Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  “You may stand up, Duchen. Now, I will show you some basic methods for dealing with someone approaching from behind. The rest of you, practise your grapples, as I showed you last week. Oh, and Treadwell?”

  “Yes, miss?” said the blonde girl.

  “The equipment cupboard is a disgrace. Restore it to order, if you please.”

  Treadwell gave Eveline a glare as she passed, keeping it carefully out of Miss Laperne’s sightline. Eveline pretended not to see, and wiped dust from her face.

  BY THE END of the lesson Eveline was panting, sore, and filthy. Miss Laperne looked her over, and gave a single, brisk nod. “You are small, and like many of the class, must rely on quickness where others can use weight. However. Girls? Your attention, please.”

  They lined up. Eveline was pleased to see that they all looked as dirty and sweat-streaked as she felt. Miss Laperne said, “Duchen here has learned a lesson that I endeavour to teach you over and over again and which some of you still have not embraced. What is the first thing you should do in any fight?”

  A few hands were raised.

  “Yes, Calendar?”

  “Disable your opponent, miss?”

  “No. Hastings?”

  Hastings proved to be the girl with the curly brown hair who had served Eveline’s breakfast. On closer expression she had a determined nose, grey eyes and a slightly distracted air; she jumped when addressed as though she had forgotten why her hand was up.

  “Oh! Try not to be there, miss.”

  “Correct.” Miss Laperne looked around at her class. “I do not know, nor have I any interest in, your individual histories. But it is obvious that Miss Duchen’s life has taught her something of value. You would do well to follow her example in this. The most important thing in a fight is to try and prevent it from happening in the first place, or at least, prevent it from happening to you. Fight only if you cannot run.

  “Tomorrow we will be covering the use of the parasol. And why will we be using parasols?”

  Another girl put her hand up. “Because they won’t let us have guns, miss?”

  “No. Anyone else? No? Parasols are something that ladies may carry, indeed are expected to carry. Less useful than a cane or swordstick, but still of worth. Remember this, girls – always adapt, always be alert. There will almost always be something in your immediate vicinity that you can use as a weapon if you have to.

  “Those of you who wish to practise with the parasol may take one from the cupboard, but work outside, please. A sufficient number of innocent lampshades have already been sacrificed.”

  There were a few subdued giggles.

  “Now go wash before your next lesson. Dismissed.”

  Eveline splashed her dusty face with almost equally dusty water – as the new girl she had last go at the basin. Damn, she hurt; skinny as she was, she bruised easy. She’d be as colourful as a rag-rug by tomorrow.

  It had been so busy she had hardly thought of leaving. When would Holmforth come back? And what would he say when he did? His watch lay safely tucked in one of the secret pockets in her drawers. At least she’d been allowed to keep her own underwear – though given needle, thread and a couple of handkerchiefs, she could make near-undetectable pockets in almost anything. Not to mention false arms that could lie innocently folded in the lap while hands delved about elsewhere. She wondered what Miss Cairngrim would think of ‘mending time’ being used for such purposes.

  MISS PRAYNE, WHO taught Map-Reading and Navigation, had the look of something left too long in the sun. Her eyes, hair, skin and gown all appeared to be fading towards the same dull snuff-colour. She delivered her lesson in a drifting monotone, and when her pupils’ attention inevitably wandered, employed not the cane that lay on her desk but a put-upon sigh which made Eveline feel both guilty and intensely irritated.

  Eveline already had a headful of maps and country names and looked at the work in front of her with a sense of mounting dread. Why did she need to know all this? Would they expect her to go somewhere? On a ship? She only knew one thing about ships. They sank.

  And as for Navigation... the words latitude, longitude, celestial, and sextant flew past her ears. “Hand in your work from last week.” What work? She hadn’t been here last week. She stared at maps and charts in a state of increasing, furious frustration. She was used to being good at things. Ever since she’d joined up with Ma, she’d been Ma’s star pupil. Now she was faced with descriptions of things she’d never heard of, and as for stars, she’d barely seen them since she came to London. The constant smog made the sky one roiling smear that even the sun struggled to pierce. Luckily the daft bitch seldom asked questions – she simply pointed at things and told them, in her die-away voice, what page to look at. In fact, Miss Prayne seemed entirely unaware that she had acquired an extra pupil, although someone had provided Eveline’s battered, splintery desk with a slate and chalk.

  Not that she had anything to write on it. Feeling as though her head were coming to the boil, Eveline sat back, trying to get some air, or space.

  It was quiet, except for the squeaking of chalk on slates and the occasional cough or sigh. She looked around at the collection of bent heads. Some of the girls had made some effort with their hair, others had done the bare minimum, but all were neat with the exception of Hastings, who was muttering and pushing her fingers through her hair so that her curls fell out of their bun and around her face. Then, to Eveline’s amusement, she became exasperated, twisted them up out of the way and stuck a pencil in to hold them in place. Bet Miss Grim won’t like that. She had a strong feeling pencils in the hair were not something Miss Cairngrim would find acceptable.

  She looked around for another source of entertainment, or information, or anything at all. The maps on the wall were all at least five years old; the books too were old, stained here and there with tea and other, unknown substances.

  The windows were sash ones – one or two open a few inches at the bottom, and easy enough to get out of, if they hadn’t been barred on the outside. Air in, no-one out.

  Miss Prayne’s monotone seemed to coat her eyelids, weighing them down. Her head drooped.

  A sudden scuffling all around her and the squeak of chair legs on the floor roused her to the realisation that the class was over. She closed her book with a thud, feeling no better off than when she’d started.

  She followed the rest of the girls back towards the room where they’d had breakfast. She had a good idea of the layout by now, at least of the ground floor. There wasn’t a window she’d seen that didn’t have bars.

  This time it seemed she was to be permitted to eat with the rest of them. Miss Prayne sat at the head of one table; at the other was a slight man with a head that seemed too large for the sparse amount of oiled black hair scraped across it.

  An unoccupied chair stood near him. Treadwell sat opposite. The blonde girl seemed subdued, her gaze fixed on the table.

  Eveline sat herself down. The teacher gave her a nod, and a small smile. He was the first of the staff to smile at her. She gave him a cautious half-smile back, in case Miss Cairngrim had a thing about excessive smiling.

  Lunch was watery stew whose main ingredient seemed to be cabbage, with elderly bread to sop it up. So far as Eveline was concerned, it was a feast. Ravenous as always, she had eaten more than half before she became aware that there was something going on across from her.

  Treadwell was pushing her fork through the food, but so far as Eveline could tell not a morsel of it had left the plate. She was sitting oddly hunched, and the hands holding her cutlery were gripping it white-knuckled. She stared down at her plate as though she expected to find something in the mush of greyish gravy and pallid green leaves and stray fibres of mud-coloured meat.

  The teacher turned to Eveline. “You are the new girl,” he said. “I am Monsieur Duvalier. I will be teaching you French. Your name is?”

  He didn’t sound like a Frenchy to Eveline, just posh English, but for all she knew posh French
people and posh English people sounded the same when they spoke English. The only Frenchies she knew were sailors, the onion-man and Bon-Bon.

  “Eveline Duchen,” she said.

  “You should address me as monsieur, but you are new, and have probably not heard the word before. It means the same as sir, you understand?”

  “Yes, monsieur,” she said, doing her best to say it the way he did.

  “Duchen? That sounds as though it might have been a French name. Did you know that names change over the years? Your great-grandfather, perhaps, was Du Chien.”

  “Oh,” Eveline said. “How... interesting. Monsieur.”

  “Shall I tell you what that means? Or perhaps Mademoiselle Treadwell can tell you? Mademoiselle?”

  Treadwell shot Eveline a glance she couldn’t read. “It means something to do with dogs,” she said. “Chien is dog.”

  “Indeed. Du Chien is of, or pertaining to, the dog. It is possible your ancestors were the lord’s kennellers, or some such thing – the men who trained his lordship’s dogs for the hunt.” He gave Treadwell a reproving glance. “Dogs are useful and necessary beasts, you know.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” Treadwell muttered.

  Eveline wondered if Duvalier actually thought he was being helpful. She glanced at her plate, where the remains of her stew was cooling, hoping he would shut up jawing long enough for her to finish it before Hastings whisked it away, as she was already doing with empty plates at the other table.

  Duvalier lifted a forkful of stew, and sighed. “Ah, English cuisine. Well, it is only to be expected. If you are very good in class, and work hard, Mademoiselle Duchen, there may be bon-bons for you, to take away the taste.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” Eveline said, briefly imagining a line of Bon-Bons, dancing away, grinning gap-toothed grins and swigging gin. Hiding her smile, she hastily scooped up the rest of her stew.

  AFTER LUNCH, THE French lesson proved somewhat easier than Navigation. Her time around the docks had given her a smattering of half-a-dozen languages, and not all the words she’d learned were rude, though a good many of them were. For the first time she realised how a word that meant almost the same thing in another language could help you pick up the sense of a phrase.

  Duvalier was pleased with her and did, indeed, give her a bon-bon – which proved to be a piece of pink marzipan, from a box tied up with green satin ribbon. When she took it, she caught Treadwell giving her that look again – an odd mix of resentment and a sort of sly satisfaction.

  Marzipan and pleasure at her own cleverness aside, Eveline didn’t particularly enjoy the lesson. Duvalier would pet her so, smoothing her hair as though she really were a dog, or squeezing her arm, whenever she pleased him. She was still bruised from Bartitsu and Mr Clancy’s stick, and it hurt. And she just didn’t like it.

  By the time it came to the last lesson, Retention, Eveline was tired in a way that was completely unfamiliar, wide awake but distracted, her brain pulsing and buzzing with information. She didn’t think she’d be able to fit a single other thing in there.

  Which proved to be the entire point of Retention. Miss Fairfield was a large, brisk woman with black hair so very thick and shiny and tightly wedged in its bun it looked as though it was all of a piece, like a hat. Eveline wondered whether she took it off at night. “Memory!” she snapped. “Memory, girls, is your greatest treasure, and your most useful ally. Nothing you learn here, not one word or chart or position of a star, not the name of an ally nor the location of an army, is of the slightest use unless you can retain it. Who can recite the Four Principles of Retention for our new girl?”

  This time a number of hands shot up.

  “It should be all of you, come on! Recitation...”

  “Recitation, Repetition, Association, Imagination!” the class shouted.

  “Good!”

  And away they went into memorizing lists of names and objects on a tray and a number of other things for which Eveline struggled to imagine the slightest use.

  She just about managed to keep her eyes open during a supper of cold fat bacon and bread and dripping. Afterwards the girls gathered in another echoing, high-ceilinged room with peeling paint, a battered assortment of uncomfortable chairs, and an inadequate fire muttering to itself in the grate. Here, they did mending or schoolwork under the half-hearted supervision of Miss Prayne, who was absently tatting some lace, in the same faded snuff-colour as everything else about her, in between bouts of staring out of the window at the darkening evening, and sighing.

  Eveline got the woman’s attention long enough to supply herself with needle, thread, and scraps of cloth. She tucked them away in her apron pocket; she wasn’t going to go putting secret pockets in her uniform with the others watching. Instead she opened the great atlas she’d been lugging about since this morning’s lesson, and stared at maps.

  She only realised she’d fallen asleep when someone nudged her foot. She jerked awake to see that Hastings had taken the chair next to her. She smelled faintly of bacon and still had a pencil in her hair. She nodded at Eveline and opened a large book with a blue cloth cover, full of drawings, and a small battered notebook.

  Eveline stared, fascinated, at the drawings. Wheels and levers and cogs and things she had no name for. Tiny precise labels saying fig 1 and ratchet assembly. They reminded her of her mother’s workbooks.

  Hastings dug around in her apron pocket and looked exasperated. She leaned close and whispered, “Do you have a pencil spare?”

  “You’ve got one,” Eveline whispered back. “It’s on yer head.”

  Hastings’ hands flew to her hair and she whipped out the pencil, sending her curls tumbling. “Thank you.”

  “Some people are trying to work, miss,” Treadwell said loudly. “And other people are chattering.”

  “Quiet down, girls,” Miss Prayne said.

  Hastings rolled her eyes at Eveline, who grimaced back.

  A few moments later, she felt something nudge her hand and realised Hastings had turned her notebook towards her. Written there in tiny, precise letters she saw, My name’s Beth Hastings. I saw you looking at my notes. Do you like machines? I like machines.

  Glancing around to make sure no-one was watching, Eveline scrawled, Eveline Duchen. I like – she hesitated – games. Card tricks and such. My mama liked machines, but hers weren’t like the ones in your book. How did you get here?

  She realised Treadwell was eyeing them and gave her a cool stare, then looked back at her atlas as though it occupied all her attention. When she could see, out the corner of her eye, that Treadwell was no longer watching, she slid the notebook back to Hastings.

  Some time later it reappeared. You’re to learn about mechanism. I’ll see you in lessons.

  That night Eveline lay in a bed in a long room lined with beds, listening to the shuffles and sighs of the other girls. Tired as she was, her brain was still whirling too fast to let her sleep.

  Her life had changed again, big and sudden. Did everyone have lives like this, suddenly swinging from one thing to another like a conker on a string?

  Margate

  FIRST THERE HAD been the place she still, in weak moments, thought of as home: the cosy little redbrick house in Margate, with the sea before and the woods behind and Mama and Papa and Eveline and, later, Charlotte, safe as rabbits in a burrow. Mama with her instruments and Papa with his books and fossils and Eveline with her family and the Folk, and especially Aiden. Aiden who was her best friend, who had first appeared when she wandered away from Mama and found a pretty, plump boy the same age as herself, laughing and surrounded by little Folk. He had smiled at her and taken her hand and the little brightly coloured flying Folk had spun and danced about their heads. When Mama had come looking for her, he had disappeared; but after that, she saw him often.

  He would appear sitting on a branch above her head, swinging his legs, and drop down beside her light as a leaf, making not a sound. He was light and swift as a squirrel in the trees, and liked
to tease the naiads, pulling leaves from their branches while they scolded in their silvery whispering voices. He would coax her away from the house with promises of secrets, and he always kept them. Aiden was one of the Higher Folk, a son of the Court.

  He showed her the houses of the goblins down among the moss, and the den where the fox laid up with her cubs, bringing them out to play at dusk. He made her crowns of leaves and berries and put them on her head and hung necklaces of dew and cobwebs around her neck. She had no gifts to give him in return but a crust of fresh bread stolen from the kitchen, which he liked; when she brought him some he would tear into it eager as a puppy.

  Between her sixth and seventh year they spent hours together in the woods and fields and along the shore, though Mama would come and search for her if she was out too long, calling her in to eat or do her lessons.

  She asked him to take her to see his house, but he always shook his head. “Maybe later,” he said. “And you can’t go without me, you can’t cross into the Crepuscular without permission.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just can’t. If you try, something will happen to you.”

  “Like what?”

  But he had gone. He often disappeared when she talked about something he didn’t like, and most of the time she had no idea what she had said wrong. It was better, in the end, to let him do most of the talking.

  One day Aiden took her down to the shore at dusk and made her sit on a rock while he called a strange sweet cry across the water, and there was a glittering stir in the waves and out of them rose the heads and shoulders of three of the merfolk. Eveline had caught glimpses of them, but never so close. Their hair was green-gold and their eyes were silver and they had strange long ears, not pointed like Aidan’s but ribbed like a parasol. He called to them again and they laughed, and began to sing.

  Eveline listened in a wild dream of wind and water and shifting blue light, until the tide came up and wet her boots. She woke to cold feet and a wet bum and the splash of the merfolk disappearing. Aiden had gone and the sun was dipping below the waves.