by Alex Grecian
16
Day woke from a dream within a dream. Someone was chasing him, but he was underwater, moving slowly, pushing himself forward. When he had awoken the first time, he was still underwater, but now he was on his cot in his cell. The beams of sunlight that stabbed through his barred window, through the green water, were bars themselves, solid yellow, hot and sharp. He swam around them, straining to get to the window, but the sun kept cutting him, burning him, the water cooling his skin so that he would try again. The second time he woke, he lay there for a long time, his skin still tingling, listening to the quiet. At last he rose and crossed the room and looked outside. There was no sun to cut him or burn him, and the air was diffuse, grey and comforting, a mist that hugged the ground, hiding all the evil and fear that Day knew was there.
He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face from the basin beside his bed. Within ten minutes, he was dressed and on the path in front of Esther’s shop, closing the door behind him. Drapers’ Gardens was larger in the fog, bounded on all sides by nothing except his imagination. He could hear horses clop-clopping along Throgmorton Street and he turned in that direction.
“Where are you going?”
Day wheeled, his cane raised and ready, and saw Ambrose standing in the shadows of the shrubbery, blinking sleep from his eyes.
Day lowered his cane. “Did you sleep here in the gardens last night?”
“I meant to be gone already,” Ambrose said. “I usually wake up with the sun, but there ain’t no sun, is there?” He looked up at the sky, inviting Day to see for himself. “I thought it might be safer for you if I was nearby.”
Day smiled and nodded. The boy was still frightened. Day realized he should have found a place for him to sleep out of harm’s way. He knew all too well how cold and hard a trench beneath the trees could be. But he had been distracted by other worries.
“So where are you going?”
“Just taking a walk, I suppose,” Day said. In fact, he wanted to think a bit before his noon date with Jack, turn the situation over in his mind and try to find some advantage for himself.
“Gimme two minutes.” The boy darted into the shrubbery, and Day stood, watching the fog roll at him and away, pushing the air ahead of it, kneading the gardens like so much bread dough. He snapped to attention when Ambrose spilled out onto the path, combing his hair down with his fingers. “Weren’t even two minutes, were it?”
“Fast.”
“That’s me.”
They walked in amiable silence, each wrapped in his own grey thoughts. There was almost no traffic yet, and they passed no other people. Then Plumm’s rose out of the fog ahead of them. It seemed to vibrate there, humming with kinetic current. Day paused on the path, and Ambrose stopped beside him. They watched the building for a long while, and Day thought he might not be surprised if it uprooted itself and lurched toward them.
Ambrose grabbed his wrist. “Someone’s coming.”
Day listened. Through the fog came the sound of a man’s footsteps, approaching from the direction of the gardens. He knew in an instant who it was. Without a word, Day took Ambrose by the arm and hurried him across the street toward the department store. A white-gloved man exited the front of the store and glanced at them. Day nodded politely but steered the boy diagonally away. The black maw of an alleyway presented itself, and Day ushered Ambrose into it. Behind them, the sound of steady footsteps clocked off the flagstones. When he glanced back over his shoulder, Day saw nothing but swirling grey.
“What’s happening, guv?”
“Shh.”
He couldn’t see anything in the alley. Strange things crunched under his boots, and something furry brushed against his ankle. Ambrose tried to jerk away from him, but Day tightened his grip on the boy’s arm and kept him marching forward. A minute later, they came to a wall and Day turned the corner to his left, feeling along the bricks. At last they reached the end and there was nowhere else to go.
“Dead end,” Ambrose said. “You think that bloke’s still comin’ along? You hear him?”
Day could not hear him, but he could sense him circling in the dark. Jack was drawing near, he was somewhere just round the corner, coming closer to them with every panting breath they took. Day felt along the wall and found a knob and tried to turn it. A locked door. He raised his walking stick and rapped on the door with the brass end, but there was no answer, no sound from within the building.
“Quick, Ambrose, feel around the ground here and find something thin and flat, something metal, if possible. A collar stay or hairpin will do.”
“What for?”
“Just find me something now.”
He heard the boy scrabbling around on the stones, sifting through the filth that accumulated on every square inch of London’s streets and alleys. Day felt along the door next to the lock for a keyhole and ran his index finger over it, seeing the shape of it in his head. When he reached back, Ambrose dropped four wet objects in his palm.
“Any of those do, guv?”
“Yes, Ambrose. Perfect.” One of the objects seemed to be a flat strip of thin metal, perhaps a rib from a lady’s corset. (Day tried not to think about how a corset had come to be torn to pieces at the back of a dead-end alley in Cornhill.) Another was a bit of bent wire. He dropped the other two objects at his feet and went to work on the keyhole, inserting the flat rib and working the bit of wire in next to it, listening all the while for those footsteps behind them. He maneuvered the wire until he heard a click and he smiled, licked his lower lip, and reached for the knob. In a matter of seconds he had ushered Ambrose inside and closed the door behind them. He turned the lock and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I don’t remember where I learned it,” Day said.
“Well, I’m glad you remember the doing of it. You ought to use that little trick of yours to do better than old tobacco leavings. You could clean out a place before nobody knowed you was ever there in the first place.”
“But that would be wrong, Ambrose. We must survive, but we must also observe the law at all times.”
“All times?”
“Well, perhaps the law might be bent when your life depends on it.”
“I’d say. Like now.”
Ambrose produced a small box of matches from his pocket, and they rummaged around until they found a lantern hanging from a hook on the opposite wall of the room. Once lit, the lantern revealed that they were in a small storeroom with large double doors. “To bring in big things like furniture,” Ambrose said. These interior doors weren’t locked, and so the two of them went through and into the vastness of Plumm’s main floor. Day immediately ducked down behind a counter and pulled Ambrose down beside him. People were bustling about all round them, preparing the store for opening, laying out fabrics and jewelry, and lighting gas globes. Day waited, but nobody approached their counter; nobody had seen them enter through the storeroom.
“Can’t go back that way,” Ambrose said, and Day put a finger up to his lips, warning the boy to keep quiet. Ambrose lowered his voice to a whisper. “How’re we gettin’ outta here, guv?”
“Carefully,” Day said. It seemed to him that the safest course of action was to wait where they were until Plumm’s opened for the day’s business and then leave when there were shoppers about. But there was always the possibility that Jack had a key to the outside door and could pop up behind them through the storeroom.
Was Jack even there? Had Day imagined the familiar cadence of his step? No, Ambrose had heard it, too, and he’d been terrified.
Day reached out and patted the boy’s shoulder. It seemed ineffectual, but Ambrose smiled up at him. Whether he was comforted by the gesture or humoring Day, the smile was welcome. Day smiled back.
“Look,” he said, “we can’t stay here or we’ll be discovered. I think the only thing to do i
s go back into that room and wait.” He pointed at the storeroom, and Ambrose nodded.
Together, they crawled along behind the counter and dashed back into the room. They were visible again for perhaps half a minute, but there was no hue and cry. Nobody came to investigate the trespassers, the man and the boy who were hiding from a monster in the fog. And so they sat there in the dark and watched the door and listened for the expected crowd of morning shoppers, when they might slip out unobserved and make their escape.
17
Claire had made a careful inventory of every wooden item in her house: furniture, toys, knickknacks, utensils. She had a list on the table next to her on the sunporch and she referred to it as she wrote. She had used the word armoire five times now. She stood and brushed her hair behind her ear and walked into the kitchen. There was the sideboard and the butcher block counter. There were chairs and giant spoons. She walked on down the hall to the sitting room where there was a gliding rocker and an end table and there were several paintings in wooden frames.
She had used them all.
Claire wondered if she wasn’t making an enormous mistake. She hadn’t told anyone yet, but she was running out of money. Her book of rhymes had sold well, but she didn’t feel like writing more rhymes for publication. Her publisher had refused to give her an advance on anything but more poems, and she simply didn’t feel she had enough of them in her to make a book. Her babies were getting older and they’d want real stories. She wanted to write about the things that interested them: dolls and toys and playing outside on a clear blue day.
It amazed her that a stray thought had become a full-fledged story in a matter of a day or two and now it was coming along nicely. In her new book, a forest had been razed and the wooden things had all returned to their birthplace, the place where they had been simple trees and known nothing but the green and the rain and the lemon rays of the sun.
The sun that hadn’t touched London in months.
The fog that covered the city seemed also to have covered Claire’s mind. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep Nevil’s office open and his staff employed, wouldn’t be able to keep him from becoming a dustman and abandoning the search for her husband.
She knew she could still take money from her father, but she would rather die. She shook her head and scolded herself for indulging her miserable thoughts. Perhaps it would help to get out of the house.
The governess wandered into the room, saw Claire’s dour expression, and turned to leave, but Claire grabbed her arm.
“Dress the children to go out, won’t you?”
“An outing, mum? Today?”
“Yes. It’s . . . Well, we ought to enjoy the last of the cool weather while we can, don’t you think?”
“The cool weather, mum?”
“Yes, it’s still a bit cool out, isn’t it?”
“If you say.”
“I do.”
“Of course. Shall I tell them where we’re off to?”
“I thought we might step out to the new store. Look at the wares, the furniture and such.”
“Furniture? The store?”
“Yes.”
“Graham’s?”
“No, I was thinking Plumm’s.”
“Ah. Because Graham’s doesn’t have furniture.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Only groceries.”
“Yes.”
“But why there? Why Plumm’s?”
“Oh, why not? Will you get them ready or won’t you?”
“Of course, mum.” The woman, Tabitha, scurried off, and Claire sank back against the wall. Everything was a chore. And Walter wouldn’t have helped her one bit, really. He would have run off at the first sign of trouble with the governess. But he would have made her laugh about it later. He would have given her a hug and whispered something pleasant in her ear. He would have been sweet. He would have been kind. He would have put the whole rest of the world in perspective somehow.
She tried to think of what Walter might say to her now. She wasn’t exactly a match girl, he would have told her. Money was tight, corners had to be trimmed, pennies pinched, but her children had a fine home and food to eat. It wasn’t as bad as all that. Was it?
She pushed herself off the wall. Plumm’s would have lots of the kinds of things she wanted to see. All sorts of wooden items for sale, and she would be inspired just seeing them all. She would finish her new book and then maybe she would write more rhymes after all. It occurred to her that she ought to invite Fiona Kingsley to come along with them.
What they all needed was a splendid outing to lift the doldrums.
18
The case of the missing Hargreave brother was much bigger and more important than the usual sort of inquiry Hatty Pitt undertook, and she saw it as an opportunity to prove herself in Mr Hammersmith’s eyes. She’d wasted no time in getting to work on it and had made a list of the places she thought Joseph Hargreave might be hiding. He lived his life as many London gentlemen of decent means did. He had an apartment in the city that he shared with his brother where he spent the bulk of the week. He and his brother also owned a cottage in Brighton, where they whiled away the weekend hours. Hatty thought she might be able to gain access to both places. Hargreave had his club, of course, and Hatty had no chance of getting in there, so she had drawn a question mark next to that item on her list of locations. Lastly, he had his place of employment: Plumm’s. That would be the easiest place to get into, and so she had underlined it on her list, but decided to save it for later in the week when she would be more tired and might need something relatively simple to do.
She did not worry about the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing. Nobody, after all, knew what they were doing when they started a new job. They learned. And Hatty was a quick study.
A man gave her his seat on the train to Brighton and she fell asleep, and so felt groggy and bad-tempered when she arrived. She followed a family on holiday off the train, and a solemn woman handed Hatty a pamphlet about the new clock tower. Hatty took it and smiled at her, but the woman didn’t smile back. The sky was a dusty blue color, and she could taste salt on the air. No fog to be seen in any direction. The breeze was a bit chilly, but Hatty wasn’t the sort to complain. She avoided the taxi rank outside the station and oriented herself before setting out, shading her eyes with one hand (the sun wasn’t visible anywhere in the sky, but it was still brighter than anything she’d been accustomed to of late), while in her other hand she clutched a torn piece of notepaper on which she had written Hargreave’s address.
She walked south down Queens Road and stopped to admire the clock tower, referring to the pamphlet the woman had given her. The tower was tall and all of polished stone, with decorative arches and little statues guarding little nooks at all the corners. Hatty thought it looked nearly as solid as the woman with the pamphlets. A pair of troubadours sang “Mr and Mrs Brown” while strolling round the square. “Dear Mistress Brown, your clock is fast, I know as well as you . . .” The man played violin, and the woman held out a hat. Hatty dropped a ha’penny in, pretending to herself she was on a seaside holiday.
After the clock tower the road changed to West Street, and she turned left onto Duke and followed that along to the end of Prince Albert Street, where she found the small detached cottage. The home shared by Joseph and Dr Richard Hargreave was in need of a coat of paint and a new roof. The garden needed tending, and the black wrought-iron fence along the street was missing several rails. But through a break between the houses behind it, she could see Kings Road and, beyond that, the endless grey haze of the sea.
A woman came out of the house next door, at the end of a queue of terraced homes, and stood framed in the open doorway. She was perhaps ten years older than Hatty, but her face was lined and she wore the shadows under her eyes like badges.
“They don’t want any,” the woman
said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Those brothers don’t want any of whatever it is you’re selling. You needn’t waste your time.”
“Oh, I’m not selling anything,” Hatty said. “They’re not at home, are they?”
“What do you think, I watch this entire street? I wouldn’t have the slightest idea if they’re home.”
Puzzled, Hatty hesitated with one hand on the gate. She thought she might be able to ask the woman a question or two about the Hargreaves, but she wasn’t sure where to begin or how to break through the woman’s hostile front. She tried on her best and brightest smile and shone it on the woman. “May I ask your name?”
“I am Mrs Ruskin. Ruth Ruskin. And that’s all you’ll get from me. I’m not any more interested than my neighbors are in buying from you.”
“Again, Mrs Ruskin, I’m not selling anything. I don’t suppose your husband’s at home?” Perhaps, Hatty thought, Mr Ruskin would be easier to talk to.
“My husband has not been with us for some time now.” Ruth Ruskin’s frosty exterior cracked, and before she could break entirely, she turned and fled back into her house, slamming the door behind her.
“What an odd woman,” Hatty said. “I hope everyone here’s not like her.” She shrugged and let herself through the gate and marched up the path to the door of the Hargreaves’ cottage. She knocked and waited and, when nobody came to the door after a minute or two, she knocked again, keeping one eye on the house next door in case Ruth Ruskin decided to come back out and cause trouble.
She didn’t have much of a plan worked out. She thought she might question the servants and perhaps they’d let her have a look round inside. At the very least, she’d be able to verify that Joseph Hargreave was not, in fact, simply away on holiday, which seemed to be a sensible first step in the investigation. She was surprised when Dr Richard Hargreave opened the door wearing a dressing gown and slippers. His hair was disheveled, tufts of silver sticking up in every direction, and he hadn’t shaved. He had a book in his hand, a finger holding his place halfway through. Hatty tilted her head to read the title. Venus in Furs.