by Steven Price
I don’t doubt Charlotte Reckitt known the jack what killed her.
Foole frowned. The Saracen wasn’t in the habit of leaving parts of his kills in sacks around the city. Unless I remember the stories wrong.
He didn’t leave his kills nowhere. The bodies weren’t never located. Fludd cleared his throat. When we was in New York, Molly told me a story old Mrs. Sharper an her sister used to tell to their dippers. To keep them in line, like. Story bout a regular customer even old Sharper’s sister was frightened of. This was all years before Molly were born. Sharper called the customer the Grindbones, like in the children’s rhyme. Him what cuts off the heads of the wee ones. Except this monster were real. Used to come round to Sharper’s at night, lurk in the alley, watchin the windows. He only ever come for one girl, French Anne, an older girl. Molly says he were sweet on her like a cat with a cornered rat, an her right back at him. She took a knife to his good cheek one time she reckoned he were messin with another girl. Good as married, them two was.
You think she was talking about the Saracen.
It ain’t just me thinkin it. Rumour is Charlotte Reckitt rolled the Saracen out of his share on a job one time, an the two of them parted ways in a ugly fashion. An it weren’t no secret his fortunes took a downturn after that. When I were askin around I heard it from two different lads, this.
The flash world’s talking about this?
Black luck travels fast, Mr. Adam. It’s no wonder, when one of their own gets diced. Even a jill what retired from the flash years back. There’s still those remember her name.
Foole gave him a long level look. The man would be what, sixty, sixty-five now? Is he even still alive?
The giant shrugged.
You’re serious about this.
It don’t strike me as unlikely, now.
Foole took a long slow sip of his tea. I’m listening, he said.
Fludd nodded soberly, he beetled his eyebrows low. A jack can keep a grudge a long time, Mr. Adam. I know it. An given what all the bugger suffered after your Charlotte boiled him, an his French Anne got the rot an were sent down from Sharper’s? If I were the bastard, I’d date me misfortune to Charlotte Reckitt. An I’d be angry enough to want to rectify me troubles.
Foole ran a soft finger over the rim of his saucer. The house around them was hushed. That was a long time ago, he murmured. Why would he wait this long?
You ain’t no stranger to long grudges yourself, Fludd said. An here’s me point. Maybe you don’t need Pinkerton. If you was to locate a person knew the Saracen back then—
You mean the whore.
French Anne, aye. I were thinkin maybe if Molly were to ask around, like, maybe just inquire of old Mrs. Sharper an her sister. See if they known where the girl got to.
Foole stared at his friend. I can’t ask Molly to do that, he said.
Aye, you can.
You don’t understand. Matters didn’t end well between those two.
Fludd shrugged his bulk. Suit yourself.
Foole stared into the grate where the coals pulsed and glowed with an unholy heat, turning the teacup in his hands. After a time he glanced down, the brown leaves drifting together, silting apart as in some weird latticing of fate. There was a little boy, Peter, he murmured. Four years old. He and Molly worked the crew together, he was like a brother to her. When she went back for him he was gone, the sisters had sent him down into the streets. Dead by then, I’d guess.
Footsteps approached in the corridor outside, passed, were gone.
She’d never go back. Not to Sharper’s.
Aye she will, Fludd growled. If it’s you doin the askin, she will.
In the evening he drifted upstairs to her bedroom, its door ajar. It was a narrow room wallpapered and dim with an in-cut gabled ceiling and under the slope she lay, blankets rucked up around the small of her back. A small green Arabian lamp was burning on her bedside table. Pressed flat before her was a rough paper excitement novel, the printing blurred and poor, the pages tissue-thin, and Foole watched her where she lay, this small creature with her broken past whom he loved, her cruel mouth that would pout or smile slyly, concealing the long teeth. She did not know herself yet, did not know the beauty that was coming. It would be a thing she would wake late to one morning and never not know again. In the bedclothes next to her he saw the chipped doll’s head she had stolen from the girl on the steamer, its glass eye staring at the ceiling, and he felt a pain in his throat so fierce it seemed he could not breathe. When she glanced up startled from her page he felt the living force of her like a current that could pull a man under and close over his head and leave no trace of him behind.
You just goin to lurk there like a bloody rampsman? she said.
He had a hand on her door frame. He started to ask it and then he could not. He said, instead, I’ll be going out later.
She lifted herself onto one elbow. To Sharper’s?
He stared at her.
A sly look, her eyes darkening. You like to catch flies, your mouth hangin open like that.
I guess Japheth told you?
She grinned. He maybe said a little somethin bout it. It’s okay. It’s a long time since I were frightened of them two, Adam.
Well.
An look at your luck, now. She gave him a pointed look. I ain’t busy this night neither.
He watched her there with the lamplight playing across her eyelashes thinking the very opposite and feeling an old sadness startle, bat-like and crooked, in his heart. I wasn’t going to ask it, he said.
I know you wasn’t, she said.
They were the last of five half-blind sisters famously beautiful once and none of whose husbands had survived their wedding nights. The two youngest had been hanged as poisoners in 1862 and the second-born had been taken by the cholera before that. Mrs. Sharper’s fingers had been cut from her hand for dipping in her own childhood and she had fashioned at considerable expense wooden replicas which she screwed into the stumps and wore ungloved. All had emerged like a brood of rats from the murk and filth of Wapping in the year of the Great Exhibition but remained denizens of that world with names still feared among the miserable and the destitute thirty years on. They had commanded a fleet of child dippers two dozen strong once but as their eyesight failed they had gradually conceded to fate and were now out of the trade. In her first year free Molly would wake crying and creep to Foole’s bed in her pale nightgown and he would pull aside the covers and allow her in. She had been six years old then, dreaming she had forgotten the labyrinthine way back to their house. Do you want to go back to them? he would ask her, stroking her hair, confused. Do you miss them? And she would turn, mumbling, and sigh, already asleep, and have no memory of it in the morning.
Foole watched her now as they went, remembering. When their cab would go no farther Foole and Molly got out and made their way through dripping courts and under arches and down rickety stairs in the foul offing of the Thames. At last they stopped at a nondescript door, its white paint long since peeled into strips, and Foole stepped forward and knocked.
The door opened at once. An ancient sailor with powerful shoulders and tattooed knuckles leered out. A crutch was tucked up under one arm. His head was smooth as a shilling and shining in the faint light and where his left knee had once been his trouser leg was slack, pinned into place. When he caught sight of Molly something in his face opened, twisted up.
That ain’t you now, birdie? he whispered. What you doin back?
We’ve come to talk to the sisters, Foole said. We’d like to speak with Mrs. Sharper.
Let us in, Curtains, said Molly.
After a moment the man grunted, limped aside. Shut the door behind them and locked it and squinted one last time out the peephole at the courtyard and then led them crookedly through. The house was dim, drafty, cold. There was a staircase leading up into darkness and a doorway just beyond that and from somewhere in the walls a high faint laughter came to them. At the drawing room the man Curtains called in loudly to announce t
hem and then he took his leave. A single lamp with a rose shade was burning a sickly light and Foole waited for his eyes to adjust. He could smell sweat, an odour of pickled herring, cut daffodils from a vase on a pier table. Molly brushed against his side in the dimness and slowly his eyes distinguished the furnishings, the drapery, the pianoforte in its felted skirts. On an ottoman under a standing clock lounged a girl, soft, languid, not fifteen, staring at Foole with dull eyes. Then some huge thing thick and ancient stirred in the far shadows and then a cushion creaked in a different corner of the room and the girl turned her face dreamily between the two.
Leave us, a voice murmured.
The girl rose, her neckline dipping across her breasts, her gown faltering over one shoulder, her hair waterfalling across her face. The door shut behind her. A heavy silence descended.
Our guests must excuse us, sister, a second voice called softly. We can offer them nothing.
Slowly a seated figure materialized. Foole could see darkness pooling in cadaverous cheeks, clawlike fingers clutching the low armrests, chin upraised and listening. It turned its face sightlessly.
They are surprised, sister, it whispered. They see how we suffer.
They did not think the disease would have advanced so.
They did not think, sister.
Across the room then a second figure stirred so that the lamplight caught the horror of her blindness also. There were livid red scars at her eye sockets where the surgeons’ knives had failed her. Skin white with powder, hair in an artful tangle. She wore an old-fashioned blouse with bone buttons and a high collar at the throat, a blanket across her legs. She was laying out a hand of solitaire on a table at her elbow, eerily running her fingertips lightly over each card as she turned it. Foole knew her at once.
You have brought your Mr. Foole to us, birdie, Mrs. Sharper murmured, her face turning from side to side. Twisting a card in her fingers. Or has he brought you? He cannot wish us to buy you back?
He don’t, Molly whispered.
It was the first words she had spoken and now the sisters shivered and turned as one in her direction. Mrs. Sharper laid aside her cards.
O birdie, there you are, she said.
Foole felt his skin prickle. Molly had stiffened beside him and he put a hand on her hair and started to shake his head and then realized the pointlessness of it. We’d like to ask you about a customer, he said. A man who used to come here. He let his glance take in the shabby drawing room, its draped mantel, the blackened grate where no fire had burned in days. We’re sorry to disturb you. We’ll compensate you for your trouble, of course.
He wants to know about a customer, sister.
Who is he to ask, sister? We do not disclose details.
Not to him.
Only to relations, sister. Only to our own blood.
Molly gave Foole a veiled look. I weren’t never your blood, she said. I were your property. You sold me.
Into a happier situation, child. You are happy now, yes? When Molly said nothing the old woman murmured, You see.
O how she wounds us, sister. Is that what she came for? To wound us?
Molly shrugged angrily out of Foole’s hand. I come to ask after the Grindbones, she said. Not for nothin else.
Mrs. Sharper raised her ravaged face. The Grindbones, she murmured.
Molly picked up a small brass paperweight of the Crystal Palace, turned it absently in her fingers. He were acquainted with one of your dippers. We was told you might know where she gone to.
Put that down, Mrs. Sharper said coldly. Touch nothing.
We have had many dippers, child.
Her name were French Anne. You maybe remember her. You cut her face so she weren’t able to work an you sent her down into the docks.
The thinner sister was tilting her face in the shadows as if to catch some scent. You talk to us about cutting, child? You who cut that poor boy?
What boy?
Peter.
I never cut Peter. I loved him.
And yet you left him. That was the cruellest cut of all. You went with your precious Mr. Foole and left him alone. Poor, thieving Peter. How he cried when you did not come back for him.
Peter weren’t a thief, Molly said.
O but he was, child.
Incorrigible and corrupted, he was.
He weren’t a thief. You sent him down into the streets even though you knew he weren’t able to make his way. He weren’t even six years old.
We asked him to return what he had stolen, the thinner sister murmured. He declined.
He left us to go with you, Mrs. Sharper said. He said he would find you, you would take care of him. What could we do?
He did not find you, child?
Molly was silent.
Come here, birdie. Mrs. Sharper held out her ruined hand. Let me see you. Even in the eerie light Foole could see the wooden fingers screwed into their stumps. She held forth that hand a long moment in silence as if to touch the ineffable and then she drew it back, and it disappeared into murk and gloom. Molly started to drift towards her.
Molly, Foole said sharply.
But she only gave him a vague distracted glance and continued on. He understood some private exchange was playing itself out, something rooted in hurt and fury and even, somehow, love. Molly kneeled down at the woman’s feet and raised her face and Mrs. Sharper passed a hand slowly, methodically, across. The grey fingers crept like spiders over her eyelids.
How you have grown, birdie, she whispered. Such delicate features. You will be a beauty yet.
Molly opened her eyes. Her expression was unmoved.
Two long fingers under her chin, tilting her face upward. And what is it your Mr. Foole wants with Jonathan Cooper, child?
Foole held his breath. He had been staring at Molly, at something in her face which she could not strangle. Cooper, he said now, turning the name over in his mouth. Jonathan Cooper.
What have you told him, birdie? That Cooper had no face? Might your Mr. Foole want him for his particular talents, or has he offended in some fashion? Ah, yes, there it is. He has offended you. Her nostrils flared as she took a long slow deep breath and then her creeping hands fell still. It is true what you have heard, birdie, she continued. We had some sight yet when he used to come here, we remember him. We could see his teeth through a hole in his cheek. Grinning as if there were some joke in it all. But his eyes were awful, black all through, always weeping. O it was not tears. He was as big as a horse, but his back was twisted so that he could not stand straight. He came for Anne in the small hours of the night. He used to run a finger over her ear and whisper to her in his rough Italian.
Italian? said Foole.
Mrs. Sharper ignored him.
He never conducted any violence, sister, the thinner one called across. Not on yourself and not on any of our girls. But the two of them would quarrel so—
Such a fierce creature, Anne was. So jealous.
A jealous whore, sister.
Foole rubbed a damp palm on his trouser leg. His tongue felt thick, the bad air of the parlour oozed around him, made his thoughts sluggish. The stories they told you, he interrupted, speaking to Molly. About the Grindbones, what he would do to the littlest ones, what they protected you from. Ask them—
Ask us what.
Foole cleared his throat.
He doubts the truth of them, sister.
Their truth? Mrs. Sharper waved her ravaged hand at the darkness. The truth that is found in a story is a different kind of truth, but it is not less real for being so. We had always known the truth of Mr. Cooper’s nature.
O we knew what he was, sister.
As did Anne.
As did Anne. That is why she left us, sister.
She never left you, Molly said. She was staring at the old woman with a fascination Foole did not like the look of. She never left. You sent her away.
We caught her stealing from us, birdie. We had no choice but to ask her to leave. We could not keep a thief.
Foole cut his tongue along his teeth as if to sharpen it. He withdrew two five-pound notes from his pocket and stepped forward and set them down in front of Mrs. Sharper on the card table. I should like very much to find French Anne, he said coldly. I should like to speak with her.
The banknotes disappeared into Mrs. Sharper’s right fist and she clutched them to her chest and started to trace her thumb around their edges. There came a rustling as the banknotes vanished into her blouse.
The thinner sucked sharply at her teeth. Is it, sister?
It is.
Very well. You wish to find French Anne, Mr. Foole? Look for her under the lime.
The lime pits? he said. Is she dead then?
Mrs. Sharper glared a slow smouldering glare. French Anne is dead, yes, she said. But the woman who used to be her is not. She lives yet.
He stared at the old woman’s clouded pupils and then she turned her face towards him and he felt the hairs prickle along his neck. She was looking at him. It was not possible and yet it was so.
She works the sewer mouths south of Blackfriars, Mrs. Sharper hissed. Lives as a mudlark in the cubbies. They call her Muck Annie now. She never comes up from the tunnels. Or so we are told.
The berserkers, sister.
Mrs. Sharper grunted and shifted her bulk. Foole could hear the click of her wooden fingers on the armrest. The tunnels are punishing, Mr. Foole, she murmured. No one survives them for long. They are the haunt of the berserkers now, even the police fear to go below. The berserkers will tear a man to pieces and leave him as feed for the rats merely for the pleasure of it.
Foole steadied the slender walking stick in his grip. How will I know her? he asked.
The scars.
Yes. Mrs. Sharper waved her ruined hand in the darkness before her face. Here, and here, she said. She drew her thumb in a long crescent from each corner of her mouth up her cheeks to her ears.
And the man Cooper? Is he with her?
Now the thinner shrugged slyly. It has been fifteen years, Mr. Foole. Our Grindbones was useful in frightening the little ones, nothing more. She turned her baleful face from side to side. In this life the lost stay lost, she said. And Mr. Cooper was always among the lost.