their own paltry bedsheets out of my cropped hair.
“Figs,” I gasped, quite at a loss for how to proceed.
“Henry! Still alive?”
The rats were – just about – reassuring in the context of Nick Fitzdegu’s voice, though the bed decidedly wasn’t. I stared about, eyes swivelling, far too scared to move my head, and there he was: cross-legged at a desk under a dirty porthole of a window, decanting his rat food into chipped bowls with manic precision. He flung it down when he saw me gaping, skidded about on his chair to toss me a smile, snatching up a mug from beside the bowls on the desk. It had a glorious scent quite unlike any tea I had ever encountered, heady with cinnamon and cloves.
“Here you go. Food and fluids, that’s what you need, and chai’s nothing if not invigorating – ancestral recipe, that. And I stuck a few drops of Nettleblack’s in it, just in case. Hope you don’t mind the bed – bit un-gentlike, I know – but better than the floor, eh?”
I blinked. How to ask him to extricate his rats?
“I – erm – what – what happened?”
“After you collapsed? Well, we got you upstairs, and – you sort of fell asleep. Think you were asleep, at any rate. You were talking a lot. Chattering away like a right little medium!”
Now I sat up, so sharply that half the rats went flying. “I – but – what – what did I say?”
“Begging your pardon, but it was mostly nonsense.” He grinned, stretched down one lanky leg and nudged a flailing rat back to its feet on the bare floorboards. “The sort of stuff that doesn’t make much sense on its own. Just lots of but you can’t and please don’t and the like – and fruit, whole market-fuls of fruit. Bit of a thing for you, the fruit, isn’t it? Or is it just hunger? Apparently you had to skip lunch. And possibly breakfast. You need to eat, you know that?”
Pineapples, but I hardly heard him. It was all back, every scrap of the terrible revelation that had knocked me senseless in the first place, shot through with a new nightmarish question: what would Septimus think? If my conscious existence had exasperated her before, how much more would my spontaneous delirium bristle at her nerves? And to have swooned in the wake of – oh, pomegranates! – what must have seemed like an utterly tangential concern – some missing heiress, nothing to do with the Division – she must think me entirely deranged!
“Septimus – she – where is she? She didn’t – doesn’t – is she angry with me?”
It was Nick’s turn to blink. He folded the mug of chai into my palm, slid off the chair – holding my gaze all the while, as if I were yet another rodent he was endeavouring not to startle – and perched himself down on the end of the bed, lean face cupped in his hands.
“I wouldn’t say angry. More – eh, what’s the word? – when you’re a bit, y’know, you don’t know what to do, and you don’t like it, but you’re more confused than annoyed – ”
“I – erm – perturbed?”
“There you go!” He smiled, snatched a tumbling rat without looking and notched it over his shoulder. “Perturbed, then. Maybe a bit guilty? She’s downstairs with Matty, waiting for you – but they’re not talking about you anymore, don’t worry. It’s the case. She’s not sure the Div’s got space for it – chasing the rich, bringing them back like naughty children with a Division-ful of governesses.”
This was about as reassuring as anything could have been. If Septimus objected to Mr. Adelstein working for my sisters, surely that made her distinctly disinclined to aid investigations into the missing Nettleblack?
“Plums.” It was a sigh, but more relief than dismay, rounded off by a voracious gingery gulp of the chai. “I – erm – I really am sorry – for – well – I didn’t mean to inconvenience – ”
He flapped a hand, swatted my apologies out of the air – then set that hand, quite as he’d set the rat, on my shoulder, and gave me a bolstering shake. It was just as well that I’d halved the chai; his gesture set the remnants slopping up the mug. “No harm done. No one’s angry with you. Mostly people just want to feed you. You’ll be alright, fieldmouse – I know Septimus might look scary as a penny dreadful, but she’ll look after you – ”
“Nicholas!”
There were terrified squeaks, and they were mostly mine. The detective was glowering round the door, from Nick to me to the chai in my hands, as if he could prise all the proffered comforts away from me with sheer glare alone.
“How long has she been awake?” he demanded.
Nick flashed me a quick smile, sprang off the bed to weather the storm. Plums, but I had to follow his example, even with my lungs garrotting themselves on my ribcage, plunging my face into the last of the chai by way of a brief escape. “Gently, Matty! Henry’s only been back a few minutes!”
Mr. Adelstein sniffed. “I see. Clearly, she doesn’t waste time.”
If I’d had more nerve – if I’d had any nerve – I would have – oh, I don’t know – I would have expressed my utmost incredulity, and in no uncertain terms! Yes! Whatever he was insinuating, he was about as wildly wide of the mark as it was possible for a detective to be – and quite what right did he have to be prodding me with such insinuations anyway? I saw myself in my mind, growing a good three inches and transforming into Rosamond, saw a killingly ironical smirk framed in feral curls. Sweet pomegranates, Matty, but I’ve really no interest in stealing your lodger – the only one conjuring a scandal here is you!
But I wasn’t Rosamond. “I – erm – I do apologise for – the yelling – and the collapsing – quite – ”
Mr. Adelstein was still glaring at me, head notched to one side. If I’d been deemed a fieldmouse, he was decidedly living up to his goshawk streak, ready to swoop down and dash me into the skies. But – that said – there was something else in his look. Something had sharpened there whilst I’d been stammering at him, something quite apart from his wary disdain.
“That’s quite alright,” he returned coolly. “As Nicholas might say, no harm done, Miss Harriet.”
Figs. Figs. There it was, and there was consummately nothing I could do to keep the horror out of my face.
“Harriet? Who’s that?”
Mr. Adelstein didn’t drop my gaze, not even for Nick’s bewilderment. He edged himself further into the tiny attic-room, round the three enormous rat-cages that littered the floor, where rodents scurried into their hay at the creak of his footfalls. Now, he was close enough for me to spot the yellow flecks in his eyes, his disapproval visibly sparking into triumph.
“Henry is an – ah – unusual name for a woman. I simply assumed it was short for Harriet.”
How – how could he have – what? I’d been the soul of timidity for the entire duration of my acquaintance with this man, short-haired and pained-looking and as far removed from the confidence of the wealthy as it was possible to be! Had Edwina and Rosamond given him a likeness of me? Had I gasped out something in my hysteria by way of a fatal clue?
No. It wasn’t even what I said – it was how I said it. My peculiar accent, too bizarre for Cassandra to place – but if you broke it down into its composite parts –
It froze me quite cadaverous. My traitorous voice cowered in my throat. Every word – however timid, however inarticulate – every word only confirmed his suspicions!
“Is it short for Harriet?”
I gasped a breath, made myself swallow. He had no evidence, nothing, beyond the first smartings of an idea, and a smattering of circumstances which surely – surely? – couldn’t stand up on their own. But he plainly expected me to quail at the mere suggestion of his victory, to slump to the floor again, to sob myself into a frenzy and confess the lot –
“No,” I heard myself declare, rather louder than I’d meant to, every word rattling back off the rat-cages. “It’s just Henry.”
Well – if he thought I had any intention of making it an easy triumph – !
He blinked, startled, but there wasn’t time for him to retort. The same name I’d just brazenly assured him was my baptismal original was ricocheting up through the floorboards in Septimus’s voice, thick with impatience. She must have caught our voices, and she clearly wanted to be away from the place.
I could second her with a vengeance on that!
Mr. Adelstein arched an eyebrow. Pomegranates, he recovered quickly. “Your superior has been lecturing me about the apparent foolishness of taking on the Nettleblack case. If you’ll excuse me – Henry – I think I’ve heard more than enough of it for today. She’s waiting for you downstairs.”
There was the slightest twinge of a sneer about his ruler-sharp lips. Scurry back to your superior, it seemed to say, and enjoy it whilst it lasts.
But he had to step aside. Nick was there, looking unabashedly baffled, and my desperate gamble had been right. As long as I denied it, Mr. Adelstein didn’t have sufficient evidence to overrule me. It set my skin prickling with terror, but I made myself dip him a – not a curtsy, which would have had far too much of Miss Harriet about it, but a terse bow, the sort of thing I imagined Septimus would do.
“I – erm – of course,” I stammered, and sprinted through the door before I could catch his reaction. I had just enough wit left to put the mug back before I descended the stairs – decidedly empty of its brilliant contents, which doubtless he would take as my greatest insult yet.
The fear’s still coiling in my chest, even now, back in the Division dormitory with my journal on one knee, and half of Dallyangle between me and Pole Place. This isn’t merely a pheasant-shoot – this is a duel in earnest – and, once again, my very future seems determined to stake itself on the outcome!
Mercifully, the incessant sprinting seems to have come to an end for the evening. We spent far too much afternoon on yet more laps of Dallyangle, in which I watched and shivered whilst Septimus checked the locks on outhouses and cellars, scribbling in her notebook with vigour fit to snap the stubby pencil. She stopped us at the market to pick up bread rolls, shoved one into my hands with a wary frown: “Nick’s right – you need to eat!” The sky darkened, thickening to heavy shadows between the houses, and a sharp wind knifed in from the fields. No detective dropped from the swarming clouds to ensnare me, for which I was profoundly grateful. Not that his absence helped when it came to recovering from my bout of terror; the slightest sound in the street was enough to set me twitching.
Now I feel, I confess, quite a thing apart from the curious cosiness that’s sprung up around me. For the others in the dormitory – Gertie Skull and her relations and their self-declared Inferior Contingent – it’s a gentle evening in familiar shades, unhampered by scheming sisters and their detective-errants. Slabs of warm thick-buttered toast, punched through with the toasting-fork, are being passed in to us from reception. Gertie is cross-legged on her bed, steadily devouring that shiny-backed copy of Life and Limbs: a Comic Romance of the Medical School! (She was both delighted and perturbed to discover that I’d already finished it – I am not, she insists, to tell her whether the disguised surgeon heroine chooses the rakish fellow-student or the swaggering stableboy, nor am I to reveal the fate of the doctor’s missing gangrenous hand.) Oliver Skull is stood on his creaking bed, fiddling with the mirrors behind the dripping candles, to universal demands of brighter! – whilst insisting in a splutter that the lights can’t manage it. Millicent Musgrove splays her spare split skirt over the draughty floor, digs under her bed for a ramshackle sewing-kit, applies herself to some deft repairs on the interminable buttonholes. I have a hasty glimpse of Mordred’s pale head, darting out of a break in the floorboards beneath my bed, before he vanishes back to a subterranean existence I cannot even attempt to pursue. Cassandra leans round the door, smirking – “Millicent! Your young man’s out front, wondering if he can squeeze in an evening stroll before night shift?”
There is something I can do, at least, something beyond hysterical scribbling. That raggedy scrap of petals survived the day at my belt. I fear Gertie would demand impossible heaps of explanation if she caught a glimpse of them – so into the journal they go, too swift to be seen, whilst the Skulls are watching Millicent leap into her button-boots. I’ve never been one for flower-pressing – Rosamond was the amateur botanist, in her clifftop youth – I can only hope the poor posy-remnants stay vaguely in place on the page –
Figs. Right. I’ll have to finish here – no time – I’ll explain properly later – but –
In short – I may well be duelling Mr. Adelstein for my life, but something rather worse has apparently just happened to Dallyangle. A decapitated head, it seems, has unexpectedly appeared onstage, in the prop-chest of The Pirates of Penzance.
6.
OF SEVERED HEADS
IN STRANGE PLACES
The Director’s Record
October 29th 1893 (Sunday)
REPRIMANDS, &c. –– Septimus, for seventh (?) attempt to involve Pip Property in the Division’s affairs. Fine of one week’s pay if situation occurs for an eighth time without extremely good reason. Gertrude Skull, for another untimely visit to the tavern next door – one shilling.
LETTER. –– Will send to Matthew for examination. Contents identical to those of the previous missive. Handwriting and sender unknown. Mem. – perhaps best to open the post myself for the next few weeks, until this so-called correspondence dies down. Cassandra and Gertrude were far too shaken for my liking when they brought the thing to my office.
NEW RECRUIT. –– Miss Henry Hyssop, with Septimus as mentor. An unorthodox but necessary move. Number of recruits urgently needs increasing, if we are to meet the council’s demands on time, and Miss Hyssop’s education may yet prove useful. (As, indeed, may the training process, to Septimus.)
October 30th 1893 (Monday)
MICE. –– Irrelevant, perhaps, by comparison with other announcements, but worth noting that an unprecedented number of mice – or, the mangled remnants of mice – have appeared in the building. Could send Millicent (not Gertrude) to enquire whether her parents’ tavern has started keeping a cat. We can hardly complain if the Division has inadvertently acquired a mouser, but the creature must at least be trained to clean up after itself. Cassandra claimed to have seen a monstrously elongated rat on the premises last night – which could simply be Cassandra’s overactive imagination exerting itself once more – but I will not have rodents in the Division, and I do not especially wish to tolerate the dismembered remains of them either.
MATTHEW. –– Letter delivered. Ensure evidence arrives intact next time (what on earth possessed Cassandra to scribble all over it, and indeed over every scrap of paper she finds?). News of possible case: missing Nettleblack sibling, of Nettleblack’s Tincture family. Division involvement in the matter presently suspended, in light of major new preoccupations (see below).
SEVERED HEAD AT THE DALLYANGLE THEATRE. –– Urgent. Septimus and her new assistant dispatched to scene. No further news as yet. Real potential for advancement of the Division – if nothing else, it might buy us some time.
