“I need your help,” Lily said, stepping up to the door of the stall.
“Didn’t his lordship just offer that?”
Lily felt the quick jab of that, but refused to let it provoke her.
“This isn’t something he can do,” she asserted.
“What is it?”
“Trespassing.”
There was a hitch in the rhythm of his strokes. The bay snorted. After only a moment, Sam picked up the regular motion again.
“What makes you think I’d help you with that?”
“Nothing,” Lily admitted frankly. “But you’re the one I know can do it. And I need to get inside.”
He didn’t answer. He continued to brush, moving to the far side of the horse.
“This about your friend?” he asked at last. “The one who’s in trouble?”
“Yes.”
Sam set the brush aside. The bay nudged at him with its nose.
“Don’t you start,” he chided the animal. “Go eat your supper.”
The bay snorted once more, then clomped over to the bucket that hung from the wall. It pressed its nose inside and began to munch.
Sam stepped back into the aisle, gently closing the door to the stall. He leaned against the weathered planks, his arms crossed over his chest.
“What building?”
“A charity hospital in the Borough, near the old Mint. But it’s been closed for months. There was a fire.”
“Not a nice place to be wandering about late at night. And there’d be other risks, even if we do manage to get in.”
“Such as?”
“Might not be the first ones to get the idea. Could be others knocking about, likely not the nicest sort. And if it burned, then there’s the structure to worry about. Stairs giving way, floors falling out from beneath you.”
The bay came over. It pressed its nose against his shoulder. Sam reached back to stroke it absentmindedly.
“When?”
“Tonight,” Lily replied.
He opened the door to the other stall, where the chestnut waited patiently. He took up the brush again and began to repeat the ritual, long strokes smoothing the rich, dark coat.
“I’ll collect you at eleven,” he said without looking up.
She felt her heart skip.
“Actually, it would be better if I met you.”
“Why?”
“I think I’m being watched.”
He glanced up at her over the back of the horse. Then he shrugged.
“Here, then.”
“I won’t be late.”
She turned to go. His voice stopped her.
“That stick of yours. The one you’re always carrying about.”
“What about it?”
“You don’t have a limp.”
“No,” Lily confirmed.
“So I take it you use it for something other than walking.”
She didn’t answer.
“Bring it along,” he ordered and continued to brush.
The mews behind Bedford Square looked different at night, the long shadows warping the profiles of the elegant houses.
It was cold. When Lily coughed, fog burst from between her lips, lingering in the still winter air.
Any day now, that recalcitrant chill could turn to snow. Yet here she was on what could very likely be a fool’s errand.
The clatter of carriage wheels broke the silence of the night. Lily stepped back, concealing herself in the shadows that lined the narrow way.
The vehicle that turned into the mews wasn’t the polished, well-kept carriage of one of the denizens of the tonnish square. It was a hackney, one that had seen better days, likely when Queen Victoria had been in the fresh blossom of youth. The paint was chipped where it wasn’t obscured by mud and one of the wheels was clearly out of alignment. The driver was as ancient as the carriage, a wizened old stick of a man with a dirty white beard, perched like a gull in the seat, a fraying cap set on his head.
It rolled to a stop beside her.
Lily had a moment of fear. She had been careful when she left March Place, slipping past Mrs. Bramble’s bedroom to the kitchen, where she’d used the service entrance to make her way out. She had circled around the block before finding her way back on course for Bedford Square, checking all the while for followers.
Perhaps she hadn’t checked well enough.
She shifted her grip on her walking stick as the door of the hackney swung open.
Sam poked his head out.
“Come on, then,” he urged impatiently.
Lily hopped onto the step and swung through to the narrow interior.
“Alright, George,” Sam called up through the opposite window.
The carriage jolted into motion, swaying with the uneven movement of the wheels.
Her companion for the evening slouched in the seat beside her, crossing his arms over his chest. After giving her a quick look over, he turned his face toward the open window as though daring her to object to the rush of cold air that poured inside.
“George said he’ll hold for us if you pay him a double fare.”
“That’s fine,” Lily replied.
It made sense, of course. Sam couldn’t have taken his employer’s carriage into the verge of one of London’s most notorious slums and left it there with no one to mind it while they went scavenging through someone else’s property. The hackney seemed carefully chosen to deflect any unwanted attention from the denizens of the Mint.
The lanky young man beside her knew far better than she did what they were getting into that night, including all the attendant risks.
“Do we have everything we need?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“I didn’t know if there was equipment required for this sort of thing.”
“The more you carry, the harder it is to run.”
“Do you expect we’ll be running?”
Sam shrugged.
They rode in silence, the seat bouncing with the uneven motion of the hackney.
“Thank you for agreeing to help me,” Lily said at last.
“We ain’t done it yet,” he retorted without looking at her.
They stopped near the Borough Market. It looked very different from the bustling, crowded place Lily had passed through that afternoon. The market hall itself was closed and dark, the neighboring stores and stalls all shuttered. Lights still shone from the nearby brewery. Lily could hear the calls of the night shift workers and the clatter of machinery.
Sam leaned out the window.
“Over there,” he ordered.
The driver turned the hackney into a narrow bay beside a second-hand furniture store.
Sam hopped down, neglecting to hold the door or offer her a hand. Lily made her own way out without trouble. She was still clad in her riding gear. It had seemed a sensible choice. As Sam had pointed out, they had no way of knowing the condition of the interior of the building. She also thought that her coat and trousers would be less likely to draw attention on the shadowy streets that surrounded the hospital.
“Take care of George,” Sam ordered.
Lily took a generous pile of coins from her pocket.
“We might be a while,” she warned the driver as she handed the money over.
George tipped his cap and flashed her a gap-toothed smile.
“Where is it?” Sam asked when she rejoined him.
“This way.”
Lily lead them down the high street. It was far from deserted. A couple enjoyed an embrace in the shadows of a shop door. A few boys, too young to rightly be out, dashed down the road, kicking a ball ahead of them. Like Drury Lane, where she had once lived, this neighborhood was never entirely asleep. It couldn’t be. Many people here needed to work during the time when the quiet, middle-class residents of Bloomsbury were all tucked into their beds.
They turned to pass the Golden Fleece. There was a raucous burst of laughter from inside the pub, which was hosting a lively crowd. Lily was aw
are of the glances of a pair of men who lingered at the door, measuring her and Sam as they passed on the far side of the road. The looks didn’t last, Lily’s ensemble and the relative darkness of the night keeping her from attracting more than a precursory notice.
They stopped in front of the clinic. It looked grander in the darkness than it had during the day. The burnt roof timbers rose like a scaffold against the night sky and the limestone shone paler in the darkness, the stains of soot and coal-smoke less apparent.
Sam put a toothpick between his lips and considered the prospect, hands in his pockets.
“Likely there’s a service door out back,” he concluded. “That’ll be our way in.”
The alley smelled of rotting cabbage and dog waste. Rats dodged across the way in front of them, then paused, raising their heads as though taking notice. Their eyes followed Sam for a moment. He ignored them. Lily saw the creatures move on and wondered if perhaps she was simply imagining the shift in their attention.
The door at the back of the clinic was unassuming. It had been boarded up, as had the windows along the ground floor.
“Keep a lively eye, eh?” Sam said as they approached.
He took a knife from his pocket and used it to pry free a few of the boards. Then he took out a slender tin cigarette case, which opened to reveal a row of metal picks topped with variously crooked and pointed ends.
He knelt at the lock and Lily turned her attention to the alley. It remained deserted as he worked. After a moment she heard a click as the lock gave way.
He pushed at the door. It opened only a foot or so.
“It’s blocked from the inside. Give us a hand.”
Lily tucked her walking stick into the back of her belt, then lent her weight to the effort, wedging the heel of her boot against the paving stones and shoving. The door slowly gave way, accompanied by the scraping shift of some unseen obstacle.
Sam glanced around, then motioned her through.
“Go on, then. Look sharp.”
She tossed her stick inside, then followed it, squeezing through the gap in the boards.
It was impossible to tell what this room had once been, as most of the one above had collapsed and fallen into it. A spill of bright moonlight revealed plaster and shattered tile covering the floor along with the burnt and twisted wreckage of a half-dozen metal cots. The source of that illumination became apparent as Lily retrieved her staff and looked up. Above them, a great hole in the ceiling opened to the upper floors and, beyond that, to the night sky where a full winter moon gazed down at them between the jagged remains of the rafters.
Water dripped down from somewhere, landing with a musical ping on an overturned basin. On the far side of the space, a staircase had half-crumbled into dust. One wall had been completely torn away, leaving the steps hanging in the air like a row of broken teeth.
Sam crawled in beside her. He straightened, taking in the wreckage.
“That don’t look good. If part of the floor’s caved in, there’s no telling how stable the rest of it is. Sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Could also be we ain’t the first ones in here. And some of those others might still be lurking about.”
“You’re welcome to wait here, if you’d rather,” Lily replied coolly.
“I can handle myself. Just making certain the lady knows what she’s getting into.”
“Duly noted, Mr. Wu.”
Sam grinned. He popped the toothpick back into his pocket.
“Right, then. Let’s get to it.”
They clambered over the wreckage, boots slipping on slick tile or raising little clouds of plaster dust. Lily used her walking stick to brace herself and keep from skating down the debris.
The door at the far end of the room opened onto a wide, dark hallway.
The boarded windows obscured all but a few filtered rays of soft blue light. Lily’s eyes took a few moments to adjust, but accustomed themselves as she and Sam moved slowly and quietly along.
The fire had not made so much of a mark here, but signs of other intruders were visible. A few sandwich wrappers littered the floor along with an empty bottle of bitters. In one of the rooms they passed, which looked as though it had once been some kind of laboratory, Lily glimpsed the remnants of a campfire next to a singed mattress.
There were offices and storerooms, largely cleared out of whatever might have been left in them after the blaze. Here and there between the shadows, piles of linens sat gathering mildew, or jars lay smashed on the floor.
The fire had taken place only a few months before, if Berta was to be believed. Walking through the shadowy corridor, Lily felt like she was inside something that had been rotting for years.
In another lab, she pulled open cabinets, rifling quietly through the few intact pieces of glassware within.
“What are we looking for, anyway?” Sam asked.
“I’ll know when I see it. Help me with this?”
Sam came to the other side of a toppled trolley. Together, they hefted it upright. As they lifted, a door in the cart fell open, a pile of tin chamber pots spilling out and clattering brashly against the floor.
Lily held her breath, meeting Sam’s eyes across the metal table.
He lifted a single finger to his lips, then raised it.
Lily could read the signal.
Quiet. Wait.
He inched toward the door, keeping his body close to the wall. He waited there, listening.
Lily moved herself back into a deeper well of shadow, holding her breath.
The silence stretched, tense as a bowstring.
Then Sam stood. He kicked an empty tin across the floor. It pinged neatly off the leg of a table.
“Nobody here,” he concluded.
“Clearly someone was at some point,” Lily countered, relaxing her grip on her stick and nodding toward the tin.
Sam shrugged. “Like as not they found someplace better to hole up. Or they might’ve been moved along.”
“Moved along? By whom?”
“Ain’t you got more cabinets to check?” He nodded toward the line of doors.
Lily wavered for only a moment before moving to the low metal bays.
She opened them one after the other, her eyes adjusted enough to the darkness now to make out their general contents after a moment or two.
“So who taught you how to pick locks?” she asked as she nudged aside a mound of rubber tubing.
“Bloke named Cannon.”
“You worked for him?”
“It was employment of a sort.”
“How old were you?”
Sam shrugged. “Old enough.”
“But small enough to get into places a grown man couldn’t reach,” Lily hypothesized. She had heard stories of how some of the less scrupulous denizens of the East End made use of desperate young boys to do their dirty work for them, climbing into places—often dangerous places—an adult couldn’t access.
Of course, when someone got caught, it was far more likely to be the boy, not the man who put him up to the job.
“My father couldn’t find work. No one would hire him. Nai Nai, she got a job in a laundry. Came home every night with her hands boiled, all for a few pennies.”
“Nai Nai?” Lily asked.
“My grandmother. My father sold everything we had to pay for passage here. Somebody had to keep us all from starving.”
“He let you do that?”
“He knew I’d got work. He didn’t need to know what sort.”
Lily closed the last cabinet and stood.
“There’s nothing here,” she announced. “Is there another stair?”
“End of the hallway.”
“Let’s try it.”
They stepped over a barricade of toppled chairs, continuing down the darkened hall.
“Why did your father leave China if it meant coming here with nothing?”
When Sam didn’t answer, Lily realized her questions had become
presumptuous. He had agreed to help her break into this place, not share his life story with her.
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”
“Course I don’t,” he retorted.
He kicked a tin bedpan aside. It clanged off the tiles.
He entered the darkened stairwell and began to climb, Lily following.
“It was my fault,” he said at last.
“But you must have been fairly young when you left China.”
“I was ten.”
“What could a ten year-old possibly do to drive his whole family out of their country?”
“Fell in with a bad crowd.”
“Worse than a bunch of East End housebreakers?”
“Aye. Worse.”
Lily knew there must be much more to the story. She opened her mouth to ask but was overwhelmed by a sudden instinct.
It was as clear as it was sharp, sudden and undeniable.
Move.
“Go!” she shouted. She pushed Sam forward, scrambling after him. They tumbled onto the landing just as the stairs beneath them broke from the wall and crumbled, collapsing in a cloud of dust.
Sam glanced over at her from where he slouched against the wall.
“Your talent raise that alarm?”
“I . . . don’t know what it was,” Lily admitted. “It’s not usually like this.” She touched her hands to her temples, feeling dizzy.
Had she just picked up on some subtle cue in the atmosphere? Perhaps a minute shifting of the stone under her feet, or some sort of sound that indicated the steps were about to crumble?
That wasn’t what it had felt like. It had felt like the knowledge that Frank the Spiv was about to turn the corner earlier that morning. Like one of her visions but clearer and carrying with it an urgency to act.
It had been like this before.
She had forgotten until her father mentioned it during his unexpected visit. The awareness of what was approaching had been natural. The postman would arrive shortly. It was going to rain. Her father would drop by that afternoon.
She had taken delight in it, in knowing what no one else seemed aware of.
That had been gone for years. Why had it resurfaced now?
Perhaps because the day before, she had deliberately provoked a vision.
In front of that scrying glass, Lily had kicked open doors she spent the last fourteen years trying furiously to shut. They might not have simply closed back up once she was done.
The Fire in the Glass Page 32