by Emma Newman
She watched him leave, unable to stop her eyes drifting down to his calves, so shapely within the tight legs of his trousers. Shutting her eyes, Charlotte tried to work out whether that conversation had gone well and, more important, whether the magus had really been encouraging her to do something dangerous and most definitely unladylike.
Tea would help. She stood, stretched and went to get the kettle to fill it. It was only then that she noticed it was frosted and frozen solid to the stove. She could only hope that Hopkins was even less observant.
Chapter 8
THAT NIGHT, HOURS AFTER the consultations were over, Charlotte closed the back gate of number six, New Road. She leaned against it, hoping that no one had seen her. It was far too soon since the last time she’d felt this frightened, earlier that very day, when she was convinced the Enforcers were coming for her. Unlike then, however, she was finding this quite exhilarating.
She had never walked the streets of her local area alone at night, let alone sneaked into another area she barely knew that felt unsafe. She was wearing an old day dress that could be worn without a corset and crinoline cage, her old navy blue coat over the top and a black bonnet she had only ever worn once, to her aunt’s funeral years before. Standing in the backyard of number six, New Road, she couldn’t quite believe she was doing this.
It wasn’t what she had planned to do; in fact, she’d tumbled into bed utterly exhausted only a couple of hours before, fully intending to sleep. Ben said the interviews had gone well, but he was so tired by the end of them that he’d done the same straight after supper, and her parents retired early, too. But no matter how much she needed to sleep, Charlotte couldn’t settle. She’d fidgeted and fretted, going over the conversations she’d had with her father and with Magus Hopkins endlessly, picking over the details she could remember and worrying about those she could not.
The fact that thoughts of Magus Hopkins, of his lips in particular, plagued her was most disturbing. What was worse was that she hadn’t realised her mind had slipped back to that place until she started to daydream about him leaning even closer when they’d been in the kitchen together. Appalled at herself, she thought of George and how sweet and kind he was, and twisted the engagement ring to remind herself she shouldn’t be thinking of anyone else. It only worked for so long.
She soon discovered that the worry over her father and the debt collectors pushed any silliness from her mind. She wasn’t convinced a polite letter from her father would make any difference, and the thought of him in that cage, dying from a heart attack, made her sit up and light the candle again.
Why did Magus Hopkins know about that house in particular? Had he owed money to them before he became a Fellow of the Royal Society? Did he know others who had fallen afoul of Anchor Financial Services? Whatever the reason for his interest, he’d made it clear that he wasn’t prepared to find out more.
But there was nothing stopping her from doing that.
So now she stood at the back of the dark house, using the moonlight to pick out the back door handle and the window. She couldn’t see into the room she’d looked at before, and with it being so dark, she wasn’t sure if it was because the house was empty or if thick curtains had been drawn and were blocking out any light.
Tiptoeing across the backyard, she jumped when the clock towers across the city chimed midnight. They wouldn’t chime again until six o’clock the next day, and she hoped desperately that when they did, she’d be asleep in her own bed, safe once more.
Charlotte pressed her ear to the back door and then to the ground floor window, listening for any sound coming from within. She couldn’t hear anything, but with two dogs barking in nearby streets and the background rumble of carriage wheels on cobbles and trains in the distance, she wasn’t confident in her appraisal. Cupping her hands around her eyes again, she pressed against the bottom left corner of the window and was heartened to see a sliver of moonlight stretching across the floor inside. Whilst it made the cage loom out of the shadows like something out of a nightmare, it was reassuring to see that the room was empty.
She tried the handle on the back door and, as she expected, it was locked. She returned to the window and looked for the clasp keeping the lower sash locked in place. When Charlotte saw that it was just like the ones they had at home, with a simple curved bolt to slide out with one small movement, she smiled. She knew how they felt, where the resistance would be and where the force needed to be applied to open it.
Crouching down until her eyes were level with the lock on the other side of the glass, and trying not to think too much about the awful things her dress was being dragged through, Charlotte shifted from side to side until the moonlight shone on as much of the lock as possible. Then she imagined her hand being able to pass through the window frame to press her thumb against the flattened edge of the hasp, pushing it sideways to slide the rest of the semicircle out.
At first, she feared it wasn’t going to work, and then all of a sudden the lock swung round so fast she squeaked in surprise. She shrank lower in the shadows as another dog started to bark, sounding much closer than the others. What would her mother say if she knew what Charlotte were doing now? Even worse, what would George think? He simply wouldn’t believe it. Then she caught herself wondering how Magus Hopkins would react and couldn’t stop herself mirroring the smile she fancied would spread on those lips of his.
“Charlotte Persephone Gunn, you should be ashamed of yourself!” she whispered to her own shadow, but not because she was about to break into a private property.
The window was mercifully easy to open, and she climbed in over the windowsill. She could only hope that no one had been looking out of the many darkened windows that overlooked the back of the house and its grubby yard. After pausing to listen carefully again, she pulled the lower sash back down but left it open just a crack for peace of mind. The house was silent and somehow felt empty. The air was surprisingly stale, considering that man who had been in there earlier, and it smelt of damp walls. She could imagine the mould creeping up the walls and the size of the spiders in the shadows and was glad she could see neither.
She could see very little, in fact. The moonlight only stretched so far in and barely reached the edge of the cage. Charlotte had planned ahead, though—she could list her many failings, but being unprepared was rarely one of them. She fetched a candle and holder from the old leather satchel worn beneath her coat, and after taking a moment to drag the heavy drapes across the window, she lit the candle with barely an afterthought. It took her a moment to regulate the flame she’d created at the tip of the wick, then she shifted her attention to the room again.
The candlelight threw more shadows than it gave comfort, but at least she could inspect things more closely. First, she went to the open doorway to the rest of the house and saw a front parlour that was little more than a small reception room–cum–office. There was a cabinet of the sort that contained paperwork, a dusty desk and chair tucked beneath it and a couple of rickety wooden chairs on the other side of it. There was just enough light from the candle to show several locks on the inside of the front door and a blind pulled down in the front window. At least none of the neighbours across the street would be able to see inside. She saw a letter on the floor next to the front door. From the extravagant loops on the handwriting, she suspected it was the one her father said he would send. It must have arrived in the second post.
Bare wooden stairs rose up to her left, and she had the sudden, awful thought that the proprietor could be asleep in a room up there. Expecting that horrible broom-moustached man to come clattering down in long johns any moment, Charlotte retreated back to the room she was interested in, planning to see as much as she could as quickly as possible. As she turned to go back to where she’d entered, she thought she saw a man out of the corner of her eye, tall and slender, staring at the cage. She jolted, making the candle wobble in the holder, and then realised there was no one there. Her fears were getting the better of
her.
Charlotte retraced her steps, taking care to keep her heels off the floorboards. It was cold in the room, cold enough for her to see her breath, and there was no fireplace that she could see. There were marks on the wall where there was once a stove similar to the one at home and in the corner an area was curtained off behind grey cotton that was once white. Her imagination swiftly placed a man behind it, waiting to jump out at her, so she headed straight for it and pulled the curtain back. She found nothing more than a filthy sink with a cluster of old tin mugs nestled in it, covered in spider webs.
Relieved, she let the curtain drop back into place and approached the cage. It must have been where all those poor souls died. Cage didn’t seem an adequate word as she approached it. It was too sturdy, too imposing, more like a prison cell, but freestanding in the centre of the room. It was large enough to hold a tall man if he stood but not if he lay down, being only four feet square by her estimate. It must have been assembled in the room, being too large to fit through doorway or window, with a solid iron base and top into which the thick bars were slotted.
As she approached, Charlotte couldn’t help but shudder. It felt like the time George took her to see the waxworks at the Baker Street Bazaar and they had braved the separate room in which the re-created scenes of violence from the French Revolution had made her feel faint. There was no blood, nothing but iron in fact, but something of that horror lingered here. The promise of cruelty, perhaps, or simply the reminder of how one person could so easily abuse and debase another. The draught from the open window caught wisps of her hair that tickled the back of her neck, and she clenched her teeth tight together to stop them chattering. There was such a sense of death here, such a feeling of despair. The thought of anyone, let alone her father, being subjected to imprisonment here was enough to make her want to weep.
The candle flame flickered and then, as she watched it, it curved to the right—against the direction of the draught from the window—in such an unnatural manner that for a moment, she wondered if she were somehow doing it herself. After convincing herself that she was not, she moved the candle holder slowly in a circle, studying the way the flame reminded her of a compass needle, remaining pointed in its chosen direction.
Charlotte lifted the candle in the direction the flame pointed until she saw a mark on the slab of iron that formed the roof of the cage, where the flame straightened again. There was something engraved or stamped into the iron, like a hallmark, only larger. It was a rectangular shape the size of her thumbnail, filled with several symbols that overlapped in places.
The flame tugged sharply to the left and she saw another at the other end of the metal edge. A quick circuit of the cage confirmed that the same hallmark was stamped into the iron at each of the corners, on the lid and base. An inspection of the bars revealed a different symbol, simpler in design, set into an oval that was half the size of the others and stamped into each bar at the top and bottom.
This was important. She knew it. It didn’t seem like a manufacturer’s mark—there would only be the need for one, after all. Her instinct was that it had something to do with magic, though how the marks could influence the candle flame, she had no idea. As far as she knew, a magus had to be present to do anything like that.
Whatever they were, she couldn’t stand there staring at them all night. She set the candle down, fished out her small notebook and pencil and copied both of the “hallmarks” down as accurately as she could. Just as she was finishing the second, smaller design, she heard the sound of a key tumbling a lock in the front door.
She dropped the pencil in her panic, scrabbled to find where it had rolled to as the second lock was tumbled, grabbed it and the candle holder as the third lock was opened and darted behind the curtain as a start was made on the fourth. Charlotte licked her fingertips and pinched out the candle flame, freezing the wick to choke off the smoke’s distinctive scent. Then she remembered, with heart-stopping horror, that she’d left the curtains closed and window open. Leaving the satchel and candle behind the curtain, she just had time to dash across, set everything back as quietly as she could to how it had been when she arrived and then race back to the curtained nook as the last lock was opened.
Pressing herself back against the sink in an effort to keep her toes away from the curtain, Charlotte tried not to think of the spiders that might be crawling up her coat, into her hair, as the sound of two sets of footfalls echoed from the office area. She could smell the dank air rising up from the drain beneath the plughole and hoped desperately that she wouldn’t catch something awful from the miasma.
“I told ya, every time there’s one on the way, he wants it checked,” a gruff male voice said.
“But the last one was only last week,” said a different male voice that she’d heard somewhere before. “’Ent that much could ’appen since then. No one’s been ’ere.”
“Them’s the rules,” said the first. They both spoke with London accents, but the second was deeper and vaguely familiar.
Both men entered the room with the cage, one of them carrying a lantern. Its light stretched beneath the shabby curtain, making Charlotte stand on tiptoe so she could move her feet just a couple of inches further back into the shadows. The light penetrated the thin fabric and Charlotte was certain that any moment they would spot her, as she could see their silhouettes on the other side. She could only hope that her own blended sufficiently against the outline of the sink in a forgotten corner. But what if one of them decided they wanted a drink of water? A burning rush up from her stomach made her swallow several times as she told herself that no one would ever want to use one of the foul mugs resting behind her.
“So, then,” said the familiar voice, “what’s it like, now you’re one of them?”
“I was always one of ’em. I just got a fancy bit of paper and me own mark now.”
“Let’s see it, then.”
“No, it’s private.”
“What, they tattoo it on or summat?”
“Course they don’t. Hold this.”
Charlotte watched the bright core of the lantern light swing over to the left as the unfamiliar man handed it to the second to hold. There was the sound of keys jangling and then the clunk of one of them being put into a lock, presumably the one in the cage door.
“You were always a lucky little sod,” said the voice she couldn’t place. “If only all my sons were magi. I’d be too bleeding rich to get up to this sort of bizniss.”
“Don’t be so ungrateful, Pa. You’ve never ’ad it so good. You don’t have to live in this dive anymore for one thing, thanks to me.”
“Thanks to your guvnor, more like. What’s he really like?”
“How he seems,” the son said, and the sound of his boots changed to a soft clank as he presumably climbed inside the cage. “That’s what I like about ’im. He seems like a bullying old bastard and that’s exactly what he is. You know where you are with ’im. If he’s angry, you know it, it hurts, then it’s over. Job done. Move on.”
Why was he getting inside the cage? Charlotte tried to wrestle her curiosity down deep inside, make it smaller, quieter, but it was too much. She parted the curtain opening just enough to give her a sliver to spy out of, and bit her lip when she recognised the man holding the lantern. He was the one who’d delivered the letter to her father. He was holding a letter again, now, in the hand not holding up the lantern. The one she suspected was from her father. He must have picked it up when they came in.
His son was inside the cage, with the door still open, kneeling down as she watched. He rummaged in a pocket and then pulled out a screwdriver.
“What kind of a magus are you, needin’ one of those?” his father scoffed. “Thought you could do all that with the power of your thoughts, like them mesmerists.”
“It’s nothing like mesmerism,” said the son, directing the tool at something in the base of the cell that Charlotte couldn’t see before starting to unscrew. “And I’m not that type of mag
us. Can’t do the fiddly stuff like this.”
“Nah, you never were one for delicate fings,” said the father, setting the lantern down next to where his son worked. He opened the letter, chuckled to himself and then stuffed it in a pocket.
“Who’s that from?”
“The bloke who’ll be in here on Friday. Beggin’ for more time. They always do. Silly sod should ’ave lived within ’is means. Now he owes twice as much and is spinning some bollocks about his son testin’ to be one of you lot.”
The son paused, looked up. “They’ll pay ’im, if he is.”
“Don’t make no difference to me, son. I reckon your guvnor wouldn’t be impressed if I told ’im this one got off the ’ook. And anyway, what he’ll pay me is far more than what this pillock’s debt is. In for the long term, me.”
Charlotte had never hated anyone so intensely as she hated that man now. The fury and disgust erupted inside her and the flame in the lantern brightened sharply before she got a proper grip on it all and pressed it down. Losing her temper now was not going to help her father, or bring justice to this despicable man. It would only get her killed.
“Last one,” the son said as he attacked another screw, as if he and his father were chatting about something as harmless as fishing.
Scowling at the son, Charlotte did all she could to memorise his features. He had the same bushy sort of moustache as his father, though slightly better groomed, a long, thin face with a narrow mouth and close-set eyes. She would have no trouble remembering him. Surely the Royal Society of Esoteric Arts would be very interested to know that one of their recently installed fellows was involved in some sort of bizarre . . . what, exactly?