The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “At night, in the fog?” said Hodge. “Jed’s lower to the ground and his nose is almost as good as mine. You worry about Sara and the house. We’ll backtrack your visitors and see who met whom and when.”

  Mr Sharp clapped him on the shoulder.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, and was about to turn when Hodge took his sleeve.

  “Sluagh. Do they kill animals? Birds and the like, say pigeons, wholesale killing for pleasure or maybe just pure malice like a fox? Just crush ’em and leave ’em?”

  Mr Sharp thought and shook his head.

  “Not really. No. I mean they’ll kill easy enough, but always to a purpose. What have you seen?”

  Hodge grimaced.

  “Raven saw a child this afternoon crying on a rooftop among some pigeon coops. Coops were full of dead squabs.”

  “Birds die of many things…” began Mr Sharp, clearly eager to be on his way.

  “Raven draws my attention to something, I take it seriously,” said Hodge.

  “Wise,” said Mr Sharp. “Where?”

  “Farringdon way,” said Hodge. “Not close to us but the birds had all been crushed. Little chests a tangle of broken bones. Pitiful to feel it.”

  “People do strange things,” said Mr Sharp. “Normal people.”

  “Strange things do strange things too,” said Hodge grimly.

  “Should be checked out no doubt,” agreed Mr Sharp. “But it can wait until tomorrow. If it’s some kind of breath-stealer or mara we should find it and deal with it. But for now, I don’t think it relates to the Sluagh, and it’s the Sluagh and this girl that we must deal with. First things first.”

  Hodge nodded, but from the look in his eye he was wondering if he’d been distracted by the comely bitch a little too easily. He watched Mr Sharp disappear into the fog in the direction of Wellclose Square and took a deep draw on his pipe, before knocking it out on his boot-heel.

  “Come on then,” he said, and set off up a different street. “We’ll run this errand to The Smith then maybe have another look at that rooftop.”

  There was a flutter from the top of the octagonal rotunda above the tunnel shaft and a mass of oily black feathers dropped out of the gloom and landed deftly on his shoulder. The feathers shook themselves as the wings folded and resolved into a large raven.

  The Raven turned an unblinking eye towards him, and then very precisely bit him in the ear.

  “Ow,” said Hodge, swatting the bird’s beak away from the side of his head without any evident rancour. “I was just telling the truth. You hate the fog and Jed can follow with his nose what your eyes can’t see.”

  The Raven clacked its beak and looked away. Hodge rubbed his ear.

  “You’re getting very easily offended in your old age,” he said. “Positively crabby.”

  Hodge had no real idea of how old the Raven was, and the Raven had forgotten long ago, so long ago that it was before the river they were at present walking away from had had a bridge or even anything more than a scrabble of huts alongside it, let alone a whole teeming city. He wasn’t a very normal raven, but then Hodge wasn’t a very normal Terrier Man. He had an innate ease with animals, being able to see into the minds and often through the eyes of the less sentient ones, and able to communicate with the more intelligent like Jed or the Raven, though the Raven was, he knew, something even more than merely sentient.

  Hodge did not live at the Safe House since he was, officially, the Terrier Man of the Tower of London. It was an ancient, little known but vital office of state, for the Tower was home to the ravens, and if the ravens left, legend had it that the city and the Tower would fall.

  The Tower, being eight hundred years old, had acquired many unplanned-for residents, the most significant for Hodge and the realm at large being the rats. Ravens lay eggs, and rats eat them. The Terrier Man’s job was a constant war against the hungry rodents, and Jed joyfully scoured the undercrypts and the hidden foundations of the Tower every day, never happier than pouncing on an unwary rat, some of whom were so ancient as to be nearly his own size, and breaking their necks with one rough shake of his head, throwing the lifeless corpse over his shoulder and leaping forward to the next one. Being a terrier he was only following his nature, and being a terrier he would never stop fighting forward, even when severely outnumbered, as he often was. Hodge, who was not his master but his companion, had the same resolute determination and inability to back off, no doubt acquired by long association with the battle-scarred dog. Where Mr Sharp had speed and elegance on his side in a fight, Hodge had a battle-rage which would have been familiar to the Vikings whose blood ran in his veins and whose clear blue eyes he shared.

  His Norse blood also explained the affinity he had with the Raven, whose black pinions had fluttered like dark pennants over long forgotten battlegrounds and the narrow ships of the warriors who fought on them.

  CHAPTER 23

  A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

  Lucy Harker lay in bed and listened to the dark.

  Earlier she had stood over a basin while Cook washed her hair with a solution of rosemary water and borax. She had then been given a scrubbing brush and a bar of Castile soap and allowed to enjoy the luxury of a long hot soak in a high-backed copper bath, on the strict understanding that if left to herself she would use both brush and soap with vigour. She had dried herself behind a screen in front of a fire, and had been given a cotton nightdress so sharply ironed that it snapped and crackled as Cook shook out the folds and held it out for her.

  The linen sheets above and beneath her were so white and crisp and smooth, and tucked in so tightly that she felt like a flower pressed between the pages of a heavy book. She stretched her feet to the edge of the bed, enjoying the cool feel of virgin sheets beyond the area already warmed by her body.

  She had, she decided, never felt so clean.

  Not on the outside.

  On the inside where her thoughts and her memories lived she didn’t feel clean at all, and that was why she couldn’t get to sleep.

  The knowledge that she was going to do something bad spread through her like a stain. She didn’t know exactly what the bad was, or why she was going to do it, but the inevitability of it loomed over her as if the future was impossibly casting a shadow backwards onto the present. She tried to banish this feeling of impending doom by thinking of her past, but that didn’t help much because there weren’t that many happy memories lurking back there and, more importantly, she had recently found the past had alarming holes in it, bits where her recollection just seemed to run out of road and hit a blank drop-off.

  Those blanks frightened her almost as much as the certainty of the unknown badness she was about to do. She felt her heart beginning to trip-hammer with panic, and tried to slow it down by joining up what she could remember of her life into an orderly chain: she remembered being very little in the big city in France, in a tall pale house with blue shutters which folded around a courtyard garden with a big tree in the middle of it. She remembered her mother, and sitting in her lap in the shade beneath the generous green spread of leaves, and she remembered watching herself hanging upside down from a low branch and sticking her tongue out at herself, which was strange and maybe a dream memory, because the herself who stuck the tongue out had shorter hair than she did, and how could she be sticking her tongue out at herself anyway since being in two places at one time wasn’t possible?

  She did remember her mother’s hands, always busy, sewing or making as she sang to her or told her stories. They were strong, nimble hands, and the smallest finger on the right hand was missing the top joint. Whenever she had asked about it her mother had said a little bird had taken it one day when she wasn’t looking, and when Lucy asked if it had hurt she had shaken her head and smiled and said no, and anyway the bird must have needed it more than she did, so she mustn’t mind at all.

  Lucy remembered the finger and the smile, and the smell and the warmth of her mother’s body, but she couldn’t quite remember her fa
ce, not all of it at one time. When she tried to put the bits she could remember together to make a complete face, when she tried to join the crinkle at the edge of her eye with the freckles across her cheek and the smile and the hair, it never made a whole person, not sharp and distinct: the smile seemed to blaze out and blur things, so that it was like trying to look at a street-lamp through a haze of rain. And the last time she had seen her mother, it had indeed been raining, the cobbles wet and slippery beneath Lucy’s bare feet, giving no purchase or chance of stopping herself as she was dragged away and lifted into the back of a closed carriage, and her very last glimpse before the door slammed shut was doubly blurred by rain and tears as she saw her mother on the steps of the house with the blue shutters, arm outstretched towards her as two men in darker blue dragged her back into the black mouth of the hallway.

  That hallway not only swallowed her mother, it seemed to have devoured a large portion of her past because it left an almost perfectly blank hole in her memory after that, but it didn’t trouble her because instead of falling into it, she fell asleep instead, and now that she was no longer listening to it, the darkness that filled the house listened back…

  CHAPTER 24

  THE SMITH’S FOLLEY

  Hodge, as one of the perquisites of his official job, drove a dog cart. It was a small two-wheeled open carriage painted a dull green with two cross-seats back to back, the rear one cunningly contrived to open up if needed, so as to form a box for the transport of dogs.

  Jed being a terrier, and thus proud and of an independent mind, never rode in the box. Instead he always sat beside Hodge on the front seat and watched the horse pull them through the streets with a proprietorial air, quite as if it was he who was driving and not the man who held the reins at his side.

  This late at night, and so far east of the city, most people would have kept a careful eye on the figures loitering in the shadows, but Hodge gave them little thought, knowing he had unusually acute reflexes, a stout blackthorn cudgel close to his right hand, not to mention the comfort of the black and tan terrier to his left. The city thinned as they passed through Limehouse to Poplar on their way to the Isle of Dogs, and what lights remained visible through the increasingly grimy windows of the passing houses and drinking dens became dimmer and fewer.

  Hodge had ratted across the landscape ahead as a boy when it had still been known as Stepney Marshes, and as an even younger child he had watched the butchers slaughter the marsh-fed cattle on the great field known as The Killing Ground. The Killing Ground was now gone, dug up and filled with water to create the West India Docks. He knew it was fancy, but whenever he passed the black water at night he still smelled the flat tang of blood in the air.

  The Isle of Dogs was an unlucky place for him. He had lost his first little terrier Jig there when he was ten, after the bank of the old inlet known as The Gut had collapsed and swallowed the dog and the rathole he had gone down in one heavy slump of mud and gravel. He had dug all night to try and rescue Jig, bloodying his fingers and tearing his nails. He had found the dog in the dawn light, seven feet down, smothered and lifeless, his jaws still locked on a huge rat. None of his friends could understand why he stayed and dug for so long, and one by one they had left him to it. He could not tell them that he knew the dog was alive and where it was trapped because he heard it, because what he was hearing was not audible to the normal ear. What he was hearing, at least for the first few hours, was the dog telling him he was still there and waiting trustingly for rescue. He had wept over the dog, said some fumbled words and then reburied him where he’d fallen. He had sworn to Jig that he’d never lose another dog, and he never had. He had sworn that he would die before he’d let that happen.

  He had also never returned to the spot. It was no consolation to Hodge that the docks and the canal had in time swallowed The Gut too as they cut off the neck of the land, turning the marsh into an island in reality as well as name.

  The Smith chose to live on the east side of the marsh, below the docks. His house was known as The Folley for reasons lost in time, but it was certainly thought a foolishness to set up a forge on what was still an outof-the-way stretch of wild land overlooking the forbidding waters of Blackwall Reach and the dank Greenwich marshes beyond. Folly it would have been if The Smith had need of trade to justify his workshop, but the truth was that he had a workshop because he was The Smith, not that he was a smith to make a living. It was more than a living: it was his life. It was what he was to the core of his being: a maker. His workshop was also more than a smith’s forge, though it was that too: to the undiscerning eye it looked like the aftermath of a bad explosion in a well-stocked ironmongers, a great muddle of tools of every shape and size slung promiscuously on hooks which covered every available space, garlanding the walls, spilling out of wooden racks and dangling from the roof-trees.

  To the discerning eye, it was clear each tool had its place and was arranged according to an idiosyncratic plan. The workshop was set up with a section in which to work metal and a section for woodwork, and it was clear that the tools ranged in age from great antiquity to the most modern mechanical devices: there were dark hammers which had formed hot iron into swords long before the Romans came, and burnishers which had brightened the metal on Saxon shields; there were chisels and block-planes and spoke-shaves and adzes and saws which had built wagons and half-timbered houses; there were pliers and moulds and salamanders which had formed rings of gold and silver for courtiers in Tudor times; and there were screwdrivers and augers and wrenches which had mended Hodge’s own dog cart on at least two occasions in living memory. There was also a flint knife.

  The sharpest of the discerning eyes would have enjoyed the symmetry of the fact that the flint knife, perhaps the oldest tool in the workshop, rested on a shelf above the newest tool, a Holtzapffel Rose Engine lathe. The Smith sat in front of it, his foot working the treadle that powered the great cast-iron flywheel which in turn, via a cunning arrangement of pulleys and rope loops, drove a razor-sharp cutter whirring happily as it made shallow geometric cuts in a block of ivory. The ivory was held steady in the jaws of a chuck attached to one of a series of great brass rosettes which slowly moved in a pumping rhythm against a bumper as he turned a crank with his left hand.

  He was so rapt in what he was doing that he appeared not to hear Hodge pull up outside, or feel the cold air fan the fire in the forge as he entered. Jed stopped to sniff at some long metal boxes stacked against the wall. They were as tall as a man, and had hinged lids. Hodge looked at them and tapped the metal. It made no sound other than a dull thud.

  “What are you making?” he said.

  The Smith gave no sign of surprise, just peering even closer at the pattern the whirring blade was cutting into the ivory.

  “A five-pointed star. Of a new sort. It’s quite fascinating how it happens, it quite stretches my understanding of geometry from two dimensions into three! I find it most relaxing trying to work out what will occur…”

  “Not that,” said Hodge, and rapped the boxes again. “These coffins.”

  The Smith turned from the lathe and looked up at him through a pair of half-moon glasses. He was a powerful man with thick, dark eyebrows and long greying hair brushed back from a high forehead. He wore a bushy moustache which had something of the Viking about it in its extravagant length and proud curve. His face had all the dark components of a storm cloud, betrayed by the flash of happy sunlight in his eyes as he turned them on his friend.

  “Hodge,” he boomed, his voice deep as rolling thunder.

  “Wayland,” said Hodge, his hand still testing the boxes.

  “Not coffins, you fool. Chests!” growled The Smith, rising from his seat. The only sound was the crackle from the fire and the declining whirr of the blade as the great flywheel slowed to a halt once he had taken his foot off the treadle.

  “Made from lead,” said Hodge. “They do seem coffin-like.”

  The Smith stretched and walked over to the chests, pau
sing to scratch Jed’s head as he passed. Jed had made straight for the heat of the fire and was warming his bones alongside it.

  “They can be soldered shut and made watertight. Being so heavy they will sink directly. It is a solution to our problem if we are further reduced in number.”

  “I was not sure you would be here,” said Hodge, accusation hovering in the background of his voice.

  “I returned yesterday,” said The Smith.

  “You returned empty-handed.”

  The Smith grimaced and wiped his hands on his apron.

  “No new recruits.”

  Hodge’s brow creased in incredulity.

  “You found no one?”

  “I found people. I found plenty of people, several Glints as it happens, some others like Mr Sharp, a couple of families with your gifts with animals and so on. If you know where to look, the strong mixed blood is still out there. There’s no mystery in that. But I found no one who would join us. And there’s the rub: since the Disaster happened The Oversight is far from trusted.”

  “But it wasn’t our fault!”

  The Smith laid a great hand on Hodge’s shoulder. His fingers were blunt and scarred.

  “It was our fault. That it was not you nor I nor Sara nor Cook nor Mr Sharp who made the decision is irrelevant to the others. That those who made the decision did so out of the most admirable intent carries no weight either. They have heard what happened, felt the loss and have no desire to join us.”

  “Sharp could persuade them,” said Hodge.

  “He could turn their minds, but that is not how we recruit. You know that. You speak out of desperation. Have some warm ale. The nights are damp out here on the Isle.”

  He took a tall jug from the sideboard, limping as he walked back to the fire. It was an old limp, something which he clearly didn’t think about, something which had become a part of him. He rested the jug on the edge of the forge as he gave the bellows a couple of hearty squeezes. The red coals paled as they heated up, and he grabbed a rag and pulled a poker from the fire, quenching its hot tip in the jug in a sizzle of steam. The room filled with the scent of warm ale and spices.