The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  He kissed the tips of his fingers and held them out to her, and then, just as they nearly touched her, just as the others saw her strain her face forward towards something they could not see—

  —the past snuffed out and Sara staggered away from the wall, her hand falling limply to her side.

  Her eyes fluttered and she looked confusedly at Cook and Mr Sharp as she whispered hoarsely, “I thought I should draw strength from it. From them. I thought I would…”

  And then her eyes rolled back in her head in a dead faint, and she would have dashed her brains out on the cobbles had Mr Sharp not caught her as she crumpled.

  The others watched as he scooped her up and carried her away, back towards the light in the kitchen.

  The Smith turned and unlocked the door at the end of the passage.

  “No good has come of being down here,” said Cook, her eyes still on Sara. “There’s a good reason that door’s been locked since the Disaster.”

  “There’s no reason,” said The Smith, stepping into the cellar beyond the door. “No reason other than sentiment. The Disaster happened because of the mirrors, and the Murano Cabinet has been moved to the Red Library. As well say we should not go there!”

  Cook still grumbled as she followed him inside to where Jed was already sniffing hopefully round the edge of the wall for any rats that might have chosen to hide there.

  It was a bare cellar, with dry brick walls and stone flags. At the far end was a half-flight of steps leading to a double door studded with iron nails.

  “There,” said The Smith. “Emmet takes the caskets out through there. It leads to a Thameside culvert, close by Talleyman’s Cut.”

  “I didn’t know there was another tunnel,” said Cook.

  “Well, all the more reason not to let superstition and sentiment cloud your naturally enquiring mind,” smiled The Smith. “If you’d come here you would have known.”

  Cook harrumphed and looked around.

  “Could store my preserves in here,” she allowed. “It’s dry enough.”

  The Smith carried on, pointing at the doors.

  “From the culvert we put them on a boat and take them midstream up by Blackwall Reach where it’s deepest. Then we sink them. Far as any watchers see, we’ll deliver caskets to the front door by cart, and they’ll be waiting to follow the cart once the caskets come back out.”

  Cook looked at Hodge.

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Don’t have to like it,” he said. “Just have to handle the boat.”

  There was a beat of silence as she absorbed the word “boat”. A close observer might have seen a dreamy look pass over her eyes for an unguarded instant.

  “Been a while since I was out on the water,” she said.

  “But I expect you’ll remember the ropes,” said The Smith. “Once you’ve done it, you never forget. It’s just like riding a horse—”

  “Don’t ride horses,” said Cook. “Horrible things. One end kicks and the other bites.”

  She shook herself and glared at them.

  “I still don’t like this,” she said.

  “Nor I,” said Hodge. “Mind, I don’t feel like I’ll like much ever again after that babby’s eyes a-staring at me.”

  “I don’t like this either,” said The Smith. “But it needs doing. Sara is dying. Or worse. And without her we lose the Last Hand.”

  CHAPTER 42

  THE SHOWMEN’S DRUMHEAD

  The long line of carts and wagons crawled across the landscape for two days in a snake which stretched as it went, those who travelled lighter moving to the head as they inexorably outstripped the lumbering wagons grinding heavily along in the dust-cloud at the tail.

  “Them poor flats choking at the back will be wishing it would rain,” said Charlie, looking up at the sky. “Then when it does they’ll be axle-deep in mud and hoping the jolly old sun will pop along and dry it all out again.”

  He smiled with the assurance of one who knew everything and was lucky enough to travel at the front of the line.

  Lucy didn’t meet his father until they stopped to water the horses in the early afternoon of the first day. Then Charlie and she hopped down and helped him.

  Mr Pyefinch was an energetic man of medium height who limped as he walked, but did so with such vigour and so nimbly that he seemed twice as able as most undamaged men. The damage had been acquired, Charlie confided to Lucy with some pride, fighting the French at the Battle of Waterloo, more than thirty years in the past.

  “But don’t worry,” he said. “He don’t bear a grudge. He won’t mind that you might be a Frog.”

  “Don’t mind at all, girl,” said Mr Pyefinch. “It was a long time ago, and I was no more than an eleven-year-old drummer boy minding my own business in the middle of a crowd of Guardsmen as Boney’s cavalry rode round us trying to break our square. Fellow who shot me was as English as me, a big fumble-fingered Kentishman he was, dropped his musket as he was reloading and it landed just clever enough to put a ball through my shin, it did!”

  He held out a hand and shook hers with a nod.

  “Frenchies never touched me, though one of them Imperial Guard put a bayonet through the Kentishman later in the day–nasty-looking bloke he was with a big bushy moustache. Thank you for the rabbits.”

  “Thank you for looking after me when I passed out,” said Lucy.

  “Wasn’t me,” he said. “Thank Rose for that.”

  Rose, it transpired, was his wife. They returned to the road, and this time Lucy was invited to sit at the front. It was a situation she would normally have avoided if she could because she was sure that she was going to be plied with questions about how she’d appeared in the big tent last night, and where she came from. Strangely they didn’t ask her any of those sort of questions at all, not even why she wore gloves at all times, something people usually remarked on, and as the afternoon progressed and the warmth of the sun worked with the rhythmic sway of the cart, she relaxed and listened to them talk instead. The particular “show” that they travelled the country exhibiting was a series of “Historical and Infamous Tableaux” which, she gathered, were glass-fronted cases behind which were tiny models of places and people that were made, by a well-blacked-out tent and a clever use of lighting, to appear all the more real as Mr Pyefinch gave a reading or narration to add to the drama.

  “We’ve been doing the Battle of Waterloo since the beginning, and very profitable it is too,” he said. “Being ever so patriotic, you see. People come to the fair in a holiday mood and gets some holiday ale in them, and that produces an excess of the sentimental humours, and there’s nothing as sentimental as patriotism. It’s been so nice an earner that I had a very talented maker in Clerkenwell do me up a diorama of the Battle of Trafalgar which we do on alternate nights.”

  “It’s very cunning,” said Mrs Pyefinch. “Almost like magic, for the ships are connected beneath the sea with wires—”

  “The sea which is a cleverly contrived piece of shantung silk, dyed special,” interrupted her husband, “in the hue known as eau-de-nil, which as I’m sure you know is French for Nile water, though I’ve never seen the Nile nor a pyramid neither, truth to tell…”

  Mr Pyefinch had the habit of dreaming of things while he talked, and his eyes seemed to drift a long way off as if he was imagining desert sands and sphinxes all around them.

  “The ships are connected with rods and piano wire, which enable us to move them as Mr Pyefinch tells the story of the battle,” said his wife.

  “Most effective, the illusion,” said Pyefinch, his eyes coming back into focus. “The general public finds it highly gratifying.”

  “The general public likes an illusion, and pays well for it,” grinned Charlie. “Which is just as well cos in our world nothing’s what it seems. Everything’s like Huffam’s Educated Pig, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t really,” said Lucy.

  “You see a pig in a dress?” he said. “Before y
ou fainted?”

  She was about to say she didn’t faint and wasn’t the sort of girl who did faint, but then she remembered two things: that she had, shamefully, done so, and before so doing had seen, amongst the other horrors, a woman with the head of a pig.

  “Well Huffam’s Educated Pig looks like a pig, but ain’t,” said Charlie. “I mean you could get a pig in a dress, but you couldn’t get it to sit upright or walk on two legs could you? So what they does is take a little bear and shave the poor thing. All its nice brown fur comes off, right down to the pink skin beneath, and what with its snout and its tusky teeth, it looks like a pig in a bonnet. They offered me thruppence a week to shave it for them, but I won’t do it. I’ll do most things for money, but I won’t do that. Do that, you got to look in the poor creature’s eyes, and they’re so like a person’s that it’d break your heart to see it.”

  That first night they camped on a rising slope of heathland beside a long stretch of the river which had been flirting with the dusty road all through the day’s journey, sometimes kissing the edge, sometimes darting off through the fields to make hidden oxbows behind distant stands of willow before returning again. Lucy stood back and watched the neatness and speed with which the showmen turned their vehicles into homes, watering and feeding the horses, throwing up canvas shelters into which they decanted tables, chairs and lanterns from the wagons, and kindling fires on top of which soot-black kettles were soon steaming away all across the camp. They did all this with so little fuss and such economy of movement that Lucy thought they moved like sailors, at which point she sat down because she couldn’t remember how she knew they were like sailors. She was sure she must have been on a ship, the feeling was so strong, but it was one of those memories that seemed to have fallen into a black hole in her head.

  Remembering those black holes made her feel nauseous with vertigo. She was used to dealing with fear by moving away from it as fast as she could, but the worrying voids in her memory were travelling with her. At some point she hoped she’d start recalling how she got here, or at least begin to understand why if not where the memories had gone. Until then she knew she had to keep her hands busy to keep the sick feeling in her head at bay, so she borrowed a jack-knife from Charlie and skinned and jointed the rabbits, and by the time Rose had the tea made the meat was ready to go into a pot.

  “You’re a handy one,” said Rose, nodding at Mr Pyefinch to draw his attention to Lucy’s dexterity. “Though I’ve never seen anyone cook in gloves before.”

  Lucy had a practised answer to this and it rolled out with all the ease of an old untruth oft repeated.

  “The skin on my hands is damaged,” she said. “Sensitive. I worked in a soap factory. The stuff, the lye burned me.”

  “Lye sounds about right,” said Rose, casting a sharp eye at her husband behind Lucy’s back. “Yes, lye would do that. Poor girl.”

  “We shall have to see what else you can do,” said Mr Pyefinch with a smile. “I’d say you’ve got hidden talents, Miss Falk.”

  “Sara,” said Lucy, beginning to wish she hadn’t lied about her name, or at least, if she had lied, that she’d chosen a completely made-up one: the name Sara Falk seemed too weighty, too well known or too obviously belonging to someone who actually existed for her to carry it lightly, as if she’d called herself Jack Spratt or the Duke of Wellington.

  “We’ll leave this to simmer,” said Rose after she’d added vegetables and herbs to the pot. “Have it after the Drumhead.”

  “Drumhead?” Lucy said to Charlie.

  “Showmen’s Drumhead,” he said. “Like a town meeting. All the showmen come together to discuss what’s fair when something’s been done, or has to be done.”

  What had been done, it transpired, was the whole business of Nellie the Educated Pig going berserk and one very expensive mirror having been smashed. Lucy sat at the edge of a great circle of light as the showmen hunched round a fire discussing it, painfully aware that the mirror in question was the one through which she had fallen.

  The aggrieved party was revealed to be Na-Barno Eagle, Georgiana’s father, and as he spoke Lucy was able to see him properly for the first time. He was a tall clean-shaven man with sad eyes, long grey hair and a nose of the proud and upturned variety, criss-crossed with broken veins giving it the unmistakeable rosy glow of the tap-room. He wore a suit of darkest velvet that had evidently seen better days but was cleverly patched and mended. His energy rose and fell like a flame, sometimes flaring, sometimes guttering as he told his side of the events, and she saw that whenever he looked about to topple over Georgiana was always at his side, watching and ready to help. The gist of his complaint was that someone had broken his mirror and he should be reimbursed for its loss.

  There seemed to be several problems attending his claim. The first was the cost he ascribed to the mirror, which was generally opined to be much too generous. Secondly was the reason why his mirror was in the big tent, which belonged, along with the Educated Pig, to a Mr Huffam, rather than within his own smaller establishment.

  “The mirror,” he said, “was in Mr Huffam’s tent by a prior arrangement. It is no secret that I am engaged to perform my illusions in a contest with the imposter Anderson in the near future. My own modest Temple of Magic being inadequate in size, I wished to practise a new effect away from prying eyes, an effect necessitating the use of my large and expensive looking-glass.”

  “He’s all mirrors and smoke,” whispered a voice in Lucy’s ear. The hairs on her neck stood up because she knew from long experience that her senses were too sharp and permanently on guard for anyone to be able to get close to her without her being aware of it. She turned. It was Charlie who had appeared silently out of the dark. He grinned, unaware of how he had disconcerted her. “Only he’s slowing up and fumbling things on stage now he’s getting older, I reckon. That’s why he bought himself an automaton he doesn’t know how to use properly, so a machine could manage the illusion and he’d just have to do the patter. He’s still a talker, ain’t he?”

  Eagle was holding forth at the centre of the circle of firelight, listing the various oppressions and difficulties he was beset by.

  “I ask for no more than what is due me,” he said, sweeping his arm around the ring of faces. “Is not such open-handed fair-dealing as vital to our lives as the very water we drink?”

  “The only water Na-Barno drinks is that what Georgiana dilutes his gin with when he ain’t looking,” whispered Charlie.

  “That’s all well and good,” said one of the showmen, “but you ain’t got a clue who broke the thing, and no more nor do we. You just got to take it on the chin as an accident and write it down to bad luck.”

  General nods and grunts of assent followed this, and it seemed the matter was over, but Na-Barno turned on the man who had spoken, a finger jabbing into his face.

  “You say bad luck, but I say bad intent. I have been practised on. Ill-wishers have sabotaged me. Sabotaged, I say. And it is not the first time. My Mechanical Moor has been damaged, and now my great mirror lies in shards. I see Anderson’s hand in this!”

  “Careful, Na-Barno,” said a showman. “You’re amongst friends here, but that’s a slander and you wouldn’t want it finding its way back to Anderson’s ears.”

  “Anderson can go hang,” said Eagle. “And if any of his lackeys are within earshot, you may tell him I said that too!”

  And with that he sat down with an impressive bump, so impressive that his momentum (and the gin he may well have imbibed) conspired to tip the chair backwards and pitch him heels over head on to the grass.

  It was such a sudden fall from dignity that Lucy snorted in laughter an instant before everyone else burst out in merriment. It was unfortunate that she was so quick to laugh, because Georgiana Eagle caught it and fired a look of pure hatred across the fire at her as she bent to lift her father on to his chair with the help of two of the acrobats.

  “I am glad that my misstep affords you all such merriment
,” said Eagle stiffly. “But laugh as you will at an old man tumbling in the grass; I will still have justice. The mirror was in Huffam’s care; I do not like to say it but—”

  “No, Barney,” said Mr Pyefinch, speaking for the first time. “That’s too rich. Don’t come that one. Can’t make old Huffam pay for doing you a favour and letting you use his tent for your rehearsals.”

  The general grumble of agreement which met this seemed to hit Eagle like a slap. His eyes goggled and his mouth worked, but nothing came out. He looked round and found Georgiana.

  “You see?” he said. “You see, my child, the unkindness with which we are beset?”

  This signalled the end of Eagle’s claim, and the crowd rose and turned their backs on the fire as they walked away to their tents and wagons: disgust at Eagle’s attempt to extract money from Huffam, who they saw as having done him a favour, was part of the reason, but the main part was that it had been a long day on the road and they knew tomorrow would bring an early start and more of the same. They now wanted nothing more than hot food, a warm blanket and then a good night’s sleep.

  Eagle himself tried to keep going, clutching at sleeves with rising desperation, attempting to keep people interested, but other than a few mildly apologetic chuckles and some pats on the back, he got nothing. He slumped in his chair by the fire. Georgiana strode against the flow of the thinning crowd like an arrow aimed right at Lucy.

  “Georgie,” began Charlie with a half laugh. “What—?”

  “She laughed at Father,” said Georgiana.

  “Everyone laughed—” said Charlie.

  Georgiana didn’t break step, just marched right up to Lucy.

  “Nobody laughs at the Eagles!” she hissed and slapped her face, hard.

  Lucy felt the red sting on her cheek and didn’t even have time to think: on reflex her fist bunched into a hard knot and she punched straight back. There was a sharp crack as the blow landed and a gasp and then Georgiana was flat out on the grass.

  “And nobody hits me,” said Lucy.

  Georgiana looked more stunned by the sheer outrage of the counter-punch than the fist that had solidly connected just below her eye. Lucy could feel the dull ache in her knuckles and a breeze on her skin which seemed to tell her that she’d split the seam on the old gloves. She wasn’t going to give the other girl the satisfaction of seeing her look down to check.