‘Stop that,’ ordered Mickey.
But Joe just hacked another series of brutal coughs and then arched his back. The air whooped in a strange way as it entered his lungs. Harry climbed to his feet, terrified by the bloody spit on Joe’s lips, the glassy terror in his eyes. To his horror, Mickey the Wrench raised his stick again, snarling furiously at Joe: ‘Stop that messing!’
Harry launched himself between them. Quick as a snake-strike, Mickey butted him between his eyes. Harry was down in the hay before he could even think. He rolled to his back. The other men closed in on him and Joe, and with a sudden spear of despair Harry realised he wasn’t going to win this battle.
How had Joe ever survived these men?
Mickey grinned and raised his arm high. But before he could bring the staff slamming down to brain Harry, a rich, deep voice spoke from the far end of the depot. ‘You shall leave those boys alone.’
All the men except Mickey obediently lowered their weapons. Oddly passive, they turned towards the voice. Mickey simply rested his weapon across his wide shoulders and, without taking his eyes from Harry, said, ‘Hello, darkie. Come to fetch your master’s carriage?’
The carriage driver stepped into the light. His dark eyes moved from man to man, before settling on Mickey the Wrench. ‘You shall leave now,’ he said.
To Harry’s amazement, Mickey’s three henchmen nodded and made to go. Mickey, however, just chuckled – a low and dangerous sound. ‘We’ll leave when we’re good and ready,’ he said.
His voice seemed to snag something in his companions, and they paused, their faces creased in frowning puzzlement, as if torn between his command and the driver’s.
‘We’ve harnessed up your master’s carriage,’ said Mickey. ‘And all his pretty packages are stowed like he wanted, so you can just haul your inky-black arse up into that box, drive out that arch, and bugger off down to the bog-hole of nowhere you came from. This’ – he indicated Harry and Joe – ‘is no concern of yours.’
The carriage driver’s expression changed from distaste to fascination, and he regarded Mickey as if he were some strange new species of creature. ‘Such independence. Is this due to the Bright Man’s recent lack of power, perhaps? Or are you some anomaly in and of yourself?’
A fleeting moment of doubt showed in Mickey’s face. The carriage driver laughed softly at his confusion, then glanced at Harry and Joe. Harry saw his eyes widen as he recognised the young man gasping for air on the ground at Mickey’s feet. ‘Matthew!’ he cried, striding forward.
‘Hey!’ bellowed Mickey. ‘Did you hear what I said? This isn’t your business!’
At his voice, the men accompanying him jerked to life, raising their staffs. The carriage driver simply motioned his hand – move aside – and they subsided. Mickey could only stare as the man strode past and into the stable where Joe lay.
The driver crouched beside Harry, and between them, they heaved Joe onto his back. At the rough movement, Joe grabbed a panicked hold of Harry’s jacket. He was panting short desperate hacks of air, his lips and nostrils tinted pink with blood.
‘He can’t breathe!’ cried Harry.
‘What is the matter?’ asked the driver. ‘Is it the consumption? Has he succumbed to an attack?’
Consumption. Harry’s mind recoiled from the dreaded word. ‘No.’ He jabbed a finger at Mickey. ‘It was him. He hit Joe on the back – hard. He hurt him. Hurt his lungs somehow.’ He grabbed the carriage driver’s hand and pressed it to Joe’s side. The man’s expression fell, his face reflecting Harry’s own horror at the lopsided feel of Joe’s breathing – at how only one side of Joe’s chest was expanding with each breath.
The driver’s carriage cloak fluttered about him as he surged to his feet.
Mickey took a step back, his black wooden staff clenched in his hand. ‘Don’t even think it, darkie. Me and my boys will break you like a twig.’
The carriage driver shook his head. ‘A pack animal. Like most cowards. I have always wondered, coward, does your kind even exist when you are alone?’
Mickey looked to his companions. The carriage driver glanced their way. Quick as lightening, Mickey jerked back his staff, intending to jab the man’s temple. Before Harry could even yell a warning to the driver, he had whipped out a hand, caught Mickey’s wrist on the downward arc, and twisted. The staff flew from Mickey’s fingers.
The driver, side-stepping in a flare of cloak, spun, twisting Mickey’s arm behind his back. He was magnificent – a blur of stunning grace. He grabbed the back of Mickey’s bull-neck with his free hand and pressed down, forcing Mickey to his knees.
Terrified, Mickey cried out, ‘Lads! Help me!’
The driver tutted, looking up at the conflicted men. ‘Oh, but look at their faces,’ he crooned. ‘So dirty. Their mothers would be appalled.’ The men, ashamed and uncomfortable, began rubbing at their cheeks with childish concentration. ‘You shall wash yourselves,’ decided the driver. ‘In the trough.’
To Mickey’s horror and the driver’s chuckling delight, the three men made a dive for the horse trough. There, they dropped to their knees and began a hectic sluicing and scrubbing at their faces.
The driver hauled Mickey to his feet. ‘Let us see, animal, how well you survive without a pack of dogs at your heels.’ He began herding Mickey across the depot floor, to get a better look at his companions.
‘Harry,’ Joe hissed, scrabbling for Harry’s attention. ‘Can’t … breathe …’
Harry helped him sit a little higher. Together they watched in horror and fascination as the men splashed and gasped and strove with the water in the trough.
‘Mesmerism,’ whispered Harry. ‘But how? I’ve never seen anything like it …’
Joe said nothing. His attention was fixed on Mickey. Mickey, who Harry guessed had dominated most of Joe’s life with violence and terror; who must never have seemed anything other than indomitable. Mickey, who now crouched, hunched and helpless within the carriage driver’s grip, watching as his thugs made fools of themselves in the filthy water of a horse’s trough.
‘Not enough,’ the carriage driver told the splashing men. ‘You need to soak the dirt off.’ The dripping men paused, gazing up at him. ‘You shall soak the dirt off,’ he said.
Mickey’s eyes widened in understanding. ‘No, lads!’ he cried. But his men had already plunged their heads deep into the horse trough. ‘You’re killing them!’
‘Tut,’ said the driver. ‘Haven’t you ever drowned unwanted pups? It ain’t a bad way to go, all told. I’ve inflicted far worse. As, no doubt, have you.’
‘Let them go,’ gasped Joe. His words were barely a hiss, but the carriage driver glared across at him, as if Joe had yelled. There was a sudden dark rage in that glare, utterly shocking in contrast to his previous chuckling good humour. ‘They’ll drown,’ gasped Joe.
‘They will indeed,’ snapped the driver, and Harry realised with a jolt that he meant to carry this strange game through to its bitterest end. He fully intended killing these men.
With no more effort than if he were lifting a child, the driver hauled Mickey to his feet. ‘Come along to the fire, friend!’ he cried. ‘You are cold. I shall heat you up!’
At the brazier, he rubbed Mickey’s shoulder and murmured soothingly in his ear until Mickey, his expression a horrified mingling of desire and fear, at last seemed to succumb to his suggestion and lowered his face towards the flames.
Desperate, Joe yelled, ‘Let them GO!’ The effort wrung him out, his breath reduced to a wheeze.
The driver turned from Mickey. ‘Let them go?’ he said.
At the trough, Daymo’s toes began drumming the cobbles. His knuckles went white against the rim. Still he didn’t lift his head. Beside him, quietly and with no effort to remove his head from the water, the nameless man pissed himself.
‘I’ll tip it over!’ yelled Harry. He scrambled around to the trough and began heaving. It was a big trough, full to the brim, and he felt the tendons stand
ing out on his neck as he strained into the lift.
At the fire, Mickey thrust out his hand as if to hold himself away from the flames. His fingers sizzled as they closed around the rim of the metal brazier. His eyes bugged in pain, his teeth bared to the gum. Still he kept his hand there, as if holding himself in check with it; as if it were the only thing preventing him from plunging his face into the burning coals.
The driver seemed to have completely lost interest in him, however, and was striding towards Joe. He passed by the trough just as Harry managed to tip it, and the drowning men spilled like fish from a barrel in his wake. Daymo and the henchman flopped and gasped, but Graham slid to the cobbles loose and sodden, dead as yesterday.
‘You’re … killing them,’ gasped Joe. ‘Let them … go.’
Something within the driver seemed to snap entirely at that, and he released a great howl of rage. ‘Let them go? Let them … What are you doing here, Matthew? You have broken your mother’s heart! You broke her heart! And I allowed it. Decades, I held my patience. Decades. Thinking you simply needed to gather your pride – thinking you needed to settle your mind. I respected you. I trusted you to return. But you did not. I have been seeking you forever, boy! Over and over, mistaking others … and now where do I find you? Here! Here! Debased and huddled and degraded as you have no right to be. Subjecting yourself to the tyranny of this scum. How dare you. How dare you be living this life?’
Harry flung himself past the driver and onto the ground by Joe. Grabbing handfuls of Joe’s jacket, he pulled him into his arms as if to protect him from the man who paced before him now, clutching his hair, apparently speechless with rage.
‘Let … them … go,’ gasped Joe again.
The driver sneered. ‘Oh, you have not changed, Matthew. Even after so wicked an exposure to mankind’s crapulent brutality. You are just the same.’
Joe lifted himself from Harry’s grip, as if willing the words from himself. ‘Mister … I’m not … Matthew. Stop … killing … me cousins.’ Abruptly his face drained of all remaining colour, his eyes lost focus, and he fell back. ‘Oh, shite,’ he whispered, his hand to his chest. ‘Oh, shite.’
He went completely limp in Harry’s arms.
The driver leapt as if to grab him, and Harry hunched over Joe’s body. ‘Leave him alone!’
‘But I will help him.’
When Harry continued to hold on, the driver shocked him by smiling gently. ‘I could order you to release him,’ he said. ‘I suspect you know this.’ From the other end of the depot, there came a loud hiss, the acrid stench of burning hair, and Mickey the Wrench released a scream. The driver’s eyes, only inches from Harry’s own, glimmered green in the flickering light of the stable lamps. ‘I am honouring you with choice, boy, because I saw you defend Matthew. Because I suspect you are his friend.’
Harry swallowed hard. ‘What if I won’t let you take him?’
‘Then he will die here, surrounded by evil men who have abused him, and who deserved the retribution he saved them from. Is that what you wish for him?’
Harry released his grip.
The driver lifted Joe as easily as if he were a baby, and crossed with him to the waiting carriage. ‘The survivors will not remain insensate for long,’ he called. ‘You had best run while you can.’ Then he was taking his place in the driver’s box, Joe pale and unmoving on the seat beside him. He shook the reins, and the horses lurched forward, filling the depot with the ring and clatter of hooves.
‘Where are you taking him?’ shouted Harry, running to catch up. ‘Where are you taking him? He needs a doctor!’
The great wheels flashed past, missing him by inches. Then he was behind the carriage, running through the noise and chaos of its departure as it sped out into the cold grey murk of the pre-dawn street. Soon it would be gone, with Joe as its prisoner, unconscious, helpless and alone.
Harry didn’t even pause for breath. Without thought, without planning, he just leapt. The ropes of the luggage-rack burned his palms as he hauled himself up. The tarpaulin was slick beneath his scrabbling hands. Then he was wedged into the packages beneath the canvas, burrowing and squirming into the great pile of luggage on the roof. Irrevocably committed to a plan he had yet to even think of, he huddled in the precarious and swaying dark as the growl of the wheels on the cobbles drowned out all other sound.
Two Small Stops
along the Way
VINCENT URGED THE horses up the wide double street that would take him around the block to the theatre entrance. The boy was motionless on the seat beside him. He would be dead soon. Vincent had seen many a collapsed lung in his time. In his experience not even the healthiest of men came back from such a wound, and it had been obvious that Matthew was dangerously ill even before those animals had beaten him.
Seeing the boy in this condition had provoked such an upsurge of emotion. Vincent had not felt that way in … in how long? Have I been asleep? he thought. It feels as though I have been asleep.
‘I found you just in time, did I not, Matthew? Never mind, I shall get you home soon enough. I shall reconcile you and Cornelius to each other, and all will be well.’ He glanced again at the boy’s thin face. ‘I will have to clean you up before your mother sees you, though. You are barely recognisable as you are.’ There was the briefest moment, the tiniest itchy flicker, of doubt. He pushed it aside. This was Matthew, Vincent was certain of it. There would be no more embarrassing mistakes.
He cracked the reins and whistled the horses on. It would be good to be on the open road again, to urge the horses into a frenzy and simply let loose. Snowflakes slanted from the brightening sky. He opened his mouth and they melted like tiny moments of clarity on his tongue.
By the devil, it was excellent to be alive!
Without thinking, he breathed deep, and pain snagged dull and wicked in his lungs. His old friend, making itself known: the wasting sickness, the consumption, tuberculosis, whatever you chose to call the disease that was once again threatening to disassemble him one cell at a time.
You and me, Matthew, he thought. Home and healed …
And then? asked his mind slyly. Home and healed … and then? Silence, and dust, and stillness once more …
Vincent frowned into the wind. ‘Cornelius spends so much time underground since you left. I am amazed he has not begun to glow in the dark. As for dear Raquel … your mother spends hours at her work table, Matthew, yet I do not think she ever sews. In your time, we were always out and about, do you recall? At the village, on the river, in the woods. When did that change?’
Matthew did not reply. He had slid to one side, his head angled awkwardly within the corner of the high-backed seat. Vincent took off his hat and gently placed it on the boy’s tousled head. ‘Things will improve when you return home,’ he whispered.
The empty streets echoed as the carriage took a corner and the theatre came into sight. Cornelius was standing beneath the stained-glass porch of the entrance, making last-minute arrangements with the stage manager. He looked wretched, his face paler than the coming dawn, his eyes sunken in shadow.
Poor Cornelius. With so many trips up and down to the city – researching the theatre, arranging the arson – and so much time away from his beloved ‘angel’, it was no wonder he was coming undone.
‘We must get him home, Matthew, before he falls asunder. Now, do excuse this small indignity.’
The boy’s eyes widened in horror as Vincent jerked him down to lie on the seat and pulled the lap blanket up to cover his face. Vincent patted him through the fabric. ‘We cannot have him seeing you until you are both ready to admit your feelings,’ he said.
The manager, seemingly anxious that Lord Wolcroft might slip on the newly fallen snow, took Cornelius’ elbow. Cornelius tensed, his hand tightening on his sword-cane, and Vincent straightened in concern; Cornelius hated to be touched when in this state – men had died for doing so. But Cornelius simply shook free and made his own way to the carriage, choosing to use th
e cane as an aid to walking, rather than putting it to its other, more lethal form of employ.
The manager hovered, desperate to please. ‘You are certain your man remembers the way, Lord Wolcroft?’ he asked. ‘I can send a boy with you, if you feel he may need some help?’
Cornelius speared the man with a look. ‘Captain,’ he snarled, ‘this creature believes you are too stupid to hold his instructions in your head. He wants to know if you need a child’s help to find your way. What do you think? Do you need a child’s help to find your way?’
Vincent couldn’t help being amused. ‘I need no help to find my way. Thank you very kindly for the offer.’
The manager huffed and tugged his waistcoat, not certain how to respond. When Cornelius had climbed into the carriage and slammed the door, Vincent took a coin from his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, flipping it to the manager. ‘For your trouble.’
The man caught it without thinking. His face blazed as he realised he had just taken a tip from a carriage driver – a darkie one at that. Then his mouth fell open as he recognised the coin as a gold sovereign. Vincent laughed – the man’s mingled shock, horror and greed were just too comical. He was still laughing as he pulled the carriage into the street and drove off.
THEY COLLECTED THE actress first. She lived on one of those square little parks surrounded by decaying houses that this city seemed to have in abundance. Her home was a shabby little three-storey hostel, the snow-crusted sign reading ‘St Martha’s Boarding House for Ladies’.
Vincent took all this in from the driver’s seat as the old woman crept out and gently shut the door. She was quite obviously slinking away. She owed rent, no doubt. Poor thing – Vincent thought she looked quite frail and tiny outside the confines of the theatre. He smiled at the thought of her in that glittering dress. Cornelius must have been appalled at the sight of her, wrapped in the trimmings he had intended for the fresh and lovely seamstress. How he must have bellowed!
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