Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  WIDOW’S WELCOME

  WIDOW’S WELCOME

  D.K. FIELDS

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © D.K. Fields, 2019

  The moral right of D.K. Fields to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Designer: Helen Crawford-White

  Authors photograph: Two Cats in the Yard Photography

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781789542486

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781789542493

  ISBN (E): 9781789542479

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London ec1r 4rg

  www.headofzeus.com

  For Mike, for Vancouver

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  The Swaying Audience

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  The Swaying Audience

  Abject Reveller, god of: loneliness, old age, fish

  Affable Old Hand, god of: order, nostalgia, punctuality

  Beguiled Picknicker, god of: festivals, incense, insect bites

  Blind Devotee, god of: mothers, love, the sun

  Bloated Professional, god of: wealth, debt, shined shoes

  Calm Luminary, god of: peace, light, the forest

  Courageous Rogue, god of: hunting, charity, thin swords

  Curious Stowaway, god of: rites of passage, secrets, summer and the longest day

  Deaf Relative, god of: hospitality

  Delicate Tout, god of: herbs, prudence, drought

  Engaged Matron, god of: childbirth

  Exiled Washerwoman, god of: sanitation, rivers, obstacles

  Faithful Companion, god of: marriage, loyalty, dancing

  Filthy Builder, god of: clay, walls, buckets

  Frail Beholder, god of: beauty, spectacles, masks

  Generous Neighbour, god of: harvest, fertility, the first day of the month

  Gilded Keeper, god of: justice, fairness, cages

  Grateful Latecomer, god of: good fortune, spontaneity, autumn

  Heckling Drunkard, god of: jokes, drink, fools

  Honoured Bailiff, god of: thieves, the dark, bruises

  Insolent Bore, god of: wind, bindleleaf, borders

  Inspired Whisperer, god of: truth, wisdom, silk

  Jittery Wit, god of: madness, lamps, volcanoes

  Keen Musician, god of: destiny, wine and oil

  Lazy Painter, god of: rain, noon, hair

  Missing Lover, god of: forbidden love, youth, thunder

  Moral Student, god of: the horizon, knowledge, mountains

  Needled Critic, god of: criticism, bad weather, insincerity

  Nodding Child, god of: sleep and dreams, innocence

  Overdressed Liar, god of: butlers, beards, mischief

  Overlooked Amateur, god of: jilted lovers, the wronged, apprentices

  Pale Widow, god of: death and renewal, winter, burrowing animals, the moon

  Penniless Poet, god of: song, poetry, money by nefarious means

  Prized Dandy, god of: clothes, virility, bouquets

  Querulous Weaver, god of: revenge, plots, pipes

  Reformed Trumpeter, god of: earthquakes, the spoken word

  Restless Patron, god of: employment, contracts and bonds, spring

  Scandalous Dissenter, god of: protest, petition, dangerous animals

  Senseless Brawler, god of: war, chequers, fire

  Stalled Commoner, god of: home and hearth, decisions, crowds

  The Mute, god of: Silence

  Travelling Partner, god of: journeys, danger and misfortune, knives

  Ugly Messenger, god of: pennysheets, handicrafts, dogs

  Valiant Glutton, god of: cooking, trade, cattle

  Vicious Beginner, god of: milk and nursing, midnight, ignorance

  Weary Governess, god of: schooling, cats

  Wide-eyed Inker, god of: tattoos, colour, sunsets

  Withering Fishwife, god of: dusk, chastity, flooding

  Yawning Hawker, god of: dawn, comfort, grain

  Zealous Stitcher, god of: healing and mending

  Prologue

  The night her sister left, Cora told her first story to the Stowaway. He was the member of the Audience for such tales: people coming and people going, growing up and leaving home. But not that other kind of leaving. The lasting kind. A story of that sort was better told to the Widow.

  Cora’s story for the Stowaway began with sudden waking.

  *

  It was the sound of breaking glass, somewhere downstairs, that pulled her from sleep. Then there was quiet, and that was worse than the shock of the noise. Her heart beat with a thump she could hear. The silence grew until the air of her bedroom felt sharp with it. Then there was a bump, a bang.

  Footsteps below.

  Her parents, returning from their engagement? They both liked a drink with company, and their meeting tonight was an important one. Her mother had talked about it all week. Perhaps her father had been clumsy with his nightcap. Perhaps that meant it hadn’t gone well, whatever had been so important. Cora waited to catch his muffled apologies and her mother’s scolding – safe, known noises – but neither came. It wasn’t a night for such expected things; the night felt full of secrets and their dangers.

  That was how the Stowaway liked it. Cora thought of the story she could tell, if she only knew a little more, and gently placed her feet on the floorboards. The wood was cold against her bare skin, but she couldn’t find her slippers, and couldn’t stop for them. She needed to get down there.

  She snuck onto the landing, then to her parents’ room, stepping as lightly as she could. Their door was open, their bed empty. She crept to her older sister’s room. Ruth must have heard it by now. Ruth would go down with her.

  ‘Ruth!’ she whispered.

  But Ruth wasn’t there. Cora said her sister’s name again, uselessly, as if Ruth might be hiding somewhere and this was her idea of a game, a joke, because Ruth did that sometimes, when their parents were out. She slipped behind doors, tucked her tall, thin frame into cupboards, where by rights a body shouldn’t have been able to fit, then grabbed Cora as she passed, unsuspecting.

  And now Ruth had left her in the hous
e, alone, and people had come to rob them. Cora took an empty candlestick from Ruth’s shelves, dislodging a pile of Seminary papers covered in her sister’s neat writing, and held it up like a small but heavy club.

  Cora wasn’t entirely surprised by Ruth’s absence. It had been the way of things recently. Her sister had kept late hours the last few weeks, not coming home when Seminary classes finished but disappearing into the darkness of the winter evenings, missing dinner. Their parents, usually so strict about their daughters sitting up to table with them, had seemed not to notice that their eldest child wasn’t there. Nothing had been right for weeks. And now this.

  At the top of the stairs, Cora paused. Below, in the hallway, light spilled from beneath the closed study door. Her parents’ shared study: a room of locked drawers, glass-fronted cabinets, and animal heads mounted on the walls. The noises were coming from there. Perhaps her parents had come home after all, and there was business after the meeting that kept them from their bed. There had been worrying and fretting when they left the house earlier that evening. Cora knew better than to ask her parents about their work in the trading halls. They never welcomed such questions. That hadn’t stopped Ruth asking them, again and again, in the last few weeks.

  A shriek of metal sounded from the study. That couldn’t be her parents, who never slammed a drawer, never even dropped a ledger.

  Cora crept down the stairs, her grip on the candlestick weapon almost painful. A cold draught blew from under the study door and swirled around her. She took a deep breath, then kicked the door.

  There was light, and… And she couldn’t believe it: Ruth, a chisel in hand, looking as relieved to see Cora as Cora was to see her.

  ‘Ruth! I thought you were a robber! What are you doing?’

  ‘You should go back to bed.’ Ruth bent over their father’s desk and rammed the chisel into the top drawer’s lock.

  Cora moved towards her sister but as she did so she stepped on something sharp. At once there was pain, hot in her foot. Glass was scattered across the floor. The door of the cabinet beside Ruth was broken. The cabinet had been packed with wine-coloured ledgers, which were now spread across the floor, their cream innards spilling. And, beside them, small smears of blood. Cora’s blood.

  Ruth didn’t look up from her frantic efforts. ‘I didn’t want you to… you should go back to bed.’

  With some considerable effort, she wrenched open the drawer and grabbed a handful of papers from inside. She rifled through them then gave a cry – of joy or pain, Cora didn’t know.

  ‘You mustn’t, Ruth! It’s not allowed.’

  Her sister appeared not to hear her, only glanced at the study window, which was wide open. Someone was out there, in the garden, a dark shape among the flowerbeds. Cora still held the candlestick and now she was ready to use it.

  ‘Who’s making you do this? I’ll—’

  Ruth’s hand on her arm. Her thin face flushed.

  ‘It’s all here,’ she said, and shook the papers, as if that should mean something. ‘The whole place is rotten, right through the middle. You’ve been at the Seminary long enough; haven’t you felt it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Cora’s foot throbbed.

  ‘The Commission, Cora! Audience-sake, this whole city. It’s built on lies. There’s power in stories and a story of power.’ She thrust the papers at Cora. ‘This – this is the story of that power, and it consumes people.’

  ‘Who? Who are you talking about, Ruth?’

  But Ruth only shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to believe it of them, but I can’t pretend anymore. I don’t want any part of it and neither should you, Cora. Come with me.’

  ‘Where are you going at this time of night?’

  ‘Anywhere but here.’

  And then Cora saw it: the bag by the window. She dropped the candlestick and it chipped the edge of a flagstone. Her mother would be livid.

  ‘You’re… You’re running away?’ she managed to stutter, though the question seemed ridiculous.

  ‘I have to. Please – come with me.’

  ‘But you’ve only got a year left at the Seminary,’ Cora said. ‘Don’t you want to finish?’

  ‘You’re not listening! There isn’t much time. They’ll be back soon.’ Ruth darted to the window, taking the papers with her.

  ‘Wait – Ruth!’

  Like a strange kind of echo, her sister’s name was whispered urgently from the garden.

  ‘Last chance, will you come with me?’ Ruth said, sitting on the window ledge and lowering her feet over the other side.

  But Cora was backing away. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to find your own way out.’

  ‘Ruth—’

  And then, if the Stowaway would believe it, her sister was gone.

  *

  As Cora sat on the bottom stair and tried to pull the glass from her foot, she began her story to the Stowaway. A story told through sobs – that didn’t help the telling, but she hoped the Stowaway would understand.

  It was only later, much later, that Cora realised the story would have been better told to the Widow after all: Ruth’s leaving turned out to be a tale of death for everyone in Cora’s house, one way or another.

  One

  The body was left there to be found. At least, that was how it looked.

  Not dumped in the back doorway of the slop-shop, or the whorehouse, or the chequers’ halls that ran the length of the alleyway. It hadn’t been hidden behind the pile of rain-softened crates and their rotted food scraps that lent the early morning air a staleness it didn’t deserve. The body was in the open, face-up.

  A blue-clad figure stood watch beside it, glancing up and down the alley to the streets at either end, her hand gripping her baton.

  ‘Expecting an ambush, Constable?’ Cora called.

  On seeing her, the young woman made an effort to compose herself.

  Detective Cora Gorderheim, Bernswick Division, looked hard in her pockets for a few pennies. The gig driver, as grey and simple as his Clotham’s uniform, showed no surprise when Cora paid the exact fare and no more. The gig lumbered off along Hatch Street, which was slow to rouse itself that morning, and Cora made her way down the alleyway to the constable.

  ‘Jackson, isn’t it?’ Cora said, recognising the young woman from the station’s briefing room. Recognising her buck teeth more, if she were honest.

  ‘It’s Jenkins, Detective Gorderheim.’

  ‘Right then, Jenkins. Get yourself out on Hatch Street and wait for the stitcher – he’s on his way.’

  ‘Wait for him, Detective?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Cora took her bindleleaf tin from the pocket of her old red coat and was annoyed to find she hadn’t any rolled smokes among the loose leaves and papers. She snapped the tin shut. ‘Get yourself out on the street. And once Pruett arrives, start knocking on doors to see what people saw or heard last night – that’s if they’ll admit to being anything but blind and deaf. I’ll keep an eye on our friend here.’

  Jenkins set off at a near trot towards the end of the alley.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ Cora said to the body. She squatted beside him and felt the pull of the damage done to her foot all those years ago. The dull heat of the tendon, and of her anger too. She shook away the thought of Ruth, as she always did, and spoke to the dead man. ‘I’d say you’re not from around here.’

  In fact, she’d bet her bindleleaf that the dead man was a Wayward. He was lying on one of their cloaks, the kind made of stiffened skin and lined with all manner of pockets. Lying on it, but not as if he’d fallen while wearing the thing. More like someone had spread it neatly beneath him. But that was where the niceties ended: this Wayward had joined the Audience after some violence.

  His mouth had been sewn shut.

  No wonder the constable had been nervous.

  Daylight had just about regained its claim on the world and in its weak glow Cora took
a better look at the man’s face. Two lengths of string wound their way through his lips. No, something tougher than string. Cora touched one of the ends hanging from the Wayward’s bottom lip. Feeling through the dried blood, she was sure the lengths were boot laces – the kind from sturdy work boots. One black, one white. Or, white originally. Now that lace was stained with blood. Blood that had also poured down the Wayward’s chin and onto his smock. He was rusty with it.

  She eased his chin up. Strangled was the story of the fat, purpled ring of skin around his neck. Pruett, the stitcher at Bernswick Station, would officially determine the cause of death, once he dragged himself from the depths of the cold room. Knife wounds and smashed skulls were Cora’s bread and butter – she’d seen it all in this part of the city. Her part. But not this kind of mutilation. This was new.

  She rolled a smoke and saw that the end of her coat had caught the murk that lay between the cobbles. A constant feature of the glorious city of Fenest, capital of the Union of Realms. Come rain, come sun, there was always something dark and dirty to be found in the gaps.

  A single lamp still burned at the door nearest her. A lamp-man had found the body. He was in such a hurry to get to the station he’d abandoned his rounds and left one lamp unextinguished. Cora thanked him out loud, and used the lamp to light up, taking a deep drag.

  Detective Sergeant Hearst, Cora’s commanding officer, had also been in a hurry when he’d shaken Cora awake in a corner of the briefing room. He had a dead man and an address: the alley that connected Hatch Street and Green Row. The alley between the Swan’s Teeth Inn and Mrs Hawksley’s whorehouse was how Cora knew it.

  ‘Everyone was in a hurry – except whoever did this to you, right, friend?’ Cora said to the dead man.

  Someone who had designs to sew a man’s mouth shut wasn’t about rushing things. That, and the cloak laid out all nice, made no sense for a back-alley mugging gone too far, or a fight over one of Hawksley’s whores.

  Maybe it was a Wayward thing? The Wayward people – and realms were people, not so much a place – spent their lives crossing the Northern Steppes and all the other lands of the Union, moving their herds and building other people’s fences. That would wear away at you, make you capable of anything. It had certainly worn away at this man, Cora thought, looking down at him. He was about forty years of age, but it was hard to be sure. ‘Weathered’ would be a kind way of putting it.