Nettleblack, page 5
“Take a seat!”
We’d reached the second door in the passageway, and she bustled me into it, kicking the door wide with one sturdy boot. Whatever this room’s previous use had been – judging by the remnants of hooks on the walls, I guessed either tack room or torture chamber – vague efforts had been made to transform it into an office, with brittle shelves full of ledgers and loose papers, and a stack of stained teacups lining the skinny legs of a desk. Plums, it was still every penny dreadful Rosamond had ever lent me. The metal poking from the walls was peeling with rust, and the sallow desktop had its own scratching of stains, which I fervently hoped were merely the work of an inkwell. Another brace of gaslights had been haphazardly nailed in at head-height, but they hadn’t been lit; there was a piece of torn paper stuffed into one of the glass casings, hollering don’t turn on, they will explode! in jaunty inked capitals. The only light in the room came from the tapers dotted about the shelves and desk, their flames swooning fit to rival even my earlier performance.
Cassandra threw me into a spindly wooden chair, bristled herself down opposite me with her sheet of paper, hooked a loose curl behind her ear, and grabbed for the nearest of many battered ink-pens. The tapers trembled for her every movement, raking clawed shadows from the hooks on the walls.
“Alright. Want to join us, you say?”
And in that instant – sodden and half-mad – still reeling from the loss of my very existence – scorched at the eyebrows by that encounter with Septimus and her formidable hair – and frantically dodging thoughts of all that my sisters would do if they discovered it – I was either too polite, or too terrified, to want anything else.
“Well – quite!”
Cassandra, gangly and elegant in her strange uniform, allowed herself full thirty seconds to study me properly. Her freckled face slowly crumpled into a turbulent combination of scepticism and irritation, a good quarter of it directed solely at my cravat. I knew the look all too well. There was nothing to do but stare at the nearest inkstain, my toes curling in my boots, the jagged edge of my truncated hair dripping icy gnat-bites down the back of my neck.
“Right. Well. Whatever you are, you’re on my head, so we’d better make the best of you. And you’re new – unsolicited – which is something, at least. Name?”
Yes! She hadn’t instantly thrown me out!
Cassandra cleared her throat, nudged me back into panic. Name? I was far too twitchy to try anything ostentatiously Welsh again. Edwina had always bungled my first name, so that was a possibility – but it wasn’t as if I liked the name Harriet – and if I spluttered out Nettleblack everyone in Dallyangle would know it –
“Henry!”
Her eyebrows melted into her hairline. Figs, I could hardly blame her.
“Really. Just like Javert named herself Septimus, I suppose.”
Neck-deep in my own mire, there was nothing to do but force a petrified smile. “Well – in a manner of – anyway – it’s Henry – erm – Hyssop?”
My other middle name. Herbal as it was, it was at least not famously associated with a certain household tincture.
“Henry Hyssop.”
“Yes! I – well – my – my parents just – erm – were – eccentric – ”
She flicked a hand at me. “Alright, alright. At least you’ve got a surname. What are your parents?”
“Dead,” I stammered, like a consummate fool. “I – I mean – well – yes – ”
“My condolences.” Her sympathy was dry as paper, and quite as ironical as the flourish with which she scrawled down my impromptu alias. “Anyway. Age?”
“Oh – I – erm – twenty-one – ”
“Mm. Older than you look. Height?”
Plums, how was I to know? “I’m sorry, I – I haven’t the faintest – ”
She rolled her eyes. “Didn’t come prepared, clearly. Fortunately for you, I’m not Javert. Get up – I’ll measure you.”
I skittered off the chair, tipped onto my toes, prayed my skirt and the shadows and the looming desk would mask my doing so. Minimum height, Septimus had said, and I was the shortest of my sisters by half a head. I must have been near the end of the test – and I was hardly having this oddly-named version of myself getting thrown out of the Dallyangle Division before she’d fully signed up!
The Dallyangle Division. At what point was I going to venture that feeble, small-voiced, petrified enquiry: what actually are you?
Cassandra, for her part, appeared to be grappling with a conundrum of her own. I had been expecting her to produce a tape measure, or perhaps gesture me towards one of the metal-studded walls to mark out my height – but she clearly had no such intention. She fumbled in her desk-drawer, extricated a ruler – a skinny wooden thing that couldn’t have been longer than twelve inches – glanced from it to me in several increasingly panicky stares – held it up, as if she meant to toast me with it – then dropped it straight back into the drawer. I blinked at her, and got a valiant shrug by way of answer, a quick jerk of the head for me to sit down again, a wry grimace as she did the same.
“It’s probably fine,” she muttered, after several seconds of dazed silence on both our parts. “We’re desperate, and I’ve had it just about up to here – ” (here being a violent hand-gesture towards the ceiling, quite possibly level with the minimum height) “ – with Javert quoting my mother at me.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Apology appreciated,” she smirked irritably, apparently disinclined to elaborate. “Look – Hyssop – Henry – whatever – is there anything you can do? Please?”
Well. I’d been asking myself the same question for twenty-one years.
“Oh – erm – I – I can read – write – draw – paint in watercolours – badly – embroider a handkerchief – more or less – play the pianoforte – not well – ”
And this genteel spiel was, of course, more than enough to bring the whole Rights of Woman crashing down on my sheltered head. Cassandra looked ready to upend me through the door. Was there nothing else I knew – anything less accomplished?
“I’m also – erm – very proficient with firearms?”
Sweet nectarines, the irony!
Cassandra flung a groan up past her quivering tapers, lolling back in her chair in an attitude of exhausted despair. “And what good will that be, when the Div don’t carry weapons? How’s your constitution? Physical strength? Capacity to shrug off bad weather?”
I paled. Mercifully, she didn’t demand further answer than that.
“Look, just sign here,” she declared through a sigh, skidding a form across the desk. She’d put my name in quotation marks. “You’ve got to be useful somehow. And there’s a free bed in the dorm.”
I gaped at her. “I – what – am I expected to reside here?”
“Oh, no. We sleep in the fields, mostly.” She sniggered for her own sarcasm, pen-nib dripping ink on the dotted line. “The Dallyangle Division’s no longer an out-of-the-living-room affair – we have lodgings now. Apprentices sleep here. Anything higher sleeps in its own home, if it’s sensible, or under the desk in its office, if it’s Javert. Did you not know this? Do you know anything about being part of the Division?”
“I – erm – well – ”
Plums, how to put this delicately?
“I’ve only very recently been – erm – made aware that I – erm – had such an option – I’ve – ah – not encountered a – a police with ladies – ”
“We’re not the police!”
She straightened up in her chair, cleared her throat, reeled off the rest as if it were a poem for a drawing-room – much like the way Septimus had introduced the Division to me, not that I imagined Cassandra would appreciate such a comparison. “Dallyangle doesn’t need them, not while it has us. Hurl upon us all sinister activity and midnight menaces, and so forth. And there’ll be no metropolitan interference here, now that we’re providing public protection for our town’s particular needs – or something like that – and it’s all thanks to our brilliant Director. Haven’t you heard of her? Or… any of this? Are you not from around here? Have to say, I can’t place your accent.”
In the face of all these brilliant women, I could hardly admit that I’d simply never been permitted to walk the Dallyanglian streets alone – or, for that matter, to attend to anything in Dallyangle beyond its nobility. As for my voice – well, figs – when one thwacks a South Welsh lilt against the affected elocution of the English upper classes, the result is certainly rather difficult to place.
“I – erm – well – I’ve just come back from studying at Cambridge – ”
Her tired eyes quite popped. “Real Cambridge? Girton College?”
“I – quite – ”
To my astonishment, she struck up a triumphant laugh. “Well, what do you think of that, Javert? I’ve only gone and hired a Girton girl! That is – ” – and her grin wavered – “ – if you’re sure you want to sign?”
Pheasants and proposals or spontaneous Divisionry.
Have stranger choices been made?
But – I’d come this far, hadn’t I? And it was hardly hurting anyone! And – surely slipping myself into some sort of structure – something pioneering and useful, if what they all said was to be believed – surely that was a start? The panicky stab of thought – you can still sneak back to the house – struck me between the eyebrows, but I frowned it off before it could settle. Coward that I was (well, am), I couldn’t entirely bear the thought of braving the stormy witch-hour streets again.
Was this what decided me? I could claim it was that noble desire to serve a useful purpose, but in wretched honesty it was a bit of both. I signed, blotted the pen to turn N into H, and Cassandra shook my hand.
“Welcome to the Dallyangle Division, Henry Hyssop,” she drawled. “I can assure you, you’re in for the rollick of your life.”
3.
IN WHICH A PLACE THAT
QUITE CAN’T EXIST DEFIANTLY
CONTINUES TO DO SO
To further pursue my insanity
I had barely a breath, in that stunned shadowy moment, to think on what I’d done, before all thoughts were abruptly curtailed by the sound of a door opening – well, to be precise, smashing open with clang fit to set the walls shaking. Cassandra dragged herself to her feet, shot me an eye-roll, stalked out into the corridor to meet the carnage with astonishing sangfroid. Given that I’d toppled half off my chair already, it seemed only prudent to follow her lead.
“It does make sense! You’ve got to trust me!”
The yawning door – the one at the top of the corridor – flung out a splash of gaslight, illuminating the passageway like a magic lantern, catching all the colours of the two figures beyond Cassandra’s sprightly curls. It was Septimus again, whirling about to plead with another woman – taller and older than the others, her skin deepest brown and her hair tight-bunched in a bun, her pristine uniform starred with a gleaming silver badge. She seemed quite profoundly disinclined to indulge whatever strange request had been proffered to her, pinning on a calming smile with alarmingly quick precision, her hands neatly clasped at her waist.
“Septimus. I appreciate your zeal, but we cannot employ this – this tactic of yours again. Pip Property is not personally involved in every crime ever to have struck Dallyangle.”
“But they’ll know something! And if you’d just let me question ’em again – you’re the Director, you can authorise it – and you’re the one who said we shouldn’t be afraid to use our abilities, ’long as the town required ’em – ”
“But this isn’t about the town, is it?” the Director interjected. “This is about you, continuing to neglect the good sense that made your name. We will discover the author of these letters, and we will unmask whoever sees fit to harass us – but we are not dragging that cravat designer back into our affairs.”
Brilliant was what Cassandra had called the Director, this fearfully controlled leader with her polished badge and elegant gold-rimmed spectacles. Looking at her, I could well believe it. Edwina, perpetually stressed and dragging the Nettleblack fortune from her shoulders – she was another brilliant woman, as our parents and our servants had all agreed, and the fact that she looked completely tormented by her own brilliance only enhanced its credibility. The Director was the same, though her calm façade was far more convincing than Edwina’s. She kept her brilliance perfectly poised, balancing on that careful self-control – and if you’d not lived with a sister similarly hounded by just how highly everyone thought of her, you’d never have noticed the edge to that armoured smile.
“So – in a shocking turn of events – we’re not chasing after Property tonight,” Cassandra smirked, grasping behind her to shunt me forward. Unsurprisingly, considering the blazing row unfolding a metre down the corridor, I wasn’t inclined to let her. “But one of your Division Sergeants has done something right this evening! I’ve only gone and – ”
“Property could give us a lead!” Septimus insisted, still doggedly intent on the Director. “That’s if they ain’t the one writing the letters! It makes a mort of sense for ’em to want us disbanded – ”
The Director set her teeth. “Because you provide ample reason. Which you would do well to stop doing.”
“It’s the moral of Javert’s existence,” Cassandra remarked loudly, her sardonicism slightly more panicked, her fingers still flitting blindly in search of my arm. “Anyone in a fancy cravat must be harbouring terrible secrets!”
Oranges. I was sporting a fancy cravat at that precise and incriminating instant, and my mad past self had apparently seen fit to trap it under a penny-collar.
“Septimus,” the Director sighed, patting her on the shoulder with one measured flick-of-the-wrist – or quite possibly preventing her from springing at Cassandra – “Enough of this. The Division has its duties, and you need to start prioritising them again.”
Cassandra snickered. “Do you hear that, Javert? No more burglaries on your lookouts, eh?”
The Director glanced around, lifting her voice high over Septimus’s retort, with such shrivelling disapproval in her tone that both Cassandra and I wilted. “Cassandra, is there some reason you are stood here offering unhelpful witticisms, when you should be – and who is your companion?”
Every gaze in the corridor slid in my direction. The Director, in a rather objectionable flash of brilliance, edged a step to the side to unblock the stream of gaslight from her room, until it lit me up like a bedraggled votive. Given that I’d spent the last ten seconds feverishly wrestling the cravat from my neck, it was all I could do to manage a countenance of approximate composure.
“She’s our latest recruit to the Division,” Cassandra declared, triumphant at last. “I found her in Weeping Alley, and – hear me out – I’ve just signed off her paperwork.”
“What?” Septimus spluttered.
I curtsied, face flaming, utterly devoid of words. Three shadowy silhouettes gaped back at me. The Director swallowed, arched her eyebrows, radiating forced calm frantically enough to steady every quivering flame in the building.
“Your reasoning, Cassandra?”
I could only be grateful she hadn’t asked me.
“Well – I know it looks mad, but we can train her up – and she wanted to join! And she’s not a Skull – she’s not just clung on from one of the old cases – she’s a proper Spontaneous Dallyanglian Citizen, choosing to make a career of the Division! The very thing you’ve been hoping we might start to get!”
Septimus looked more inclined to protest than words can do justice to – but the Director held up a curt hand to silence her, glanced me over with wary curiosity. “Is this true, miss?”
“I – erm – I – quite – ”
“It is!” Cassandra blurted, not without a scowl for my paltry efforts. “And I chose well! She went to Cambridge!”
The Director’s voice was a perfect tritone of shock. “The University of Cambridge? And you have a – that is to say, you completed your studies there?”
She had plainly been on the brink of asking what my qualification was, as if I’d sat the London exams instead of a Tripos. Edwina’s choice of institution for me had been based rather more on proximity of nobility than ability to receive a degree – although, with my grades, I probably never would have obtained one regardless. Figs – not that admitting as much would have been at all wise –
“I – yes!” I stammered hastily. “I – at Girton College – I – quite – do you – erm – do you know it?”
The Director’s golden eyes twitched behind her glasses, and I felt my stupidity on the instant. “Yes. I know it. And I know that the university makes a point of refusing to offer its female students any qualification for their efforts. I am intrigued that you chose to study there regardless – was there some resource that only the College could provide?”
Nectarines, tread carefully. Do not mention tinctures, or inheritances, or sizeable donations. “Oh – erm – no – I – I just – my family – ”
“Ah.” Her smile sprang back, sharp at the edges, the determined politeness stopping just short of her spectacle-frames. “Family connections. I see.”
She frowned a moment, the distracted brow-furrow of someone making a note. I expected the inevitable what family? – and was already scrabbling to find some credible profession for the fictitious Hyssops –
