Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact

by Alison Goodman

  ‘Glory!’ a voice said.

  She spun around in a crouch.

  Sprat stood in the doorway, eyes fixed upon Lowry’s corpse. The girl edged into the room, thin arms wrapped around her body, the faded dress bunched up past her bare ankles.

  ‘Did you do that?’ she asked.

  Helen tried to say yes, but her voice was gone, lost within quick, shallow breaths that brought no air.

  Sprat squatted in front of her, eyes solemn. ‘You all right?’ She reached across and patted Helen’s shoulder with one dirty hand. ‘All yer bits an’ bobs together?’

  Helen gasped at the touch — God forfend, the energy! — but no torrent boiled up to fling the small girl across the room. She could still feel the Deceiver power within her, its distant click and moan, but it seemed to need a path of blood.

  ‘Don’t give his worthless carcass no thought, my lady, he deserved it.’ Sprat regarded Lowry with satisfaction, then wrinkled her nose. ‘Lordy, he reeks, don’t he.’ She scratched her grimy neck. ‘Looks like it hurt him. A lot.’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen finally managed.

  ‘Good.’ Sprat clambered to her feet, hitching her dress. ‘You lookin’ for what he stashed, ain’t ya? The book.’

  Helen lurched forward. ‘You know where it is?’

  ‘Saw him put somethin’ in with Mad Lester afore you came.’

  Helen bowed her head, almost overcome by the giddy wash of relief. Thank the Lord for small, inquisitive girls.

  ‘I need to get it, Sprat.’ She climbed to her feet. Shaky, but firm enough.

  Sprat nodded. ‘Come on then.’ She snagged one of the lamps and led the way to the door. ‘I’ll get you past Lester. He’s all riled up right now, but he won’t hurt me.’

  Shyly she held out her other hand. Helen took it in her own, the wrap of small sticky warmth fighting back the horror of the room behind them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mad Lester was indeed riled up. Helen watched through the bars of his cell door as the wild-haired, dirt-encrusted young man paced back and forth, the chain attached to his thin ankle slithering and chinking along the dirt floor. He punched the air around him, both hands balled into fists. One eye was swollen half shut, the other wide and darting to all corners of his gloomy enclosure. Helen pressed her hand to her nose. Wafts of foul air — rancid meat and excrement — exuded from the shed, stirred up by the poor creature’s frantic perambulations and intensified by the warmth of the night.

  Sprat lifted her lamp and stood on her tiptoes to see through the bars. She clicked her tongue. ‘Glimflashy, ain’t he?’

  Helen searched her cant. Glimflashy: angry.

  ‘Always gets this way when his uncle goes in there. Looks like the blasted louse hit ’im in the face again.’

  For a moment Helen did not know whom Sprat meant, then realised Lester’s uncle was Lowry. Or had been Lowry.

  ‘Where is the book, Sprat?’

  ‘In that box o’er there,’ she said, waving the lamp towards the chest pushed up against the far wall. ‘Hey, Lester,’ she called, her voice lilting into a gentle singsong. ‘It’s all right. Go sit yerself down.’ She held up the hunk of bread she had filched on their way through the dark, deserted kitchen. ‘Got this for ya.’

  Lester kept pacing and punching, his breath wheezing gasps.

  Helen looked back at the bawdy-house. The shutters of the two bedchambers above the kitchen were still open, the soft light from within reaching out across the yard and bringing a ghostly glow to the hanging laundry. Shadows flickered across the slice of wall visible through one window. The room was occupied. Someone could look out at any moment and see them.

  Sprat dropped back onto her heels and glanced up at the windows that still held Helen’s attention. ‘It’s all right, my lady. No one will go near Lowry’s bolt-hole — we was all told to stay away. He won’t be found for hours, so no one’s gunna be lookin’ for yer.’ She gave a reassuring grin. ‘’Sides, no one’ll be able to see us when we’re inside wiv Lester. It’s where I hide all the time.’

  ‘Let us go in, then,’ Helen said. ‘Out of sight.’

  ‘You keep behind me, my lady. I knows you could kill ’im with one hand, but he’s all bovvered and he might try you. I’ll get ’im to sit down and be real quiet. He always listens to me.’

  Helen lifted the heavy metal bar that secured the cell door and swung it around upon its hinge, the iron grinding into a soft screech. She held her breath, but no one came to the windows. Lester, however, stopped pacing.

  Sprat held out the lamp. ‘You take this, my lady. He don’t like light. Keep to that side,’ she gestured to the left, ‘and move real slow.’

  Helen hooked her fingers around the tin handle on the side of the lamp, the metal still warm from Sprat’s grip. The candle within was little more than a stump, the flame close to its end.

  Sprat stepped into the dark, stinking cell. ‘Lookee, Lester. I got some bread.’

  Helen followed, shielding the light from the panting young man.

  Sprat inched closer, holding out the bread. ‘You gotta sit down if you want it.’

  Slowly Helen sidestepped to the chest, the lamp casting long shadows of Sprat and Lester upon the back wall. The chain clinked.

  Helen stopped, muscles tensing, ready to pull the girl out of harm’s way. ‘Be careful!’

  ‘Don’t worry, my lady. Me an’ Lester is good friends. I do this all the time,’ Sprat said as Lester sank down onto his haunches. ‘There you go.’ She passed him a piece broken off the bread.

  Helen crouched beside the chest. Made of cheap wood and no lock. Apparently a madman was guard enough. She placed the lamp on the floor and, with a formless prayer made of hope and need, lifted the lid. The lamplight caught flashes of silver poking out from dirty calico wrappings — a spout and the dome of a sugar shaker. Someone’s treasures. Or more likely, their haul. But where was the journal?

  She shifted the wrapped teapot, and a gilt candlestick below it. Ah, something encased in leather, slotted between the wrapped flat shape of a tray and the side of the chest. She slid her fingers down the narrow space, hooked them around a leather thong and pulled out a book. No larger than her own hand and bound in stained green leather.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she said.

  Sprat looked over her shoulder again. ‘Are yer sure, my lady? Yer don’t wanna nab the wrong thing.’

  Good point, Helen thought. She had never actually seen the journal, only the post bag that Lowry had carried it in. She had to check. There was time — no one knew they were in the cell — and if it was the journal, then she could rip out the precious pages about the Comte. Please let them be there, she prayed. She untied the thong and opened the book, turning the front page to the lamplight. The scrawled words were written in a pale rusty ink. Even as she thought blood, a deep, roiling nausea hit her, like one of Martha Gunn’s waves, slamming her onto her knees and hunching her around a hard retch.

  ‘My lady!’

  She forced her head up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sprat was slowly backing away from Lester. Coming to her aid.

  ‘Do not come any nearer,’ Helen gasped. ‘It is alchemy.’

  Now she remembered. In the Lewes tavern, Lowry had told her that reading the journal had made him puke. But this was way beyond mere sickness. She felt as if her innards were being ripped from their moorings.

  Sprat stopped her slow creep. ‘Alchemy? Ain’t that magic?’

  ‘In a way. It is written with murdered people’s blood.’ And, if Lowry had been telling the truth, the blood of Deceivers. ‘It is making me sick.’

  ‘Dead’uns’ blood?’ Sprat gave a sniff of disgust. ‘I’d reckon so.’

  Helen slowly straightened. It did not matter if she vomited out her internals, she must find the information about the Comte. She drew a shaking breath and, squinting through the mounting pain, turned the pages. Each had a title at the top: a person’s name or a notation like Rumour
or Myth. Benchley had method in his madness. Although one page seemed to indicate nothing more than madness: it was entirely filled with the legend GD2, over and over again. Was it someone’s initials?

  Her stomach heaved again, sour bile burning her throat. She would have to be quicker. She flipped more pages. The names were written clearly, but the rusty scrawl below them was in some kind of code. Initials and abbreviations and …

  She retched again and again, the spasms deep and unforgiving. Her heartbeat thundered from the strain, the power of the blood alchemy scritch-scratching in her mind like a nest of rats.

  She heard the chain shift and rattle.

  ‘It’s all right, Lester,’ Sprat sang. ‘It’s all right.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘You all right, my lady?’

  Helen nodded and wiped her mouth, her chest and diaphragm aching. Maybe she was flipping too fast through the pages. She slowly turned the next page: Hallifax. Another: Dempsey. She felt a sudden heaving lurch, her vision blurring from the violence of the hard convulsion. One more: Pike.

  She blinked, clearing the blur from her eyes. Holy star! Benchley had written about Pike. She had to read that entry, whatever it cost. Taking a deep, stomach-steadying breath, she held the pale writing up to the lamp again.

  12 March 1807. Messenger came 7 of evening. I Pike killed Sir D in botched reclaim. Fool desperate to cover up. Obliged. Told him one day I would call in the vowels.

  As she finished reading the last word, the spasms slammed through her body, the journal falling from her grasp. There was nothing left in her guts to bring up. Every wrenching gasp was dry and deep, pushing her onto her hands and knees.

  ‘My lady, stop readin’ it!’ Sprat pleaded. ‘I think it’s doin’ somethin’ bad to Lester, an’ it’s makin’ me feel sick too.’

  ‘Not too much longer,’ Helen said. She slowly drew herself upright, back onto her knees, as stiff as an old woman.

  Lester’s one good eye was fixed upon the journal, his thin body rocking, fingers shredding the bread into tiny crumbs. Sprat was right: the book clearly disturbed him too. It seemed the blood alchemy affected everybody, but especially any kind of Reclaimer or Deceiver energy, be it Lester’s vestige or Lowry’s fading Terrene power. And for a full Reclaimer like herself, it was like poison.

  She shook her head, trying to bring what she had read about Pike back into focus. He had killed his own Reclaimer and enlisted Benchley to help hide the fact. No wonder he had been desperate to find the journal: he knew Benchley would have recorded such a damning piece of information. Even so, Benchley had written a botched reclaim. Surely that meant it had been an accident. Why did Pike feel compelled to hide it? He had clearly placed himself at Benchley’s mercy by doing so: the phrase the vowels meant IOU. Without a doubt, Benchley would have called in that debt many times over.

  Helen gasped: the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Benchley must have forced Pike to hide his crime. Did Pike realise the man had been collecting blood for this very journal? For a Ligatus? Helen allowed herself a grim smile. All along Pike had been accusing Lord Carlston of helping Benchley make this godforsaken book, when in fact it had been himself.

  The journal lay on the filthy floor, still open at the entry for Pike. In there somewhere must be a page for the Comte d’Antraigues. For her parents too. But she could only look in the journal once again; she did not have the strength for more than that. It had to be the Comte. Bracing herself, she picked up the heinous book and flipped the pages, feeling the impending violence build in her body. She passed Stokes, Ball and then … Comte d’Antraigues. She gave a hoarse, sobbing laugh. It was there; the information was there. The Comte would have his bargain and Carlston would have his cure. She dared not read it. Instead she ran her finger down the roughly sewn binding; the page should come out easily enough.

  She gripped the paper close to the spine and tugged. It did not tear. Rather, the page was strangely immovable, and every drag upon it sent a sickening stab through her body as if she were ripping at her own innards. She doubled over, vomiting bright red blood, gasping with pain.

  She tried again, wrenching at the paper, agony building through bone and flesh as she pulled. Understanding finally penetrated the heaving pain: the book was protected by its alchemy, irrevocably bound together, the pages never to be torn from the spine. She would come apart before it did. Her body convulsed, expelling more blood, the tears that streamed from her eyes not only from the pain of the grinding retches that rocked her body. No bargain. No cure. The pages could not be pulled from the journal and she could not give the whole journal — a Ligatus — to a Deceiver.

  Distantly, she heard Lester’s chain chinking, Sprat talking, but her vision was grey, her body under siege, unable to do anything other than ride the pain through to its end.

  She came to herself lying flat on the floor, panting, the closed journal a few feet away.

  ‘My lady,’ Sprat whispered, ‘Lester ain’t takin’ notice of me no more.’

  Slowly Helen looked up. The madman was rocking to and fro on his haunches, all of his attention fixed on the journal between them. His lips curled back in a wet, yellowed snarl. He looked up at Helen. She saw the intent lock in his eye a second before he leaped.

  She sprang, hearing Lester’s chain snap tight and Sprat’s yelp as he lunged. Filthy hands groped for the book, Lester’s swollen face a blur of scream and spittle an inch from her own. He slammed into her side and they rolled, arms and legs and chain entangled, the book sliding from the madman’s desperate grasp.

  Helen snatched up the journal, the scratching energy surging through her mind as her hand closed around the soft green leather binding. Lester’s clawed fingers clamped over her own, their hands locked around the journal. He screamed, a deafening, rancid-meat screech in Helen’s ear. A sickly yellow light enveloped him, his flesh-and-bone body a shadow shape beneath it.

  Helen gasped. The alchemy had conjured Lester’s sick soul. She had seen this kind of bilious light before, around the boy reclaimed in London. But that had been through a ritual; this power was coming from the journal. She could feel the loathsome energy stirring within it, using her as a pathway to reclaim the vestige in Lester. It howled and chattered against her mind as if called by the oily, dark nugget of Deceiver energy rooted deep within the light that surrounded Lester’s crown. Thick trailing tentacles writhed tightly through the glow of his soul, choking and warping him into madness.

  Helen’s pulse pounded in her ears, every throb of heart and blood aligning Lester’s beat with her own. She pushed against his rigid body atop her, trying to throw his weight off, but it was as if they had been fused together. The howling grew louder in her head, built of blood and death, Deceiver and Reclaimer, innocence and murder. A dank metallic taste flooded her tongue and then the blood power rose: a roaring, blinding, searing light that swept from the journal through her and over Lester. A ravening force, boiling across his soul, consuming the dark mass of the vestige and its obscene tentacles, claiming the foul dark energy.

  The power slammed back through Helen, back into the journal, ripping at her screaming soul, her mind loosening beneath the gibbering madness caught within it. She could feel the journal’s darkness clawing at her own sanity, dragging her into the howling blood and suffering of its pale rusty ink.

  Sprat’s face above. Cracked lips. Watery blue eyes, all the whites showing. ‘My lady?’ A hand on her arm, shaking it gently.

  In her mind, she formed the words, Do not worry, Sprat, but nothing happened. Her mouth did not open, the sounds did not issue. She felt a moment of distant concern at the failure.

  Another face leaned over. A man. Wild black hair, swollen eye bruised blue. She groped for a name. Ah, Lester.

  ‘What’s wrong wiv ’er?’ he said. ‘Why don’t she move? Why is she starin’ like that?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ A warm hand touched her cheek. ‘My lady, say somethin’.’ Sprat’s face leaned closer. ‘You fixed Lester.’ She tapped her fin
ger against her temple. ‘Got all his marbles. Just like that!’

  Too much effort to listen. Easier to sink into the soft silence.

  Three faces. Blurred.

  ‘What’s that she’s holding? A book?’

  A woman, face too close. Thick black hair. Cleft chin. The name arrived, dragged from a distant place. Kate Holt.

  ‘You don’t wanna go anywhere near that.’ Sprat’s voice again, heavy with warning. ‘She said it’s made of blood. Murdered coves.’

  Yes, she could still feel it, the scritch-scratch in her mind. The metal taste upon her tongue.

  ‘Is that what she killed my brother for?’

  ‘She saved Lester with it. I calls that square, don’t you?’

  ‘Watch yourself, girl.’ A sniff. Shrewd green eyes looking into her own. ‘I’m not complaining about the bargain. Still, she looks mighty morbid. If she’s going to die, I don’t want her doing it here.’

  ‘She ain’t gunna die.’ Sprat leaning over her again, all frown and ferocity. ‘We gotta get her back to her people.’

  ‘Ma, she’s right.’ Lester coming into focus, thin hand gripping Kate Holt’s shoulder. ‘Gotta do somethin’ for ’er. You don’t know what it was like. I was in the dark with this chatterin’ in my head and no hope.’

  ‘I saw what it did, love.’ Kate’s hand over his, patting away the memory. ‘Sprat, you know where she comes from?’

  ‘Surely do.’

  ‘Get Big Tom to put her into a hackney. Make sure she gets there.’

  Get where? She tried to hold on to the question. It was important. But the balm of dark silence was calling her back.

  The smell of horse and old sweat. Hands, big and efficient, rolling her onto a hard seat. Cold, cracked leather beneath her cheek. Her hat upside down on the scuffed wooden floor, amongst the straw and dirt.