The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  His smile was frankly irresistible, and thus dangerous. She knew she should start running, but there was the smell of the bacon sizzling in the pan, and she couldn’t help but notice that her feet were bare and getting cold and wet in the dew-drenched grass. She shivered.

  “Stick your feet by the fire,” said Charlie, who had quick eyes that noticed everything. “Watch that bacon don’t burn and I’ll get you boots and a blanket.”

  He sprang to his feet with a wink, and handed her the stick he had been using to steer the rashers with.

  He disappeared back into the tent.

  She thought of running now, but he looked fast, and also there was the matter of boots and the prospect of bacon and, if the basket by the stump he had been sitting on didn’t lie, eggs too. So she poked and flipped the bacon, by which time he was back at her side: she’d been right in her assessment–he was fast.

  “Boots,” he said, holding them out. “Blanket.”

  “Thanks,” she said, exchanging them for the cooking stick. Meeting his eyes was suddenly disturbing; she covered up her discomfort with a question.

  “Charlie who?”

  “Pyefinch,” he said, and then put on a mock-serious face and bent forward in a half bow. “That is, Mr Charles Allflatt Pyefinch, at your service. But everyone calls me Charlie. And what’s yours?”

  “Falk,” she said, without a flicker of a pause. “Sara Falk.”

  Lucy survived by her own rules: there was bacon; there might even be eggs. But breakfast and a nice smile did not entitle anyone to the truth, even if she could have got the contradictory snarl of her own story straight in her head.

  He stuck out a hand and they shook.

  “Hello, Falk,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I fainted,” she said.

  “Either that or took a knock to the head, that’s what they thought,” he agreed.

  “They?” she said.

  “Ma and Pa,” he replied, hooking his head towards the tent from which she’d just emerged. “Ma, she said they couldn’t just leave you there, and no one from the town knew you, so once things had calmed down a bit she had us carry you back here, and here you are indeed. They’re sleeping late because it took so long to clear up the mess.”

  She wanted to ask where “here” was more than almost anything else in the world, but didn’t want to reveal she didn’t know.

  As they’d been talking, her eyes had been doing a fast tour of the area. There were other tents and wagons and carts, and on the other side of a small stand of willows was a large tent of the kind used for circuses, festooned in limp but still colourful flags of bunting. Some of the tents around the larger one had garish paint on their façades. She could read one announcing a “House of Marvels” and another advertising “Lady Sowerby, Porcine Prodigy!–The One and Only Educated Pig!”

  “What mess?” she asked.

  He pointed to the big tent and told her how yesterday’s fair had gone well and the townspeople and villagers had enjoyed themselves, spent freely and gone home happy and tipsy with all the fun of the fair, after which the various showmen had closed up shop and settled back to count the takings and eat round their own fires with their families. Then he explained how the satisfactory calm of the night had been riven by shouts and crashes from the big tent, and how by the time they had all run there “Big Nellie” had got loose and lanterns had been kicked over and there was a real danger of fire burning down the whole thing. He explained how the showpeople–ever resourceful as was their nature–had distracted the by now highly agitated Big Nellie and put out the small fires before they could grow into a large conflagration, and generally minimised the damage, the only irreplaceable item being a large mirror used in a magic act belonging to one Na-Barno Eagle.

  “And anyway, Nellie calmed down in the end, so no great mischief,” he said, looking down at the pan. “And that’s that. Well, Falk, you fancy an egg?”

  She nodded and he broke two into the pan, keeping the bacon clear of them as they cooked.

  “And that’s where we found you all asleep on the ground, like a regular babe in the wood,” he added. “Or stunned, more like.”

  He let the unasked question hang in the air, but she didn’t catch at it. He shrugged and carried on with his cooking. Lucy was busy stitching what he’d told her into the fabric of her own recollections: it was clear that somehow she’d fallen through a mirror in the house in London into the middle of a circus, which was itself in the grip of a momentary panic and emergency. She was beginning to feel more comfortable, but then she remembered the hand crabbing towards her across the floor again: she shivered and looked instinctively around her as if suddenly expecting to find it creeping up on her. The thought of it made her skin crawl, and reminded her not to relax as she had been doing with both the comforting heat of the fire playing on her legs and the equally warm smile and ease of her companion.

  “You ain’t from round here, are you?” he said, interrupting the narrative she had been running in her head.

  “No,” she replied.

  This was the point where people usually asked where she was from. This was where she began building the wall of lies which cut her off from those she met, a wall necessary for survival. But Pyefinch just nodded as if that was quite enough of an explanation, and slid the eggs on to her plate.

  “Join the club,” he said, nodding round at the campsite. “Loveliest thing about being a showman is none of us is ever from where we are, most of the time. Hey-ho for the open road, eh?”

  And he grinned at her and then dug into his own eggs and bacon as if she wasn’t there at all.

  Lucy relaxed. The smell of the bacon was making her stomach gurgle in rude anticipation, so she followed his cue and dug in herself. She chewed slowly because having her head down over the plate let her think and meant she didn’t have to talk. She ate some of the bacon and used the fried bread to scoop up the egg and then mopped the broken yolk out of the bottom of the tin plate.

  “Here,” said Charlie. “Mind your fingers–that cup’ll burn you if you don’t use the handle.”

  She looked up to see he was offering her a battered tin cup of tea. She took it and sipped, watching him pour his own cup from the black kettle hanging over the fire. He sat back and pulled a stubby clay pipe from his waistcoat.

  “Smoke?” he said.

  She shook her head as he lit it from a twig pulled out of the coals.

  “Best bit of the day,” said Charlie, drawing on the pipe and coughing a little as he did so. “Before the others is up and making their racket. Before they all start sending me on errands and suchlike. Be busy today and all, since we’re striking camp and heading west.”

  And he closed his eyes and smoked his pipe with so great an air of contentment and–most importantly for Lucy–casual disinterest in her that she allowed herself to sit by the fire for a few more warm minutes as she tried to plan her next move. She began to see the shape of it, of a way to be for a few days that might not involve her running, but she liked to examine possibilities from all angles, and to know as much as possible about anything before she made decisions. That was how she stayed safe.

  “Who’s this Big Nellie?” she said after a while.

  “Nellie Sowerby,” he said, pointing at the sign on the distant wagon. “The Educated Pig…”

  He paused to relight his pipe. She realised as he did so that there were now sounds of movement all around them as people were waking and getting ready for the day. In the distance she saw a man emerge from his wagon and stand there on the backboard, unconcernedly pissing off it into a nearby patch of brambles. Closer to, a young girl stumbled towards the canal, a bucket clanking emptily at her side. She still looked more than half asleep.

  “Who’s Na-Barno?” said Lucy. Charlie spluttered in amusement.

  “Na-Barno? Who’s Na-Barno? Na-Barno Eagle, the Great Wizard of the South? Don’t let him hear you asking that, not after he’s paid a small fortune to put post
ers up all over the county!”

  “He’s a… wizard?” said Lucy.

  “Course he is,” said Charlie, dropping an eyelid in a slow wink. “Least-ways he’s a wizard same as I’m a clown, once I got the greasepaint on.”

  He ran his finger behind his neck, close to the hairline and showed her the white smudge on it.

  “Na-Barno ain’t a real wizard, cos there ain’t such a thing: that’s ’is stage name. Off the boards he’s plain old Barney Eagle, a conjurer. Does magic tricks. He’s a character too, and no mistake. Don’t let him play cards with you though or he’ll have your arm…”

  “Charlie Pyefinch, how can you speak of Father like that? He’s the kindest man in the world.”

  Lucy looked round at this spirited interruption to find herself looking into the enraged face of the prettiest girl she had ever seen.

  “Now Georgie—” he began.

  “Don’t ‘Now Georgie’ me,” spat the girl, stamping her foot. “After everything he’s done for you!”

  Lucy had never seen anyone actually stamp their feet in frustration before, but then nothing about the girl was normal: rather she was an exaggeration of all the finer points of beauty in one person. Her pale skin was almost translucent in its delicacy, daintily offset by the pretty rose highlights which her current outrage had flushed across it, pinking both her cheekbones and the very tip of her elegant nose. Her blue eyes, which flashed angrily at the unfortunate Pyefinch, were not the more everyday washed-out blue but the most uncommonly deep sapphire. The hair framing her face was a gilded mass of ringlets and curlicues which shook and quivered in sympathetic outrage. She held an empty bowl in her hand, a thin cracked china thing covered in faded roses.

  Standing there in the early morning light, surrounded by the ramshackle disarray of the showpeople’s camp, Lucy thought she looked as out of place as a princess in a pigsty.

  “Who’s this?” she said, turning on Lucy.

  “She’s Falk,” he said. “Banged her head in the hurly-burly last night. Ma took her in.”

  “She isn’t one of us,” said the girl.

  “I don’t know what she’s one of,” he replied. “Only just met her.”

  “I mean she’s not show-folk,” said the girl. “And yet you choose to gossip with her and laugh about my father.”

  “I wasn’t laughing; I just—”

  Whatever he just was never got said because the girl threw the bowl at him and turned away before seeing him snatch it out of the air an inch from his face.

  Lucy watched her hair bounce out of sight among the other tents.

  Then she turned and looked at Pyefinch who was looking at the bowl with a rueful smile.

  “Your friend seems upset,” she said.

  “That’s just Georgie. Georgiana Eagle. Na-Barno’s daughter. Proud as cockerels the Eagles, but you see this bowl? Haven’t got enough to buy sugar for their tea. She come to borrow some off us, and now she’s got to go back and tell Barney there’s none to be had. That’ll make her twice as angry!” He said this with a mixture of glee and pride, as if the ability to enrage Georgiana Eagle was something he revelled in. “You better watch out for her if you’re going to stick around.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to stick around?” said Lucy, looking at the canal. It was time to go, and the canal was as good a road as any if she could slip onto a passing barge.

  “I think you’re going to stick around because it’ll suit you for a bit,” he said. “Thing about show-folk is no one asks any questions, except can you earn your keep?”

  He looked at her and though his smile was unchanged, his eyes were, for a moment, a lot older than his face. It made her uncomfortable again, not because he was suspicious of her, but because he was understanding. That was a knife which got a lot closer in under her guard, and she feared it. He was dangerously friendly, but maybe he was also right: maybe staying with a group of people who were all from somewhere else, and who spent a lot of their time pretending to be something they weren’t and who didn’t ask questions might be exactly the kind of thing that would suit her very well indeed.

  CHAPTER 34

  AN ENGAGEMENT TO HUNT

  “You. Failed. Me.”

  Mountfellon’s voice was tight with barely contained rage. Issachar Templebane stood in front of him, curiously unflinching.

  “The ruse failed, my lord.”

  “You were engaged to make it work.”

  “And no one could have done more than I. If it failed, it failed because of something you did not factor into your calculations.”

  Mountfellon stepped closer to Templebane, who did not move backwards. Instead he smiled and waved a hand around the long room they were now standing in.

  “We gave you the full assistance of our house, an assistance that is still yours to command, should you wish it.”

  It was a cavernous office lined with bookshelves and racks, piled with ledgers and deed-boxes. A long clerk’s desk ran the length of the room with sloping lecterns and stools to accommodate ten clerks on each side. Candles were lit along the table for, although the room was lit by windows along both sides, the dark oak of the shelves and desk and perhaps the ancient ink-splattered floor somehow sucked the light from the space and left the well-lit room with a sense of brooding darkness.

  “The game still runs, my lord,” he continued, “and nothing is lost until it is over.”

  Mountfellon stared at him, nostrils flaring in outrage.

  “Do you think I am a callow schoolboy, sir? A booby to be fobbed off with trite inanities like that?”

  “No,” said Templebane calmly. “I think you are the most dangerous man outside London.”

  “I can assure you that I am the most dangerous man in London too, sir,” snarled Mountfellon, spittle flying from his mouth and landing on Templebane’s still unflinching face. “Indeed I can assure you that I am the most dangerous man in this room. You have betrayed me!”

  “We have done no such thing,” said Templebane, impassively producing a handkerchief and wiping his face. “Our word is our bond.”

  “Disappointment and failure are betrayals and you, sir, have this day served me a foul breakfast made from both of those things,” spat Mountfellon.

  His bunched hand flexed open and slid inside his coat.

  “Do you know what happens to those who betray me? I think not. I think you would not stand so insolently unmoving and unrepentant if you did—”

  “You kill them and dissect them in the interests of what you see as natural science,” smiled Templebane. “Usually but not, I believe, always in that order.”

  Mountfellon froze, looking as if Templebane had slapped him.

  “I understand you have resorted to vivisection, that is you have cut into the living flesh of those you deem to be unnatural in order to anatomise them and determine if they are made like normal people.”

  Mountfellon started to interject but Templebane waved a hand airily, as if dismissing a charge no one had voiced.

  “I understand your reasoning, indeed I do, though I am not a man of science but a mere creature of the law. You are not, my lord, any kind of monster, whatever others might say were this habit more widely known. I am aware you have been known to flay the cadavers to see if the blue markings and scarification on their skins come from within or are mere tattoos and indignities applied to them from outside. I know you have put the anatomised cadavers in a boiler and seethed the flesh off their bones, bones which you have then painstakingly varnished and arranged in cabinets and added to your already extensive collection of skeletons and other natural historical specimens.”

  “Knowledge is a very dangerous thing, Mr Templebane,” said Mountfellon.

  “I know that. I know all that, my lord, and more. I know you carry a folding surgeon’s scalpel in the right hand pocket of your waistcoat, and I know you carry one of Nock’s overcoat pistols in the skirt of your coat, just below where your hand is at the moment resting a little u
ncertainly.”

  “And that does not give you pause, lawyer? To know what I am capable of?”

  Templebane just smiled wider.

  “No, my lord. Those are just mildly dangerous weapons. I, as you have just intimated, have a very dangerous weapon. I have knowledge.”

  “Do you think to blackmail me, sir?”

  “No more than you think to slash my neck with your scalpel or pistol me on the floor of my own counting house,” said Templebane.

  Mountfellon’s right hand twitched and clawed at the air, and then disappeared behind his back where it was gripped by the other hand as he drew himself to his full height, visibly containing the great rage coursing through his veins. The smile he mustered in response to Templebane’s was thin as a paper cut.

  “Not blackmail, then, but insurance,” he said. “You are indeed a cunning man, Mr Templebane.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  “And what does the cunning man suggest we do now?”

  “We? Jointly? Nothing. Separately I suggest you go to your London house with all dispatch and clear your head of the reasonable cloud of disappointment that at present may be fogging your faculties.”

  Mountfellon’s right hand broke free of his left for an instant but he quickly regained control both of it and his temper.

  “My head is always clear, Mr Templebane, I assure you. To see the world with full clarity is my guiding principle. And it is clear to me that the next logical step for us it to find the girl.”

  “The girl? Is she not a mere dupe, a cat’s paw used in a ruse which has sadly failed? Or is she something more to you…?”

  “What she is or is not to me is not a scintilla of your concern,” snapped Mountfellon. “And it is not clear to me that the ruse failed entirely: the occupants of the house were obviously shaken by more than just our arrival. The Falk girl was in visible distress and the man Sharp was highly exercised. It may be that the girl did manage to steal the key, and this is why their feathers are so ruffled. It may be that she succeeded, but herself and it are now lost to both our knowledge and theirs. So we must scour London and find her.”